During a busy week on Capitol Hill, Sen. Bernie Sanders played a leading role in a new campaign to stop outsourcing American jobs to low-wage countries overseas. He also introduced a resolution to protect seniors from cuts in Social Security benefits. It was past midnight on Thursday when Congress finally approved a stopgap spending measure to keep the government running into the new fiscal year that began on Friday.  Put off until a lame-duck session in November was the fate of Bush-era tax cuts that expire at the end of the year. Sanders favored acting sooner to extend lower rates for middle-class taxpayers.

Social Security With a White House budget panel contemplating Social Security cuts, Sanders on Wednesday introduced a Senate resolution to protect seniors and safeguard the program's surplus funds for future retirees. The measure would put the White House commission on notice that raising the retirement age, privatizing the program, or cutting benefits would meet stiff opposition on Capitol Hill. "Let's be clear," Sanders and others said in a letter to Senate colleagues. "Social Security is not in crisis." The Social Security Trust Fund has a $2.6 trillion surplus that is projected to grow to more than $4 trillion by the year 2023, the senators noted.  

Outsourcing Jobs "We've got to tell corporate America that if they want us to buy the products they produce, they've got to start manufacturing those products here in the United States," Sanders told a Capitol Hill press conference on Tuesday. On MSNBC, Bernie reminded Ed Schultz that "during the Bush years, alone, we lost 30 percent of our manufacturing jobs." The number of U.S. factory workers plunged from 17 million to about 12 million, fewer than at any time since before World War II. Senate Republicans on Tuesday blocked a modest proposal to stem the flow of jobs overseas. Bernie would go further. He wants a total turnaround in U.S. trade policies that unfairly tip the scales against American workers in favor of other countries and multinational corporations.

Rich Get Richer, Middle Class Collapses Partly as a result of the disappearance of good-paying manufacturing jobs, middle-class family incomes fell by more than $2,600 over the past decade, the Census Bureau reported. "The income gap between the richest and poorest Americans grew last year to its widest amount on record as young adults and children in particular struggled to stay afloat in the recession," according to an Associated Press report on Tuesday. "It's clear that the Great Recession battered those on the bottom most heavily, adding 6 million people to the ranks of the officially poor, defined as just $22,000 in annual income for a family of four. Forty-four million Americans - one in seven citizens - are now living below the poverty line, more than at any time since the Census Bureau began tracking poverty 51 years ago," Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in The Nation.

Community Health Centers Friday was the first day of the new federal fiscal year and the beginning of an $11 billion, five-year commitment to revolutionize primary health care in America. Sanders' signature contribution to the new national health care law will make affordable primary care, dental care, mental-health counseling and low-cost prescription drugs available to 40 million Americans, twice as many as today.  The biggest of Vermont's eight community health centers broke ground Monday on a new $11.3 million facility to be built mostly with funding Sanders put into last year's economic stimulus bill. As the Burlington Free Press said in an editorial published Thursday, "The nation has a better chance of controlling health care cost in the long run if Americans are healthier, focus on prevention and catch problems before they become conditions that will cost much more to treat."