Bernie Buzz: make college tuition-free

Take the poll: Do you think 4-year public colleges & universities should be tuition-free?

Bernie on Tuesday introduced legislation to make 4-year public colleges and universities tuition-free. “We live in a highly competitive global economy. If our economy is to be strong, we need the best educated workforce in the world. That will not happen if every year hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college and if millions more leave school deeply in debt,” he said. The legislation also would overhaul student loan programs so students and their parents could reduce crushing debt loads which now exceed Americans’ credit card debt.

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Break up big banks Bernie introduced legislation to break up the nation’s too-big-to-fail banks. “No single financial institution should have holdings so extensive that its failure could send the world economy into crisis,” Bernie said. “If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.” Three out of the four largest banks in the United States are now 80 percent bigger than they were one year before the financial crisis in 2008. To bail them out, the Federal Reserve provided $16 trillion in near zero-interest loans and Congress approved a $700 billion taxpayer bailout. Read more

bad trade deal The Senate on Thursday advanced a bill that would grant President Obama accelerated power to complete a trade accord with 11 other Pacific Rim nations. “The Senate just put the interests of powerful multi-national corporations, drug companies and Wall Street ahead of the needs of American workers. If this disastrous trade agreement is approved, it will throw Americans out of work while companies continue moving operations and good-paying jobs to low-wage countries overseas,” Bernie said after the vote. watch bernie's floor speech

THE KING OF SOCIAL MEDIA Bernie “has emerged as a king of social media,” according to The New York Times. “His Facebook posts attract tens of thousands of likes and shares, and threads about him often break through to the home page of Reddit.” His most recent Ask Me Anything this Tuesday “was full of moments that illustrate why his fans love him so much,” Matthew Yglesias wrote for Vox. READ MORE IN VOX READ MORE IN THE NY TIMES

Must Reads

Minimum wage: L.A. City Council approves increase to $15 by 2020 Peter Jamison, David Zahniser and Alice Walton for Los Angeles Times

Perils of Globalization When Factories Close and Towns Struggle Binyamin Appelbaum for New York Times

It's Official: The Class of 2015 has the Most Student Loan Debt in History Zeeshan Aleem for Policy Mic

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