Showing posts with label #Socialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #Socialism. Show all posts

Friday, June 25, 2021

America’s continued move toward socialism

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Just half of younger Americans now hold a positive view of capitalism — and socialism’s appeal in the U.S. continues to grow, driven by Black Americans and women, according to a new Axios/Momentive poll.

Why it matters: The pandemic has caused millions of Americans — including many younger Republicans — to re-evaluate their political and economic worldview. That’s likely because of two factors: a renewed focus on deep societal inequalities and the tangible upsides of unprecedented levels of government intervention.


  • “The pandemic is sure to have lasting impact for decades to come,” said Jon Cohen, the chief research officer for Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey).

The intrigue: Shifts are happening on the right as well as the left, at least among those under 35.

  • Just 66% of Republicans and GOP-leaners ages 18-34 have a positive view of capitalism, down from 81% in January 2019, when we first polled on these questions.
  • 56% of younger Republicans say the government should pursue policies that reduce the wealth gap, up from just 40% two years ago.

By the numbers: In 2019, 58% of Americans ages 18-34 reacted positively to the word capitalism. That’s plunged to 49% today.

  • Back then, 39% of all U.S. adults viewed socialism positively. That has since ticked up to 41%.
  • Socialism has positive connotations for 60% of Black Americans, 45% of American women and 33% of non-white Republicans. Those numbers have grown over the past two years from 53%, 41% and 27%, respectively.
  • Only 48% of American women view capitalism in a positive light, down from 51% two years ago.
  • Today, 18-34 year-olds are almost evenly split between those who view capitalism positively and those who view it negatively (49% vs. 46%). Two years ago, that margin was a gaping 20 points (58% vs. 38%).

The bottom line: Politicians looking to attack opponents to their left can no longer use the word “socialist” as an all-purpose pejorative. Increasingly, it’s worn as a badge of pride.

Methodology: The Momentive online poll was conducted June 11-15 among 2,309 adults ages 18 and older in the United States. The modeled error estimate is +/- 3.0  percentage points.

Source: https://www.axios.com/americas-continued-move-toward-socialism-84a0dda7-4b8d-483a-8c4e-0c2e562c4e67.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Felix Salmon



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Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Basic income payments increased full-time employment in California study

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An effort by a California city to provide basic income payments to some 125 residents ended last month with officials recording rising levels of full-time employment among the study’s participants after one year.A…

Source: https://thehill.com/policy/finance/541444-basic-income-payments-increased-full-time-employment-in-california-study
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The Article Was Written/Published By: John Bowden



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Saturday, January 2, 2021

Graham bucks McConnell: $2,000 payments ‘not socialism’

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Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) pushed back Friday on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) characterization of $2,000 coronavirus relief payments to Americans as “socialism for the rich.””With all due resp…

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/532333-graham-bucks-mcconnell-2000-payments-not-socialism
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Zack Budryk



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Saturday, October 24, 2020

Sanders hits back at Trump’s attack on ‘socialized medicine’

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) lashed out at President Trump in a new video on Friday, criticizing the president for attacking “socialized medicine” during the presidential debate this week against Democratic nominee Joe Bid…

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/522560-sanders-hits-back-at-trumps-attack-on-socialized-medicine
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Marina Pitofsky



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Monday, September 28, 2020

Bernie sanders blasts Trump as corporate socialist over his tax returns

<p>American taxpayers have paid nearly $1m to Trump properties during Mr Trump’s tenure, according to GAO reports.</p>

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/bernie-sanders-donald-trump-tax-returns-corporate-socialist-b674690.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Graig Graziosi



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Monday, June 29, 2020

Do you really want to vote for 'Typhoid Mary' Trump or disappointing Joe Biden? There's another way

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I am ready to debate Trump and Biden, but are they ready to debate me? Their Commission on Presidential Debates — which sounds like a government agency but is in fact a private corporation controlled jointly by the two major parties — is designed to keep their competition out

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/howie-hawkins-green-party-socialist-2020-us-election-trump-biden-candidates-a9591586.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Howie Hawkins



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Thursday, March 19, 2020

Factbox: From Boeing to Tennessee whiskey, coronavirus U.S. bailout requests top $2 trillion

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As the coronavirus pandemic threatens to bring U.S. economic activity to a halt, American businesses are jockeying for a financial lifeline from President Donald Trump’s administration and Congress.

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Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-bailouts-factb/factbox-from-boeing-to-tennessee-whiskey-coronavirus-u-s-bailout-requests-top-2-trillion-idUSKBN2161I5?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews
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Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Super Tuesday: Can Bernie Sanders turn Texas socialist?

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Lone Star state would be a massive prize for Democrats

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/super-tuesday-states-texas-bernie-sanders-polls-south-carolina-a9361911.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Andrew Buncombe



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Friday, August 16, 2019

What FDR Understood About Socialism That Today’s Democrats Don’t

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt arrived at Franklin Field on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in characteristic style: beaming, from the back seat of an open car. He had earned this smile. It was June 27, 1936, and he had just been re-nominated by acclamation in the smoke-filled Philadelphia Convention Center a few blocks away. It was, arguably, the high-water-mark of his career. Thanks to the monumental initiatives of Roosevelt’s first term, it was also a moment of transcendent significance in the nation’s history, though none of the 100,000 people sweating in the yellow-brick football stadium realized it.

This was the pinnacle of American socialism, by that or any other name.

In the four years just past, Roosevelt had transformed the purpose of the United States government, making it a constant companion in the lives of Americans. The Social Security Act of the previous year was merely the crowning achievement. Roosevelt’s initiatives, meant to curb the misery brought on by the Great Depression, directly funded millions of government jobs, employing everyone from photographers to brush-clearing conservation workers. To pay for this, he raised the income tax—which hadn’t even existed two decades earlier—to 75 percent on the highest incomes. The rich were subsidizing the poor, and that was A-OK with FDR.

The giant crowd bristled with excitement to hear their hero defend these policies. What followed was his so-called “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech, which historians rank among the greatest of his career, a tall order from the man whose oratorical roster included “nothing to fear but fear itself,” and “a day that will live in infamy.” But while those speeches perfectly captured individual moments, Roosevelt’s “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech came far closer to revealing his inner theories and motivations: Never before or after would he lay out his vision in greater clarity.

That vision included one truly insistent message: He was not a socialist.

Though he never used the term socialism in his speech, Roosevelt’s anger at those who accused him of ideological motivations, of applying an economic theory that was anathema to the United States, exploded from the lectern. In line after line, the fiery president defended his actions as pragmatic responses to the real, glaring needs of a changing society. The rich who criticized him, who cloaked their greed in an affinity for capitalism, were dangerously missing his point. He knew the ideological threats of communism and of fascism were real, and were overtaking democracy in European countries. An etched-in-stone commitment to the status quo would be an invitation to extremists everywhere. By fulfilling the government’s obligation to assist its people, he was instilling confidence in the American system. He was vindicating the Founding Fathers.

Now, in a time of far less suffering and little sense of economic crisis, some Democrats are embracing the very title that Roosevelt shunned. It is, in their eyes, truth in packaging. Their proposals sound much like Roosevelt’s: using the power of the federal government to create a fairer society, in which essential services are subsidized by higher taxes on the wealthy. But unlike FDR, they say that, yes, these programs amount to socialism. The Republicans who inveigh against them aren’t misstating their intentions, as Roosevelt claimed. The GOP may be dead wrong to demonize them—to turn a benignly descriptive word like socialism into a scare word—but, yeah, they’re socialists in pursuit of a socialist platform.

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For Sen. Bernie Sanders, socialism was a way of distinguishing his left-wing views from those of the dominant moderate wing of the Democratic Party in Vermont. He has proudly, even courageously, worn the socialist moniker since the days of the Cold War, when fears of Soviet-style socialism were rampant. On the presidential campaign trail, however, he does more than just claim the title of “democratic socialist” for himself. By embracing policies shared by many other Democratic candidates, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio, he puts the socialist imprimatur on their platforms, as well. Some younger Democrats, eager to advertise their distance from the party’s tired status quo, have also embraced the term. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has won plaudits for her unambiguous endorsement of the pro-worker socialist tradition.

The Republicans, meanwhile, show every sign of putting the term at the very center of their efforts in 2020, with President Donald Trump sounding the charge in his State of the Union speech last winter. “Socialist” has already become a chyron for numerous Democratic initiatives on Fox News. And, indeed, polls suggest that initiatives such as “Medicare for All” attract solid support when described in generic terms, but rather less when the word “socialist” is affixed to them.

Would Franklin Roosevelt applaud these later generations of Democrats, who claim a piece of his legacy, attempting to demystify the term that was used to slight his record? The evidence strongly suggests he would not. Roosevelt the canny salesman might well say that attaching an ideological label to a pragmatic proposal such as Medicare for All—which is intended to eliminate waste and cut costs, after all—is foolish and misleading.

But his objections would also probably run well beyond political expediency. In Roosevelt’s experience, ideology was something to be feared, not embraced. Communism, fascism, Nazism (“National Socialism”) and even the unbending capitalist principles of his conservative critics were all looming dangers to the nation’s survival. This was the underlying message of his “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech. This was the point he desperately wanted to make to those who assembled in Franklin Field.

His audience had journeyed to Philadelphia from all over the country expecting to hear another of his declarations of bright skies ahead, in the reassuring tones of the man whose fireside chats comforted the families of America and who made “Happy Days Are Here Again” his anthem.

They would be disappointed.

***

In the moments before his 1936 convention acceptance speech, Roosevelt experienced what he later called “the most frightful five minutes of my life.” Paralyzed from the waist down by polio, with his withered legs held in place by steel braces, Roosevelt relied on the steady arm of his son James and the strength in his hips to cautiously wend his way to the speaker’s platform. Navigating through the crowded football stadium, Roosevelt paused to greet the bewhiskered poet Edwin Markham, whose “The Man with the Hoe” (“Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans …”) was beloved by the labor movement.

As the 84-year-old Markham stepped forward, someone jostled him and he brushed into James Roosevelt, who leaned into his father. The president’s leg brace buckled under the pressure, which sent Roosevelt sprawling, the pages of his speech fluttering into the air.

Lucky to escape serious injury, the president composed himself while aides scrambled to find the missing pages of the speech. Fortunately, it was one of the shorter acceptance speeches in Democratic Party history.

Roosevelt began solemnly, by referring to the times as deeply fraught, and himself as a person “upon whom many critical hours have imposed and still impose a grave responsibility.” He saluted those who “put partisanship aside” to assist in the “efforts to achieve recovery and destroy abuses.”

“Above all I thank the millions of Americans who have borne disaster bravely and have dared to smile through the storm,” he continued. “America will not forget these recent years, will not forget that the rescue was not a mere party task. It was the concern of us all. In our strength we rose together, rallied our energies together, applied the old rules of common sense, and together survived.”

Woven into this seemingly boilerplate language is the assertion that Roosevelt was not pushing a personal agenda, but rather bringing people together to solve problems that plagued the entire nation. The solutions weren’t intended to change America but to repair America. They were not precepts but “common sense.”

Nonetheless, Roosevelt explained, beneath the immediate symptoms lay a deeper sickness. Modern advances in industry and technology had served to separate individuals and even whole communities from the fruits of their labor. The changes in the economy have “raised for us new difficulties, new problems which must be solved if we are to preserve to the United States the political and economic freedom for which Washington and Jefferson planned and fought.”

Roosevelt drew a line from the 18th-century royalists who tyrannized the fledgling colonies to his era’s “economic royalists,” building “new kingdoms … upon concentration of control over material things.” He warned, “There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small businessmen and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer.”

The president’s message was clear: His efforts to protect the ordinary American businessman and worker were solidly grounded in the core principles of “the American system of initiative and profit.” No revolutionary was he. But technology had changed, and the massive scaling of industries had empowered a small group of elites, while disempowering the very masses who had won their freedom in the Revolution. “Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government,” Roosevelt continued.

The appeal to government was a plea of last resort. FDR’s administration answered the knock on the door. The wealthy, however, refused to acknowledge the problems or offer any solutions. Instead, they fell back on a biting critique of the expanded role of government, claiming it represented nothing more than Roosevelt’s ideological assault on American free enterprise.

“These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America,” Roosevelt thundered. “What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the flag and Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjugation; and against dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.”

Roosevelt claimed as his guideposts the Constitution and the Founding Fathers themselves. But he admitted that, in his search for solutions, he was often improvising and fully capable of making mistakes.

“We seek daily to profit from experience, to learn to do better as our task proceeds,” he said. “Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of indifference.”

Roosevelt’s assessment of his intentions and methods—responding to woes in a spirit of charity, crafting creative solutions, fulfilling the spirit of the Constitution and the dreams of the founders—represent the soul of pragmatism and the antithesis of ideology.

***

The enduring significance of the “Rendezvous with Destiny” speech is in its brilliant last three paragraphs, when Roosevelt announces a further motive for his New Deal programs: preserving democracy and capitalism around the world. Among Roosevelt’s many accomplishments, historians especially credit his early apprehension of the collapse of democracy in Europe, and the danger it presented to the United States. As Roosevelt stood to accept the Democratic nomination in 1936, almost no one in the giant crowd at Franklin Field foresaw the possibility of a global conflict in just a few years. He did, but hesitated to inflict a lengthy dissection of the threat on a beleaguered population. Instead, he alluded to it in a way that erased any doubts about the motivations behind his policies.

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events,” he declared. “To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.

“In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.

“I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a great and successful war. It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.”

Roosevelt’s eagerness to be seen as a pragmatist was partly a political concern: Growing numbers of critics, including his onetime friend and fellow liberal Al Smith, were starting to use the socialist label to attack him. But there was a further motive: his own resistance to the left. He often felt the sting of ideological critics on his left flank, from the liberal populist Huey Long to the gentlemanly socialist Norman Thomas. He accepted their support at times, but didn’t trust them, precisely because he saw them the way many Republicans and Democrats did: as imposing a one-size-fits-all agenda.

The virtue and weakness of ideology is that it’s fixed: The same program applies in good times and bad, regardless of changing conditions. Roosevelt operated differently. His claim to be making it up as he went along rang true. Until he became president, many people regarded him as a feckless aristocrat. In 1932, he campaigned on a balanced budget and purposely blurred the contours of his New Deal, partly because he hadn’t figured it out. Like many American leaders—including some of the Founding Fathers—he could be a bit of a Sphinx.

That description does not apply to Sanders, who, more than 38 years ago, became the socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont. He has espoused the same priorities—a far greater government role in assisting the poor and providing services for all—in a long career that extended to the U.S. House and Senate and the presidential campaign trail. Consistency is his calling card. Younger voters trust him because he’s always sounded the same notes and his decision to be a socialist is a major part of his appeal, indicating that he’s willing to accept some derision in defense of his principles. He’s transparent about his intentions. He’s a very different animal than Franklin Roosevelt.

Nonetheless, Sanders is using FDR as his shield. In hopes of winning over some voters who may be distrustful of the socialist tag, he has drawn parallels between Roosevelt’s platform and his own. More recently, he’s begun to suggest that—just like FDR and every recent Democratic president—he is the victim of ideological scare tactics. The difference here is that a candidate’s own words matter. Socialism is indeed a slur that’s frequently flung at Democrats. (Roosevelt cheekily rebutted Al Smith’s claim by pointing to times when Smith himself fought back against people who depicted him as a socialist.) But it’s a different matter entirely when the candidate himself is using the term.

Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez clearly see an opportunity to make socialism popular—an emblem of consistency, a sign that they will not bow to expediency, as many young people believe that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did. While Sanders has tried to draw parallels between today’s world and the 1930s, it’s actually helpful to his cause that times have changed. Without Russia and Germany falling into an ideological swoon, the whole notion of socialism seems less threatening today, more of a sleeping cat than a roaring tiger. And yet Roosevelt’s critique extended beyond communism and Nazism to the very nature of ideology itself—the way it both binds and blinds leaders, making them unable to see the direct needs of the people or the reality of the global scene. His rejection of socialism was about more than semantics.

The architect of the New Deal would surely rise up in fist-shaking fury when Donald Trump blasts away at all Democrats as socialists. But when the charge is leveled at Bernie Sanders, he might be tempted to think: He brought this on himself.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/08/16/democrats-socialism-fdr-roosevelt-227622
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Saturday, May 25, 2019

The Secret of Bernie’s Millions

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BURLINGTON, Vt.—Early on in his eight years as the mayor of this city, when he typically dressed in a tieless ensemble of work boots and corduroys, Bernie Sanders one day left City Hall and found a ticket on the windshield of his rusty Volkswagen Dasher. The offense: This was the mayor’s spot, and, surely, a cop had thought, this was not the mayor’s car. But it was. It matched perfectly with both Sanders’ image as a scrappy advocate of the little guy and his own shaky financial reality. It was the beginning of the 1980s, and he was approaching 40, a single father of a not-quite-teenage son, renting a sparse second-floor apartment and having a hard time keeping up with his bills. “Not only,” he wrote on his yellow, coffee-splotched legal pads kept in archives at the University of Vermont, “do I not pay bills every month—‘What, every month?’—I am unable to …” His scribbles in barely legible cursive in the margins read like reminders and afterthoughts: “gas,” “light,” “water.”

He was, said Bruce Seifer, a friend of Sanders, an economic aide in his administration and one of many people who know him who told me this, “frugal.” Seifer paused and considered the right way to put it. “That’s a nice way of saying he’s a cheap son of a bitch.”

Today, he might still be cheap, but he’s sure not poor. In the wake of his 2016 presidential run, the most lucrative thing he’s ever done, the 77-year-old self-described democratic socialist is a three-home-owning millionaire with a net worth approaching at least $2 million, taking into account his publicly outlined assets and liabilities along with the real estate he owns outright. In a strict, bottom-line sense, Sanders has become one of those rich people against whom he has so unrelentingly railed. The champion of the underclass and castigator of “the 1 percent” has found himself in the socioeconomic penthouse of his rhetorical boogeymen. This development, seen mostly as the result of big bucks brought in by the slate of books he’s put out in the past few years, predictably has elicited snarky pokes, partisan jabs and charges of hypocrisy. The millionaire socialist!

Sanders has been impatient to the point of churlish when pressed about this. “I wrote a best-selling book,” he told the New York Times after he releasing the last 10 years of his tax returns. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.” Asked on Fox News if this sort of success was “the definition of capitalism,” he bristled. “You know, I have a college degree,” he said.

Based on a deeper examination of his financial disclosures, tax returns, property records in Washington and Vermont, and scarcely leafed-through scraps of his financial papers housed at the University of Vermont, Sanders’ current financial portrait is not only some stroke-of-luck windfall, it’s also the product (with the help of his wife) of decades of planning. The upward trajectory from that jalopy of his to his relative riches now—as off-brand as it is for a man who once said he had “no great desire to be rich”—is the product of years of middle-class striving, replete with credit card debt, real estate upgrades and an array of investment funds and retirement accounts.

As an immigrant’s son who started close to the bottom and has ended up near to the top, Sanders has a narrative arc that would form the backbone of the campaign story of almost any other candidate. But it’s more complicated for him. There’s never been anybody like Sanders in the modern political history of this country—somebody who made a career out of haranguing millionaires … and who is now a millionaire himself. There is no set strategy for how to run for president as a democratic socialist with an expensive lakefront summer house. Americans generally don’t begrudge millionaires their millions—and, as Donald Trump has confirmed, the aura of wealth can serve as a useful means of self-promotion—but what to make of Sanders’ apparently conflicting narratives?

“He became the very thing he criticized others for becoming and at the same time didn’t fix any of the problems he’s been railing about that got him to this point,” Boston-based Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh told me.

“He almost at times sounds like he thinks it’s inherently evil to be well-off,” veteran Democratic strategist Bob Shrum said in an interview.

Does all of this make Sanders’ abiding calls for economic justice more authoritative or compelling, especially as he, the ranking member on the Senate Budget Committee, argues on the 2020 hustings for costly programs like tuition-free college and universal health care, or does it defuse his drilled-home political brand and somehow muffle his message?

“I think it’s only awkward if someone has sort of a facile understanding of what Bernie is trying to accomplish,” senior Sanders adviser Jeff Weaver told me, “which is to give lots of people opportunities to have a modicum of security.”

“It depends on how it plays out,” Shrum said.

What’s certain, though, is that how Sanders has become wealthy and how he has managed his money are two of the least radical things about the self-identified radical Sanders.

***

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Before he had three homes, Sanders grew up in a rent-controlled apartment with 3½ rooms. The national economy boomed in the years after World War II, but in Sanders’ corner of the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, life meant cut-rate groceries and hand-me-down coats.

His parents, a Polish paint salesman and a homemaker, were “solidly lower-middle class,” as he once put it, and they argued frequently about money—“arguments and more arguments,” Sanders has said. “Painful arguments. Bitter arguments. Arguments that seared through a little boy’s brain, never to be forgotten.” There was some talk at the outset of his second presidential campaign that Sanders was reluctantly ready to share more of his past, but this at least is a piece of it he’s been talking about for as long as anybody’s been listening to him and writing it down. “Money was a constant source of anxiety,” he told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal in 1983. “Money was something the family, the whole neighborhood, was constantly preoccupied with,” he told the Atlantic in 1985. “The money question to me,” he wrote in a 2010 book titled The Jews of Capitol Hill, “has always been very deep and emotional.”

Sanders’ mother died when he was 18, and his father when he was 20. He got “a few thousand dollars” of inheritance. And for $2,500, the summer after he graduated from the University of Chicago, he and his first wife bought 85 acres of meadow and woods in Middlesex, Vermont, an out-of-the-way plot that came with an old maple “sugarhouse.” With no electricity or running water, life in the ascetic, dirt-floor, shacklike structure didn’t work out, and neither did his marriage.

Toward the end of the 1960s and throughout the the ’70s, as he ran twice for governor and twice for the Senate as a member of the anti-war, left-wing, little-but-loud Liberty Union Party, Sanders worked sporadically as a carpenter and as a freelance writer and eventually made and sold to schools filmstrips about largely regional history. “He was always poor,” friend Sandy Baird told me. Sanders collected unemployment during one of his political campaigns, borrowed gas money for his battered beater of a VW bug and dangled extension cords to share electricity with a downstairs neighbor. He got evicted. He didn’t seem to those around him to be too worried about it. “Everyone has to make sure that they survive, so obviously money was a concern,” remembered Linda Niedweske, a nutritionist at the time who got to know Sanders and later would become a political aide, “but it was never an overriding goal.” Fellow pal Dean Corren agreed. “I don’t think he ever really worried about that on a personal level,” he said.

“He didn’t give a shit about clothes,” said Tom Smith, a progressive activist and former city councilor. “He didn’t care about his car.”

In this respect, according to local attorney John Franco, a longtime confidant who’s known Sanders since the 70s, Sanders fit in with many of the congenitally parsimonious citizens of his adopted home. And it’s more than even that, Franco added. It’s not just that he didn’t and doesn’t want to spend money. “He doesn’t want to be bothered.”

Sanders also used his meager means to buttress his political aims, wielding it almost as a kind of authenticator for the crux of his lodestar view of the haves and have-nots. He lambasted “a United States Congress composed of millionaires.” He said again and again that it wasn’t right that their elected representatives appeared in his estimation to disproportionately serve “the interests of corporations and big business—their fellow millionaires.”

In 1974, waging one of his quixotic campaigns for the Senate, he practically ran more against Nelson Rockefeller than he did his actual opponents. And in 1976, in releasing his financial disclosure as a candidate for governor, he attached a short statement that sat on the page not like an apology so much as a chest-out boast. “Unfortunately,” he said, “there is not too much to report. At the present moment, I am ‘worth’ about $1,100, which includes a savings account and a 1967 car. I own no real estate, stocks or bonds.”

This steadfast posture became more locally focused when he ran for mayor starting in the fall of 1980. As the election of Ronald Reagan ushered in a conservative, pro-business age nationwide, Sanders prioritized tenants’ rights, pledged he would not hike property taxes and promised a “people-oriented” waterfront instead of an enclave of high-priced condominiums. “It is my belief, if present trends continue,” he wrote in a crinkled newsprint pamphlet tucked in the UVM files, “the City of Burlington will be converted into an area in which only the wealthy and upper-middle class will be able to afford to live.” He knocked on door after door in the cold in the city’s poorer wards.

“Not having money, he was able to identify with these people,” Garrison Nelson, a Vermont political science professor and veteran Sanders watcher, told me, “and they were able to identify with him.”

“He would walk into a home where people were fairly poor,” former City Councilor Gary De Carolis said, “and he’d be absolutely right at home.”

He won by 10 votes. His new job came with a yearly salary of $33,824, plenty hearty at that time, the equivalent of more than $100,000 in today’s dollars and easily more than he had ever made. “It’s so strange, just having money,” he marveled to a reporter from the Associated Press.

Nearing a year into his tenure, he bought a new car, a silver Honda Civic—paying $6,400 and taking out a three-year loan, committing to monthly payments of $239.69, according to records of the transaction in his files. After three fender benders, he came to regret the splurge. “I knew I should never have bought a new car,” he told New England Monthly.

And shortly after his first reelection, in 1983, perhaps feeling a smidgen more secure and emboldened, he stopped renting. With a mortgage of $49,500—records don’t show what he put down, or the total price of the sale—he purchased a two-story, six-room, 1,900-square-foot house on Catherine Street, a mile south of City Hall. The decor remained spartan. “Not a whole lot of furniture,” De Carolis recalled. Even so, and even then, the fact that the socialist mayor owned just one home caused some critics to tut-tut. “I can remember lefties criticizing Bernie when he bought his first house,” Franco told me. Their suggestion, he said: “He was a bourgeois sellout when he did that.”

***

“My political philosophy,” Sanders penned in one of his legal pads, underlining his mid-‘80s chicken scratch.

“Ultimately, I believe in democracy—that we should live in a society where all of our citizens help decide what happens—and where all of our citizens enjoy the fruits of their labor. In practical terms, the development of a democratic society in our nation would mean a far greater degree of citizen participation, public ownership of production, and a far more equal distribution of wealth and power,” he wrote.

“Essentially, I believe that 200 people years after the 1st American Rev.—we need a 2nd American Revolution.”

In these private writings, he returned to this theme regularly.

“There is a great deal of confusion in this country as to what politics is really about,” he wrote. What it wasn’t about: ads, TV, how a candidate looks, “inane debates between Dems and Reps, saying the same thing.”

No, he wrote. “In politics, there are winners and losers,” and the losers, Sanders believed, were “the majority of our population who work hard—day after day, year after year—and often have nothing in the bank to show for their years of efforts.”

Those were the people he sought to represent.

“My view of politics,” he wrote elsewhere in his notes, “is that you can’t always represent everybody. Which side are you on? The Class Issue is the major issue.”

When he was mayor, the monomania of Sanders’ theory and rhetoric didn’t change, obviously—but something else about him did. In retrospect, a step toward improving his finances in some sense was stabilizing the city’s.

Surprising skeptical and even fearful local businessmen, surprising both Republicans and Democrats on the City Council, surprising his friends and, many say, even himself, “Hizzoner the socialist,” as the Boston Phoenix called him, proved to be a diligent and able steward of the municipal purse. “He’s not a spender,” Peter Clavelle, one of his top economic staffers who succeeded him as mayor, told me. “He was, in fact, a fiscal conservative that managed the city’s resources quite well.”

With the help of a savvy treasurer in accountant Jonathan Leopold, Sanders found an unexpected surplus of $1.9 million, which he used to pave roads without hiking taxes. Putting out to bid the city’s fuel and insurance contracts, instituting the first audit in nearly 30 years of the city’s pension fund, and streamlining cooperation between departments, he saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. He upped fees for large-development building permits. He raised taxes on commercial properties, but opponents’ ads saying Sanders “does not believe in free enterprise” fell flat. From his third-floor office, with a Eugene Debs poster hanging on the wall—“Unionist. Socialist. Revolutionary,” it said—he launched an economic task force that led to the creation of the Community and Economic Development Office. “It is my view that there is probably no more important area of concern for the City of Burlington than the issue of economic development,” he wrote in announcing the endeavor.

“The Republicrat administrations were acting just like a big corporation,” Sanders said in 1982 in an article in New York’s Ithaca Times, emphasizing his conviction that there was little difference between the two major parties. “They were sluggish, without motivation or ideas. We had the good fortune to inherit that moribund system and revamp it.”

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“Socialist Mayor Presides Over a Spell of Prosperity,” read a headline in Connecticut’s Hartford Courant in 1985.

City staffers sometimes claimed Sanders was “out-Republicaning the Republicans.”

“Trotskyites for Sound Fiscal Management,” they joked.

The “red mayor in the Green Mountains,” as Rolling Stone had dubbed him, was reelected the first time around with 53 percent of the vote, and in 1985 with 55 percent, and in 1987 with 56.

If he wanted to talk about what he really wanted to talk about, which was income and wealth inequality, the burgeoning American “oligarchy,” and foreign policy, he knew, his advisers and friends said, that he first and foremost had to get right the dollars and cents. “If he did a good job there,” De Carolis said, “then he could talk about what’s going on in Nicaragua. But he couldn’t talk about the inequalities of various parts of our country if he didn’t take care of that home front.”

He was, W.J. Conroy wrote in the 2016 preface to his 1990 book about Sanders that started as his doctoral thesis in the ‘80s, a “pragmatic socialist.”

“Bernie himself may or may not have been a good financial manager,” Steven Soifer told me. Now the chairman of the Department of Social Work at the University of Mississippi, he is the author of a 1991 book on Sanders’ time as mayor. “However,” Soifer said, “Bernie always had the skill of surrounding himself with very competent, sometimes brilliant people.”

One of them was Bruce Seifer, a higher-up in the Community and Economic Development Office. “It’s about fairness and democracy with a small ‘d,’” he told me. “You run government effectively and efficiently, No. 1, and then you make sure that everybody does the job they’re supposed to do and everybody pays their fair share of taxes.” But Sanders was at the helm. “And the thing is, he’s not a radical,” Seifer said. “He’s just, like, your commonsense uncle.”

***

Looking back, the last two years of the ’80s can be seen as the start of the rest of Sanders’ life—because that was the time when he really started using traditional tools of the country’s capitalistic financial system to put himself on firmer footing.

In May 1988, he married Jane O’Meara Driscoll, a divorced mother of three who had been his significant other the entire time he was mayor and served as the director of his administration’s youth office. And that summer and fall, nearing the end of his fourth and final term at City Hall, Sanders ran for Congress as an independent, of course, and lost. But he lost by only 3.7 percentage points, and he beat the Democrat, effectively becoming, for the first time in his career, a realistic electoral option in a statewide race. “A real breakthrough for him,” Nelson, the UVM professor, told me. It was a hint of what was to come.

At the time, though, that’s all it was—latent potential in a moment marked by unknowns and unease. Biding time and weighing his options, Sanders scrambled for paying gigs. In January 1989, he contacted the chair of the sociology department at Hamilton College, four hours away in Clinton, New York. “I believe,” Sanders wrote to Dennis Gilbert, “that I could offer your students an unusual academic perspective.” After spending a semester as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, he taught classes on urban sociology and social democracy at Hamilton. Leaning on the last hunk of his salary as mayor and speeches at colleges and universities, Sanders made more than $45,000 in 1989—given inflation and the rising cost of living, it was effectively less than he had made when he was first mayor. At 50 and mulling another crapshoot of a congressional bid, he fretted. “At Hamilton,” Steve Rosenfeld, his 1990 press secretary, said, “Bernie would often confide in Dennis, saying he was worried about his professional future and financial security.”

Sanders and his wife responded by pooling resources. Central to their efforts? One of the most reliable ways that millions upon millions of Americans have sought to leverage and improve their financial fortunes: real estate.

In September 1988, according to local property records, Jane Sanders changed the house she owned on Isham Street to a house they owned—kicking off a spate of activity and shifting legally from “sole owner” to “Jane O’Meara Sanders and Bernard Sanders, husband and wife, as tenants by the entirety.” Just two days later, they used the house to take out a mortgage of $50,000. The following February, according to a three-line recording of the transaction in the Burlington Free Press, Sanders sold the house he had bought in 1983 with a $49,500 mortgage for $82,000—a fine return on that first investment. Not quite three months later, leaving the more urban portion of Burlington and moving to a neighborhood closer to picturesque Lake Champlain, Bernie and Jane Sanders got a $140,000 mortgage to purchase for $175,500 a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, not-quite-1,600-square-foot house on Killarney Drive—“a red-paneled, boxy, split-level house,” as Rosenfeld would describe it, “that could be in any middle-class suburb in America.” Barely more than a month after that, they sold the house on Isham for $135,000.

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In 1990, sometimes wearing a blue blazer missing a button and working out of a cramped basement office in the Killarney house—which had plywood tables, a painted-shut window and green indoor-outdoor carpet—and getting into hot water in the news for paying his staffers as contractors instead of as full-time employees, Sanders tried again to win Vermont’s sole seat in the House—and this time, he did. In the aftermath of his victory, he was a mixture of exultant and indignant. “I’m not an insider,” he said. “I know who I am. I know where I came from. I don’t need to get down on my knees and ask rich people for help.” After having excoriated members of Congress for voting to give themselves pay raises two years earlier—“quite beyond comprehension,” he huffed in a letter to the three members of Vermont’s congressional delegation that he had made public as a mayoral news release—Sanders started making considerably more than he had ever earned: $125,100 a year.

In the first half of the ’90s, though—as the crotchety independent butted heads with Democrats in Washington while navigating the topsy-turvy political terrain of the time and as the election of Bill Clinton spawned the rise of increasingly virulent, Newt Gingrich-led hyperpartisanship—Sanders’ prospects were far from ensured. And he used his house to hedge his bets. He signed over power of attorney to his wife, and they refinanced their home in 1991 and again in 1993, both times with mortgages larger than the one they had agreed to in 1989—$140,500 in ’91, $145,600 in ’93.

Sanders settled in, though, as a more and more fixed political presence in Vermont. His race in 1994 was the last one he could have lost, really, as he cemented his status and security.

In 2000, with a real estate boom underway, and with a mortgage of $62,100, he and his wife bought in essence their first second home—a condominium in Burlington, which they initially bought for Jane Sanders’ elderly mother, according to Weaver, and used intermittently as a place for extended family or a rental property.

In 2004, Jane Sanders was hired as the president of Burlington College, a small, middling liberal arts school. Making a six-figure salary, she saw her tenure end in acrimony after her decision to pursue a campus expansion by making a $10 million land purchase crippled the institution. She resigned in 2014 and took with her a $200,000 severance package some called a golden parachute. In 2016, the debt-beset college closed for good, felled by “an inexperienced president,” in the barbed words of Jane Sanders’ successor.

In the meantime, Bernie Sanders’ career was heading in the opposite direction: up. In 2006, he was elected to the Senate. At the top of a surging real estate market in 2007, with his congressional salary at $165,200, Sanders bought a row home in Washington for $489,000, adding to the condo and house on Killarney and quietly climbing some financial stair steps when far fewer people were paying him any attention.

And in 2009, when the markets were crashing and half of the 100 senators were still worth a million dollars or more, Sanders’ estimated net worth clocked in at $105,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics—at the bottom of the Senate wealth chart. In Burlington, Bernie and Jane Sanders returned to real estate, using a mortgage of $324,000 to purchase a $405,000 upgrade: a four-bedroom, 2,352-square-foot house sitting atop a slow slope of a hill up from the street on Van Patten Parkway. (They bought the house, interestingly, from her son, David Driscoll, and his wife. In 2012, for $265,000, Driscoll and his wife bought from Jane and Bernie Sanders the Killarney house. Effectively, they swapped houses. Driscoll, Weaver said, wanted to live in “his childhood home.”) In 2013, Bernie and Jane Sanders refinanced the Van Patten house, taking out a mortgage of $312,275.

And in 2015, when he started running for president, he had a net worth of a little more than $700,000, according to CRP calculations, a financial picture that had all his assets in his wife’s name and liabilities from a pair of mortgages as well as credit card debt listed as between $25,002 and $65,000. It made him, a spokesman said at the time, “a regular American.” More “regular,” perhaps, than he should have been: According to the Federal Reserve, the average household in 2015 had credit card debt of about $10,000.

“Unfortunately,” Sanders said during his 2016 presidential campaign, using the same effacing opening clause and striking the same tone that he had in his financial disclosure of 40 years before, “I remain one of the poorer members of the United States Senate.”

But for the politics he practiced—always—it was a useful note to sound.

He all but compared his finances to those of front-running Hillary Clinton, she of the high-dollar speaking fees. “That type of wealth,” he said, “has the potential to isolate you from the reality of the world.”

It wasn’t long before unprecedented money for Sanders started rolling in.

***

Driving from address to address, I recently made a quick self-guided tour of Sanders’ sequence of houses in the Queen City of Vermont, tracing from Catherine to Isham to Killarney to Van Patten the almost 40 years of the socialist’s slow climb to the upper class. I stared at his car, a red 2010 Chevrolet Aveo, parked in his driveway.

Then, though, I carried on an hour so north, to bucolic North Hero, some 20 miles south of the Canadian border, to see the emblem of the economic altitude to which Sanders has ascended—the third house, the summer house, the house with rustic wood sides, a silver-colored tin roof, four bedrooms and 500 feet of waterfront that Bernie and Jane Sanders bought for $575,000, cash, through an entity they created called the Islands Trust. “Jane’s idea was to have something that would stay in the family,” Weaver told me, “over generations, and that sort of structure was the way to help accomplish that.”

Past horses and silos and campsites and apple farms, it’s nestled at the end of a gravel private lane, hidden behind a cluster of evergreens, looking out over the wide, resplendent blue of Lake Champlain.

Much has changed in these past four years. In 2015, Sanders had that credit card debt and two mortgages that ranged from $250,001 to $500,000, according to his Senate financial disclosure of that year. In 2016, the credit card debt was gone, and one of those mortgages had been halved. By 2018, only one of the mortgages remained; that January, records show, he paid off what was left of the $312,275 mortgage he had on his main house in Vermont.

In 2015, he published a book called The Speech, basically a transcript of his memorable 2010 filibuster on (what else?) corporate greed, income inequality and the decline of the middle class. Sanders made $3,035, which he donated to charity. In 2016, though, book money began to pile up. He got a $795,000 advance to write Our Revolution. He pocketed an additional $70,484 in royalties. In 2017, the book royalties added up to $880,091.14. And last year, while they dipped, they still were a hunk of money: $392,810.37.

The Sanders’ tax returns, too, tell the tale: From 2015 to 2018, their total income went from $240,622 to $1,073,333 to $1,150,891 to $566,421. Some of that, along with money from a retirement account, according to Jane Sanders, and proceeds from a sale of a share of a family home of hers, helped pay for the lake house that I sat and looked at while listening to birds chirp in the chill of spring in the northern reaches of New England.

“Bernie is a known quantity in any socialist paradise,” GOP consultant Rick Wilson told me, “the party apparatchik with the dacha …”

This kind of characterization makes Sanders’ friends and others who’ve known him for years all but roll their eyes.

“He’s still the same cranky guy,” said Terje Anderson, chairman of the Vermont Democratic Party. “I run into him at Hannaford shopping for groceries.”

And in his cart, I asked, aren’t the finest meats and cheeses?

“Hell no,” Anderson said.

“There’s no change,” Niedweske added. “His priorities remain the same.”

“I mean, I don’t think any of Bernie’s supporters said, ‘Oh, well, now that he’s made a lot of money selling a book … I can’t support him anymore,’” Terry Bouricius, a former Burlington city councilor and progressive who’s known Sanders since the ’70s, told me. “No—I don’t think that happened to anybody.”

A spectrum of politicos I talked to don’t think this is that big of a political problem for Sanders. He has problems, they said, that are bigger than his bottom line—his persistent lack of appeal to female voters and black voters, for instance, and his generally sagging poll numbers ever since an evidently formidable Joe Biden entered the race, and the slap-in-the-face mathematical fact that this time around he’s running against not Hillary Clinton but 20-plus Democrats. He is, in other words, no longer the beneficiary of the anybody-but-her voters.

“The least of his problems,” Marsh, the Democratic strategist from Boston, said of Sanders’ wealth.

“Detractors will needle and pester and continue to push that argument,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist who’s been working on presidential campaigns for almost 40 years. “But I don’t think in the end it’s going to have much impact.”

“On the list of stuff that bothers me about Bernie,” said Stuart Stevens, a GOP consultant who was the chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 run, “the fact that he wrote a book and made some money doesn’t bother me at all.”

Ditto Democrat Bakari Sellers.

“I’m not going to sit here and shit on Bernie Sanders for being a millionaire,” the former South Carolina lawmaker and current Kamala Harris supporter told me.

Why not?

“I want to be a millionaire, too!”

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/05/24/bernie-sanders-millionaires-226982
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Friday, April 12, 2019

Republicans already ran a campaign blasting Democrats as socialists. It didn’t work.

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With Bernie Sanders leading the Democratic pack and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turning congressional hearings into viral sensations, Republicans can hardly wait to turn 2020 into a referendum on “socialism.”

But the GOP already tried that very strategy in a swing state that was essential to President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory — and it flopped.

In Pennsylvania last year, Republicans tagged Democrats up and down the ticket as socialists or sympathetic to socialism: Gov. Tom Wolf, congressional candidates and state representative hopefuls all got the hammer-and-sickle treatment. The strategy was deliberate and coordinated, emanating from the state’s Republican Party chairman, Val DiGiorgio.

But come Election Day, Democrats flipped three House seats and 16 more in the state General Assembly. Wolf easily won reelection, as did Democratic Sen. Bob Casey.

“Their attacks backfired,” said Democratic state Rep. Jennifer O’Mara, a first-time candidate who won a GOP-held seat in the Philadelphia suburbs. “They protested an event I was at and handed out fake $10,000 bills that said ‘In Socialism We Trust’ with my face on it. They went really low, and it didn’t work.”

The election in Pennsylvania serves as a case study of a campaign strategy that could prove critical to Trump’s reelection — or undoing — in 2020. The president and his allies have made it no secret they plan to brand the eventual nominee — no matter who it is — as a socialist on the fringe of the political spectrum. If centrist voters are uncomfortable with Trump, think about the radical experiment the other side is offering, the theory goes.

But Democrats say the tactic failed in Pennsylvania partly because it didn’t ring true: Many of the party’s candidates ran as moderates, they said, and even most progressives who campaigned for office were far from socialists. Plus, they argue, the GOP has cried wolf for years when it comes to socialism, including by labeling the Affordable Care Act as far left.

Of course, the effectiveness of the attack in the presidential race could depend on which Democrat wins the nomination and which policies that person has endorsed, Republicans said. Sanders, the Vermont senator, doesn’t shy away from the “democratic socialist” label; Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wants no part of it. Former Vice President Joe Biden cuts a more centrist profile than either of them.

Plus, there’s a big difference between a midterm election and a presidential election with Trump using his bullhorn day in and day out.

“It’s a different messenger, a different moment, a different race,” said Charlie Gerow, a Pennsylvania-based GOP consultant. “In the 2016 cycle, [Ocasio-Cortez] was a bartender in New York challenging Joe Crowley for a seat. Now she’s a sitting member of Congress proposing the ‘Green New Deal.’ That is a seismic shift in the political dynamic.”

But if Republicans think they have a surefire winner with the socialism message in 2020, the Pennsylvania experience offers a cautionary tale, at least. Even Republicans who think they’ll have better success in 2020 concede the tactic wasn’t fruitful in the state last year.

“It didn’t work in 2018,” said Ryan Costello, a former GOP congressman from Pennsylvania. He called the concept “a bit premature” in the midterms, but predicted it would work better next year with prominent Democrats giving Trump fodder.

In Pennsylvania, the strategy took the form of mailers, tweets, fundraising emails, news conferences and news releases. DiGiorgio, the state GOP leader, called on all Democratic congressional candidates in July to state whether they supported the agenda of the Democratic Socialists of America. Sometimes, Republican Party leaders hit Democrats for campaigning alongside self-described democratic socialists, such as Kristin Seale, who narrowly lost her bid for the state House.

In the gubernatorial race, a billboard funded by Republican Scott Wagner warned of “A MORE SOCIALIST PA,” featuring images of Wolf, as well as John Fetterman, then the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor and a Sanders supporter in 2016.

“I wanted to get a copy of that. It was just so comical,” said Fetterman. “Anyone that examines either of our records would know that that’s just unfounded.”

J.J. Abbott, a spokesman for Wolf, tweeted recently that the Pennsylvania GOP’s messaging during the midterms, including “fake socialism hysteria,” proved to be irrelevant to swing voters. Wolf, with Fetterman as his running mate, won by 17 percentage points.

But there’s no sign that the outcome in Pennsylvania is giving Republicans pause about going all-in on the socialism message, in the Keystone State or elsewhere.

“The situation is actually different,” said Bryan Lanza, an aide on Trump’s 2016 campaign. “One, Trump’s on the ballot. And the [Democratic] Party now is legislatively more associated with socialism than they’ve ever been before. … In 2018, you had a lot of candidates who weren’t able to be defined. They can’t avoid that this time.”

Republicans also noted that any anti-socialist campaign will be more far more heavily funded in 2020 than it was last year in Pennsylvania. And the message this time will come from Trump directly instead of lesser-known state party officials.

Ed Rendell, the former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, agreed that the “socialist” label didn’t stick to mainstream candidates such as Mary Gay Scanlon, who won a House seat in the Philadelphia suburbs. “The district knew Mary Gay so well from all her work as a pro-bono lawyer that nobody believed that for a minute, and Mary Gay is certainly a left-of-center moderate,” Rendell said.

He added, however, that Republicans successfully painted multimillionaire Scott Wallace, an unsuccessful candidate for Congress in a Philadelphia-area swing district, as too far left.

“I think they were very effective in their ads making him seem to be a socialist, and I think that cost him the election,” he said.

Some Democrats pushed back on that assumption that the socialism attack would hurt even Sanders. They said he has an established brand that could inoculate him from such criticisms — and scare tactics might fall flat because many Americans know and like his platform, regardless of how it’s labeled.

“He’s so well-defined and well-known already,” said Fetterman. “I don’t think it would have any meaningful impact.”

For those hoping that the “socialist” epithet won’t work against Democrats in 2020, there was a piece of good news this month: Despite Donald Trump, Jr. recording a robocall that said she supported “socialized medicine,” Pam Iovino won a special election for the state Senate in a western Pennsylvania district that voted for Trump in 2016. It was the first special state legislative seat in the nation that Democrats flipped this year.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/12/republicans-socialists-democrats-campaign-2020-1271706
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Saturday, March 23, 2019

Democratic Socialists of America back Bernie: ‘The best chance to beat Trump’

Democratic Socialists of America back Bernie: 'The best chance to beat Trump'The group helped leftwing candidates Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib win long-shot elections to Congress in 2018Bernie Sanders waves to workers at a rally at the University of California Los Angeles, on Wednesday 20 March 2019. Photograph: Richard Vogel/APThe Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has officially endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, with the organization throwing its growing political clout behind the Vermont senator ahead of the 2020 election.The DSA’s National Political Committee leadership team voted to back Sanders during a meeting on Thursday night, after the rank-and-file membership had earlier overwhelmingly pledged their support.The backing of the DSA will provide a further fillip to Sanders, who quickly outraised most of his rivals for the Democratic nomination. The DSA endorsed Sanders in 2016 and helped the leftwing candidates Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib win long-shot elections to Congress in 2018.“He has the best possible chance of the Democratic field to beat Trump,” said Jeremy Gong, a member of the NPC who voted to endorse Sanders.“Specifically because he has a working-class political agenda, as opposed to an elite, or moderate, or corporate-friendly agenda that is not exciting to anyone electorally – except a very small number of either Democratic party diehards or upper middle class or wealthy people.”Sanders announced his run for president on 19 February and raised $5.9m in the first 24 hours of his campaign, second only to Texas’s Beto O’Rourke among Democratic candidates. Sanders is running second, behind Joe Biden, in most polling of Democratic candidates – although the pair are probably benefitting from superior name recognition at this point in the election cycle.The DSA has seen a dramatic increase in membership since the 2016 election, rising from 5,000 members to more than 55,000. Ocasio-Cortez is the highest-profile beneficiary of the DSA’s political heft, her victory in New York’s 14th congressional district aided by the wealth of volunteers DSA can offer access to.Gong said the DSA was still working on its strategy to support Sanders, who is advocating for Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage and a Green New Deal climate policy. There are more than 100 chapters in the US and each will decide how to promote Sanders. But Gong said the DSA was looking beyond just electing Sanders as president.“Sanders alone, once in office, is not capable of pushing through these reforms,” Gong said.“We need to have a mass movement of ordinary people building organizations like the DSA, building their union, going on strike, demonstrating in the streets, pushing for his radical reform agenda.”The DSA also aims to elect progressive candidates to local government across the country. Six democratic socialists are running for election to the Chicago city council this year, and despite Republicans seeking to use the term “democratic socialist” to denigrate Democrats, the DSA is continuing to grow.Sanders, 77, has been criticized in some quarters for entering what promises to be the most diverse race for the Democratic nomination in history, but Gong pointed to some polling which shows Sanders is popular among black and Latino voters, and said there is “not a deep bench” of candidates who have the politics and reach of the veteran senator.“It’d be better and preferable if Sanders was not an old white man, and that there be someone who has the same track record, and the same politics and the same potential to transform our society that Sanders does,” Gong said.“[But] there is no one else who is advancing the Sanders agenda and building a movement in the way that Sanders is who could also be elected president.”

Source: https://news.yahoo.com/democratic-socialists-america-back-bernie-023532484.html
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Thursday, March 14, 2019

Republicans using 'socialist' scheme to save unprofitable coal plants

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GOP passes bill to prop up outdated power plants in Wyoming, with costs set to be passed on to consumers

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/wyoming-coal-plant-republican-socialist-subsidy-energy-gop-a8822961.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Tom Barnes



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Thursday, March 7, 2019

How Bernie Could Save Socialism From Trump

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President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign strategy seems like it can be summed up in one word: “SOCIALISM!” With Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” near the top of many of the early primary polls, and with several other candidates cribbing from his platform and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez increasingly driving the policy debate, Republicans are eager to paint the entire Democratic Party pink.

For Republicans to use socialism as their foil presents Sanders with both possibility and peril. He has the opportunity to engage Trump now and prove he can win an argument over socialism, soothing any Democratic anxiety about his electability. But if Sanders can’t satisfactorily respond to Trump’s broadsides, his presidential candidacy will sputter and Democrats will backpedal from his agenda.

Sanders’ typical explanations for his brand of democratic socialism appear insufficient to the task at hand, especially with the political and economic crises in Venezuela helping to return socialism to its “dirty word” status. While Sanders has resuscitated socialism in American political discourse, the ideology remains far from popular. In this week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, only 18 percent of voters view socialism positively, and only 25 percent are “comfortable” or “enthusiastic” about a socialist president.

So Sanders needs to confront the socialism question, starting with a complete separation between his vision and the ruinous reality of Venezuela.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, Trump and his allies gave a preview of how socialism is likely be wielded in 2020. Trump brought the crowd to its feet when he thundered, “America will never be a socialist country. Ever.” Vice President Mike Pence warned, “The moment America becomes a socialist country is the moment that America ceases to be America,” and “If you want socialism, just look at Venezuela.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy stated the strategy plainly: “This election is not going to be about Republican or Democrat. It’s going to be about socialism and the free market.”

While that framing is meant to terrify Democrats, some on the left aren’t quaking. The Nation’s John Nichols argued last month that Sanders’ strong performance in general election trial heats proves that socialism isn’t heavy baggage, thanks to Sanders’ own “aggressive” use of the word to describe his politics. Others contend that, as a slur, socialism has lost its sting from conservative overuse. The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel observed that histrionic claims of socialist takeover have been a staple of CPAC events going back at least 10 years, and socialism has gained traction anyway.

The New Yorker’s Osita Nwanevu suggested that Trump’s anti-socialist tack amounted to a foolish abandonment of his more clever 2016 positioning: “Republicans tried to paint Barack Obama as a far-left radical in 2008 and 2012. They lost both times. In 2016, Trump ran a populist campaign focused on depicting Hillary Clinton as corrupt and, if anything, in the pocket of the international elite. He won.”

If Sanders follows the comforting leftist logic that conservative attacks on socialism are nothing to fear—and he is intrinsically inclined to believe they are not—he won’t see any need to adjust his pitch. But, as recent poor polling for socialism indicates, Sanders shouldn’t be so sanguine. Yes, when Republicans targeted Obama as a socialist, they failed to prevent his election and reelection as president. But that’s because Obama wasn’t a socialist.

Obama bailed out Wall Street and General Motors, but he didn’t nationalize them. His signature health care reform didn’t eliminate private insurers; it ensured them more customers. In Sanders’ case, having presented himself and his ideas as socialism, Republicans won’t even have to bother convincing voters of it.

Yet if Sanders isn’t Barack Obama, he also isn’t Hillary Clinton. He hasn’t spoken at enough private Goldman Sachs lunches for Trump to easily peg him as “in the pocket of the international elite.” Still, Trump isn’t abandoning his right-wing populism when he denigrates socialism. He’s reinforcing it. Trump said to CPAC: “Socialism is not about the environment; it’s not about justice; it is not about virtue. Socialism is about only one thing: It’s called power for the ruling class.” Sanders and his socialist allies may scoff at Trump’s attempt to strip them of their moral authority. But if there’s one thing Trump is good at, it’s gaslighting his way through a scorched-earth political blitz.

Finally, and most important, there is Venezuela, which Trump cited to underscore his “ruling class” point. Venezuela is not only a socialist country in the news for its dictatorial abuses of power, economic calamity and political disintegration. It is also a country of crucial import for perhaps the most important demographic in the 2020 presidential election. For those Latino voters whose families fled socialist dictatorships, particularly in the swing state of Florida, Venezuela viscerally represents what they chose to flee.

Sanders has tried to distance himself and his brand of democratic socialism from Venezuela. In a NBC-Telemundo town hall just before the 2016 Nevada caucus, Sanders was warned by the host that “when some Latinos hear [“democratic socialist”] they think Venezuela and Cuba, [Hugo] Chávez and the Castro brothers, 57 years of dictatorship.” Sanders assured, “I’m not looking at Venezuela. I’m not looking at Cuba. I’m looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden.”

But other remarks by Sanders will complicate his attempt to associate his brand of socialism with Scandinavia, not Latin America. He has taken flak for refusing to label Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro as a “dictator.” Granted, Sanders has never endorsed Maduro (though Maduro endorsed Sanders in 2016). Sanders has criticized Maduro for a “violent crackdown on Venezuelan civil society.” He calls the nation’s economy a “disaster.” He supports new internationally supervised elections and sending humanitarian aid, over Maduro’s opposition. But by going out of his way to avoid the term “dictator,” Sanders leaves the impression he does not want to completely undermine Maduro’s political legitimacy, or abet the transfer of power to a more capitalistic successor in Juan Guaidó.

Sanders also had difficulty, during a 2016 primary debate in Florida, explaining his kind words from 1985 about Cuba’s Fidel Castro—who, he said, “educated [parents’] kids, gave their kids health care, totally transformed the society.” At the debate, he declined to express “regret” for the characterization. While he offered “hope” Cuba would become democratic someday, Sanders again praised its “advances” in health care and “progress” on education. That was just a few months after Sanders said he is “not looking at Cuba” when he talks about socialism—and a few days before he lost Florida, and Florida’s Latinos, to Clinton.

In 2020, the attack ads yoking Sanders to Venezuela by way of Cuba (which, some argue, exercises considerable control over Venezuela), won’t be hard to write. The big risk for Sanders is that his typically pat answers to tough questions won’t defuse concerns that he really does like some aspects of Latin American socialism. No matter how much Sanders stresses the “democratic” in democratic socialism, or equates his platform with Scandinavian social democracy, or models himself on Franklin D. Roosevelt, many voters will still fear his presidency, or a successor’s, might end up like Maduro’s.

What can Sanders do that he isn’t already doing, to head off this criticism? He could lead on Venezuela.

Last month, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie praised Sanders for developing a “fully formed vision for American foreign policy” that wisely framed the choice as one between “authoritarianism, oligarchy, and kleptocracy” and “democracy, egalitarianism, and economic, social, racial, and environmental justice.” Well, here is Sanders’ chance to embrace that foreign policy vision. Maduro’s Venezuela is the epitome of “authoritarianism, oligarchy, and kleptocracy,” Sanders should treat it as such and forcefully explain what he would do about it. If he can’t, or won’t, maybe his critics are right about his affection for undemocratic socialism.

Sanders should deliver a detailed speech that chronicles exactly where Maduro went wrong, and why he does not deserve the moniker of “socialist.” He should excoriate Venezuela for remaining dependent on oil revenue, creating a rickety economy that harms the planet. He should demand Cuba pull any political advisers and intelligence operatives out of Venezuela. As Sanders is already willing to say Maduro is waging a “violent crackdown on Venezuelan civil society,” he should get over the reluctance to brand him a “dictator,” which would allow him to lacerate Trump for the president’s highly selective opposition to autocrats.

He need not side with Trump and recognize Guaidó’s claim of the Venezuelan presidency, let alone encourage American military intervention. But by restating his support for new elections, Sanders could state flatly that Maduro’s fraudulent election and abuses of power leave him without any democratic legitimacy. In doing so, he would make clear how his vision of democratic socialism does not at all resemble Venezuela, inoculating himself from Trump’s barbs as much as possible, while also showing he is ready to lead on the global stage.

Sanders has been able to improve the image of socialism among left-leaning American voters over the past three years. But has never had to defend socialism in the face of a Republican-led public-opinion carpet-bombing campaign, the kind of permanent conversation on talk radio and Fox News that routinely turns Democratic presidential nominees into caricatures in the public eye. Now that the rhetorical bombs have started dropping on him, it’s time for Sanders to show how he plans to win the war.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/07/bernie-sanders-socialism-trump-225692
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The Article Was Written/Published By: (Bill Scher)



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Thursday, February 21, 2019

Venezuela: US/Canadian Attempted Coup Not About Democracy – Paul Jay (Pt1/2)

Venezuela: US/Canadian Attempted Coup Not About Democracy - Paul Jay (Pt1/2)

Corporate media hides that the crisis in Venezuela is a class struggle, and whatever its faults, the Bolivarian revolution is a struggle for equality and democracy – Paul Jay joins host Jacqueline Luqman

The post Venezuela: US/Canadian Attempted Coup Not About Democracy – Paul Jay (Pt1/2) appeared first on The Real News Network.

Source: https://therealnews.com/stories/venezuela-us-canadian-attempted-coup-not-about-democracy-paul-jay-pt1-2
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Jocelyn Dombroski


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Saturday, February 16, 2019

Karl Marx's London grave vandalised for second time in two weeks

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‘Whatever you think about Marx’s legacy, this is not the way to make the point,’ says cemetery charity

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/karl-marx-grave-vandalised-highgate-cemetery-london-memorial-a8782746.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Chris Baynes


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Thursday, January 24, 2019

Warren readies plan for tax on ‘ultra-millionaires’

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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is preparing to propose a new “ultra-millionaire” tax on the richest Americans, as part of an effort to bridge the massive gap in income equity that she has long decried.

The proposal — which would create a 2 percent wealth tax on those with a net worth above $50 million and impose an additional 1 percent on net worth above $1 billion — draws from an analysis by University of California-Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, who have been consulting with Warren on the matter.

“We estimate that about 75,000 American households (less than 0.1%) would be liable for the wealth tax and that the tax would raise around $2.75 trillion over the ten-year budget window 2019-2028, of which $0.3 trillion would come from the billionaire 1% surtax,” Saez and Zucman wrote in a Jan. 18 letter to Warren, obtained by POLITICO. The Washington Post first reported on the proposal.

Smacking the ultrawealthy with a new tax burnishes the centerpiece of Warren’s 2020 campaign for president: a message about income inequity that she’s hammered away at in front of crowds in Iowa and New Hampshire. It also builds on a career centered on the economics of middle-class families, laid out most prominently in her 2003 best-selling book, The Two-Income Trap.

Warren’s proposal — dubbed the “ultra-millionaire tax,” according to a person familiar with it — also returns the spotlight to her core message at a time when progressive phenom Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently captured attention with her own suggestion of income tax rates at 60 to 70 percent on the highest-earning Americans.

Saez and Zucman defended Ocasio-Cortez in a recent New York Times op-ed, crediting the congresswoman with having “kick-started a much-needed debate about taxes.”

In their letter to Warren, the economists stressed the debt burden saddling the middle class and argued that the wealthy are taking advantage of loopholes unavailable to the majority of Americans. They also argue that the top 1 percent of families face a total tax burden of 3.2 percent relative to their wealth with the bottom 99 percent having a tax burden of 7.2 percent.

“One of the key motivations for introducing a progressive wealth tax is to curb the growing concentration of wealth,” they wrote. “The top 0.1% today owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90% of US families, which includes the vast majority of US families.”

The timing for the rollout of Warren’s proposal is unclear; her campaign would not comment.

In her talks before crowds in early presidential states, Warren — who on Dec. 31 launched an exploratory bid for president — has railed against billionaires and a “rigged” tax system that sticks it to the middle class. She has pledged not to accept money from political action committees and has called on other Democratic candidates to do the same. She’s also been critical of billionaire-financed super PACs and prospective billionaire candidates who might self-fund their campaigns.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/24/elizabeth-warren-2020-wealth-tax-1124983
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The Article Was Written/Published By: nkorecki@politico.com (Natasha Korecki)


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