Sanders on Elections and Socialism : How We Win

Thanks to Duane Campbell for posting this:

Sanders on Elections and Socialism : How We Win




Over the weekend, Bernie Sanders spoke to the How We Win conference, a gathering of democratic socialist elected officials and their staff in New Orleans sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, Jacobin, the Nation, and other partners. Below is a transcript of his remarks.

Thank you for inviting me to say a few words. Let me begin by thanking all of you for having the guts to run for public office. It’s a lot harder to go out and knock on doors to represent constituents with the problems they face seven days a week. So I want to thank you very much for that. Despite the horror in the White House right now, they’re out there all across this country. We’re seeing strong progressive growth. It is not just Zohran Mamdani in New York or Katie Wilson in Seattle. From coast to coast, you are seeing progressive democratic socialists standing up, taking on the establishment and winning elections.

And one of the great secrets of the corporate media is that right now in the House of Representatives, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has about one hundred members, including dozens and dozens of very strong progressives. That is the result of the hard work all us have done over the last number of years.

I’ve been asked to give you some advice. What I’m gonna tell you is probably what you already know. Number one, here is a radical idea — do your job that you were elected to do. Now, I’ll tell you a story. Here is the story. I was elected to be mayor of Burlington, Vermont; won it by ten votes way back in 1981. We had a strong foreign policy. We had exchange programs. We dealt with national issues. But I’ll never forget there was an article in the local newspaper and the report asked some guy, “But what does it mean? What do you think about having a socialist as your mayor?” And the guy said, “Well, I don’t know much about socialism, but I do know they’re getting the snow off of the streets a lot faster than they used to.”

You gotta do your job. If you’re on the city council, the school board, the state legislature, you gotta do it. And if you do your job well, people will give you the latitude to talk about many, many other issues. But don’t lose focus regarding the job that you are elected to do.

Second of all, establishment Democrats have the brilliant idea that the only people they can talk to are establishment Democrats. They literally have lists of people: “Don’t knock on this door; don’t knock on that door. Only on these.” I strongly disagree with that suggestion. Knock on every door in your district. And what you’ll find when you do that is you’ll have the right-wing people slam the door in your face. You’ll have some unpleasantness. But by and large, what you’ll find is that there is a lot more commonality of interest than you might have appreciated. In my view, the reason Donald Trump is president of the United States today is not because people voted for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1 percent or massive cuts in health care. He is the president of the United States because of Democratic establishment candidates’ failure to provide a real analysis and agenda that meets the crises that we face today.

Establishment Democrats believe that you can tinker around the edges, you can tell the world how terrible Donald Trump is, and that’s fine. But right now, what the American people understand is that übercapitalism — an oligarchic form of society, which is what we have today — is a disaster for the working class of this country. We don’t have to tinker around the edges. We have to create a very new form of society.

So for just your average person out there, you are in many cases going nowhere in a hurry. You understand that with real inflation accounted for, wages are basically the same as they were fifty years ago, despite a huge increase in worker productivity as a result of all of the expansion of technology. And almost all of the gains of that new technology have gone to the 1 percent. And ordinary workers know that there’s something wrong with 60 percent of our people living paycheck to paycheck while Elon Musk owns more wealth himself than about the bottom 52 percent of American society. They know that.

Here is a radical idea — do your job that you were elected to do.

They know that there’s something wrong when we have a campaign finance system that is totally corrupt and allows billionaires in both political parties to buy elections. That’s a broken system. I say these things because you’re gonna have Republicans who understand this as well. They understand if you look at the basic necessities of life — just think for a moment: you’re living in the richest country in the history of the world, and it cannot even provide the basic necessities of life for working people.

Just take a look at the health care in your community. Talk about health care. Everybody will tell you that despite spending twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation, the health care system is totally broken. Everybody knows that. The educational system is largely broken, and the childcare system is a disaster. Kids can’t afford to go to college, or they’re leaving school deeply in debt. Public schools are under enormous pressure. Teachers are underpaid. They’re dealing with all kinds of disciplinary issues, kids who come from troubled families or are acting out in school. We are dealing with a situation where our food system, just nutrition . . . we are the most obese and unhealthy nation on Earth because you have a food industry that makes huge profit by selling our kids crap, and the price of groceries is soaring.

People understand that. I flew in from the National Airport in Washington; there was a four-hour delay because they couldn’t figure out how to de-ice the plane. All over the country you are looking at basic problems people are struggling with. The system is failing. Our job is not to run away from that reality but to offer a real alternative. Because in my view, what the future is gonna be about isn’t establishment Democrats. All over Europe, for example, the establishment parties are fading away. The struggle is going to be between the Trumpists of the world — right-wing extremism — and a democratic socialist alternative, which recognizes the problems that we face and provides concrete and real and bold solutions for working families.

So what Donald Trump does is go, “Yeah, we got a lot of problems. And the problem is undocumented people, the problem is the trans community, the problem is that we have Somalians who are ‘garbage.’” That’s what demagogues do. They take the problems that we face — often that they cause — and then you blame a powerless minority. Our job is to recognize the problems are real and to put the finger on the real cause of the problem, which is the greed of the oligarchs in this country. So that’s where we’re at now. And it ain’t gonna be easy. Especially with Trump in the White House.

To summarize, the American people know the system is broken. They are hurting. They can’t afford groceries. They can’t afford health care. They can’t afford education. They can’t afford a lot of things. And at the same time, the billionaire class has never had it so good. The establishment Democrats cannot talk about these things because, very often, they’re getting funded by the billionaire class. So what we have gotta do right now is get out into the streets. We gotta talk to our people — allpeople, not just people within our zone of comfort. And we’re gonna be providing real solutions to the crises that we face. So once again, what you have done is extraordinary. I thank you so much and congratulate you for getting out on the streets, for winning elections, and for standing up for working people.

An incredible (Chinese) love poem

 

This strange square 👇 is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it.

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered… pic.twitter.com/xVjzmkIWRj

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) December 12, 2025

The Obama Myth

From Naked Capitalism (here)

To get a better sense of what Obama was always about, please read the 2012 post, Exclusive: How Obama’s Early Career Success Was Built on Fronting for Chicago Real Estate and Finance. Its opening:

Barack Obama remains an icon to many on what passes for the left in America despite incontrovertible evidence that he does not represent their interests. There are many contributing factors, including his considerable skills as a speaker and his programmatic effort to neuter liberal critics by getting their funding cut.

A central component of the seemingly impenetrable Obama mythology is his personal history: a black man, son of a broken home, who nevertheless got on the fast track to financial success by becoming editor of the Harvard Law Review, but turned instead to working with and later representing a particularly disadvantaged community, the South Side of Chicago.

Even so, this story does not quite add up. Why did Obama not follow the usual, well greased path of becoming a Supreme Court clerk, and seeking to exert influence through the Washington doors that would have opened up to him after that stint?

A remarkable speech by Robert Fitch puts Obama’s early career in a new perspective that explains the man we see now in the Oval Office: one who pretends to befriend ordinary people but sells them out again and again to wealthy, powerful interests – the banks, big Pharma and health insurers, and lately, the fracking-industrial complex.

Fitch, who died last year, was an academic and journalist, well regarded for his forensic and archival work, as described by Doug Henwood in an obituary in the Nation. He is best known for his book Solidarity for Sale, which chronicled corruption in American unions, but his work that is germane to his analysis of Obama is Assassination of New York. In that, he documented the concerted efforts by powerful real estate and financial interests to drive manufacturing and low-income renters out of Manhattan so they could turn it over to office and residential space for high income professionals.

Fitch gave his eye-opening speech before an unlikely audience at an unlikely time: the Harlem Tenants Association in November 2008, hard on the heels of Obama’s electrifying presidential win. The first part contains his prescient prediction: that Obama’s Third Way stance, that we all need to put our differences aside and get along, was tantamount to advocating the interests of the wealthy, since they seldom give anything to the have-nots without a fight.

That discussion alone is reason to read the piece. But the important part is his description of the role that Obama played in the redevelopment of the near South Side of Chicago, and how he and other middle class blacks, including Valerie Jarrett and his wife Michelle, advanced at the expense of poor blacks by aligning themselves with what Fitch calls “friendly FIRE”: powerful real estate players like the Pritzkers and the Crown family, major banks, the University of Chicago, as well as non-profit community developers and real estate reverends.

Don’t take my word for it. Download the speech and read it. And then circulate it widely. And thank Michael Hudson, Fitch’s friend for over 30 years, for making this document available.

You can find the speech as an embedded document here.

The Happy Secret to Better Work

 Hilarious!

 (I've taken notes, too, since some of it goes by so fast)

The Happy Secret to Better Work
https://youtu.be/fLJsdqxnZb0

Creating lasting positive change (a 21-day practice):
- 3 Gratitudes
- Journaling (about at least 1 positive in last 24hrs)
- Exercise
- Meditation
- Random Acts of Kindness

US Interventions South of Its Borders

 Gosh, I wonder why we have so many political and military refugees crossing our borders.

 

Local Public Policy Heartlessness

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Homelessness Heartlessness

The latest newsletter from Sacramento County Supervisor Rodriguez begins by saying that an appeals court has finally allowed local governments to destroy whatever meager shelter the homeless have managed to cobble together on public land, even if no alternative housing is offered. Supervisor Rodriguez is eager to permit homeless sweeps on private land, too.

Where will these people go once the police destroy their encampment? Ms. Rodriguez doesn't say.

Let's not be too hard on Ms. Rodriguez, though, after all, homeless people are at least a sanitation problem. But local governments are not helping there, either. One enterprising citizen paid for porta-potties at a homeless encampment, but local government prohibited that. Apparently, the unhoused must be a conspicuous threat to public health.

Reducing poverty is the key to solving the problem of homelessness. The majority of the unhoused are simply too poor to afford rents that have been rising faster than salaries in recent years--and 40% of the unhoused are employed. Should employers be allowed access to American markets when they employ people at such low rates that they can't afford life's necessities? Ms. Rodriguez doesn't say.

 

Ms. Rodriguez often states that the unhoused are mentally ill and/or addicted, and that is her excuse for the difficulty in solving this problem. These illnesses should also make them unsympathetic enough that most people will shun them, too.

Yet the majority are just poor. Self-medicating for the PTSD of homelessness typically occurs only after people lose their housing. Yes, there are mentally ill homeless, but, in a stunning demonstration of political heartlessness, the government-run asylums that previously housed them were closed without providing alternative housing.

The attack on poor people is generations-long now. US affordable housing programs were designed to fail from their inception, so currently, the US has its biggest homeless population since the Great Depression. Nevertheless, the consistent message from public policy makers is that the US isn't a "can-do"country. The poor are even at fault that they're mentally ill and addicted!

What happened to affordable housing? Nationally, the Nixon administration stopped the feds from building it directly. As his administration cut taxes on the wealthy roughly in half, Reagan cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. 

This kind of heartlessness is bipartisan too. Clinton signed legislation with the Faircloth amendment that limited how much federal support is available for affordable housing. And there's always been the covert sabotage of underestimating maintenance for such housing so it deteriorates rapidly--particularly important when housing people whose attention to material things is limited.

Is there any local government interest in a more humanitarian response like free clinics that would free up money for housing? Or what about creating money with a public bank so we could build more affordable housing? That's right, banks don't lend deposits; by extending credit they actually create money. Several communities have found providing housing is cheaper than the cost of homeless sweeps and emergency room visits. The basic income guarantee--giving the poor money--has been successful too, when it's been tried in Stockton and Mississippi.

Sacramento's local governments' response to these alternatives: [crickets]. As for the most commonly proposed "remedies" for homelessness, veteran Los Angeles planner Dick Plotkin says "Loosening up local zoning codes to reduce homelessness and over-crowding does not work."

Police Heartlessness

In her previous newsletter, Supervisor Rodriguez described a ride-along with the local police in glowing terms. She believes police are the ones to handle the problem of crime, and, not incidentally, conduct those homeless sweeps. 

Although Hollywood says they always get the bad guy, in reality police solve less than 15% of crimes--13% in 2022 in California, and this is after public spending on police has increased more than four times faster than population growth since the early '80s. Police don't even solve the majority of murders.

Incidentally, instead of riding in a police car, no local leader has offered to live poor, never mind homeless, for any period of time. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickled and Dimed describes what it's like living at the other end of the police baton. Executive summary: it's exhausting.

Could treating people better, rather than (heartlessly) relying on cops, courts, and cages encourage lower crime rates? The US cages people at five times the world's per-capita average--seven times the per-capita incarceration rates in France and Canada. Yet France and Canada also have lower crime rates.

One suggestive difference: The US has more than half a million medical bankruptcies annually. France and Canada have single-payer healthcare...and lower crime rates. Incarceration is expensive; the savings that would come from reducing it could certainly fund social programs that diminish crime more cheaply.

In fairness, the Sacramento County jail is full, but 60% - 80% of its inmates are just too poor to afford bail. This separation between inmates and their jobs and families is a powerful incentive for them to accept a (guilty) plea deal, even if they are innocent. So in Sacramento, you're guilty until proven wealthy, not innocent until proven guilty. Any local discussion of no-cash bail--only the US and the Philippines have cash bail--or supervised release? Nope.

Sprawl as a (Heartless) Ponzi scheme

According to the late Sacramento Supervisor Grantland Johnson, the Sacramento region is widely acknowledged throughout California as the most favorable to development interests--the land speculators--particularly those that want to make the agricultural land surrounding the already developed area into more Conventional Suburban Development--i.e., sprawl. The speculators can purchase agricultural land for a few thousand dollars an acre, and, when they get permission to develop it, sell it to builders for 50 to 100 times more. There's even a tax break for such real estate deals, so they get to pocket all their egregious profits.

Sprawl is particularly heartless. Not only does it lengthen commutes, but its longer roads, pipes and wires are also roughly twice as expensive to maintain as infill. The region has roughly 20 years' worth of unbuilt infill, but profits for developing that are far less.

So the Supervisors are creating an infrastructure time bomb. At some point, maintenance cost for outlying development will exceed tax revenue, and the public will, in effect, subsidize land speculator profits. 

Extending commuting not only contributes to global warming, but it also requires every driving-age adult to own a car, one of the most regressive "taxes" known to man, further impoverishing the poor. Oh yes, and sprawl also makes public transit virtually impossible without large subsidies. Not enough riders can walk to bus stops to make transit financially viable, and the public (rightly) complains their tax dollars that subsidize transit are misused.

But isn't sprawl what the public wants? The most valuable real estate in the region is the area around McKinley Park--pedestrian-friendly mixed-use, an alternative to sprawl. People actually pay premiums to live in areas that are not sprawl. 

Conclusion

The heartless consequences of these policies crush the poor and encourage criminality. All of what's critiqued here is optional. Options though they are, all of these demonstrations of heartlessness contribute to an environment that persecutes and immiserates its inhabitants.

Update: Not only is the Trump administration cutting funds for the homeless, Trump’s DC Occupation Costs 4 Times More Than It Would Take to House City’s Entire Homeless Population

John Oliver's Healthcare Commentary