Well, I'd vote for her, but she's no Bernie Sanders. His foreign policy leaves
a lot to be desired. Her's is worse. I also heard a very detailed discussion of
her medicare for all plan today. It isn't actually a plan. People who study
this stuff think that she may be supporting Bernie's plan, but she's said some
things which leave a margin of doubt. And by the way, there are some proponents
of a single payer system who think there are problems with Bernie's plan. But
the issue with her plan for funding is that she avoids an income tax by taxing
every employer who has more than 50 employees, $9,500 for each employee,
regardless of the employee's salary, $30,000 or $250,000 e.g. So the effect
would be to cause employers to have as few employees as possible or to
re-classify employees as private contractors so they're not counted. That means
that basically, working people would be negatively effected. Bernie just has an
income tax for anyone earning more than $29,000 annually. So someone might
have to pay a few thousand dollars more in taxes, but would have no medical
bills: no annual premiums, no deductibles, no copays. The other difference is
that he's building a movement and wants it to continue after he's elected so
that there will be pressure on the congress to pass his legislation. She does
not have anything like that in mind. He has a hope of making changes in our
system by organizing citizens. She is a technocrat. She wants to do the right
thing in terms of regulations and fairer taxes, but she's philosophically
imbedded in the system. That's probably why the party leadership is slightly
less frightened of her.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, November 09, 2019 5:35 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Bernie Sanders's New Immigration Proposal Is
Incredibly Strong
After all my bluster about refusing to listen to debates, I went ahead and
listened to Elizabeth Warren today. She's okay. I'll vote for her...maybe,
although with the congress and the federal judges and the makeup of the Supreme
Court, she may wind up being another Obama.
It's a year away from election, so lots can happen. And I don't really know
her foreign policies.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/9/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Bernie Sanders's New Immigration Proposal Is Incredibly Strong By
Daniel Denvir, Jacobin
09 November 19
With the release of his immigration plan yesterday, Bernie Sanders has
set the bar on a just and humane immigration, border, and labor policy
agenda - and made it clear that immigrants are central to a united,
insurgent American working class.
Bernie Sanders released his immigration plan yesterday. It's a plan
that rejects and redresses the entirety of Trump's xenophobic agenda,
then goes far beyond that to radically break with the decades-long
bipartisan war on immigrants that made Trump possible.
Sanders without question now sets the bar on immigration, border, and
labor policy, and he has made it clear that immigrants are central to
an insurgent American working class and that the working class must be
united to win.
"Democrats risk losing the election unless and until they can
articulate and advance a unifying agenda that raises wages and
conditions for ALL workers across race, gender, class, and,
importantly, nationality," National Day Laborer Organizing Network
(NDLON) director Pablo Alvarado said in a statement responding to
Sanders's plan. "The deep divisions caused by the exploitation of
immigrant work was the dry timber on which Trump poured his racist
kerosene, and the populist fire that is now raging as the result of
this arson can only be extinguished when Democrats confront, head on,
the centrality of work and workers' rights within the debate about the
future of US immigration policy."
Sanders's immigration plan is dedicated to immigrant freedom. It
contains no talk of border security or targeting "criminal aliens." He
rejects the establishment's comprehensive immigration-reform model
that has traded draconian enforcement as a putative down payment to
buy Republican congressional support for a mass legalization of
undocumented immigrants.
In
other words, Bernie's plan identifies presidents George W. Bush and
Barack Obama's strategies as a failure.
As the proposal makes clear, the problem with this approach for the
last twenty years is that the more anti-immigrant measures were
offered and implemented, the more hostile Republicans grew to
legalization. Bernie, the plan states:
will not accept delays from Congress, and will not trade limitless and
unaccountable funding for border militarization, detention beds, and
deportation forces for a deal that has yet to materialize. Bernie will
use the constitutional authority vested in the president to take bold
and necessary executive action if Congress fails to enact the
commonsense immigration reforms supported by the vast majority of Americans.
He promises an immediate moratorium on deportations and pledges to use
strong executive action to ensure that a large proportion of
undocumented Americans will not be banished from their homes. His
fight to win legislation to grant them citizenship will be a fight for
legalization as a stand-alone cause, rejecting additional immigration
enforcement to woo the Right into backing a compromise they will never accept.
For decades, establishment politicians have deported millions and
built hundreds of miles of fencing on the border with Mexico in a
quixotic effort to convince Republicans that they are serious about
"border security." This strategy has not only implemented right-wing
nativist policy in exchange for nothing, but ratified nativist
rhetoric portraying immigrants as threats and the border as insecure.
Bernie is right to reject it.
Sanders pledges to increase the number of refugee admissions,
including a new climate refugee program to welcome those fleeing the
unfolding global environmental disaster that American capitalism has
played the lead role in creating. Sanders also proposes greater
opportunities for legal immigration by increasing the number of visas
based on the principle of family reunification rather than US corporations'
dictates.
Sanders recognizes that US foreign and economic policy - including
climate change - is complicit in fomenting migration from Central
America, and that we must remake the global economy and deliver
economic justice so that people are free to not migrate and stay put if they
choose.
In the 1980s, Sanders was a vociferous critic of murderous US
intervention against left-wing revolutionaries in Central America. His
immigration proposal stays true to that solidarity by recognizing that
our deep complicity in making the region unlivable for so many imposes
an ethical obligation on us to welcome immigrants and refugees.
Bernie's immigration plan, like his foreign policy, is refreshingly
internationalist, calling to "end global inequality and the
international race to the bottom so that no human being needs to migrate for
survival."
Sanders calls for radically decriminalizing immigration and breaking
the bonds that Democratic and Republican leaders have forged between
immigration enforcement and mass incarceration. As the plan rightly
notes: "The criminalization of immigrants has wasted billions of
taxpayer dollars, dehumanized vulnerable migrants, and swelled
already-overcrowded jails and prisons."
He wants to decriminalize unauthorized border crossings, repealing the
statute that Trump has used to separate families. But he won't wait on
Congress to change border policy. Sanders pledges to take executive
action to end the systematic prosecution of immigrants for the federal
misdemeanor of illegal entry that has been commonplace since the Bush
administration.
He
also wants to end programs that have turned the country's police,
jails, and prisons into the entryway to a massive deportation
pipeline, including 287(g), Secure Communities, and the Criminal Alien
Program. These programs have simultaneously fueled deportations and
mass incarceration. Ending them would curb both.
Specifically, Sanders calls for the repeal of historic anti-immigrant
measures signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996 that have made
deportations incredibly tough to fight, required mandatory detention
for many immigration offenders, barred deportees from lawfully
entering for three to ten years, and expanded the number of crimes
that subject non-citizens to all but certain deportation. He also
calls for checks on the Border Patrol's police-state powers to
question and search people with impunity throughout large swathes of
this country.
The criminalization of immigration enforcement - the rise of what
activists and scholars call "crimmigration" - has not only been
disastrous policy but dangerous politics as well. For decades,
politicians including Clinton, Bush, and Obama engaged in rhetoric and
implemented policies that portrayed immigrants as a criminal threat.
In doing so, they created the political template for Trump to demonize
immigrants as just that.
The president infamously announced his campaign in 2015 by declaring
that Mexican immigrants are "bringing drugs. They're bringing crime.
They're rapists." It was not just the far right but also
excruciatingly ordinary bipartisan politics that linked immigration to
the war on crime and so gave Trump this language and made it resonate.
Sanders is also clear that making immigration into a national security
issue after the September 11 attacks was a disaster, and that
"immigration is not a threat to national security." He calls for
breaking up the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection,
restructuring and thus taming the enforcement machine.
The integration of immigration enforcement into the War on Terror
national security state has turbocharged funding for enforcement while
portraying immigrants - particularly Muslims - as a terrorist threat.
This is another issue where establishment leaders from both major
parties helped create the demonized caricature of the immigrant other
that Trump would exploit and take to a new and dangerous level.
Sanders challenges nativist rhetoric that portrays immigrants as a
threat to taxpayers through the use of public benefits and to jobs by
driving down wages. Since California voters passed Proposition 187 in
1994, the depiction of immigrants as an economic danger has been
critical to the power of anti-immigrant politics. But immigrants are
far from the only people who have been harmed: the use of racist
scapegoating has served to undermine the welfare state for everyone
and to divide workers against one another.
Critically, Sanders's core universal programs are truly universal:
Medicare for All and College for All are for all regardless of immigration
status.
Sanders's proposal makes clear that immigrants are fellow workers and
pledges that his administration would prioritize enforcement of
immigrant worker labor rights over immigration enforcement. One way he
pledges to do that is by protecting undocumented workers who report
labor violations from deportation, a measure long pushed for by NDLON.
Allowing immigrants to receive legal status when they blow the whistle
on workplace abuse wields the law to erode the very two-tier labor
market that the persecution of undocumented immigrants has created.
The politics of this immigration policy agenda are important: by
emphasizing that immigrants are core to the working class rather than
a threat to it, Sanders strengthens the multiracial coalition that is
this country's only hope for transformative change. Sanders had deep
support among Latinos before releasing the immigration plan, and he is
counting on their massive turnout to win.
"The issues that we are talking about appeal to the Latino community
and young people in general, and that is a lot of Latinos are working
for starvation wages - they want to see that minimum wage raised,"
Sanders recently told Politico. "I'm the son of an immigrant myself,
my father came from Poland without any money. I think I know a little
bit about the experience."
Latinos support Sanders for the same reason everyone else does. They
support his working-class agenda - a universal agenda of which this
immigration plan now forms an important part.
Bernie has a good record on immigration and consistently voted against
the sort of draconian enforcement and border militarization bills
embraced by many establishment Democrats. But he has also described
immigration in troublingly nationalist terms in the past. This plan
shows that Bernie has come to understand that bosses and government
repression of immigrants, and not immigrant workers, are what undermine labor
standards.
People say that Bernie never changes his mind. That's not entirely true.
It's just that when he does, he moves in the right direction.
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