Bernie Sanders Isn't a Radical - He's a Pragmatist Who Fights to Un-Rig the System

By Mark Weisbrot, MarketWatch

20 February 20

Sanders would use both markets and government to reverse the upward redistribution of income to the already rich

s Bernie Sanders continues to increase his standing in the Democratic primary, and his opponents in both parties feel the pain, there is an effort to paint him as an extremist of some sort. Someone who might even lose to Trump because of this alleged “radicalism.” But it’s not that easy to make the case on the basis of facts. 

He has a 40-year track record as a politician. The things he is saying now are mostly what he has shouted from the mountain tops for pretty much the whole time. The main difference is that now, other Democratic politicians have joined him: on a $15 minimum wage, student-debt relief, free tuition at public universities, expanding Social Security, reducing income inequality, and some even on Medicare for All.

His actions speak even more consistently than his words: he understands that politics is about compromise. He fights hard for what he has promised to voters, but then takes the best deal he can win if it will advance the ball down the field, and prepares to fight again the next day. 

That’s why he supported Obamacare when it was the best deal on the table — expanding insurance coverage to 20 million Americans, without the life-threatening exclusions for “pre-existing conditions.” This despite the fact that Obamacare was still quite a distance from Medicare for All — “health care as a human right” — that had been his passion and signature issue for decades.

But he is a “socialist,” his opponents cry, leaving out the first part of the term “democratic socialist” that Sanders always uses when this issue is discussed. There is much room to induce confusion here because the term “socialist,” in English, has a number of different definitions that have all become common usage over the years. 

It can be used to mean anything from “communist,” as in the former Soviet Union, to the European social democratic or socialist parties that have governed for much of the past 70 years in countries such as France, Germany, Spain, and the U.K., not to mention the Scandinavian countries.

It should be clear to anyone who is not trying to frighten voters that Sanders is a social democrat of the latter, European variety. There will be no U.S. government takeover of the means of production under a Sanders administration.

The biggest expansion in government will be in public funding of health insurance. Like traditional Medicare, where less than 2% of expenses are administrative costs, public health insurance will be much more efficient than the current six times as much spent by the private insurance industry. And we won’t have 8 million people falling into poverty every year due to medical expenses, or worse, tens of thousands actually dying because of lack of access to affordable health care.

Sanders’ program is targeted at correcting a very harmful transformation of the U.S. economy that has taken place over the past 40 years. 

Unlike the first three decades after World War II, when income gains were broadly shared as the economy grew, most of the increase in income has gone to those who already had much more than their share. Since 1993, for example, the top 1% of families captured an astounding 48% of the growth in this country’s income. 

No wonder so many Americans feel like the system is rigged against them.

That right-wing transformation was mostly launched by the Reagan team, but it came to be accepted, and even deepened by some liberal political leaders as well. Perhaps this normalization of the radical changes of the past few decades is why some commentators perceive Bernie’s program — designed to reverse this damage — as “radical.”

Here it is important to note that the fight over this right-wing transformation has never been so much about “the market” versus “the state.” Almost every economy in the world is a mixture of both. 

But the Reagan “revolution” and the counter-reforms that followed (e.g., the WTO, NAFTA, financial deregulation, permanent normal trade relations with China, anti-labor legislation and practices) were not so much about changing the relative weight of market and government.

Rather what changed most is that both markets and government were harnessed vastly more to redistribute income and wealth upward. The result is an America that is unique among high-income countries in the percentage of people who are employed full-time and yet struggling to get by, not to mention the more than 10 million children in poverty and more than half a million homeless people.

Sanders, in his reform program, seeks to use both markets and government to reverse this massive upward redistribution of income and wealth.

Of course, government has to take the lead with public investment where private investment would not be forthcoming — as in the transformation of some energy infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions. 

But other important parts of Sanders’ program move the economy away from government toward more market-based solutions: for example, reducing the role of government-granted-and-regulated patent monopolies in driving up the price of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health-care costs. Or breaking up other monopolies in favor of more market competition, in the technology and financial sectors.

Sanders also favors a less interventionist role for the Federal Reserve in the labor market, as the Fed has triggered almost all U.S. recessions since the end of World War II (except for the last two) by raising interest rates when this was unnecessary. 

And he has led the way to reduce one of the most powerful and destructive abuses that our government has unleashed upon Americans and the world: the terrible, unnecessary, “forever wars” that most Americans now reject. Some of his best allies in this fight have been conservative Republicans who are skeptical of this aspect of “big government” — as has been true in the historic fight to stop U.S. military participation in Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen.

In short, Sanders is much more pragmatic and less ideological than his opponents would like to admit. But we can expect to hear more — from various quarters — of this labeling him as a “radical,” if he continues to gain on his competitors in the Democratic primary.

Bloomberg's NYPD Spied on Me for Being Muslim. He Has Never Apologized.

By Asad Dandia, The Washington Post

20 February 20

From “stop-and-frisk” to warrantless surveillance, Bloomberg has a long record of disregarding civil rights.

litzing social media and TV with over $230 million of ads, former mayor Mike Bloomberg has crafted an image of himself as the candidate who can transcend America’s polarized politics to defeat Donald Trump in November. But New Yorkers know better: For us, his presidential campaign has resurfaced long-held objections to how he has approached power and public safety.

When Bloomberg went on the Democratic debate stage for the first time last night, he was questioned about what his 2015 defense of “stop-and-frisk” policing might imply about his views toward minority communities. He responded by saying that, over his three terms, the “one thing that I’m embarrassed about” is how stop-and-frisk “turned out.” “It got out of control,” he said.

But that policy was not an anomaly. From stop-and-frisk policing, which increased sixfold under his administration, to warrantless, blanket surveillance of Muslim communities in the tri-state area, Bloomberg blatantly disregarded the civil rights of people of color when he was mayor. At 19, I was targeted by that discriminatory surveillance — and today, I’m reminded of how little the leaders responsible for it have grappled with the consequences.

While in college in 2011, I co-founded a charity dedicated to serving the poor in my community and in New York City. As Muslims, my friends and I were driven by our commitment to our faith, which calls on us to serve those in need with what we can; almost all of us came from working class backgrounds ourselves. We spent our weekends delivering groceries to families whom we knew could use the support, and as our work expanded to include feeding the homeless and establishing partnerships with other charity and relief organizations, we received volunteers and inquiries from all over the city.

In March 2012, a young man messaged me over Facebook, asking to get involved. He wanted to become a better Muslim and asked if there were “any events or anything” that he could attend with me, as a start. He was searching for faith and community, and my community welcomed him. He participated in all of our activities, whether it was raising money for Syrian refugees, delivering food to undocumented families, helping organize lectures by Muslim community leaders and traveling to gatherings such as the annual Islamic Circle of North America convention. I even invited him to my home to have dinner with my family. We offered night prayers and at one point, shed tears together over our shared struggles as Muslims trying to make sense of our place in the world.

Later that spring, two separate, credible sources told me that the police were watching me. Apparently, there was a file with my name on it somewhere. I was rattled. A year earlier, the Associated Press had released terrifying reports detailing how the New York Police Department (NYPD) had recruited a network of thousands of informants, sprawled across the city, to monitor Muslims. Fearful of this scrutiny, my friends and I temporarily disbanded our organization over the summer. But after a few weeks of internal deliberation, we decided to renew our activities. We weren’t doing anything wrong. We had no reason to stop.

In the fall of 2012, the young man confessed on Facebook that he was an informant for the NYPD. The person I’d come to consider a friend, who ate food cooked by my mother’s hands, admitted that it was all a front — and he said that there were others like him. This sent us reeling. Our sacred spaces had been violated. We didn’t know who to trust, or where we could turn for help. Did I have to vet all my friends and watch my back everywhere I went?

Bloomberg’s surveillance of Muslims extended beyond New York into Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey and elsewhere. The program was so secretive and intrusive that Cory Booker, then the mayor of Newark, was not informed of it. Thousands of informants infiltrated Muslim sacred spaces, restaurants, cafes, student associations, businesses and other social settings to spy on and entrap ordinary people. The clandestine nature of this surveillance did not make it harmless: It caused significant, documented harm to Muslim communities: it dampened organizing, reduced religious practice and caused people to self-censor their political speech. It engendered social mistrust and fear among Muslims, and also between our communities and law enforcement.

In 2013, I joined a class-action lawsuit against NYPD’s discriminatory surveillance of Muslims, led by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and CUNY’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) project. The NYPD acknowledged in court that the Demographics Unit at the heart of this spying program, did not generate a single terrorism lead or produce any investigations. The lawsuit dragged on for years, and along the way, communities had to process the enormous mental and emotional trauma — the kind of damage that’s the hardest to quantify on paper. We finally reached a settlement in 2017, scoring some significant policy changes, which included prohibiting investigations in which race, religion, or ethnicity is a substantial or motivating factor; requiring articulable and factual information before the police can launch a preliminary investigation into political or religious activity; putting an end to open-ended investigations; and installing a civilian representative within the department.

Bloomberg, meanwhile, has remained unapologetic. In 2012, he even defended the surveillance, saying that the police had a duty to “keep this country safe.”

The policies that sent cops into predominantly black and Hispanic communities to harass residents are intimately linked to those that sent informants into sacred spaces to monitor and entrap Muslims. Black, Latinx, South Asian, Arab and Muslim populations — identities which often overlap — suffered enormously under Bloomberg’s administration. In the name of security, he pursued ineffective measures that harmed vulnerable populations. Stop-and-frisk, warrantless surveillance and similar policies compounded one another, leaving a lingering sense that we are unsafe in our own neighborhoods and gathering spaces. We still grapple with that legacy of intimidation and stigma today, even as Bloomberg himself refuses to reckon with it.

New Yorkers who came of age under Bloomberg were targeted in myriad ways by the NYPD, which he once called his “personal army.” We saw how he used his power on a local level. What he could unleash on a national level, with all the powers of the presidency, would far eclipse it.