* Appointment of a commission to develop a plan not just to fully fund Social Security benefits through the next 75 years, but to expand benefits so that they replace 60% of income at retirement for those individuals earning less than $60,000 a year, and for couples earning less than $100,000 a year. "This would be in line with what European countries, do," the new president declared, again to thunderous applause that rocked the capital.
Calling for an end to reliance on carbon-based fuels, to combat the urgent threat of catastrophic climate change, President Sanders announced a bill to train and subsidize the employment of an army of well-drillers and home heating retro-fitters to install geo-thermal and heat-pump systems in existing and in all new homes and public buildings where geologically viable, and a program restoring federal tax subsidies for the installation of solar power panels and/or wind generators on residential homes, with a goal of quickly and substantially reducing the need for oil and gas for heating and cooling, and for centralized electric power generation. "For the sake of ourselves and for generations to come here and around the world, we can and we will massively reduce America's carbon footprint, beginning today," declared the new president. "There is no longer any time to wait or to debate about what to do about climate change."
A" jubilee" forgiveness of all undergraduate college debt borrowed and owed to the federal government up to and including the current spring term, and establishment of program to encourage all states, beginning next fall, to provide free tuition at state-owned and funded two- and four-year colleges to in-state students from families earning less than $150,000 a year. "The loan forgiveness program will be a trillion-dollar economic stimulus," said Sanders, "freeing currently indebted graduates to buy homes, cars, and computers and to move forward with their careers, for young entrepreneurs to take out start-up loans, and freeing their parents from having to support them or help them repay those loans." He said public colleges would have to "figure out how to change their model to operate in service to the young people" whose families' taxes had built those state institutions, instead of continually jacking up tuition and fees. "Maybe they'll have to lose a lot of management positions," he said, "and cut senior management salaries down to what most faculty earn." To encourage the change, he said the federal government would not provide subsidized loans for use at public colleges that didn't meet the proposed free-tuition guidelines.
* On foreign policy, which had not been a major topic during the campaign, Sanders vowed to work towards more friendly relations with Russia and China and to get the US out of the "regime change" business. To help calm the waters in the Middle East, he also vowed to initiate "serious peace negotiations" between Israel and the Palestinians, aimed at early creation of a "viable Palestinian state." The nation's first Jewish president warned that the Israeli government would have to reverse the illegal settlements that have for years been encroaching on Palestinian territory on the West Bank and said the US would cease providing generous military assistance to Israel as long as the Israeli government refused to do so.
Thanking Merrick Garland, outgoing President Obama's unsuccessful nominee for the late Antonin Scalia's seat on the Supreme Court, for making the frustrating and unsuccessful effort to overcome Republican intransigence about approving any Obama nominee, Sanders announced that he would be nominating Susan Herman, current president of the American Civil Liberties Union, to that vacant seat on the High Court.
Sanders stunned pollsters, pundits and the nation's political elite when, following Hillary Clinton's nomination as the Democratic Party's nominee at the party's July convention, and following massive demonstrations in Philadelphia, Washington and other major cities across the country by millions of his supporters calling on him to run as an independent candidate for president, he accepted an offer by Green Party leader and presumptive Green nominee for president Dr. Jill Stein, to run as the party's candidate in her stead. Sanders agreed to the offer, and chose as his vice-presidential running mate California Rep. Barbara Lee. Long a hero of anti-war Americans for her staunch opposition to the initial Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force in 2001 that launched the War on Terror, her vote against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and her opposition earlier to the Clinton administration's bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Lee put peace and anti-militarism squarely at the center of the Sander's campaign.
Sanders said at the time that the disclosure, by Wikileaks, of emails from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign showing that the party establishment had actively worked to subvert the primaries, combined with the structural unfairness of having some 800 unelected Super-delegates whose votes had been bought in advance by the Clinton campaign, convinced him that the primaries had been fatally corrupted and the nomination stolen from him, leaving him free to ignore his earlier promise to support Clinton if she became the nominee.
His ensuing and unprecedentedly successful third-party campaign, funded fully by public funds and small donations, electrified the country, drawing support from independent and even Republican Trump supporters -- particularly white working-class Americans -- as well as sparking huge turnouts among black and hispanic voters and normally hard-core Democratic voters, all drawn to the Sanders ticket by his promise to raise the minimum wage to $15, to revisit and either revise or cancel all trade treaties, to bust up the big banks and to end corporate control of Washington. The Green Party, already on the ballot in 26 states, was, by Election Day, able to have the Sanders ticket listed on the ballot in 46 states, allowing Sanders to win landslides in both the popular and the Electoral College vote.
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