This article, Bernie Sanders vs. The Machine. By Alexander Burns, Nov. 27, 2019 from the New York Times. is outstanding.
And in addition, I’ve included links to two additional resourcesthat highlight some of the tactics of what some have called the selfish rich.
*The term refers to the super-rich who would prefer the world remain awash in unnecessary suffering rather than agree to pay a even a modest wealth tax. Below are some of the ways they work their will on the rest of us.
- Billionaire-funded protest is rearing its head in America. By Hamilton Nolan, November 27, 2019 from The Guardian.
- “Recently a crowd of protesters disrupted a speech by Elizabeth Warren. The activists might have seemed grassroots, but they weren’t.”
- Trump And His Corrupt Old Party. By Nobel Prize Winning Economist, Dr. Paul Krguman, November 21, 2019 from the New York Times.
- Dr. Krugman details why “For Republicans, there is no bottom.”
If you’re not subscribing to the New York Times and the Guardian, I suggest you subscribe to both.
Here are some excerpts from Bernie Sanders Versus The Machine:
Less than three months before the Iowa caucuses, polls show Mr. Sanders within striking distance of victory in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
On Friday, when Mr. Sanders rebuked Michael R. Bloomberg for pouring his personal wealth into the 2020 race, it was with a confident pronouncement that captured the ethos of his own campaign: “If you can’t build grass-roots support for your candidacy, you have no business running for president,” Mr. Sanders said.
Many Democratic leaders remain skeptical that Mr. Sanders can win the nomination or, if he gets that far, the general election. But Mr. Sanders is confident in his approach — because, he says, it has worked for him before, beginning with the battles in Burlington that taught him the meaning of power, and running through his clash with Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries.
If his political ideology had long been clear, it was in his early years as mayor that Mr. Sanders refined his methods for accumulating and using influence, according to a review of hundreds of personal letters, city documents and newspaper articles from Mr. Sanders’s time as mayor, and interviews with more than a dozen people involved in Burlington politics in the 1980s, including Mr. Sanders.
In Burlington, as mayor, Mr. Sanders successfully built a progressive grass roots organization which helped his achieve his goals.
Much as he mobilized voters against his adversaries in Burlington, Mr. Sanders said that as president he would personally target senators who blocked policies like “Medicare for All,” even in the most Republican-leaning states. By showing that the working class had a fighting president on its side, Mr. Sanders predicted he could transform impoverished conservative states like West Virginia and Mississippi, which President Trump carried easily in 2016, into far more progressive ones.
“The idea that working-class people are voting for somebody like Donald Trump is abysmal,” Mr. Sanders said, “and it speaks to the Democratic Party’s failure to speak to and address the crises facing working-class people all over this country.”
Mr. Sanders conceded that he would be up against huge forces of opposition: “The Republican National Committee is not the Democratic Party of Burlington, Vt., in 1981,” he said. And he indicated in the interview that former President Barack Obama had raised questions about his plans for mass mobilization.
But in Burlington, even people who do not share Mr. Sanders’s worldview say his tactics worked.
David Thelander, a former Republican alderman, said Mr. Sanders had upended the city by enlisting “underserved community members who, historically, felt left out of the political process.”
Throughout the 2020 campaign, Mr. Sanders has sounded like an echo of his younger self, threatening reprisals against the elected officials in his way. He has pledged to campaign in even the reddest of states against lawmakers who oppose his ideas, including against conservative Democrats. It is a method of governing untested in the modern presidency.
Mr. Sanders suggested in the interview that the last Democratic president, Mr. Obama, would have done well to apply relentless pressure of the kind he envisions, rather than seeking “middle ground” with Republicans.
“Obama ran one of the great campaigns in American history — a brilliant campaign,” Mr. Sanders said. “Do I think he should have maintained that grass roots support and activism in his first term, in a way he did not do? Yeah, I do.”
