The final draft of the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform, released Friday, calls for an end to the death penalty, a $15 minimum wage, the establishment of a postal banking system, broad marijuana law reform, and elimination of tax breaks for Big Oil—all victories for Bernie Sanders and his supporters—but fails to include key concessions on trade, Israel-Palestine, or fracking.
Indeed, not only does the document (pdf) fail to endorse a national fracking ban, as climate activists and Sanders are demanding, but “the platform puts the party on record in favor of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan and the goal of ‘100 percent clean electricity,'” writes David Weigel for the Washington Post. “That plan and that goal assume that fracking will continue.”
On trade, as Common Dreams reported, the platform merely acknowledges that “there are a diversity of views in the party”—a far cry from the rejection of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) that Sanders and his allies on the drafting committee pushed for.
And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “the one area of the platform where the progressives seem to have slid back since 2012,” Weigel says, noting that “[w]here there was once was no mention of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions Movement, there’s now a clear denunciation of…BDS.”
Responding to the draft, Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz write at Mondoweiss: “How much do Democratic progressives care about Palestine? is the question. The party leaders want to say that Palestinian solidarity is a marginal fringe, and hint-hint, it’s anti-Semitic. And meantime, Israel and the U.S. share ‘common values of democracy, equality, tolerance, and pluralism.’ That is simply a lie.”
On the other hand, “income inequality has a leading role in the document,” Amanda Terkel pointed out at the Huffington Post, “and the inclusion of the phrase ‘rigged economy’ reflects the influence” of Sanders.
The document reads in part:
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On Wall Street reform, the draft “strikes a populist tone,” Clare Foran wrote at The Atlantic, pointing to the platform’s endorsement of “a modern version of the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era banking law that Sanders has described as a mechanism for breaking up big banks. Sanders and [Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth] Warren have both supported reinstating a 21st-century version of the law.”
Other key progressive victories, Sanders’ chief policy advisor Warren Gunnels told the Washington Post, include:
- Eliminating conflict of interest at the Federal Reserve by making sure that executives at financial institutions cannot serve on the board of regional Federal Reserve banks or handpick their members.
- Banning golden parachutes for taking government jobs and cracking down on the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington.
- Prohibiting Wall Street from picking and choosing which credit agency will rate their product.
- Empowering the Postal Service to offer basic banking services, which makes such services available to more people throughout the country, including low-income people who lack access to checking accounts.
- Ending the loophole that allows large profitable corporations to defer taxes on income stashed in offshore tax havens to avoid paying more taxes.
- Using the revenue from ending that deferral loophole to rebuild infrastructure and create jobs.
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