Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

chlamor
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Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Mon Dec 03, 2018 4:44 pm

Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week
1999

by Will Miller

In late April I was among the 25 Vermonters who occupied Congressman
Bernie Sanders’ Burlington office to protest his support of the NATO
bombing of Yugoslavia and the ongoing war against Iraq. Calling ourselves
the “Instant Antiwar Action Group,” we decided to bring our outrage at
Bernie’s escalating hypocrisy directly to his office, an action that resulted
in 15 of us being arrested for trespass.

Many of us worked on Bernie’s campaigns through
1980’s, the years he was–as the local press repeatedly put it–
the “avowed socialist” Mayor of Burlington, Vermont. His descent
into de facto membership the Democratic party has been a major setback
for the task of building a real electoral alternative to the
two factions of the corporate property that monopolize what passes
for political choice in the United States. Bernie’s selling out
says clearly to working people and those unable to find work
that even leftists become mainstream politicians, when and if
they win office.

Sanders presented himself to the left outside of Vermont
as the leader of the third party movement, vanquishing the two major
parties in every Mayoral election from 1981-88.

When he first got elected Mayor of Burlington he was
the only elected U.S. official to attend the anniversary of the Sandinista
Revolution in Managua. The Gannett owned Burlington Free Press
said he had to be removed from office “by any means necessary.”
Now that same Burlington Free Press endorses his Congressional
candidacy.

Bernie became an imperialist to get elected in 1990.
In August, 1990–after the Bush administration enticed Iraq into
invading Kuwait–Sanders said he wasn’t “going to let some damn
war cost him the election,” according to a staff member who was
present at the time. So Sanders backed the buildup in the Persian Gulf
and dumped on the left anti-imperialist peace movement, singling
out his former allies like Dave Dellinger for public criticism.

He lost in 1988 Congressional race, the last time
the Democratic party ran an official candidate against him. In
that election Sanders and the Democrat, Paul Poirer, split the
majority of votes and the election went to the Republican, Peter Smith.

Bernie–out of office for the first time in eight years–
then went to the Kennedy School at Harvard for six months and came
back with a new relationship with the state’s Democrats. The
Vermont Democratic Party leadership has allowed no authorized
candidate to run against Bernie in 1990 (or since) and in return,
Bernie has repeatedly blocked third party building. His closet party,
the Democrats, are very worried about a left 3rd party forming in
Vermont. In the last two elections, Sanders has prevented
Progressives in his machine from running against Howard Dean,
our conservative Democratic Governor who was ahead of Gingrich in
the attack on welfare.

The unauthorized Democratic candidate in 1990, Delores
Sandoval, an African American faculty member at the University of
Vermont, was amazed that the official party treated her as a nonperson
and Bernie kept outflanking her to her right. She opposed the
Gulf build-up, Bernie supported it. She supported decriminalization
of drug use and Bernie defended the war on drugs, and so on…..

After being safely elected in November of 1990, Bernie
continued to support the buildup while seeking membership in the
Democratic Congressional Caucus–with the enthusiastic support of t
he Vermont Democratic Party leadership. But, the national Democratic Party
blew him off, so he finally voted against the war and returned home–and
as the war began–belatedly claimed to be the leader of the anti-war
movement in Vermont.

Since 1991 the Democrats have given Bernie membership
in their Congressional Caucus. Reciprocally, Bernie has become an
ardent imperialist. Sanders endorsed Clinton in 1992 and 1996. In
1992 he described Clinton as the “lesser of evils,” (a justification
he used to denounce when he was what the local press called an
“avowed socialist”). By 1996 he gave Clinton an unqualified
endorsement. He has been a consistent “Friend of Bill’s” from
since 1992. One student I know worked on the Clinton Campaign
in 1996 and all across Vermont, Bernie was on the stage with
the rest of the Vermont Democratic Party Leadership, while the
unauthorized Democratic candidate for his Congressional seat was
kept out in the audience.

Sanders continues to support sanctions even though the
Iraqi body count has now passed 1.5 million. Just as he has supported
every bombing of Iraq since 1992. When Clinton sent military
units to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in October, 1994 because Iraq
moved troops inside Iraq closer to the Kuwait border (apparently
about 100 miles away), Bernie supported this because “we cannot
tolerate aggression.”

As a Congressman in Vermont he has allied himself the
MIA/POW crowd, the American Legion and the VFW, the very groups that
red baited him as Mayor. At the same time he and his staff “forget”
to invite the Green Mountain Veteran’s for Peace–the only anti-
imperialist veterans group in the state–to his sponsored Veterans
events. He sends out mailings to veterans that supports the US
having “the strongest military in the world,” while praising
our sacrifices as veterans “for the freedom of Americans.”

Bernie regularly rides out with the rest of the Vermont
Congressional delegation defending the military contracts in Vermont
against cuts by the Pentagon, while arguing that some moderation in
military spending is possible on the grounds “that the threat of communism
is over” (WCAX interview, 10/94).

Incidentally, Sanders now has a stronger record voting
on the Democratic side in the Congress than either Bonier or Gephardt
–the Congressional Leadership of the Democratic Party. It is
tempting to situate Sanders within the framework of the Congress
as a whole. By that standard he doesn’t look so bad–though that’s
a very low standard to use. But remember, unlike Maxine Waters
or Ron Dellums who moved continuously to their left during their
Congressional careers, Bernie got where he is now by a lurch
to the right. He promises working people, the aged, the poor,
and the “vanishing middle class” that he will defend them while
he repeatedly blocks the building of the anti-capitalist political
movement and party that might actual make such promises legitimate.
Indeed, when challenged publicly about his failure to help build
a left alternative to the major capitalist parties, Sanders claims
he is now too busy with his work in Congress to be
bothered.

Among his other discredits, Sanders supported the
Federal Crime Bill that give the gave the capitalist state more than
50 new pretexts to execute members of the working class–because
those without capital get the punishment. He did this while courting
the Vermont Police Chief’s Assn. Sanders also voted to extradite
Assata Shakur from Cuba in violation of the existing treaties with Cuba.

Recently, Bernie championed in Congress the dumping
of Vermont’s nuclear waste near Sierra Blanca, Texas, a low income
border community with a mostly Latino population that is overwhelmingly
opposed to the dump project. Environmental racism and classism
seem not to bother him.

On a related issue, Bernie was recently asked by the local
press why he was the only member of Vermont’ s three member
Congressional delegation who had no person of color on his staff.
Bernie responded that “we’re hiring the most qualified people
we can.”

For all of these reasons, we are sitting-in at Bernie
Sander’s Office. We call on all Vermonters who shares our concern
and horror at what U.S. Empire is doing in Yugoslavia and Iraq to
make your voices heard.

The response to our occupation of Bernie’s office was, unfortunately,
consistent with his lurch to the mainstream. At 6:30 PM, one half hour
after closing time, Philip Fiermonte of Bernie’s staff had 15 of us
arrested for trespass. Sanders refused a conference call with those in
the occupation, which was carried out nonviolently and with no
disruption to his staff. Fiermonte claimed he could not contact Sanders
for the four hours of the occupation– if true, it still another way Bernie
has gotten out of touch in the Congress.
Ironically, Fiermonte was one of the defendants in the celebrated Winooski
44 case in 1984, where the conservative U.S. Senator Robt. Stafford’s (R-VT)
office was occupied for his support of Reagan’s murderous wars in Central
America. At least Stafford’s staff let the occupation continue for three days
before having anyone arrested.

In the following week, Bernie, doing quick damage control, ducked
responsibility for arresting the “Sanders 15” and got himself included at
the last minute with a Congressional delegation going to Austria to meet with
representatives of the Russian Duna to bring the Russians in to help broker
a settlement in the US/NATO war in Yugoslavia. But, before leaving to see
the Russians, he voted in favor of the continued bombing of Yugoslavia,
a bombing that the Russians had already said would have to stop as a
precondition for any settlement. A general town meeting has already been
scheduled for the following Monday, so he turned it to a “town meeting on Kosovo.”

Apparently, Bernie Sanders has forgotten what a Town Meeting is.
Perhaps he lived in Burlington (too “big” for town meetings) and Washington
(scared to death of town meetings) for so many years he cannot recall how a
democratic town meeting actually works. No one is allowed to appoint themselves
the moderator for the town meeting and persons who are partisans on the issues
before the town are excluded from the moderator’s election in favor of persons
who can moderate fairly and evenhandedly.

Sanders as the self-appointed moderator/boss opened the evening with naked
self-justification. “It is a very complex situation…” followed by the ritual of
demonization of Milosevic–a technique he has perfected over the last eight years on
Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Then he presented the false dilemma that the only alternative
to bombing is doing nothing. Sanders said his situation was the same as that of Joschka
Fischer’s of the Green Party, Germany’s Foreign Minister, who has outraged his Green
Party membership by supporting the bombing his coalition government is carrying
out as part of NATO.

Back in Vermont the assembled citizenry moaned audibly.

He continued by subjecting the packed room of over 200 people to more than
an hour of a panel presentation by people of his own choosing; even then, only one
panelist overtly supported his position–Bogdan Denich, a professor from New York
City and leader of the pro-imperialist wing of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Another panelist, Shirley Gedeon, a UVM Economist whose speciality is the Balkans,
undercut Sander’s historical analysis and a third, Roddy Cleary, a feminist and
religious activist, challenged he support of the bombing directly.

Apparently, with all the college and universities in Vermont, Bernie had to
travel far into flatlander territory to find an academic willing to support his
“bomb now, talk later” position. In fact, Denich went beyond Bernie’s present position
and called for sending in ground troops, immediately.

After allotting the panelists and himself 12 minutes each and now more than an
hour and a half into the meeting, the people finally had a chance to speak. But only for 2
minutes each, dictated the self-appointed moderator Bernie! And this after having
lectured us on how “complex” the issue of the US/NATO War on Yugoslavia really is.
When he was challenged by a few members of the meeting about his undemocratic
restriction of peoples’ speech, he said anyone who didn’t like it could leave. It seems
when Sanders was in college in Chicago, he learned more from Mayor Richard J. Daley
than from his academic studies.

The overwhelming majority of the people present were against Sander’s support for the
bombing. Even with all his attempts to control the meeting, the people had at him for
more than an hour and a half. He was denounced for his selling out to the Empire and
it’s war machine and for his support for the 9 year old war against Iraq and his active
support for every US intervention since he has been in Congress–Iraq, Somalia,
Haiti, Bosnia, Liberia, Zaire (Congo), Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.
He was further criticized for his refusal to ban or even object to the use of depleted
uranium with it’s long term toxicity in both Iraq and Yugoslavia. Sanders even tried
to escape responsibility for arresting 15 of his constituents in his office one week ago
for the crime of wanting to talk to him without an appointment by blaming those arrested
for their arrest, as if they went out and brought the police in to arrest themselves.

Sanders was repeatedly unresponsive to questions put to him. He evasiveness
and arrogance did not serve him well. In the end, only a few people defended him.
Whatever else Sanders gets for his joining the other side in the global struggle for
social justice–he has lost the left and the peace movement here is Vermont.
Maybe in the next election he will finally have to run officially as the Democrat he
has been for the last 9 years! And then the people of Vermont will be free to build t
he anti-capitalist political movement and party that Sanders has worked so hard to
block for more than a decade.

People left the meeting resolving to escalate the antiwar movement before
the US escalates the war with an invasion of ground troops. The latest leaks out of
NATO sources in Europe suggest that the current plan is to invade with troops
by the end of May.

http://www.libertyunionparty.org/?page_id=363

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren glorify the late President Bush
By Genevieve Leigh
3 December 2018

Among the most notable comments on the death of the one term Republican president who oversaw countless war crimes, were from two prominent “progressive” Democrats: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Sanders tweeted early Saturday morning: “President George H.W. Bush served our country honorably. He and Barbara will be remembered for their humble and devoted service to the country they loved. Jane and I send our deepest condolences to the entire Bush family.”

Warren commented in a very similar vein on Twitter: “George H.W. Bush was an American patriot who lived his life and served our country with dignity. From joining the Navy during WWII to the presidency, his devotion to public service was unmatched. Bruce and I send our heartfelt condolences to his family.”

Also of note is the fact that of the 25 incoming congressional Democrats identifying themselves as “progressives,” all but four tweeted praise and condolences of the late Bush. Many even went as far to retweet Obama’s official statement.

The characterization of George H. W. Bush as an “American patriot” who served “honorably” and with “dignity” hardly needs to be refuted. Any truthful accounting of his presidency will confirm beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was a war criminal responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people both at home and abroad.


He is perhaps best known for orchestrating the first Gulf War which he sold to the American public on a pack of lies (a method employed for years in the form of “weapons of mass destruction” by his son to sell the war in Iraq). Throughout that conflict he oversaw the virtual destruction of Kuwait, dropping a combined 88,500 tons of bombs on the country killing thousands of innocent people. Alongside this war abroad he also oversaw the vicious escalation of the “war on drugs” on home, which lead to the incarceration of thousands of workers and youth.

These crimes against humanity are not a distant memory for many workers. In fact, a review of the comments under Sanders’ tweet Saturday morning reveal the immense anger and hatred felt within the working class for Bush Sr.’s presidency. Among hundreds of angry, and some very colorful comments one person wrote: “He was a war criminal. He loved the rich and lining his own pockets. Don't falsely eulogize someone as repulsive as GHWB just because he's dead. If there's a Hell, he's there for many crimes against the American people and the world.” Another, “Honorable? I guess that tells me a lot about what you believe to be honorable.”

What is the significance then, of the virtual universal praise of such a figure among the nominally “left” and “progressive” members of the Democratic Party? What about George H. W. Bush’s record rings “honorable” and “dignified” in the eyes of these figures? What does it indicate about the nature of the conflict between the two parties?

The outpouring of solidarity to the Bush dynasty expressed by the Democratic Party leaders, and especially Warren and Sanders, expresses a fundamental truth of bourgeois politics: despite the ferocious infighting between the Republicans and the Democrats, both parties fundamentally agree on all the basic questions. They agree on a defense of inequality, “strong borders”, war, and the system upon which their wealth and position in society rests: capitalism. It is not a question of morality or personal friendships but one of a shared class interest.

This reality has been confirmed countless times in the past two years. Among the first actions of the Democratic Party in the aftermath of Trump’s victory was to call for accommodation and cooperation to ensure a “peaceful transition.” Obama went as far to proclaim that the elections were only an “intramural scrimmage” in which all sides were “on one team,” while Sanders announced that he “and other progressives are prepared to work with” Trump on policies to “improve the lives of working families.”

The same script was played out after this year’s midterm elections. After making an extremely limited appeal to popular anti-Trump sentiment, only in order to divert it along safe channels for the capitalist system, the first order of business for the Democrats as the polls closed was to call for “unity.” Pelosi’s deputy in the House, Steny Hoyer, declared shortly after the results were that: “His [Trump’s] objectives are objectives that we share ... there is an opening for us to work together.”

As for Sanders, the declaration of solidarity with George H. W. Bush is no sudden change of heart. Rather it is completely in line with his 2016 in campaign in which he funneled the support he had won by appealing to popular hatred of the billionaires, behind the despised candidate of Wall Street, Hillary Clinton.

The exaltation of war criminals such as John McCain a few months ago and George H. W. Bush this week is part and parcel of the ferociously right-wing campaign of the Democratic Party, in which they are actively seeking to garner support among the population for future wars. The main focus of the Democratic Party’s campaign against Trump has been, not his fascistic attacks on immigrants or on democratic rights in general, or his own warmongering, but on the claim that Trump is insufficiently committed to a confrontational policy against Russia.

The elevation of George H. W. Bush by the Democratic Party is a politically calculated move. Workers and youth who may have remaining illusions that the “blue wave” of Democrats hailed as the “most diverse” incoming freshman class in history should take note of such events and draw the necessary conclusions. The “diversity” of those elected in the midterm elections consists of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, and other “identities”. But when it comes to political views, they are remarkably unified as status quo Democrats who have no problem with honoring war criminals.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/1 ... d-d03.html

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blindpig
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Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 08, 2018 2:31 pm

"the fact that Bernie Sanders, a 70-something New Deal Democrat with a glaring inability to talk about structural racism and questionable foreign policy positions, is the most “radical” option available is an indictment not of Sanders but of your dogshit Party"

courtesy @woke_hoover
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Tue Dec 25, 2018 6:36 pm

The Bernie Sanders Paradox: When Socialism Grows Old
Murray Bookchin's 1986 article analyzing Bernie Sanders' Burlington Vermont mayoral campaign and the aftermath is equally relevant in relation to his 2016 presidential campaign. Also includes a response from Brian Higgins and rejoinder from Murry Bookchin from the next issue.

The posters that appeared all over Burlington — Vermont’s largest city (pop: 37,000) in the winter of 1980-81 were arresting and provocative. They showed an old map of the city with a label slapped across it that read: “For Sale.” A bold slogan across the top, in turn, proclaimed that “Burlington Is Not for Sale,” and smiling amiably in the right-hand corner was the youngish, fairly well-known face of Bernard Sanders, sans tie, open-collared, almost endearingly shy and unpretentious. The onlooker was enjoined to rescue Burlington by voting for “Bernie” Sanders for mayor. Sanders, the long-time gubernatorial candidate of Vermont’s maverick Liberty Union, was now challenging “Gordie” Paquette, an inert Democratic fixture in City Hall, who had successfully fended off equally inert Republican opponents for nearly a decade.

That Sanders won this election on March 3, 1981, by only ten votes is now a Vermont legend that has percolated throughout the country over the past five years. What gives Sanders almost legendary qualities as a mayor and politician is that he proclaims himself to be a socialist — to many admiring acolytes, a Marxist — who is now in the midpoint of a third term after rolling up huge margins in two previous elections. From a ten-vote lead to some fifty-two percent of the electorate, Sanders has ballooned out of Burlington in a flurry of civic tournaments that variously cast him as a working-class hero or a demonic “Bolshevik.” His victories now make the New York Times and his trips outside of Burlington take him to places as far as Managua, where he has visited with Daniel Ortega, and to Monthly Review fundraising banquets, where he rubs shoulders with New York’s radical elite. Sanders has even been invited to the Socialist Scholar’s Conference, an offer he wisely declined. Neither scholarship nor theory is a Sanders forte. If socialist he be, he is of the “bread-and-butter” kind whose preference for “realism” over ideals has earned him notoriety even within his closest co-workers in City Hall.
The criss-crossing lines that deface almost every serious attempt to draw an intelligible sketch of the Sanders administration and its meaning for radicals result from a deep-seated paradox in “bread-and-butter” socialism itself. It trivializes this larger issue to deal with Sanders merely as a personality or to evaluate his achievements in the stark terms of lavish praise or damning blame. A sophomoric tribute to Sanders’ doings in the Monthly Review of a year ago was as maladroit as the thundering letters of denunciation that appear in the Burlington Free Press. Sanders fits neither the heaven-sent roles he is given in radical monthlies nor the demonic ones he acquires in conservative letters to moderate dailies.

To dwell heavily on his well-known paranoia and suspicious reclusiveness beclouds the more important fact that he is a centralist, who is more committed to accumulating power in the mayor’s office than giving it to the people. To spoof him for his unadorned speech and macho manner is to ignore the fact that his notions of a “class analysis” are narrowly productivist and would embarrass a Lenin, not to mention a Marx. To mock his stolid behavior and the surprising conventionality of his values is to conceal his commitment to thirties’ belief in technological progress, businesslike efficiency, and a naive adherence to the benefits of “growth.” The logic of all these ideas is that democratic practice is seen as secondary to a full belly, the earthy proletariat tends to be eulogized over the “effete” intellectuals, and environmental, feminist, and communitarian issues are regarded as “petit-bourgeois” frivolities by comparison with the material needs of “working people.” Whether the two sides of this “balance sheet” need be placed at odds with each other is a problem that neither Sanders nor many radicals of his kind have fully resolved. The tragedy is that Sanders did not live out his life between 1870 and 1940, and the paradox that faces him is: why does a constellation of ideas that seemed so rebellious fifty years ago appear to be so conservative today? This, let me note, is not only Sanders’ problem. It is one that confronts a very sizable part of the left today.

Sanders is by no means the sole focus of this paradox. The fact is that Sanders’ problems, personal as they seem, really reflect problems that exist in Burlington itself. Contrary to the notion that Vermont is what America used to be, the state — and particularly, Burlington — is more like what America is becoming than what America was. The major corporations in the city and its environs are IBM and GE — and the GE plant in Burlington makes the only Gatling gun in the United States, a horrendous fact that should by all rights trouble any socialist mayor. The Old North End, Sanders’ sans-culottes wards (Numbers Two and Three), consists in large part of home-bred Vermonters who work in service, repair, and maintenance jobs when they have jobs at all. The remaining four wards are filled with newcomers to the city and with elderly people who have the luck to own their homes.

Basically middle-class in work and values, the form a pepper mix of old Vermonters and “new professionals,” a term that embraces anyone from insurance brokers, real-estate operators, and retailers to doctors, lawyers, and professors. Hippies still mingle freely with Yuppies; indeed, in egalitarian Vermont, there is a reasonable degree of intercourse between the wealthy, the well-to-do, and the poor. What is most important: Burlington is a town in frenzied transition. A sleepy little place some fifteen years ago with bacon-and-egg diners, hardware stores, clothing emporiums, and even a gun shop in the center of town, it is becoming a beehive of activity. Electronics in all its forms is moving into Vermont together with boutiques, inns, hotels, office buildings, educational institutions — and in Burlington, particularly, a thriving academic establishment that draws thousands of students and their parents into its commercial fold.

The problems of “modernization” that confront the town produce very mixed reactions — not only in its inhabitants but in Sanders. A large number of people feel plundered, including some of the plunderers, if you are to believe them. Burlington is living evidence that myth can be real, even more real than reality itself. Accordingly, myth holds that Burlington is small, homey, caring, crime-free, independent, mutualistic, liberal, and innocently American in its belief that everything good can happen if one so wills it to be. This glowing American optimism, in my view one of our national assets, often lives in doleful contradiction with the fact that if everything good can happen, everything bad does happen — including union-busting, growing contrasts between rich and poor, housing shortages, rising rents, gentrification, pollution, parking problems, traffic congestion, increasing crime, anomie, and growth, more growth, and still more growth — upward, inward, and outward.

The tension between myth and reality is as strong as between one set of realities and another. Burlingtonians generally do not like what is happening, although there are far too many of them who are making the most of it. Even the alleged “benefits” of growth and modernization are riddled by their own internal contradictions. If there are more jobs and little unemployment, there is lower pay and rising living costs. If there are more tourists and a very amiable citizenry to receive them, there is less spread of income across social lines and more robberies. If there is more construction and less labor shortages, there are fewer homes and more newcomers. Office-building and gentrification go hand in hand with fewer small businesses and far too many people who need inexpensive shelter.

Very crucial to all of this is the conflict of values and cultures that “modernization” produces. Basically, Burlingtonians want to keep their city intimate, caring, and liberal. They like to believe that they are living an older way of life with modern conveniences and in accord with fiercely independent values that are rooted in a colorful past. It is this underlying independence of Vermonters generally, including newcomers who are absorbed into Burlington, that makes the clash between a lingering libertarian Yankee tradition and a corrosive, authoritarian corporate reality so inherently explosive. Ironically, Bernard Sanders owes his present political career to the irascible public behavior this libertarian tradition produces, yet he understands that behavior very little. To Sanders, Burlington is basically Detroit as it was two generations ago and the fact that the town was “not for sale” in 1981 carried mixed messages to him and his electorate. To the electorate, the slogan meant that the city and its values were priceless and hence were to be guarded and preserved as much as possible. To Sanders, all rhetoric aside, it meant that the city, although not on an auction block, had a genuinely high price tag.
Whether the electorate who voted for him was less “realistic” than Sanders is not relevant: the fact is that both saw the “sale” of the city from different, if not radically opposing, perspectives. Both, in fact, were guided by varying “reality principles.” The electorate wanted a greater say in the city’s future; Sanders wanted to bring more efficiency to its disposition. The electorate wanted to preserve the city’s human scale and quality of life; Sanders wanted it to grow according to a well-designed plan and with due regard for cost-effectiveness. The electorate, in effect, saw Burlington as a home and wanted to keep its emphasis on old-style values alive; Sanders, together with many of his opponents, saw it as a business and wanted its “growth” to be beneficial, presumably to “working people.”

This is not to deny that Burlington has its fair share of economic predators and political operators or that property taxes are very important and material problems ranging from shelter to the cost of food are very real. But this town also has a deep sense of municipal pride and its highly independent, even idiosyncratic, population exudes a form of local patriotism that fades as one approaches larger, less historically conscious, and less environmentally oriented communities. Sanders would never admit that for Burlingtonians, the electorate’s independence has begun to clash with his fading regard for democratic practice; that technological “progress” and structural “growth” can arouse more suspicion than enthusiasm; that the quality of life runs neck and neck as an issue with material benefits. Indeed, for Sanders and his administration (the two are not necessarily identical), thirties socialism is notable for the fact that it rescues the marketplace from “anarchy,” not that it necessarily challenges the market system as such and its impact on the city. In Sanders’ version of socialism, there is a sharp “business” orientation toward Burlington as a well-managed corporate enterprise.
Herein lies the greatest irony of all: all rhetoric aside, Bernard Sanders’ version of socialism is proving to be a subtle instrument for rationalizing the marketplace — not for controlling it, much less threatening it. His thirties-type radicalism, like Frankenstein’s “monster,” is rising up to challenge its own creator. In this respect, Sanders does not make history; more often than not, he is one of its victims. Hence to understand the direction he is following and the problems it raises for radicals generally, it is important to focus not on his rhetoric, which makes his administration so alluring to socialists inside and outside of Vermont, but to take a hard look at the realities of his practice.

Sanders’ Record

SANDERS’ CLAIM that he has created “open government” in Burlington is premised on a very elastic assumption of what one means by the word “open.“ That Sanders prides himself on being "responsive” to underprivileged people in Burlington who are faced with evictions, lack of heat, wretched housing conditions, and the ills of poverty is not evidence of “openness” — that is, if we assume the term means greater municipal democracy and public participation. What often passes for “open government” in the Sanders cosmos is the mayor’s willingness to hear the complaints and distress signals of his clients and courtiers, not a responsibility to give them any appreciable share in the city’s government. What Sanders dispenses under the name of “open government” is personal paternalism rather than democracy. After six years of Sanders’ paternalism, there is nothing that resembles Berkeley’s elaborate network of grassroots organizations and councils that feed into City Hall.

When it comes to municipal democracy, Sanders is surprisingly tight-fisted and plays his cards very close to his chest. Queried shortly after his 1981 election on a local talk-show, You Can Quote Me, Sanders was pointedly asked if he favored town-meeting government, a very traditional form of citizen assemblies that has deep-seated roots in Vermont townships. Sanders’ response was as pointed as the question. It was an emphatic “No.” After expressing his proclivity for the present aldermanic system, the mayor was to enter into a chronic battle with the “Republicrat” board of aldermen over appointments and requests that were to be stubbornly rejected by the very system of government that had his early sanction.

Sanders’ quarrels with the board of aldermen did not significantly alter his identification of “open government” with personal paternalism. As an accepted fixture in Burlington’s civic politics, he now runs the city with cool self-assurance, surrounded by a small group of a half-dozen or so aides who formulate his best ideas and occasionally receive his most strident verbal abuse. The Mayor’s Council on the Arts is a hand-picked affair, whether by the mayor directly or by completely dedicated devotees; similarly, the Mayor’s Youth Office. It is difficult to tell when Sanders will create another “council” — or, more appropriately, an “office” — except to note that there are peace, environmental, and gay communities, not to speak of unemployed, elderly, welfare, and many similar constituents who have no “Mayor’s” councils in City Hall. Nor is it clear to what extent any of the existing councils authentically represent local organizations and/or tendencies that exist in the subcultures and deprived communities in Burlington.

Sanders is a centralist and his administration, despite its democratic proclivities, tends to look more like a civic oligarchy than a municipal democracy. The Neighborhood Planning Assemblies (NPAs) which were introduced in Burlington’s six wards in the autumn of 1982 and have been widely touted as evidence of “grassroots democracy” were not institutions that originated in Sanders’ head. Their origin is fairly complex and stems from a welter of notions that were floating around Burlington in neighborhood organizations that gathered shortly after Sanders’ 1981 election to develop ideas for wider citizen participation in the city and its affairs. That people in the administration played a role in forming assemblies is indisputably true, but so too did others who have since come to oppose Sanders for positions that have compromised his pledges to the electorate.

Bernard Sanders’ view of government appears in its most sharply etched form in an interview the mayor gave to a fairly sympathetic reporter on the Burlington Free Press in June, 1984. Headlined “Sanders Works to Expand Mayor’s Role,” the story carried a portrait of the mayor in one of his more pensive moods with the quote: “We are absolutely rewriting the role of what city government is supposed to be doing in the state of Vermont.’ The article leaped immediately into the whole thrust of Sanders’ version of city government: "to expand and strengthen the role of the [mayor’s] office in city government:” This process has been marked by an "expanding City Hall staff,” an increased “role in the selection of a new fire chief,” “a similar role in the Police Department,” and "in development issues, such as the proposed downtown hotel.” In response to criticism that Sanders has been “centraliz-ing” power and reducing the checks and balances in city government, his supporters “stress that citizen input, through both the Neighborhood Planning Assemblies and expanded voter output, has been greatly increased.” That the Neighborhood Planning Assemblies have essentially been permitted to languish in an atmosphere of benign neglect and that voter participation in elections hardly equatable to direct participation by the citizenry has left the mayor thoroughly unruffled.

A FAIR CONSIDERATION of the results produced by Sanders’ increased role in city affairs provides a good test of a political strategy that threatens to create institutional forms for a Burlington version of New York’s Mayor Koch. The best case for the mayor appears in the Monthly Review of May, 1984, where a Pollyanna article written by Beth Bates, “a writer and farmer,” celebrates the virtues of Sanders’ efforts as “Socialism on the Local Level” — followed, I might add, by a prudent question mark. Like Sanders’ own claims, the main thrust of the article is that the “socialist” administration is “efficient.” Sanders has shown that "radicals, too, can be fiscal conservatives, even while they are concerned that government does the little things that make life more comfortable” like street repair, volunteer aid to dig paths for the elderly after snowstorms, and save money. The administration brings greater revenues into the city’s coffers by modernizing the budgetary process, principally by investing its money in high-return institutions, opening city contracts to competitive bidding, centralizing purchasing, and slapping fees on a wide range of items like building permits, utility excavations, private fire and police alarms, and the like.

That Sanders has out-Republicaned the Republicans should not be taken lightly. Viewed in terms of its overall economic policies, the Sanders administration bears certain fascinating similarities to the Reagan administration. What Sanders has adopted with a vengeance is “trickle-down” economics — the philosophy that “growth” for profit has a spillover effect in creating jobs and improving the public welfare. Not surprisingly, the City’s 1984 “Annual Report” of the Community and Economic Development Office (a Sanders creation) really begins with a chunky section on “UDAG Spur Development.” UDAGs are Urban Development Action Grants that are meant to “leverage” commitments to growth by the “private sector.” The Office celebrates the fact that these grant requests to Washington will yield $25 million from “the private sector” and “create an estimated 556 new full-time, permanent jobs, and generate an additional $332,638 per year in property taxes.” Among its many achievements, the grant will help the owners of the Radisson Hotel in Burlington (an eyesore that is blocking out part of Burlington’s magnificent lake view, and a corporate playground if there ever was one) expand their property by “57 guest rooms and an additional 10,000 square feet of meeting and banquet space. A new 505 space parking garage with covered access to the hotel will be constructed. The Radisson Hotel will now be able to accommodate regional and association conventions. The project also includes expansion of retail space (32,500 square feet) within the Burlington Square Mall. Construction has begun, and the project is scheduled for completion in late 1985.” The other grants are less lascivious but they invariably deal with projects to either construct or rehabilitate office, commercial, industrial, and department-store construction — aside from the noxious Sanders waterfront scheme, of which more shortly.

One seriously wonders who this kind of descriptive material is meant to satisfy. Potential employees who commonly sell their labor power for minimum wage-rates in a city that is notoriously closed to unionization? The Old North Enders who are the recipients of scanty rehabilitation funds and a land-trust program for the purchase of houses, an innovative idea that is still to fully prove itself out? A few small businessmen who have received loans to develop their enterprises or others who have had their façades improved in what Sanders celebrates as an attempt to “revitalize” the Old North End, an area that is still one of the most depressing and depressed in Vermont? The ill-housed and elderly for whom the office-building spree makes the limited amount of low-income housing construction seem like a mockery of their needs? Apart from the condos and so-called “moderate-income” houses that have surfaced in part of the city, housing for the underprivileged is not a recurring theme in Sanders’ speeches except when the mayor is on an electoral warpath. After a tentative stab at some kind of “rent control” which was defeated at the polls on the heels of a huge propaganda blitz by well-to-do property owners, the administration has been reticent about raising rent-control issues generally, let alone making a concerted effort at educating the public about them. Burlington, in effect, is witnessing what one journalistic wag has appropriately called “gentrification with a human face.” Indeed, such crucial issues as housing for the poor and elderly, unionization of the grossly underpaid, environmental deterioration, and the rapid attrition of old, socially useful, small concerns that can no longer afford the soaring downtown rentals — all have taken second place during the past year to big structural schemes like a waterfront plan. More so than any other Sanders proposal, this plan has opened a long overdue schism between the mayor and his popular supporters in the Old North End, the most radical constituency in Burlington.

SANDERS’ WATERFRONT PLAN is burdened by a highly convoluted a history that would take an article in itself to unravel. The 24.5-acre property, owned partly by the Vermont Central Railroad, the Alden Corporation (a consortium of wealthy locals), and the city itself, faces one of the most scenic lake and mountain areas in the northeast. Paquette, Sanders’ predecessor, planned to "develop” this spectacular site with highrise condos. Sanders has made the demand for a “waterfront for the people” a cardinal issue in all his campaigns. Civic democracy was ostensibly served when an open meeting was organized by the administration in February, 1983, to formulate priorities which the public felt should be reflected in any design. Broken down by wards in NPA fashion, the meeting’s priorities centered around walkways, open space, public access, restaurants and shops, even a museum and wildlife sanctuary — and, in addition to similar public amenities, mixed housing. Whether these priorities could have been met without a UDAG is highly problematical. What is fascinating about Sanders’ response, even before the UDAG was refused, was the clutter of structures that grossly compromised the whole thrust of the public’s priorities: a second version of a Radisson-type hotel, a retail pavilion that spanned half the length of the city’s pedestrian mall, a 1200-car parking garage, an office building, a narrow public walkway along the lakeside — and an ambiguous promise to provide three hundred mixed housing units, presumably “available for low and moderate income and/or handicapped people:” Even so, this housing proposal was hedged by such caveats as "to the extent feasible” and the need to acquire “below-market financing” and rent-level “subsidies.”
Following the refusal of the UDAG, the plan resurfaced again from City Hall with two notable alterations. Mixed housing disappeared completely even as a promise — to be replaced by 150 to 300 condos priced at $175-300,000 each (a typical Burlington houses sells for $70-80,000) and public space, meager to begin with, was further attenuated. From a residential viewpoint, the “waterfront for the people” had become precisely an “enclave for the rich,” one of the verbal thunderbolts Sanders had directed at the Paquette proposal.
The privileges accorded by the waterfront plan to moneyed people are a reminder that only token aid has been provided to the poor. The methods employed by Sanders to engineer public consent for the plan have been especially offensive: the blitz of ads favoring the mayor’s and Alden Corporation’s version of the scheme, in which Sanderistas found their names listed with those of the most notorious union-busters in the state, stands in sharp contrast with the relatively weak campaigns launched by City Hall on behalf of rent control and improved housing.

Public reaction came to a head when the electorate, summoned to vote on a bond issue to cover the city’s contribution to the plan, produced startling results. Despite the sheer frenzy that marked the mayor’s campaign for a "yes” vote, the ward-by-ward returns revealed a remarkable shift in social attitudes toward Sanders. Although a two-thirds majority is needed to carry a bond issue in Burlington, Wards 2 and 3 of the Old North End voted down the bond issue flatly. So much for the reaction of Sanders’ “working-class” base which had given the mayor his largest pluralities in the past. Ward 4, a conventional middle-class district, regaled the mayor with barely a simple majority of five votes, and Ward 5, the most sympathetic of his middle-class constituencies, a flat fifteen-vote rejection. Sanders’ highest returns came from Ward 6 — “The Hill,” as it has been called — which contains the highest concentration of wealth in the city and its most spacious and expensive mansions.
For the first time, a Sanders proposal that patently placed the mayor’s public credibility on the line had been soundly trounced — not by the wealthiest ward in Burlington which alone supported the bond issue by a two-thirds vote, but. by the Old North End, which flatly rejected his proposal. A class issue had emerged which now seems to have reflected a disgust with a rhetoric that yields little visible results.
THE ULTIMATE EFFECT Of Sanders’ aging form of “socialism” is to facilitate the ease with which business interests can profit from the city. Beyond the dangers of an increasingly centralized civic machinery, one that must eventually be inherited by a “Republicrat” administration, are the extraordinary privileges Sanders hasprovided to the most predatory enterprises in Burlington — privileges that have been justified by a “socialism” that is committed to “growth,” "planning,” “order,” and a blue-collar “radicalism” that actually yields low-paying jobs and non-union establishments without any regard to the quality of life and environmental well-being of the community at large.

Bernard Sanders could have established an example of a radical municipalism, one rooted in Vermont’s localist tradition of direct democracy, that might have served as a living educational arena for developing an active citizenry and a popular political culture. Whether it was because of a shallow productivist notion of "socialism” oriented around “growth” and “efficiency” or simply personal careerism, the Burlington mayor has been guided by a strategy that sacrifices education to mobilization and democratic principles to pragmatic results. This “managerial radicalism” with its technocratic bias and its corporate concern for expansion is bourgeois to the core — and even brings the authenticity of traditional “socialist” canons into grave question. A recent Burlington Free Press headline which declared: “Sanders Unites with Business on Waterfront” could be taken as a verdict by the local business establishment as a whole that it is not they who have been joining Sanders but Sanders who has joined them. When productivist forms of “socialism” begin to resemble corporate forms of capitalism, it may be well to ask how these inversions occur and whether they are accidental at all. This question is not only one that must concern Sanders and his supporters; it is a matter of grim concern for the American radical community as a whole.

Source: Socialist Review 90 (November-December 1986), pp. 51-62

Bryan R. Higgins, “Dilemmas of Urban Socialism on the West Coast of New England” (1986)
BERNIE SANDERS has been elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, for three consecutive two-year terms. Since he has officially run as an Independent-Socialist, considerable discussion has been sparked about the revitalization of radical politics in Burlington and elsewhere. While Sanders had previously run for governor of Vermont on the radical Liberty Union Party ticket (receiving no more than six per cent of the vote), his campaign workers in Burlington have identified themselves as the “Progressive Coalition.“ This informal organization is not an officially registered party nor is it controlled by a socialist cadre. Instead it is composed of liberal Democrats (who were alienated from the previous conservative Democratic administration), previous members of the Citizens Party (which elected a candidate for alderman in 1981), and a variety of other residents. Sanders clearly plays the central role in this group, and although rifts have occurred, they are seldom exposed or discussed openly.

A detailed analysis of who voted for Mayor Sanders indicated that in 1983 his coalition was best characterized as a melding of working-class individuals, young adults, and Democrats (with a small number of independents). Interestingly, this study also shows that Sanders has done quite well among middle-class voters, receiving a majority of their vote in both 1981 and 1983. In fact, during the 1983 election, Sanders received a plurality of votes in a middle-class ward of Burlington that a year later voted overwhelmingly in favor of President Reagan. Thus, the dynamics of local politics continue to provide opportunities for radical candidates as well as contradictions for future study.

One important characteristic of this local political movement has been its focus on efficiency within city government. As with municipal socialism in the early 1900s, this administration has instituted numerous purchasing and accounting measures that have increased the productivity of city government. While such improvements have provided important political support for the Progressive Coalition, they do not necessarily advance socialist goals or programs.

An important but sometimes overlooked feature of these well-publicized administrative improvements involves the inept character of the previous administration. Since the city had not maintained a modern system of public management, it has been easier for the Progressives to make dramatic improvements. This is especially significant as the Progressives discuss expanding their campaigns in Vermont, since not all levels of government have been so backward.

Further, how radical is the Progressive Coalition’s stance on international, national, state, and local issues? Clearly its most intense and radical positions have been in regard to United States foreign policy, especially in regard to Central America. Besides various individuals’ statements, this has included the occupation of United States Senator Stafford’s office and the subsequently successful "moral necessity” defense of this action in federal court. In addition, motions from Burlington’s board of aldermen opposed the recertification of El Salvador for American aid and established a sister-city relationship with Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua. At the national level the Coalition’s critique has focused on advocating a reduced military budget with increased funds for social programs and local government. At the state level it has lobbied for tax reform, more local autonomy, and revamping the public-service commissions. Finally, at the local level, it has emphasized government efficiency, political involvement, and economic growth. Proceeding from a global to a local level, the opinions and efforts of the Coalition are progressively less radical. This indicates the potential of using a local office to organize for broader issues, but it also suggests possible problems if public officials are able to camouflage conservative political stances at the local level behind progressive statements regarding national or international policy.
Bernie Sanders has been very candid and compelling in his critique of corporate control of government today. His rhetorical position on this issue is certainly radical for a government official. Yet while it is one thing to analyze a situation critically, it is still another to identify and establish radical alternatives. The constraints on local government in the 1980s make this a special challenge for any radical administration. Under Sanders, economic development has become a major theme. A few small projects have promoted women in the trades as well as locally owned and operated businesses. Often, though, the new public initiatives have supported economic growth as usual. This paradox was vividly illustrated in Burlington during the fall of 1985 when Mayor Sanders and prominent Progressives were part of a coalition with Republicans and big-business developers. Together they supported a $6 million tax increment bond for waterfront development. In opposition to this bond was an equally unlikely coalition of the conservative Citizens for America, liberal Democratic environmentalists, Vermont Tenants Inc., the Burlington school board, and the Northern Vermont Greens. They questioned the project’s emphasis on tourism and the rich, its impact on gentrification in the nearby low-income neighborhood, and the building of this project at the expense of improving public schools. The 53.4 per cent of Burlington residents voting in favor of the project was substantially short of the two-thirds required for a bond issue. The working-class wards which have been a stronghold for the Progressives voted in opposition. Although much more could be written about this particular controversy, it suggests a serious predicament with the economic plans of this radical administration.

Burlington’s downtown further illustrates the continuing power of business interests even under a Progressive administration. In 1985 two UDAG grants, totaling nearly $5 million, were awarded for downtown expansion. Yet Sanders’ administration initially discarded plans to link this development to any type of ordinance that would compensate for the dislocation the development would create. Although radicals may be very clear in their analysis of the present system this does not necessarily translate into radical plans or policies. This significant gulf between critical analysis and radical alternatives certainly deserves much more attention.

A FINAL MAJOR THEME of Sanders’ administration has s been political involvement. Without doubt the rise of the Progressive Coalition has dramatically increased voter participation within Burlington. Furthermore, the formation of mayor’s councils, such as the ones on youth and on the arts, has successfully involved many residents who were previously alienated from city government. Before 1980 formal citizen participation was not a part of city planning in Burlington. From 1975 to 1982 the Planning Department spent only $450 out of a total budget of over $58 million (less than 1/100,000) on citizen participation. In response, the Progressive Coalition was part of a nonpartisan effort in 1982 that established Neighborhood Planning Assemblies throughout the city. While all these achievements are commendable this political revitalization has not been without its contradictions.

Perhaps the most paradoxical conflict occurred between Mayor Sanders and local peace activists. At one point these activists were demonstrating in front of the gates of Burlington’s General Electric plant. This facility produces the “Vulcan” high-speed machine gun for helicopters, designed for use in guerrilla wars and used in El Salvador. Consequently, the nonviolent activists were bearing witness to this local connection with the military-industrial complex. Sanders came out in strident opposition to this extraparliamentary action, claiming it would alienate workers at the plant.

Although the Neighborhood Planning Assemblies have frequently been touted by the Sanders administration, they have recently appeared to stagnate. The assemblies were originally designed only to comment on issues referred to them by the administration and not to develop independent positions. As these assemblies increasingly disagreed with Sanders’ administration, the came less favored, and their voice has been diffused by providing minimal staffing that is always hired by and responsible to the administration, not the assemblies.
Another way the assemblies have been co-opted is through the administration’s refusal to refer controversial issues to them. This was recently illustrated when the city’s master plan was being revised. Many neighborhoods wanted to maintain their existing low-density character while key officials wanted to retain their present (higher density) zoning. Due to this conflict the question of neighborhood land use and zoning simply was never referred to the assemblies. Thus, as in other cities where radicals have been elected to office, the question of grassroots participation remains problematic.

Source: Socialist Review 90 (November-December 1986), pp. 62-66

Murray Bookchin, “Response” (1986)

BRYAN HIGGINS’ response to my article, which I hardly find contradicts much of what I have to say, has a couple of serious factual errors that should be corrected. The so-called “Progressive Coalition” had absolutely nothing to do with the occupation of Senator Stafford’s office by the famous “Winooski 44,” although some individual “Sanderistas” (as they are widely called) participated in the action. In fact, not a single member of Sanders’ kitchen cabinet appeared at this nationally famous trial, which placed American foreign policy on indictment. The occupation was organized entirely by peace activists, many of whom are bitterly hostile to the mayor because he has obdurately opposed their modest actions against the GE Gatling (“Vulcan”) gun plant in Burlington, even to the point of opposing their efforts to reconvert it to peacetime uses. It remains ironical, in fact, that one of the occupations’s main organizers, city accountant Barr Swennerfelt, was fired by Sanders because of her actions and arrests around the Gatling-gun plant.

Higgins makes another serious error when he says that the conservative Citizens for America participated in the coalition against the Sanders-Alden waterfront plan. The coalition against the water-front front plan was made up of people, not of organizations: in fact, the Citizens for America, more likely than not, would have supported the Sanders-Alden plan if it had taken an organizational position on the issue. Some of its more feisty members did participate in the anti-waterfront coalition as individuals, but in no way did they speak for their organization or represent it. Higgins, the other hand, is quite correct in noting that supporters of the Sanders-Alden plan included some of the most vicious reactionaries in Burlington, including the city’s worst union-busting businessmen.

Higgins should be reminded that Sanders’ denunciations of American foreign policy, which seem to escalate whenever he runs for public office, can barely be regarded as more fiery than those of any liberal Democrat. These “national” statements by a local official tend to lose their credibility when Sanders refuses to call for shutting down or even phasing out nuclear power plants nationally, with the excuse that he is running for statewide, not national, office. Sanders’ Johnny-come-lately demand that Vermont’s Vernon reactor should be “phased out” in three years — this, after a militant movement (the Green Mountain Alliance) emerged following the Chernobyl meltdown demanding its immediate shutdown — seems less believable than ever.

Sanders’ rhetoric has served to defuse virtually all independent leftist politics in Burlington, a fact that has not gone unnoticed, in my view, by the corporate interests. The need to “protect” the “socialist” mayor drained the vitality and obscured the vision of many protest groups. This kind of politics is deadly and its effect in Burlington has all but produced a political stasis that is paralyzing to most independent leftists in the city.

For the rest, I can hardly complain about the damning facts that make up so much of Higgins’ response. But they are “paradoxes” and “contradictions” only if one assumes that a socialist mayor’s main goal is to run a city rather than to educate its citizenry. Sanders does not profess to be a liberal Democrat. He professes to be a socialist, and his office wall is decorated with a photo of Eugene V. Debs. If one is in any way concerned with the moral integrity of socialism in the United States, indeed, with its very meaning and soul, he should not earn a reputation for efficiency at the cost of low-paying jobs and of “development” that brings huge profits to corporations, and fosters gentrification and real-estate speculation of scandalous proportions. He should not be known for his pacification of the peace, environmental, feminist, and gay movements through bombastic rhetoric and posturing.

One might reasonably ask what Eugene V. Debs would do in the eighties if he were the mayor of a city like Burlington — or if he simply ran for the office. It was a long socialist tradition basic reason for running for public office was to educate the people in socialist ideas. There is nothing in Sanders’ public record to show that his political horizon is wider than that of a Fiorello LaGuardia. Worse, Sanders has exacerbated the relationship between peace activists and GE workers by condemning local peace groups for “antagonizing” the local “Vulcan” gun-making workers, accusing the activists of “hostile behavior” toward GE employees — an accusation that is blatantly false. Far from bridging the gap between the two contituencies, Sanders has maliciously widened and exploited it.

Sanders has crudely maligned his environmental critics—many, quite ordinary citizens who oppose his condo-oriented waterfront plan —as “Goddard College students,” a repellent label that crassly exploits all the redneck prejudices of many people in the state. He has given lip-service at best to gay and feminist causes in town (although it was almost impossible for him to use words like "gay” in an earlier election campaign without blushing like an unreconstructed Victorian).

These are not petty examples. They reveal a social outlook that has grimly affected the political life of Burlington and Vermont. A Debs would vigorously have tried to heal the rift between arms workers and peace activists, not exploit it. In the eighties, he would have been a fiery spokesperson for environmental, feminist, and gay causes. He would have fought unstintingly for a genuine people’s waterfront and tried in every way to foster an active, local democracy — not restrict citizens’s assemblies to rubber-stamping City Hall projects.

Perhaps most important, a Debs would have fostered the development of new municipal institutions that would enhance local control by municipalities over the authority of state and federal institutions. He would have brought Vermont towns together in lasting coalitions or confederations to countervail the growing centralization of power in Montpelier and Washington, not ad hoc municipal “lobbies” to gain local tax powers. Finally, a Debs would have tried to build a grassroots movement — an independent leftist movement — not surround himself with a coterie of personal followers that has the arrogance to call itself a “Progressive coalition.”

Bernard Sanders has done virtually nothing that could be imputed to a Debs. There has been no education of the citizenry beyond electioneering, no organization beyond a personal following of civil servants, no town-wide coalitions beyond single-issue lobbies, no vital local institutions beyond assemblies to validate Sanders’ projects, no sustained efforts to control rampant speculation in housing and soaring rents, no real sensitivity to the rights of women and gays, no responsiveness to basic environmental issues beyond gestures at beautification, no understanding of qualitative urban growth. In an era of extraordinary transition and remodernization, socialists must seriously ask themselves if they will uphold a radical visionary and moral approach that can make an already changing world into a truly rational and ecological one, or if they wish to confine themselves to the old nostrums that preach a gospel of bread on the table and steak on the plate.

These two directions need not be opposed to each other. The Bernie Sanders paradox is that they have not only remained unintegrated, but have been thrown into sharp conflict with each other. Innovative socialists in Britain and the Greens in Germany have already given deep thought to the problems of a new municipal or local socialism that offers countervailing structures and institutions — confederate and bioregional — to the growing powers of the nation-state and multinational corporations. The problem is whether American radicals will explore this visionary approach and extend it to their community politics, or retreat back to the days of a Morris Hillquit, which Sanders seems to incarnate to an exasperating extent, rather than the spirit of a Eugene V. Debs.

Source: Socialist Review 90 (November-December 1986), pp. 56-69

https://libcom.org/library/bernie-sande ... -grows-old

Will include this link to a Bookchin article for the critique of Bookchin's "libertarian municipalism" foyund in the comments section:

https://libcom.org/library/municipaliza ... y-bookchin

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Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 11, 2019 4:33 pm

It should be noted that Bernie is worth $2M

Whose side is he on?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 19, 2019 3:06 pm

Bernie checks in!

Image

Bernie & AOC as seen at the DNC

Image
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Thu Feb 21, 2019 3:14 am

Bernie Sanders announces 2020 presidential campaign

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/0 ... s-f20.html

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Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by blindpig » Thu Feb 21, 2019 1:38 pm

Crimes of USA @CrimesofUS

Bernie Sanders voted to use “force” on the following nations:

1. Afghanistan
2. Lebanon
3. Libya
4. Somalia
5. Syria
6. Yemen
7. Yugoslavia
8. Haiti
9. Congo
10. Liberia
11. Sudan

*******************************************************

And the lying peckerhead sez he ain't no Democrat.......
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Thu Feb 21, 2019 10:40 pm

“Hillary Clinton will make an outstanding president, and I am proud to stand with her today.”

- Bernie Sanders

John McCain was an American hero, a man of decency and honor and a friend of mine. He will be missed not just in the U.S. Senate but by all Americans who respect integrity and independence.

- Bernie Sanders

These two comments speak volumes about Sanders hypocrisies, opportunism and overall support for the most venal proponents of US Imperialism.

Sanders is a hood ornament whose candidacy serves to distract the shallow political consumer from the fact that it is the engine that makes the car run. That engine is the economic foundation upon which the superstructure of the government rests. That bad smell you get from this engine is called capitalism as it burns up everything in sight. Bernie, who is a Democrat, our latest 'hope for change", is in agreement with this rotten system only wishing to ameliorate it's worst transgressions which is not possible under the current system. That horse left the barn many years ago.

Bernie is and always has been a Democrat in his deeds, he has supported war crimes committed by Democrats throughout his political career and he has supported the most venal of Democrat candidates over third party candidates.

Sanders always has and always will prostrate himself before the Democrat party machine and throw the public under the bus for party politics, joining hands with other unscrupulous, hypocritical party operatives and outright war criminals.

=========

The point is, Sanders is "another capitalist." Like Roosevelt, the essentials of his politics are to defend capitalism, while saving it from itself -- but in a period when the experiments undertaken by Roosevelt, entirely inadequate to need, are impossible.

Sanders doesn't even go so far as for calling for public ownership of basic utilities that were central to the platforms of bourgeois liberalism for most of the 20th century.

Don't believe me? Here's Sanders himself, speaking in November 2015 at Georgetown University:

"The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this: I don’t believe government should own the means of production... I believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America instead of shipping jobs and profits overseas."

And behind his populist phraseology, he maintains the same imperial warrior steel: "The United States must pursue policies to destroy the brutal and barbaric ISIS regime, and to create conditions that prevent fanatical extremist ideologies from flourishing.”

========

Between the "ok" (if that's what you consider warmongering imperialists shilling for corporate America and proposing policies from 50 years ago that have long since been overturned) and the "perfect" (which I'm not sure what you're positing as 'perfect' and I doubt you even know) lay the vast expanse of the possible.

The closer you get to "perfect" the more work and harder the road is. That's why the comfortable ones keep wanting to go with the "ok" (or what they consider to be "ok" given their relatively comfortable economic position). Because no work or hardship is really needed for the "ok". Just show up and vote for the "ok". And keep doing it while those below you (in the economic sense) keep falling further down. Until one day, the comfy ones realize that they are also falling... and about to join the rest of us on the bottom. Then, suddenly, they realize there is no more "ok"... there never was an "ok". But by then it may be far too late.

=======

Every time an article is written about Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez and the like, this question comes up. And I’ll provide the same answer. You can’t effect the change that is sought through the bourgeois electoral system which is highly controlled and managed by the oligarchs and capitalist class thru both mainstream parties and the media who ensure that no third party can be even close to significant. And even some that do have (minor) electoral steam like the Independent Party (Gary Johnson) and the Green Party (Jill Stein), they are still loyal to the collapsing capitalist system and offer, at best, some revisions to the system which have already been tried and overturned. An overturning that happened even when US capitalism was far stronger and in a more powerful position than today. The Democrats are fully in control of their elections and primaries as blatantly admitted by the DNC lawyer who proudly proclaimed that the DNC had the right to sabotage Sanders first campaign and push for whoever they wanted into the general election and that it was common place to do so in cigar-smoke filled rooms of earlier days. As for the ability to create a party that can even do as little as the Green Party, so much money is needed and that requires the backing of elements of the very class that is in historic struggle against the masses.

=======

We need another one of those handy German compound words, e.g. schadenfreude, to express simultaneously feeling profound exasperation and pity.

Norman Solomon is obviously sincere and well-meaning, but it's entirely predictable that he is enthralled (again) by the prospect of Bernie "Mister Magoo" Sanders conducting another bogus Don Quixote campaign.

I guess I can't blame Team Sanders too much for attempting a do-over, given its base of credulous and desperate moderate progressive-liberal devotees. I guess they calculate that reinforcements are born every minute, so their ranks have swelled in the years since they pulled this elaborate con in 2016.

Ironically, as the article and supporting comments reveal, persons excited by the prospect of another "independent" Sanders run pride themselves on being political "pragmatists" and "realists". Anyone who doesn't buy into their sociopolitical fantasy is perforce a foolish "idealist", or "purist"; if we rational skeptics aren't deemed "mad", or the equivalent, then we're condemned as "bad": Negative Nellies, Debbie Downers, spoilers, or even dreaded "nihilists".

Solomon's signature, utterly predictable exhortation to "work within the system" and choose the least-evil Democrat is just an early specimen of identical pleas or lectures from the duopoly-supporting prog-lib pundits featured here and at similar moderate prog-lib sites.

Oh, there may be internal dissension, insofar as simpatico pundits may choose one of the competing charlatans who didn't make Solomon's cut. But for the next two years, we'll be treated to a Russophobia-style propaganda campaign promoting the broken-record message that in this crucial election, all right-thinking people must support the lesser-evil Democratic(ish) candidate to prevent a catastrophic Trump re-election.

We heard it all before; the names (sometimes) change, but the siren song remains the same.

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Sun Feb 24, 2019 1:06 am

It is amazing how many people actually believe that Bernie Saunders is some kind of decent guy posing an “alternative” to the other 2 contenders when his sole purpose was to round up “dissenters” and funnel them into the Hillary camp.
As Alexander Azadgan points out –

1. He voted in favor of use of force (euphemism for bombing) 12 sovereign nations that never represented a threat to the U.S.:
1) Afghanistan.
2) Lebanon.
3) Libya.
4) Palestine.
5) Somalia
6) Syria.
7) Yemen.
8) Yugoslavia
9) Haiti
10) Liberia
11) Zaire (Congo)
12) Sudan

2. He has accepted campaign money from Defense contractor Raytheon, a defense contractor, he continues his undying support of the $1.5 trillion F-35 industry and said that predator drones “have done some very good things”. Sanders has always voted in favor of awarding more corporate welfare for the military industrial complex – and even if he says he’s against a particular war he ends up voting in favor of funding it.

3. He routinely backs appropriations for imperial wars, the corporate scam of Obamacare, wholesale surveillance and bloated defense budgets. He loves to bluster about corporate welfare and big banks but he voted for funding the Commodity Futures “Modernization” Act which deregulated commercial banks and created an “unregulated market in derivatives and swaps” which was the major contributor to the 2007 economic crisis.

4. Regardless of calling himself an “independent”, Sanders is a member of the Democratic caucus and votes 98% of the time with the Democrats and votes in the exact same way as war criminal Hillary Clinton 93% of the time. Sanders campaigned for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race and again in 1996—after Clinton had rammed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), vastly expanded the system of mass incarceration and destroyed welfare.

5. The sheepdog is a card the Democratic Party plays when there’s no White House Democrat running for re-election. The sheepdog is a presidential candidate running ostensibly to the left of the establishment Democrat to whom the billionaires will award the nomination. Sheepdogs are herders,…. charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic Party, either staying home. In 2004 he called on Ralph Nader to abandon his presidential campaign.
The Democratic Party has played this “sheep dog” card at least 7-8 times in the past utilizing collaborators such as Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, Jerry Brown in 1992, Al Sharpton in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, Dennis Kucinich in 2008 and in 2016 was Bernie Sanders’ turn.

6. Regardless of calling himself a “socialist” he labeled the late Hugo Chávez, architect of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela responsible for lifting millions of lives out of poverty “a dead communist dictator.” Then he saddled up for a photo op with Evo Morales at the Vatican and also voted to extradite former Black Panther member, Assata Shakur.

7. He refers to ISIS’ godfather and warmonger extraordinaire John McCain as “my friend and a very, very decent person.”

8. He routinely parrots the DNC lines: “the Russians hacked our elections” despite there is no evidence of such hacking, but lowered his head and tucked tail when the DNC actually rigged the primary elections against him, proving he is more loyal to the Democratic (war) Party than to the millions of people who supported him and donated to his fraudulent campaign.

9. He expressed staunch support for the aid of violently right-wing separatist forces such as the self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army, whose members were trained as Mujahideen, during Clinton’s 100-day bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo in 1999. He has an extensive record of supporting jihadist proxies for the overthrow of sovereign governments in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

10. He supported Bill Clinton’s sanctions against Iraq, sanctions that prohibited medicines for infants and children…more than 500,000 innocents killed for no other reason than that they were Iraqi.

11. He said yes in a voice vote to the Clinton-era crime Bill, the Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which expanded the death penalty to cover 60 offenses. So he is obviously pro-death penalty.

12. In the 2016 elections, he betrayed millions of people that believed in him when after making the central point of his campaign the fight against Wall Street he instructed his followers to vote for Wall Street’s candidate, war criminal/corporate criminal Hillary Clinton.

https://imperianews.com/usa-news-analys ... to-follow/

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Sun Feb 24, 2019 1:11 am

Et tu, Bernie? Sanders shamed for joining US hawks in Venezuela regime change push

The self-described democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is now getting grief from his supporters for apparently aligning himself with the Trump administration and its regime change efforts in Venezuela.
Having announced a 2020 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination this week, Sanders (I-Vermont) digressed from his twitter storm about healthcare, wage inequality and taxing the rich to endorse US “humanitarian aid” for Venezuela, which the Trump administration is using to bolster the self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido.

“The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters,” Sanders tweeted on Saturday.


Bernie Sanders

@SenSanders
The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters.

8,935
1:47 PM - Feb 23, 2019
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While the tweet received praise from accounts favoring regime change, and drew some mockery from conservatives, there has been a veritable avalanche of disappointment from the Vermont senator’s sympathizers – as well as journalists and celebrities opposed to the regime change operation.

ALSO ON RT.COM
Venezuela crisis: Border clashes, ‘masked thugs’, torched ‘aid’ & fake Red Cross
“Bernie, are you f-ing kidding me!” tweeted Roger Waters, Pink Floyd co-founder and outspoken opponent of US intervention in Venezuela, telling Sanders that if he agrees with Trump, Bolton, Abrams and Rubio he “cannot be a credible candidate” for president.


Roger Waters

@rogerwaters
Replying to @SenSanders
Bernie, are you f-ing kidding me! if you buy the Trump, Bolton, Abrams, Rubio line, “humanitarian intervention” and collude in the destruction of Venezuela, you cannot be credible candidate for President of the USA. Or, maybe you can, maybe you’re the perfect stooge for the 1 %.

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“Imagine being Bernie Sanders and thinking Mike Pence, John Bolton, and Elliott Abrams are innocently committed to alleviating the humanitarian plight of the Venezuelan people, and that the ‘food and medicine’ they’re sending has no ulterior motive,” wrote journalist Michael Tracey, asking Sanders “Have you lost your mind???”


Michael Tracey

@mtracey
Imagine being Bernie Sanders and thinking Mike Pence, John Bolton, and Elliott Abrams are innocently committed to alleviating the humanitarian plight of the Venezuelan people, and that the “food and medicine” they’re sending has no ulterior motive. Have you lost your mind???

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Sanders should “know better than to endorse a stunt led by war criminals who have snuck weapons in aid shipments in the past. This stance will not make democrats like you more and will only lose you support from socialists,” wrote Abby Martin, who hosts the investigative web series The Empire Files.


Abby Martin

@AbbyMartin
Replying to @SenSanders
you know better than to endorse a stunt led by war criminals who have snuck weapons in aid shipments in the past. This stance will not make democrats like you more and will only lose you support from socialists

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3:40 PM - Feb 23, 2019
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“A sad commentary on US politics that the country’s most prominent self-proclaimed socialist feels compelled to feed into an interventionist narrative crafted by the Trump administration,” commented journalist Max Blumenthal of Grayzone, currently in Venezuela covering the tensions.


Max Blumenthal

@MaxBlumenthal
Replying to @SenSanders
A sad commentary on US politics that the country’s most prominent self-proclaimed socialist feels compelled to feed into an interventionist narrative crafted by the Trump administration.

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3:44 PM - Feb 23, 2019
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The tweet was also poorly received by rank-and-file Sanders supporters, whose reactions ran the gamut from “Do better Bernie” and “This ain’t it chief” to unprintable expletives.


The Humanist Report🌹
@HumanistReport
Replying to @SenSanders
This is an incredibly disappointing response from you, Bernie. Don’t play into the hands of warmongers like Elliot Abrams and Donald Trump. You should know better than this.

1,795
3:44 PM - Feb 23, 2019
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Asa Winstanley

@AsaWinstanley
Replying to @SenSanders
Bad tweet, wrong position. 0/10

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5:16 PM - Feb 23, 2019
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Naomi Schiller
@naomischiller
Do better Bernie. Also, do your homework. Venezuela has been accepting aid. In November they accepted $9 million in health and nutritional aid from the UN. What Trump is offering is “not humanitarian aid” according to the Red Cross.

Bernie Sanders

@SenSanders
The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters.

1,311
3:05 PM - Feb 23, 2019
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Brandon Jonely 🌹
@Aldowyn
Replying to @SenSanders
Senator, even NPR and the Wall Street Journal have said that this humanitarian aid mission is a front for the opposition. If the U.S. wants to aid the Venezuelan people, the best way to do that is to lift the sanctions.

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6:15 PM - Feb 23, 2019
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Interim Emperor of Venezuela
@Ian_Flaming
Replying to @SenSanders
Bernie, you lose supporters by the million every time you repeat the LIES of the MSM, #Trump & his three amigo's. Plenty of aid IS getting into Venezuela via the Red Cross. Only USA's invasion-disguised-as-aid is being refused entry. The only violence is due to USA's illegal acts

6
6:22 PM - Feb 23, 2019
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One podcaster even urged him to fire his foreign policy adviser, Matt Duss.


Dave Anthony

@daveanthony
Replying to @SenSanders @mattduss
Fire Duss, Bernie. This is a shit take.

304
3:58 PM - Feb 23, 2019

https://www.rt.com/usa/452276-bernie-sa ... me-change/

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