Our Goal Is to Move This Country to a Medicare-for-All, Single-Payer System

By Bernie Sanders, Reader Supported News

01 August 17

et me take this opportunity to give you an update as to what's been happening in recent weeks.

As you all know, the disastrous Republican "health care" proposals have, for the moment at least, been defeated. They were defeated because millions of Americans stood up and fought back. They made phone calls and sent emails, letting members of Congress know how they felt. They got their friends involved in the struggle by utilizing social media. They attended town hall meetings. They went to rallies, including some that I attended in Michigan, Maine, Nevada, Arizona, West Virginia, Ohio, Utah, Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

And in poll after poll, an overwhelming majority of the American people were absolutely clear about their opposition to these destructive plans:

No. We will not be throwing 32 million, 23 million, 22 million or 16 million Americans off of health insurance in order to give tax breaks to the rich and large corporations, and to further the right wing extremist ideology of the Koch brothers.

No. We will not be cutting Medicaid by $800 billion, raising premiums for older workers, defunding Planned Parenthood and making it almost impossible for people with pre-existing conditions to get affordable insurance.

Needless to say, while we have won at least a temporary victory by defeating horrific Republican proposals, that is not good enough. We need to go on the offensive, not simply remain in a defensive posture.

The status quo is not satisfactory. Too many Americans continue to have no health insurance. Too many are paying premiums, deductibles and co-payments that are much too high. Too many cannot afford the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs they need. Too many cannot gain access to high quality primary health care or dental care, even when they have insurance. Our goal is not complicated, and it is not radical. It is to have the United States join every other industrialized country on earth in guaranteeing health care for all. Health care must not be considered as a privilege or a commodity. It is a human right to which every man, woman and child is entitled.

Our goal is to create a rational, cost-effective health care system. Today in the United States, we are spending almost $10,000 a year per person on health care. This is absurd and unsustainable. We must not continue a system which is, by far, the most expensive, wasteful and bureaucratic in the world.

Our goal is to put health care dollars into disease prevention and the provision of health care, not insurance company profits, not outrageous salaries for health industry CEOs, not advertising, not billing, not lobbying or campaign contributions.

Our goal is to move this country to a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system.

Let me be clear. This will be an enormously difficult and prolonged struggle, and one which will require the efforts of tens of millions of Americans in every state in this country. It will, in fact, require a political revolution in which the American people participate in the political process in a way that we have not seen in the recent history of our democracy.

In order to pass a Medicare-for-all, single payer system we will be taking on the most powerful special interests in the country: Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the corporate media, the Republican Party and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. In opposition to our efforts there will be a never-ending barrage of TV ads, editorials, political attacks and lies.

If we are going to be successful in this struggle, we have got to be smart – very smart. Not only do we need strong legislation (which I will be offering shortly and an outline of which I will be sending to you), but we need an unprecedented organizing and educational campaign.

How do we counter the lies and distortions against Medicare-for-all that is sure to come? How do we make certain that all of us – men and women, gay and straight, black, white, Latino, Asian-American, Native American -– are in this struggle together? How do we bring young and healthy people to stand alongside the elderly, the sick and the poor?

The battle that we are undertaking is enormous and unprecedented in the modern history of our country. Please send us your ideas as to how we can best go forward. Please give us your vision of what a humane and rational health care system looks like. Please share your experiences with the current system. Please help us map out an effective political strategy.

We are in this together. We need everyone's ideas.

The Message in Putin's Expulsion of US Diplomats

By Joshua Yaffa, The New Yorker

01 August 17

ladimir Putin’s announcement on Sunday that he would require a dramatic reduction in the U.S. diplomatic mission to Russia is a personal message to Donald Trump—at once a last-ditch effort to gain some conciliations from a U.S. President who had promised them and an indication of how, despite early hopes in Moscow, Putin and those around him are gearing up for a more familiar, confrontational pose with Washington. The Kremlin’s thinking appears to be that if the United States is so intent on demonizing it, then, fine, let it have its Cold War—and anyway, mutual antagonism has come to be a comfortable, even habitual mode for the Putin state.

In an interview on Russian state television, Putin expressed frustration with the continued attempts by the U.S. to punish or otherwise apply pressure on Russia, most recently with Congress’s vote last week to enshrine Obama-era sanctions into law, making it harder for Trump to undo them. Putin suggested that his patience had worn thin. “We waited for quite a long time that, perhaps, something will change for the better. We held out hope that the situation would somehow change,” he said. “But, judging by everything, if it changes, it will not be soon.” In response, he announced, Russia would order the United States to cut the number of staff at U.S. diplomatic missions in the country by seven hundred and fifty-five people, a reduction of more than sixty per cent from current levels.

The move is the most bitter démarche in U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations since 1986, when, in the twilight of the Cold War, the Soviet Union responded to the expulsion of fifty-five Soviet diplomats from the United States by barring all Soviet citizens from working for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. But who, exactly, are those now getting kicked out? Most of them, in fact, are Russians. According to a report posted on the Diplopundit blog, as of 2013, the U.S. Embassy and its three consulates in Russia employed about twelve hundred people. (The numbers are believed to be relatively stable over the last four years.) Of those, around three hundred were U.S. direct-hire positions—foreign-service officers from the State Department and representatives of other U.S. agencies, from the F.B.I. to NASA. The rest, more than nine hundred and thirty people, were local hires. Unlike the Russian Embassy in Washington, for example, which hires virtually no Americans, it is the usual practice of American Embassies and consulates around the world to rely on a large contingent of local staff to carry out administrative and technical work.

The bulk of the cuts required by Putin’s order will hit exactly that category: Russian citizens who maintain the U.S. Embassy’s fleet of cars, work as clerks in the visa and consular offices, deliver mail and packages, fix busted water pipes, and cook lunch in the cafeteria. They won’t be forced to leave the country, like those U.S. diplomats and other government employees whom the State Department will send home to hit the required number of seven hundred and fifty-five, but they will lose their jobs—and in so doing, greatly slow down the everyday work of U.S. diplomatic missions in Russia. That point is certainly not lost on Putin, who called the staffing cuts “biting”: not only as a symbol but as a real impediment to maintaining business as usual.

In ordering the reductions, Putin was endorsing a proposal first made last week by the Russian Foreign Ministry, which called on the United States to reduce its number of employees at its Embassies and consulates in Russia “into strict correspondence with the number of Russian diplomats and technical staff currently working in the United States”—that is, four hundred and fifty-five people. The statement from the Foreign Ministry, rueful without shutting the door entirely, listed all the issues on which the two countries coöperate, from counterterrorism to nonproliferation, while ultimately lamenting how “the United States is using Russia’s alleged interference in its domestic affairs as an absolutely contrived excuse for its persevering and crude campaigns against Russia.” Whereas the Russian side “adhered to responsible and reserved behaviour,” the statement went on, “the latest events confirm that certain circles in the US are fixated on Russophobia and open confrontation with our country.”

Taken together, the particular wording of the Foreign Ministry’s communiqué—talking of “certain circles”—and the timing of Putin’s own announcement suggest that the Kremlin might yet hope it can still split Trump from Congress and the political establishment in Washington. In the Kremlin’s understanding, those are the exact forces that hold Trump back from improving relations with Russia and delivering some tangible results, whether easing sanctions or coöperating in Syria. (On that question, results have been mixed: in April, Trump ordered a missile strike against regime targets, greatly upsetting Moscow; last week, he cancelled a C.I.A. program to arm anti-Assad rebels, a move long on the Kremlin’s wish list.)

Watching Russian television these past months, one encounters the same dark obsessions with the American “deep state” found among Trump’s more conspiratorially inclined supporters in the United States: if not for those pesky anti-Russian, and anti-Trump, elements peppered throughout the U.S. bureaucracy, Trump could be the man Russia knows he is and whom he wants to be deep down. In mid-July, after news broke of a meeting last year between Donald Trump, Jr., and a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower, Dmitry Kiselev, Russian television’s most reliably sour and gloomy propagandist, spoke of a “united campaign by the Democrats and liberal media” before rattling off a number of conspiracy theories supposedly linked to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton family.

Putin has not yet given up on Trump entirely. The goal of this latest move is not to break with Trump or to forswear working with him but, rather, to provide him with both a warning and an opening. The tactic of sowing discord and exploiting existing fissures is one of the more consistent motifs in Russia’s Putin-era foreign policy. For years, Moscow has tried to split the United States and Europe, driving a wedge between Washington and Brussels on everything from sanctions to NATO, while also looking to exacerbate disagreements among E.U. member states themselves.

Putin is now trying out the same trick in his relationship with the Trump Administration, by trying to appeal to Trump the individual and to peel him away from other institutions less inclined to make nice with Russia, whether it be Congress or the intelligence services. As Alexander Baunov, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, noted, Putin announced his decision after the congressional vote but before Trump signed the sanctions into law, meaning that his ire was directed at the former while making an appeal to the latter. Perhaps Putin believes that Trump could now refuse to sign the bill in its current form, citing the impending damage to U.S. diplomatic operations. Also, the cuts required by Putin’s edict don’t go into effect until September—enough time, potentially, to amend or soften its provisions if relations with Trump take a more hopeful turn. They may prove to be an opening gambit in negotiations rather than an ironclad position.

Another consistent feature of the Russian response to sanctions over the years has been the element of self-injury. In part, this is due to the great economic disparity between itself and the West: Russia imports most of its consumer goods and exports very few, and its largest firms are reliant on Western banks and financial institutions. A trade war with the United States or Europe would be lost from the start. Russia has tended to answer asymmetrically, by making its own market and citizens into both weapons and victims: in 2013, it banned Americans from adopting Russian orphans; in 2014, it imposed sanctions on American and European food imports, which led to both an increase in consumer food prices and a boon for the domestic agriculture industry.

Now, if Putin’s diplomatic cuts are fully enacted, it will be Russians who will likely suffer the most, both in terms of lost jobs and difficulty in visiting the United States, especially on business, when trips can materialize quickly. Michael McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, predicted that the cuts to local consular staff would mean that Russians will have to wait “weeks, if not months” for visas. That, too, is another, more subtle aim of Russian counter-sanctions: to make Russian citizens feel punished and ostracized as part of a new Cold War, even if those measures actually initiate with Russia itself. That’s a nuance that can easily be papered over on state television—not to mention used as a patriotic rallying cry for Putin’s reëlection campaign next year, which otherwise has yet to find a particularly coherent or effective message. In Moscow, just like in Washington, there are plenty of reasons why a frosty, confrontational tone suits just fine—it’s the default setting for a reason, and it may stay that way, no matter what Putin or Trump had envisioned.