NOW: Get Out The Vote: David Levitt for US Senate

Join us in voting for David Alex Levitt, on your ballots in Tuesday's June 5th primary.

We're doing something extraordinary: using our elections to stand up for what Americans want, especially the people of California, when other Senate candidates and incumbents who should be representing us just won't do it.

We have detailed Issue statements, and a policy platform to invest in jobs, renewable infrastructure and education, amid fairer taxes - developed by over 100,000 people known as the Contract for the American Dream.  For the June 5th primary election campaign we're focussed on 3 issues:

End Afghanistan     End Prohibition      Medicare for All

• Rescue our soldiers from Afghanistan – where truth tellers like Lt. Col. Dan Davis conclude there is no achievable mission and not one more life should be lost in a war that isn't keeping us safer.
• End the prohibition of medical marijuana – and the ongoing destructive federal raids on California medical dispensaries.
• Expand Medicare to all Americans - provide not-for-profit universal single-payer insurance to younger, healthier people at even lower rates - the way most other civilized countries do.

Tell Friends about David Alex Levitt for Senate on our ballots

• On Facebook, we're over 5300 California voters with over 2 MILLION Friends.
• Many of us already voted by absentee ballot.  
• Half of California will vote on June 5th, primary day.
• And surveys say half of those voters haven't chosen a US Senate candidate -- that's 25% undecided.
• They also say no Republican has more than 4% support! 

David Levitt will be one of the two primary winners if this weekend and Monday we contact our 2 Million Friends -- mostly California voters -- to Vote Levitt on June 5th!

On Facebook:

• We've made sharing easy: share this link.  Follow the instructions at http://Levitt2012.org/goviral to Tag your California friends in a Facebook post about the campaign, so it will be seen on all their Facebook Walls.  Using tags that way, one post can appear on over 40 friends Walls.
• Like http://facebook.com/Levitt2012 so others know you're involved

On Twitter: Follow, Retweet and Reply at @Levitt2012
Include @Levitt2012 in Tweets that link articles on Afghanistan, CISPA, health care, prohibition, whistleblowers and freedom.

Favorite and Retweet such messages when you see them, tagging them @Levitt2012, and put them on your Facebook Wall.

Here's more on what David Levitt stands for, from this week's Brad Blog:

"Instead of wasting trillions on war and giving $7 trillion for too-big-to-fail banks to gamble with as we have the past 4 years, we need to invest in education, infrastructure, and 21st century energy jobs," Levitt says in defining his positions.

Those positions stand in stark contrast to Feinstein, whose husband, Richard Blum, made millions off the Iraq war. Feinstein supported the 2002 Iraq war resolution, warned Republicans not to oppose Bush's Iraq troop escalation in 2007, co-sponsored the USA PATRIOT Act, joined Republicans in voting to limit the scope of privacy protections in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and supported the Obama administration's troop escalation in Afghanistan.

Levitt, on the other hand, calls for an immediate end to the DOJ/IRS raids on CA medical marijuana clinics and for a single-payer Medicare-for-All healthcare system. He not only decries the fraudulent Wall Street schemes that led to the 2008 economic meltdown, but calls for specific solutions, including a break up of the big banks, prosecutions of bank and rating agency executives, restoration of Glass-Steagall, and "a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions by any bank that received bail outs or low interest Fed loans."

Back in 1998, Feinstein was amongst the group of Senate Democrats who opened the door to the Wall Street credit default swaps casino by voting to repeal Glass-Steagall, the Great Depression era banking reform that, for decades, had disallowed investment firms from gambling with the funds of private depositors held in commercial banks.

In an email exchange, Levitt, who says he admires Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), informed The BRAD BLOG that he not only opposes the infamous Citizens United decision but supports Vermont's proposed Constitutional Amendment which would end corporate personhood and establish that money does not equate to free speech under the First Amendment.

Should Levitt succeed in achieving the second highest primary vote totals in next week's CA primary election, this could potentially create a far more significant challenge to Feinstein than any that could be mustered by a Republican --- provided Levitt's substantive positions could cut through the cloud of paid-for political propaganda that only corporate money can buy.

Great News for Democrats
If you're a Democrat, fear not.  So is David Levitt.  And there's no danger of a spoiler, since Senator Feinstein has 10 times the support of any Republican in the primary.

In fact if Levitt places second, this will be the first US Senate race in California without a Republican since 1856 - and the first one with two Democrats in the November general election, ever!

For once, it's not a "lesser of two evils" choice between what we have now and something even worse.  We can vote for what we really want.

Poll after poll shows Americans want Single Payer health care, also known as Medicare for All.  Doctors strongly prefer it too.  Single Payer provides care for every American keeps costs down by having a large pool of individuals,  It's essentially what the 35 countries that have better health care than the US are doing right.  Progressive Democrats have been calling for Single Payer for years in the bill HR 676.

But Democratic and Republican leaders refuse to stand up for what doctors and patients want -- they want to continue the insurance based system that adds at least 31% to medical costs, makes more profit when you get less care, and comes with skyrocketing premiums since there's no public option.  It's yet another industry whose interests and lobbyists prevent Americans from getting the improved care they want.

It's not rocket science.  I'm with the people, not the insurance companies and their politician servants, on this one.

And here's a bonus:

How My Party Prevents Medicare-for-All

Ever since Michael Moore’s award winning 2007 hit documentary Sicko exposed the corrupt US health care system, Americans have understood that the for-profit insurance system that lobbyists and politicians have been forcing on us isn’t what we want.

Since 2009 -- when the Democratic party controlled the House, the Senate and the White House -- polls have overwhelmingly confirmed Americans want universal single-payer health care.  That’s the cost-effective expansion of Medicare -- not-for-profit group insurance -- to include younger, healthier members so it covers every American affordably: Medicare for All.

How have Americans failed to obtain universal, not-for-profit health care - - when every other civilized country has it?  Why are we instead -- under a new Democrat-sponsored law known as the Affordable Care Act or Obama Care -- now being required to pay insurance premiums to companies that profit most when they deny us the health care we need?

One 10 minute video of Senator Dianne Feinstein helps us unravel this mystery, and demonstrates how the senior Senator and her party leaders routinely prevent Americans from getting what we want.  (I've set up the cue points properly, but it won't stop automatically after each point is made, so you'll want to pause it, read, and scroll down to start the next one.)  Let’s break it down:

Early on the Senator says, “I looked at some statistics” and discovered the US was down at 36th place in health care quality:

You have to wonder -- did our Senator and health care expert really miss the most popular, acclaimed, award-winning documentary of 2007 that a billion other people saw, focussed on health care?  Why isn’t she mentioning Sicko?  Those statistics were beyond prominent in the movie.  They were even in the trailer:

Maybe somehow Senator Feinstein never saw or heard of ‘Sicko’.  But I doubt she’s as out of touch as she seems.  She doesn’t want to mention that movie because she’s determined to escape its conclusion that for-profit insurance is bad for America.  She has other plans. 

Almost 7 minutes in, the Senator says: “Now I know people don’t like this plan, some of them. But the question comes, do we keep doing what we’re doing, spending more and more of our gross domestic product, and not really improving our over all performance, not improving our longevity, the way good, practical medicine should?”  

We might be grateful the Senator is acknowledging these problems.  But this is where an accountable Senator, a representative of California - would point out, “Polls show 59% of Americans want single-payer Medicare for All.”  Instead she’s framing it the way lawyers and politicians so often do: Do you want the changes my party is proposing, or to stick with what we have now?  The solution Americans overwhelmingly want is never introduced, discussed or debated by the senior Senator.  When the whole Progressive Caucus introduces House bill 676 or Senator Bernie Sanders proposes single payer health care, Senator Feinstein declines to introduce, co-sponsor, or champion it.  She wants for-profit health care to continue without debate -- so that’s what we’ve got.

Next the Senator raises a gravely serious issue but, unfortunately, dodges that too.  

“I want to talk about one thing that isn’t in any bill that I’m very much worried about.  ... We have about 9 very large for-profit medical insurance companies in the United States.  As a product of an earlier action, they’re the only industry other than Major League Baseball that has an anti-trust exemption.  And what they have been doing is merging and acquiring companies so that they can control markets.  ... And once you have this market share and control, you can raise premiums with abandon.  ... Can you imagine getting a notice that your insurance has gone up 40%?  And then, to add insult to injury, they say, they may come back in the middle of the year and ask for another.”

To her credit, the Senator acknowledges that the CEO of the insurance company is paid $9 million a year, and that costs like those add more than 30% to our premiums and health care costs. 

But then, in the final seconds of the video, the Senator proposes a potential solution that she believes would solve the problem and explains, “That, madame president, is not in the bill.  These rate increases go into play May 1, so it is vital that we take some action before May 1 or all throughout the United States there are going to be substantial  premium increases.”

Got it?  The Affordable Health Care Act the Senator insists on promoting skips the “affordable” part -- it just keeps the “mandatory” and “for profit” parts instead.  That’s what she got us instead of introducing, co-sponsoring or debating the Medicare for All we want.

Unfortunately this is the Senate’s and the senior Senator’s standard modus operandum.   

Voting on the National Defense Authorization Act with unconstitutional provisions that allow indefinite detention without charges or a trial?  The Senator votes Yes -- eager to introduce an Amendment later that might exempt US citizens - and hope that it passes.  No accountable citizen would dream of voting for such an unconstitutional bill.  None of my debate opponents in this race would either.  Only someone who has been in a corrupt Washington bubble for years -- including 93 Senators led by Senator Feinstein.

Pushing through an unconstitutional FISA Amendments Act renewal in the Intelligence Committee (where Senator Feinstein is the Chair) that allows data collection on Americans without warrants, without oversight, and without limits?  Let’s quietly renew it until 2017.