Take the Movement to the White House

[eridani]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/27/take-movement-white-house

At a recent dinner with my work team, I was reminded that I had said I wanted to travel less for work this year so I could focus on other projects. Instead, I find myself bouncing across the country campaigning for my friend who decided to run for president.

I first met Bernie Sanders in the 1980s, after he pulled off a surprising upset to be elected mayor of Burlington. Throughout his time as a public servant, Bernie has never abandoned his working-class roots, remaining unusually free of the peacocking strut that afflicts too many in high office. For example, he's not "Senator Sanders" but just "Bernie" — as everyone calls him that. He lives modestly, flies coach class and considers $25 a major campaign donation. It's also worth noting that he has not used his official positions to get rich. While most people in Congress are millionaires, Sanders' financial net worth is in the six-figure range, one of the lowest of any senator.

Bernie happily calls himself a "democratic socialist," a loaded term that initially spooks many people. But as Vermonters (who keep electing him — last time with more than 70 percent of the vote) have come to know from his actions and policies, and as the hundreds of thousands of people turning out to hear him are learning, the phrase essentially means being a feisty FDR populist, willing to take on the economic royalists (and welcoming "their hatred," as Roosevelt put it) in order to (in Bernie's words) "revitalize American democracy so that government works for all of us, not just the large campaign contributors."

For Bernie, the key word in democratic socialism is "democratic" — rallying and organizing workaday people to reject the plutocratic corporate order and build "a society in which all people have a decent standard of living — not a society in which a few people have incredible wealth while 47 million live in poverty." Sanders comes straight out of America's historic continuum of progressive boat-rockers: the pamphleteers, abolitionists, suffragists, Populists, unionists, Progressives, New Dealers, anti-war protesters, along with marchers for women's equality, gay rights, the environment and the civil rights movement.

[Stevepol]

1. What a great article! Hightower has struck gold

and he realizes it. Bernie is just a channel for the yearnings of a large group of people fed up with a government that ignores the will of the people. And most important, Bernie himself recognizes that. He's the handiest tool in the tool box and he's more than willing to be used. If he's elected president, whether any other Dems get in, one thing is true: the American people will have a TRUTH TELLER in the White House and the country will not be the same after he gets in.

[libdem4life]

2. Long ago, there was a party called the Know Nothings.

Could be some slight resemblance in our times?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-traphagan/the-gop-the-new-know-noth_b_9010454.html

"The party's platform emphasized purifying American politics using anti-Catholic, nativist rhetoric that pandered to popular fears about the German and Irish Catholic immigrants. The Know Nothings claimed that Catholicism was contrary to the values of a republic, because Catholics owed ultimate allegiance to the Pope. They could not be loyal American citizens.

The party, whose membership was limited to Protestant men, feared the growing flow of immigrants from Europe and elsewhere and claimed these immigrants undermined American lifestyles and values and stole jobs from "native born" Americans."

Sound familiar?