Bernie Sanders

description: an American politician, senator from Vermont, and two-time presidential candidate

347 results

pages: 227 words: 71,675

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything
by Becky Bond and Zack Exley
Published 9 Nov 2016

OCTOBER 1: Fundraising numbers come out and, astonishingly, Bernie is outpacing Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign fundraising. OCTOBER 2: Becky gets a job on the campaign as a senior advisor. OCTOBER 13: The first Democratic primary debate is held, with over 4,000 Bernie Sanders debate watch parties launched by the distributed organizing team. OCTOBER 20: Zack and Corbin pilot an early version of barnstorm meetings in Tennessee. OCTOBER 28: The national student town hall livestream is held with Bernie Sanders and members of College Students for Bernie Sanders. NOVEMBER: Zack and Becky barnstorm across Colorado and meet volunteers who are already canvassing for the March 1, 2016, caucus without access to the VAN.

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An alternate title would appropriately be: How to Make the Impossible, Possible. Prepare to be inspired.” —Assemblywoman Lucy Flores “For populists who want to continue Bernie Sanders’s political revolution and win radical change, this is a book for you. In their Rules for Revolutionaries, Becky Bond and Zack Exley lay down a new marker for what mass volunteer organizing makes possible by combining emerging consumer technology and radical trust with some tried and true ‘old organizing’ tactics.” —Jim Hightower, author of Swim Against the Current “Bernie Sanders’s presidential run was a spectacular wake-up call, revealing the huge number of Americans willing to fight for radical change.

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That was the subject line of the first email I wrote back in the fall of 2015 to the rapidly growing list of Bernie Sanders supporters. It was 6:00 a.m., and Zack and I were occupying the lobby of a Comfort Inn in Little Rock, Arkansas. While brilliant field veterans Robert Becker and Julia Barnes were building incredible traditional campaigns on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire, Zack and I found ourselves on a team of go-for-broke irregulars charged with organizing what was then a vast outpost of the Bernie Sanders campaign for president. It was our task to help organize supporters in all the states that would not be staffed until much later in the primary campaign cycle.

pages: 504 words: 129,087

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

CHAPTER 12: HOUSE OF GLASS, 2016 never for an election: Charlotte Alter, “Inside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Unlikely Rise,” TIME, March 21, 2019, time.com/longform/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-profile/. among young voters in Iowa: Chris Cillizza, “Bernie Sanders Crushed Hillary Clinton by 70 Points Among Young Voters in Iowa,” The Washington Post, February 2, 2016, washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/02/bernie-sanders-crushed-hillary-clinton-by-70-points-among-young-people-in-iowa-but/. 78 percent of first-time voters: Eric Bradner and Dan Merica, “Young Voters Abandon Hillary Clinton for Bernie Sanders,” CNN, February 10, 2016, cnn.com/2016/02/10/politics/hillary-clinton-new-hampshire-primary/index.html. underwater by more than twenty points: Frank Newport, “Sanders, the Oldest Candidate, Looks Best to Young Americans,” Gallup, April 8, 2016, news.gallup.com/poll/190571/sanders-oldest-candidate-looks-best-young-americans.aspx.

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Even at Hillary Clinton’s alma mater, the all-women Wellesley College, the college kids were feeling the Bern. He was the most popular politician in America among the under-thirty set. By March, Bernie Sanders had won more young voters than Trump and Clinton combined. In April, shortly before the New York primary, Alexandria and Maria waited in lines snaking around the block to get into a Bernie Sanders rally in Washington Square Park. People were packed into the park, overflowing onto the streets, and a whiff of marijuana hung in the air. The mood was electrifying. Maria remembers it as one of the first moments when she thought something like a progressive revolution could really happen, and she and Alexandria worked even harder for Bernie than they had before.

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How would they get health insurance when so many of the jobs they could get didn’t offer employer-sponsored plans? How would they afford college when the government no longer subsidized higher education the way it once did? Those were exactly the questions Bernie Sanders wanted to answer. * * * Millennials had been socialist-curious for a while, but Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign was an ideological turning point for many left-leaning young people. Sanders offered universal solutions that seemed to match the scope of the problems young people faced. Health care is too expensive? Medicare for All.

pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society
by Thomas Frank
Published 18 Jun 2018

For the present generation, the bailout of the crooks would stand as the ultimate demonstration of the worthlessness of institutions, the nightmare knowledge that lurked behind every scam that was to come. What I describe in this volume is a vast panorama of such scams—a republic of rip-offs. Bernie Sanders, the archetypal reform figure of our time, likes to say that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud,” but in truth we could say that about many of the designated protectors of our health and well-being. Pharmaceutical companies, we learned, jack up prices for no reason other than because they can, because it is their federally guaranteed right to do so.

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After losing to Donald Trump, she blamed the news media in part for her loss. She did this even though the editorial boards of the country’s largest newspapers endorsed her over Trump by an unprecedented ratio of fifty-seven to two. But it was the news media’s attitude toward yet a third politician, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, that best revealed the peculiar politics of the media in this time of difficulty and transition (or, depending on your panic threshold, industry-wide apocalypse) for newspapers. To refresh your memory, the Vermont senator is an independent who likes to call himself a democratic socialist.

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In March, the Times was caught making a number of postpublication tweaks to a news story about the senator, changing what had been a sunny tale of his legislative victories into a darker account of his outrageous proposals. When Sanders was finally defeated in June, the same paper waved him goodbye with a bedtime-for-Grandpa headline: “Hillary Clinton Made History, but Bernie Sanders Stubbornly Ignored It.” I decided to approach this question by examining the opinion pages of the Washington Post, the conscience of the nation’s political class and one of America’s few remaining first-rate news organizations. The Post’s investigative and beat reporting are some of the best in the world.

pages: 211 words: 78,547

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
by Fredrik Deboer
Published 4 Sep 2023

As Reason magazine pointed out: Robby Soave, “Former Clinton Campaign Staffer Accuses Bernie Sanders of Failing to Mention Race, Gender in Speech That Explicitly Mentioned Race, Gender,” Reason, March 4, 2019, https://reason.com/2019/03/04/bernie-sanders-zerlina-maxwell-race-gend/. But it is the case that: See, for one: Blair L. M. Kelley, “Biden Has Black Voters’ Support Over Sanders, and It’s Not Because They’re Moderates,” NBC News, March 5, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/biden-has-black-voters-support-over-sanders-it-s-not-ncna1150576. “In every one of the 27 primaries”: John Hudak, “Why Bernie Sanders Vastly Underperformed in the 2020 Primary,” Brookings, March 20, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/03/20/why-bernie-sanders-vastly-underperformed-in-the-2020-primary/.

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No doubt influenced by the country’s: Sasha Pezenik, “2020 Democratic Candidates Move to the Left, Become More Progressive as Climate Change Emerges as Campaign Issue,” ABC News, June 7, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/2020-democratic-candidates-move-left-progressive-climate-change/story?id=63489543. “may make it difficult for”: Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, “Bernie Sanders Wins Nevada Caucuses, Strengthening His Primary Lead,” New York Times, February 22, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/us/politics/bernie-sanders-nevada-caucus.html. It was widely reported: Carol E. Lee, Kristen Welker, Josh Lederman, and Amanda Golden, “Looking for Obama’s Hidden Hand in Candidates Coalescing around Biden,” NBC News, March 2, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/looking-obama-s-hidden-hand-candidate-coalescing-around-biden-n1147471. 2: BPMCLM: BLACK LIVES MATTER AND THE INEVITABILITY OF ELITE CAPTURE The average white American: Ember Smith, Ariel Gelrud Shiro, Christopher Pulliam, and Richard V.

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Donald Trump, one of the most controversial presidents in American history, faced an emboldened progressive movement and dissent within the ranks of the party and political ideology he ostensibly led. His constant gaffes and imbroglios, including his widely criticized handling of the pandemic, helped chip away at whatever legitimacy he held as a popular-vote loser who had been elected under a cloud of controversy in 2016. Meanwhile, the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016 had energized a new generation of socialist activists, such as those in the Democratic Socialists of America, and early in 2020 it appeared that Sanders’s return primary candidacy was genuinely viable. The country was simmering. On May 25, that simmer was brought to a boil. A forty-six-year-old Black man named George Floyd was confronted by Minneapolis police after a store clerk accused him of passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.

pages: 177 words: 50,167

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics
by John B. Judis
Published 11 Sep 2016

Chapter One The Logic of American Populism: From the People’s Party to George Wallace Chapter Two Neoliberalism and Its Enemies: Perot, Buchanan, the Tea Party, and Occupy Wall Street Chapter Three The Silent Majority and the Political Revolution: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Chapter Four The Rise of European Populism Chapter Five The Limits of Leftwing Populism: Syriza and Podemos Chapter Six Rightwing Populism on the March in Northern Europe Conclusion The Past and Future of Populism Acknowledgments Further Reading Notes What Is Populism, and Why Is It Important? Populist parties and candidates are on the move in the United States and Europe. Donald Trump has won the Republican nomination; Bernie Sanders came in a very strong second to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.

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In the 2012 election, Obama borrowed from Occupy Wall Street’s rhetoric to pillory Republican Mitt Romney. And Occupy’s radicalism would recur in more organized form—when a Vermont senator would decide to run for president in 2016. The Silent Majority and the Political Revolution: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders In an interview with the Washington Post in July 2015, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley dismissed Bernie Sanders as a “protest candidate.” “I’m not running for protest candidate, I’m running for President of the United States,” O’Malley declared. But after receiving 0.57 percent of the vote in the Iowa Caucus on February 2, O’Malley dropped out, while Sanders, who tied Clinton in Iowa, moved on to New Hampshire, where he won the primary easily and established himself as a viable contender for the nomination.

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But his support is also proportional to age, and annual income rises with age, so the fact that Trump’s supporters have a slightly above average income probably reflects their age rather than their social class. 77“that are angry”: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-reince-priebus/. On Sanders’s life story, see John B. Judis, “The Bern Supremacy,” National Journal, November 19, 2015; Harry Jaffe, Why Bernie Sanders Matters, Regan Arts, 2015; Tim Murphy, “How Bernie Sanders Learned to Be a Real Politician,” Mother Jones, May 26, 2015; and Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “I’m Right and Everybody Else Is Wrong,” National Journal, June 2014. 79“nobody in the audience fainted”: Sanders, “Fragments of a Campaign Diary,” Seven Days, December 1, 1972. 79“Why Socialism”: Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism,” Monthly Review, May 1949. 79“I don’t have the power to nationalize the banks”: Baltimore Sun, December 23, 1981. 79“I’m a democratic socialist”: Sanders with Huck Gutman, Outsider in the House, Verso, 1997, p. 29. 80higher standard of living: Michael Powell, “Exceedingly Social, but Doesn’t Like Parties,” Washington Post, November 5, 2006. 80“two percent of the people”: Saint Albans Daily Messenger, December 23, 1971. 81“buy the United States Congress”: “The Rachel Maddow Show,” MSNBC, April 15, 2015. 81“What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About American Politics:” Jonathan Chait, “What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About American Politics,” New York, January 27, 2016. 81“facile calls for revolution:” “It Was Better to Bern Out,” The New York Times, June 10, 2016. 82“eat out the heart of the republic”: George E.

pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Seelye, “Warren Defeats Brown in Massachusetts Senate Contest,” New York Times, November 6, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-massachusetts-senate-scott-brown.html, accessed April 29, 2021; “Bill de Blasio Sworn in as New York Mayor,” The Guardian, January 1, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/01/bill-de-blasio-sworn-in-as-newyork-mayor, accessed April 29, 2021; Alan Rappeport, “Bernie Sanders, Long-Serving Independent, Enters Presidential Race as a Democrat,” New York Times, April 29, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/us/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign-for-president.html, accessed April 29, 2021; Kate Aronoff, Peter Dreier, and Michael Kazin, eds., We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism, American Style (New York: New Press, 2020). 61.Adam Geller, “Bernie Sanders’ Early Life in Brooklyn Taught Lessons, Some Tough,” Times of Israel, July 21, 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/bernie-sanders-early-life-in-brooklyn-taught-lessons-some-tough/, accessed June 29, 2021; Jas Chana, “Straight Outta Brooklyn, by Way of Vermont: The Bernie Sanders Story,” Tablet, August 20, 2015, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/bernie-sanders-story, accessed June 29, 2021; Mark Leibovich, “The Socialist Senator,” New York Times, January 21, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/magazine/21Sanders.t.html, accessed June 29, 2021. 62.Leibovich, “The Socialist Senator.” 63.Marketwatch, “Text of Bernie Sanders’ Wall Street and Economy Speech, January 5, 2016, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/text-of-bernie-sanders-wall-street-and-economy-speech-2016-01-05, accessed July 19, 2021. See also Transcript of Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton Debate, March 6, 2016, New York Times, March 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/us/politics/transcript-democratic-presidential-debate.html, accessed May 31, 2021. 64.Marketwatch, “Text of Bernie Sanders’ Wall Street and Economy Speech.” 65.Bernie Sanders, Iowa Caucuses Speech, February 2, 2021, https://www.vox.com/2016/2/2/10892752/bernie-sanders-iowa-speech, accessed June 28, 2021. 66.“Transcript of Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton Debate,” March 6, 2016; Bernie Sanders, Campaign Speech in Pittsburgh, WESA, March 30, 2016, http://wesa.fm/post/super-pacs-paid-speeches-living-wages-take-sanders-full-pittsburgh-stump, accessed June 28, 2021.

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pages: 324 words: 86,056

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
by Bhaskar Sunkara
Published 1 Feb 2019

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016). 14. Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016), 23. 15. Michael Kruse, “Bernie Sanders Has a Secret,” Politico, July 9, 2015, politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-119927. 16. Sanders, Our Revolution, 50. 17. Hillary Rodham Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 227. 18. Symone D. Sanders, “It’s Time to End the Myth That Black Voters Don’t Like Bernie Sanders,” Washington Post, September 12, 2017, washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/09/12/its-time-to-end-the-myth-that-black-voters-dont-like-bernie-sanders. 19.

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No, Jeremy Liked a Night in Eating Cold Beans with His Cat Called Harold Wilson, Corbyn’s First Wife Reveals,” Daily Mail, August 15, 2015. Chapter Nine: How We Win 1. Sam Gindin, “Building a Mass Socialist Party,” Jacobin, December 20, 2016, jacobinmag.com/2016/12/socialist-party-bernie-sanders-labor-capitalism. 2. Albert Hunt, “Warren Isn’t Sanders, and Vice Versa,” Bloomberg, April 29, 2018, bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-29/elizabeth-warren-and-bernie-sanders-aren-t-the-same. 3. “Americans’ Views of Immigration Marked by Widening Partisan, Generational Divides,” Pew Research, April 15, 2016. 4. “A Slim Majority of Americans Support a National Government-Run Health Care Program,” Washington Post, April 12, 2018, washingtonpost.com/page/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2018/04/12/National-Politics/Polling/release_517.xml?

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But while not rejecting all forms of technocratic expertise, the democratic socialist knows that it will take mass struggle from below and messy disruptions to bring about a more durable and radical sort of change. In the second part of this book, I discuss the world today and why there are new opportunities for this better sort of socialism to take root. As we’ll see, Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn and the United States’ Bernie Sanders have pursued a “class struggle” social democracy, unleashing popular energy that has revitalized the Left as a whole. I offer a tentative strategy for taking advantage of this unexpected second chance and explain why the working class can still be an agent of social transformation. Even in the bleakest chapters in this book, an urgent commitment should be clear: if there is a future for humanity—free of exploitation, climate holocaust, demagoguery, and the war of all against all—then we must place our faith in the ability of people to save themselves and each other.

pages: 164 words: 44,947

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell
Published 29 Jul 2019

that examines whether the beliefs of prominent young socialists are actually consistent with the definition of socialism.15 In a speech at Georgetown University in the fall of 2015, self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders stated, “I don’t believe the government should own the corner drugstore or the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.” Um, hello? Not socialism. You’re spotting it, too, aren’t you? Nathan Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, wrote that either “(1) Bernie Sanders is unaware of the definition of socialism, or (2) Bernie Sanders is fully aware of the definition of socialism, and is lying about it,” and “Socialism means an end to capitalism. Bernie Sanders does not want to end capitalism.

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Is this socialist movement going to work out better or worse for them than the Tea Party movement did for its participants? Kibbe: Some of my Ron Paul friends get upset about this, but I often compare Bernie Sanders to Ron Paul, because they have a similar persona. The one thing about their authenticity is they’ve been talking about the same stuff from day one. Ron Paul was always this cranky antiwar libertarian and Bernie Sanders was always this cranky socialist independent. Both were railing against both Democrats and Republicans. I think part of the attraction is their consistency, because people get tired of politicians who just say whatever you want to hear.

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In an entire year’s worth of columns, only one discussed how socialism led to economic stagnation. Overwhelmingly, the Times treated us to columns about how socialism was merely an advanced form of liberalism, highlighting the allegedly green policies of “Lenin’s Eco-Warriors” and instructing us on “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.” At about the same time, Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, made a strong run for the Democratic Party nomination for president, getting 43 percent of the vote in the 2016 Democratic primaries. How can so many Americans view socialism so favorably, when in practice it has led to misery and mass murder? The answer is that, like the New York Times, many people assume that socialism is merely a more generous form of liberalism.

pages: 357 words: 94,852

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

Marine Le Pen: “manufacturing by slaves for selling to the unemployed” “France Election: Far-Right’s Le Pen Rails against Globalisation,” BBC.com, February 5, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38872335. Bernie Sanders: TPP “part of a global race to the bottom…” “Bernie Sanders on Trade,” Feel the Bern (website), accessed April 12, 2017, from http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-trade/. The Perils of Ceding the Populist Ground Approximately 90 million eligible voting-age Americans stayed home United States Elections Project, “2016 November General Election Turnout Rates,” ElectProject.org, http://www.electproject.org/2016g.

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National polls showed Sanders had a better chance of beating Trump than Clinton did Real Clear Politics, “Polls: 2016 Presidential Race,” RealClearPolitics.com, undated, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html. Whose Revolution? Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The spectacle of a socialist candidate…” Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders against Reparations?” Atlantic, January 19, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-reparations/424602/. Michelle Alexander: “If progressives think they can win…” Michelle Alexander, interview with author. A Toxic Cocktail around the World Clinton campaign: “Love trumps Hate” MJ Lee and Dan Merica, “Clinton’s last campaign speech: ‘Love trumps hate,’ ” CNN.com, November 7, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/07/politics/hillary-clinton-campaign-final-day/.

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And there are also military and surveillance contractors and paid lobbyists who make up a staggering number of Trump’s defense and Homeland Security appointments. We Were on a Roll It can be easy to forget, but before Trump’s election upset, regular people were standing up to battle injustices represented by many of these very industries and political forces, and they were starting to win. Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly powerful presidential campaign, though ultimately unsuccessful, had Wall Street fearing for its bonuses and had won significant changes to the official platform of the Democratic Party. Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name were forcing a national debate about systemic anti-Black racism and militarized policing, and had helped win a phase-out of private prisons and reductions in the number of incarcerated Americans.

pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
by Paolo Gerbaudo
Published 19 Jul 2018

Name Responsibility Organisation Date of Interview 1 Julia Reda Activist and MEP Pirate Party 8 January 2018 2 Christian Engstrom Activist and MEP Pirate Party 3 June 2009 3 Birgitta Jónsdóttir Activist and former MP Pirate Party 13 May 2016 4 Davide Bono Activist and local councillor Five Star Movement 3 September 2018 5 Gioele Brandi Social media manager Five Star Movement 22 June 2017 6 Roberto Fico Five Star Movement activist, current speaker of the Chamber of deputies Activist, MP and president of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (since 24 March 2018) 22 June 2017 7 Roberta Lombardi Activist and MP Five Star Movement 22 June 2017 8 Marco Canestrari Former employee Casaleggio Associati 22 November 2017 9 David Davros Puente Former employee Casaleggio Associati 27 November 2017 10 Eric Labuske Informatics coordinator Podemos 26 June 2015 11 German Cano Academic and activist Podemos 23 June 2015 12 Sarah Bienzobas Activist Podemos 22 February 2016 13 Alejandro Cerezo Activist and graphic designer Podemos 20 February 2016 14 Jorge Moruno Sociologist and activist Podemos 21 February 2016 15 Segundo Gonzalez Activist and MP Podemos 18 February 2015 16 Miguel Ardanuy Participation coordinator and Comunidad de Madrid councillor Podemos 7 November 2017 17 Winnie Wong Activist and communication strategist People for Bernie Sanders 16 June 2017 18 Claire Sandberg Digital organising director Bernie Sanders presidential campaign 10 December 2017 19 Emma Rees National organiser Momentum 6 October 2017 20 Adam Klug National organiser Momentum 9 October 2017 21 Aaron Bastani Media activist Novara Media 6 March 2018 22 James Moulding Activist Digital Democracy – Labour 4 October 2017 23 Antoine Léaument Social media coordinator France Insoumise 15 January 2018 24 Guillaume Royer Platform coordinator France Insoumise 15 November 2017 25 Adria Rodriguez Activist Barcelona en Comù 22 February 2016 26 Alejandra Calvo Martínez Activist Ahora Madrid 20 March 2015 27 Eugenia Quilodran-Briones Activist Rede Sustenabilidade Brazil 21 October 2014 28 Richard Bartlett Founder and developer Loomio 25 October 2017 29 Andreas Nitsche Developer and director Association for interactive democracy 6 October 2017 30 Yago Bermejo Abati Developer and activist Medialab Prado 12 July 2017 Notes 1.

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It self-describes as an organisation that wants to ‘build on the energy and enthusiasm from the Jeremy Corbyn for Labour Leader campaign, to increase participatory democracy, solidarity, and grassroots power and help Labour become the transformative governing party of the 21st century’.7 Momentum has been widely applauded for its effective use of social media, and has recently established My Momentum, an online platform that allows members to participate in discussions and make decisions. Some trends of the digital party can also be seen in related phenomena, such as Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016, which, while not adopting digital democracy tools, has been innovative in its use of digital organising tactics, empowering the rank and file to organise the campaign locally. It is fairly obvious that, at the stage at which the internet is on the point of becoming, if it has not already become, more influential than TV, all parties are compelled to ‘go digital’.

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Jeremy Corbyn’s impressive performance in the 2017 UK general elections was propelled by an avalanche of youth vote. In a post-election survey conducted by YouGov,113 it was found that Labour share of votes was inversely proportional to voters’ age. Labour scored 66 per cent among those ages 18–19; it only had 19 per cent of support among those aged over 70. Finally, the typical voter of Bernie Sanders was said to be below 45 years of age. The sympathy of young people, especially those living in urban areas, towards digital parties is unsurprising for a number of reasons. First, young people enjoy higher than average levels of internet access, which means they are more likely to buy into the techno-utopian idea of the digital revolution as a positive change.

pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
by Adam Tooze
Published 15 Nov 2021

Russell, “America’s Forever Wars Have Finally Come Home,” Responsible Statecraft, June 4, 2020. 76. J. Iadarola, “What if Bernie Has Already Won This Thing?” The Hill, February 23, 2020. S. Hamid, “The Coronavirus Killed the Revolution,” Atlantic, March 25, 2020. 77. G. Ip, “Businesses Fret Over Potential Bernie Sanders Presidency,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2020. B. Schwartz, “Mike Bloomberg Prepares Media Onslaught Against Democratic Front-Runner Bernie Sanders,” CNBC, February 24, 2020. 78. A. Tooze, “ ‘We Are Living Through the First Economic Crisis of the Anthropocene,’ ” Guardian, May 7, 2020. 79. The best compact introduction is C. Bonneuil and J.-B. Fressoz, trans.

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If there was to be a new social contract, who would make it? There was a strange aftertaste to many of the calls for grand social reform in 2020. As the coronavirus crisis overtook us, the left wing on both sides of the Atlantic, at least that part that had been fired up by Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, was going down to defeat. The promise of a radicalized and reenergized left, organized around the idea of the Green New Deal, seemed to dissipate amid the pandemic. It fell to governments mainly of the center and the right to meet the crisis. They were a strange assortment. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States experimented with denial.

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Nor, as we shall see, were the major voices of corporate America afraid to spell out the business case for doing so, including shareholder value, the problems of running companies with politically divided workforces, the economic importance of the rule of law, and astonishingly, the losses in sales to be expected in the event of a civil war. This alignment of money with democracy in the United States in 2020 should be reassuring, up to a point. But consider for a second an alternative scenario. What if the virus had arrived in the United States a few weeks sooner, the spreading pandemic had rallied mass support for Bernie Sanders and his call for universal health care, and the Democratic primaries had swept an avowed socialist to the head of the ticket rather than Joe Biden?76 It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which the full weight of American business was thrown the other way, for all the same reasons, backing Trump so as to ensure that Sanders was not elected.77 And what if Sanders had in fact won a majority?

Spite: The Upside of Your Dark Side
by Simon McCarthy-Jones
Published 12 Apr 2021

J. Gaughan, “Was the Democratic Nomination Rigged? A Reexamination of the Clinton-Sanders Presidential Race,” University of Florida Journal of Law and Public Policy 29 (2018): 309–358. 21. Bernie Sanders, “This is not the time for a protest vote,” Facebook, September 17, 2016, www.facebook.com/berniesanders/photos/a.324119347643076/1157189241002745/?type=3. 22. W. Blitzer, “Interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders,” CNN, July 6, 2016, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1607/06/wolf.01.html. 23. J. G. Voelkel and M. Feinberg, “Morally Reframed Arguments Can Affect Support for Political Candidates,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 9, no. 8 (2018): 917–924. 24.

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Data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which surveyed around fifty thousand people, as reported by D. Kurtzleben, “Here’s How Many Bernie Sanders Supporters Ultimately Voted for Trump,” NPR, August 24, 2017, www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds?t=1586332242609. 29. Nearly half of Sanders supporters who voted for Trump believed that whites were not actually privileged in America; see Kurtzleben, “Here’s How Many Bernie Sanders Supporters Ultimately Voted for Trump.” 30. M. Krieger, “‘Bernie or Bust’: Over 50,000 Sanders Supporters Pledge to Never Vote for Hillary,” Liberty Blitzkrieg, March 3, 2016, https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2016/03/03/bernie-or-bust-over-50000-sanders-supporters-pledge-to-never-vote-for-hillary/. 31.

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.… There is going to be some kind of change and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change. People are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen. It’s like reality TV. You don’t want to just see everybody be happy with each other. You want to see someone fighting somebody.6 Similarly, a Bernie Sanders supporter stated, “Honestly, I want to vote for Trump—not because I agree with anything he says but because I’d rather have it all burn down to the ground and start over again.”7 We may not agree with this sentiment (indeed, it is hard to understand how anyone with even the slightest familiarity with history could get close to supporting a “Nazi-type change”), but we may recognize it.

pages: 526 words: 160,601

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
by Bruce Cannon Gibney
Published 7 Mar 2017

“Scott Walker has tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of credit-card debt.” Business Insider, 3 Aug. 2015, www.businessinsider.com/scott-walker-has-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-worth-of-credit-card-debt-2015-8. 48. Topaz, Jonathan, and Kristen East. “Bernie Sanders’ Wife Accounts for All His Reported Assets.” Politico, 16 July 2015, www.politico.com/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-wife-accounts-for-reported-assets-120261; Gaudiano, Nicole. “Credit Card Debt a Regular Feature on Sanders’ Finance Reports.” USA Today, 12 June 2015. 49. McIntire, Mike. “Ted Cruz Didn’t Report Goldman Sachs Loan in a Senate Race.” New York Times, 13 Jan. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/us/politics/ted-cruz-wall-street-loan-senate-bid-2012.html. 50.

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“The Federal Reserve’s Dual Mandate.” www.chicagofed.org/publications/speeches/our-dual-mandate. 26. US Federal Reserve System, Board of Governors. “Credit and Liquidity Programs and the Balance Sheet.” www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttrends.htm, Aug. 2007–Dec. 2015. 27. Sanders, Bernie. “Transcript: Bernie Sanders Meets with the Daily News Editorial Board.” New York Daily News, 4 Apr. 2016, www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306. 28. US Federal Reserve System, Board of Governors. Statistical table 8. “Table 8. Initial margin requirements Under Regulations T, U, and X” (as percentage of market value). 29. New York Stock Exchange, “FRB Initial margin requirements—percent of total value required to purchase stock,” http://www.nyxdata.com/nysedata/asp/factbook/viewer_edition.asp?

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Forbes. www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/05/20/wal-mart-cleans-up-on-poor-america-with-25-of-u-s-grocery-sales/#31fa4f262bea (alternative metrics have 90 percent of Americans living within 10 miles of a Wal-Mart; the effect is the same). 25. Sanders, Bernie, and Daily News Editorial Board. “Transcript: Bernie Sanders meets with News Editorial Board.” New York Daily News, Opinion, 4 Apr. 2016, www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306. 26. Fuglie, Keith, et al. “Rising Concentration in Agricultural Input Industries Influences New Farm Technologies.” US Department of Agriculture, 3 Dec. 2012, www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2012-december/rising-concentration-in-agricultural-input-industries-influences-new-technologies.aspx#.Vxf2yzArKM8.

pages: 357 words: 99,456

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
by Matt Taibbi
Published 7 Oct 2019

somehow became a common news feature assignment after a fraud-ridden financial services sector put millions in foreclosure and vaporized as much as 40 percent of the world’s wealth. More recently, we’ve cycled through a series of unconvincing responses to Why do they hate us?—themed stories like Brexit, the Bernie Sanders primary run of 2016, and the election of Donald Trump. We’ve botched them all, for reasons that range from incompetence to willful blindness. The Trump story in particular was an industry-wide failure that exposed many of our greatest weaknesses (I was part of the problem, too) and remains a serious concern heading into 2020.

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Not challenging power?) The Washington Post, for fuck’s sake, actually ran a Behind the Music–type feature about how it settled on its new “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan. Around the same time that Bacquet and Baker were holding their televised discussion about journalism’s future, I was interviewing Bernie Sanders about the lessons of the 2016 race. He didn’t use this language, but one of the big takeaways for Sanders from his run was that nobody out there gave a shit about Meet the Press. What politics passes for now is somebody goes on Meet the Press and they do well: “Oh, this guy is brilliant, wonderful.”

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Even after the Trump fiasco, the product of such unholy unions—“electability”—is still running loose. A summer 2018 piece in the New York Times about the likely Democratic field echoed ancient articles about the likes of Mitt Romney and John Kerry. We were told to be wary of extremists like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and go with something tamer and nearer to the “center”: For all the evident support for Mr. Sanders’s policy ideas, many in the party are skeptical that a fiery activist in his eighth decade would have broad enough appeal to oust Mr. Trump… Mr. Sanders’s generational peer, Mr. Biden, 75, is preparing to test a contrasting message this fall… Mr.

pages: 211 words: 57,759

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 20 Nov 2018

In this book, I draw on over twenty years of research and teaching to write an introductory primer for a general audience interested in European socialist feminist theories, the experience of twentieth-century state socialism, and their lessons for the present day. After the unexpected success of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries, socialist ideas are circulating more broadly among the American public. It is essential that we pause and learn from the experiences of the past, examining both good and bad. Because I believe in the pursuit of historical nuance, and that there were some redeeming qualities of state socialism, I will inevitably be accused of being an apologist for Stalinism.

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But in the current political climate, it may be hard to fathom how a rivalry between superpowers could have sparked interest in the status of women.4 Today, socialist ideas are enjoying a renaissance as young people across countries such as the United States, France, Great Britain, Greece, and Germany find inspiration in politicians like Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis, and Sahra Wagenknecht. Citizens desire an alternative political path that would lead to a more egalitarian and sustainable future. To move forward, we must be able to discuss the past with no ideologically motivated attempts to whitewash or blackwash either our own history or the accomplishments of state socialism.

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By 2020, millennial voters will make up the largest demographic group of the American electorate. And young women make up half of the millennial population. The math here is simple. A June 2015 Gallup poll found that Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine were more willing to vote for a “socialist” presidential candidate than any other age cohort, and this was well before Bernie Sanders’s primary campaign was in full swing. In addition, a January 2016 YouGov poll asked Americans, “Do you have a favorable or an unfavorable opinion of socialism?” The results showed a stark difference in the opinions of different age cohorts. For those over the age of sixty-five, 60 percent had an unfavorable opinion of socialism, compared to the 23 percent that reported a favorable opinion.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Published 31 Dec 2018

How could such a polarizing and politically inexperienced figure win a major party’s nomination – and then be elected President? Many observers find it difficult to understand his victory. He has been sharply attacked by conservatives such as George Will, establishment Republicans such as John McCain, Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren, and socialists such as Bernie Sanders. He has been described by some commentators as a strongman menacing democracy, by others as a xenophobic and racist demagogue skilled at whipping up crowds, and by yet others as an opportunistic salesman lacking any core principles.1 Each of these approaches contains some truth. We view Trump as a leader who uses populist rhetoric to legitimize his style of governance, while promoting authoritarian values that threaten the liberal norms underpinning American democracy.

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These typically use populist discourse railing against corruption, mainstream parties, and multinational corporations but this is blended with the endorsement of socially liberal attitudes, progressive social policies, and participatory styles of political engagement. This category includes Spain’s Podemos Party and the Indignados Movement, Greece’s Syriza, the Left Party in Germany, the Socialist Party in the Netherlands, and Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S). In the Americas, Libertarian-Populist leaders are exemplified by Bernie Sanders, as well as the Peronist tradition followed by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.32 Arguably, there are also centrist-populist leaders, such as President Emmanuel Macron in France who campaigned as an outsider, criticizing the established parties although governing more like a moderate. 12 Understanding Populism Even in nations where Authoritarian-Populist parties hold few parliamentary seats, they can still exert ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and shape the policy agenda.33 In Britain, for example, the UK Independence Party won only one seat in the May 2015 general election, but its rhetoric fueled rabid anti-European and anti-immigration sentiment, pressuring the Conservatives to call the Brexit referendum, with massive consequences.34 Similarly, in the September 2017 elections to the Bundestag, the nationalistic, anti-Islamic, and pro-family values Alternative for Germany (AfD) won only 12.6 percent of the vote, but they gained 94 seats in the aftermath of the refugee crisis, entering parliament for the first time and thereby hindering Angela Merkel’s negotiations to form a Grand Coalition government, leaving the government in limbo for four months.35 Mainstream parties can seek to co-opt minor parties in formal or informal governing alliances, and they can adopt their language and policies in the attempt to steal their votes.

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Libertarian populists combine support for socially liberal policies with a sweeping critique of the failure of mainstream parties to address corporate greed, economic inequalities, global capitalism, and social injustice. Campaigning as outsiders, this appeal is likely to mobilize Labour Party members favoring Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders supporters in Democratic primaries, voters for Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, the Five Star Movement in Rome, and community activists engaged in Pablo Iglesias’ Podemos in Spain.28 Political parties usually attract older voters, but by adopting digital tools, some like the Five Star Movement (M5S) in Italy, have succeeded in attracting a relatively young membership.29 At the same time, levels of youthful enthusiasm are rarely translated into equivalent levels of voting turnout at the ballot box.30 The Millennial generation in the US and Europe are more likely than their elders to participate in direct protest politics, community volunteering, new social 44 The Cultural Backlash Theory movements, and online activism, but they are usually far less engaged through conventional electoral channels such as voting.31 Libertarian- Populist parties seeking the support of younger, college-educated voters therefore face stiff competition from social movements championing the progressive agenda on issues such as environmental protection and climate change, LGBTQ rights, gender equality, Black Lives Matter, the ‘Me-too’ movement against sexual harassment, gun control, immigration rights, human rights and democracy, international development, and social justice.

pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Nov 2019

Conclusion KATIE FAHEY WAS A TWENTYSOMETHING MICHIGANDER WHO WAS puzzled by Michigan’s response to the 2016 election. Initially a Clinton supporter, she was surprised when the state voted for Bernie Sanders. And then, she was surprised again when a state that had gone for Obama in 2012 (54 percent versus 45 percent) voted for Donald Trump. “What’s going on?” she asked herself. And then, as she described to me afterward, she tried to answer her own question. “Okay, what do Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have in common that maybe Hillary Clinton didn’t have.” I really do think it was kind of like this: Bernie Sanders was all about the political revolution, and Donald Trump was about “drain the swamp.”

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There is a constant fight against “closed primaries” by citizens who believe that it violates equality to deny any citizen the right to participate in critical primaries. There is a regular and serious fight within the parties about the power of party leaders within mixed systems of nomination: In 2016, early in the primary season, Bernie Sanders supporters were upset that “superdelegates” would have the power to vote independently of party primaries. Later in the season, his supporters were upset that “superdelegates” did not exercise their independent power to vote for Sanders, contrary to the votes in the party primaries. And finally, there is the unavoidable and undeniable effect of primaries that I have already described when discussing gerrymandering—that given the low participation by citizens less interested in politics, primaries bend unmistakably to the extremes within either party.

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Obama put the kibosh on that, when he became the first candidate for president since Nixon to turn down public funding. But most people didn’t seem to notice, and most politicians didn’t seem to care. Since 2008, every major candidate for federal public office has relied on private funds to fund his or her campaigns. At the presidential level, this might not matter much. Candidates like Bernie Sanders have found it possible to raise ungodly amounts of money in small contributions. Yet no one thinks Sanders is beholden to anyone—except maybe to the millions who contributed to him, which, in a democracy, isn’t a terrible thing. And while Donald Trump certainly exaggerated his reliance on his own money obscenely, it is also true that the SuperPACs—political action committees that can accept unlimited donations—didn’t get him to where he got.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

But the systemic critique of the status quo that Occupy inspired, and the digital-analog model it fostered, lived on and blossomed. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run, the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, and the more recent Sunrise Movement of young people united against global warming are three recent embodiments of a growing progressive upsurge. Like BLM and Occupy these political constellations seamlessly blend digital and analog actions and organizing; their simultaneously on-the-ground and in-the-cloud existence are written into their DNA. Bernie Sanders crisscrossed the country making speeches; his supporters spent countless hours making phone calls and spreading the word.

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These ties are visible in the movements’ networks of support and inspiration. Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders were both vocal supporters of the Standing Rock protests. Young members of Sunrise cite Occupy, BLM, March for Our Lives, and United We Dream, a youth-led immigration justice organization, as sources of inspiration.41 Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was inspired to run for elected office by a visit to the Standing Rock camp and is a champion of Sunrise. She worked for the Bernie Sanders campaign and is a member of Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that went from a sleepy five thousand members in early 2016 to more than sixty thousand today.42 The shared networks of people and supporters that undergird these movements are also increasingly connected by a critique of capitalism.

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In 2015, 76 percent of Americans had never heard of Sanders or had no opinion of him; by October 2018, more than half of Americans had a positive opinion of him, largely because of social media.39 Millions followed the Dakota Pipeline protests, a movement started by LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a Sioux elder, after two attention-grabbing videos were posted online: the well-known progressive author Naomi Klein’s interview of Tokata Iron Eyes, a cofounder of ReZpect Our Water, and Democracy Now! cohost Amy Goodman’s footage of protesters being pepper-sprayed and bitten by attack dogs at the protest camp.40 The digital nature of these movements also mitigated traditional constraints on organizing, such as age and resources. Bernie Sanders was the first candidate in American history to run a serious presidential campaign with zero contributions from big business. One enthusiastic supporter even used her Tinder account to ask men to text a donation to Bernie. Anna Lee Rain Yellowhammer was just thirteen and Tokata Iron Eyes twelve, yet they were key organizers in the Dakota Pipeline movement.

pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy
by Stephanie Kelton
Published 8 Jun 2020

CBPP, “Chart Book: The Legacy of the Great Recession,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, June 6, 2019, www.cbpp.org/research/economy/chart-book-the-legacy-of-the-great-recession. 7. Dean Baker, The Housing Bubble and the Great Recession: Ten Years Later (Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, September 2018), cepr.net/images/stories/reports/housing-bubble-2018-09.pdf. 8. Eric Levitt, “Bernie Sanders Is the Howard Schultz of the Left,” Intelligencer (Doylestown, PA), April 16, 2019, nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/bernie-sanders-fox-news-town-hall-medicare-for-all-video-centrism.html. Chapter 1: Don’t Think of a Household 1. US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5, www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec8.html. 2. Other entities may create other financial instruments—for example, bank lending creates bank deposits, which can function like government currency in some instances—but only the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve can manufacture the currency itself.

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Politicians love to trot out this myth, proclaiming that by running deficits we are ruining the lives of our children and grandchildren, saddling them with crippling debt that they will eventually have to repay. One of the most influential perpetrators of this myth was Ronald Reagan. But even Senator Bernie Sanders has echoed Reagan, saying, “I am concerned about the debt. It’s not something we should be leaving to our kids and our grandchildren.”8 While this rhetoric is powerful, its economic logic is not. History bears this out. As a share of gross domestic product (GDP), the national debt was at its highest—120 percent—in the period immediately following the Second World War.

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Even the most progressive candidates fear that they’ll be eaten alive if their proposals add to the deficit, so borrowing is almost never an option. To show that their policies won’t add to the deficit, they hunt for ways to squeeze more tax revenue out of the economy, usually targeting those who can most easily afford to pay more. For example, Senator Bernie Sanders insists that a financial transactions tax will cover the cost of making public colleges and universities tuition-free, and Senator Elizabeth Warren claims that a 2 percent tax on fortunes above $50 million would raise enough revenue to wipe out student debt for 95 percent of students and also pay for universal childcare and free college.

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The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future
by Joseph C. Sternberg
Published 13 May 2019

Millennials are supposed to be all about the new—new technologies, new career paths, new sexual mores, new culture. Yet some of us have adopted as political heroes old fogeys (not even young enough to be Baby Boomers in some cases, such as Bernie Sanders, who was born in 1941) espousing very old ideas about politics and economics. It seems downright bizarre. Millennials who are perpetually glued to our smartphones also are in thrall to a nineteenth-century economic philosophy. But before there was Bernie Sanders in 2016, there was Ron Paul in 2012—and Paul, an aging and eccentric (to put it mildly) libertarian, also attracted Millennial support during his own quixotic primary run for the Republican presidential nomination.28 Maybe Millennials are not exactly embracing socialism so much as desperately looking for explanations for what has gone wrong in our economic lives over the past decade.

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For instance, a common argument about Social Security reform is that all we need are relatively modest tax increases—perhaps another 2 or 3 percentage points added onto the payroll-tax rate,¶ and an increase in the level of income subject to the tax, perhaps to include all wage income rather than just the first $128,000—and the system would return to balance.41 The Congressional Budget Office figures an immediate payroll-tax increase of around 4.5 percent could make Social Security solvent for seventy-five years, if you believe it’s possible to make accurate forecasts over such a long span.42 More plausible plans tend to focus on balancing the books for shorter terms of only a few decades. Alternately, maybe to solve all our fiscal problems we only need to increase general income taxes on the rich or on corporations. In the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, Bernie Sanders proposed a top personal income-tax rate of 54.2 percent.43 Those plans don’t come close to the answer Millennials need. None of these tax increases would generate enough revenue to begin to cover the sort of gap generational-accounting estimates have revealed. In practical terms, most Boomers would be exempt from most of the consequences of a payroll-tax hike.

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Anyone who thought US zoning and construction woes are only a small part of our housing difficulties should look at what has happened in Britain as those problems have been allowed to fester. German Zeroes If only we could raise taxes a bit more, Americans are often told, we’d be able to balance our budget and continue providing social benefits to the poor and the elderly. Many of the Millennials who flock to politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez believe it’s true. Not so fast. It turns out a European country is helpfully offering an experiment in how to manage taxing, spending, and borrowing for maximum fairness and responsibility. That country is Germany, and how is that experiment working? Not well. Germans will bristle at that characterization, because their budget balance has become legendary in recent years.

pages: 323 words: 95,492

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards
Published 14 Jun 2017

Given that the build-up to the election in the US was so similar to the Brexit campaign, the result was always going to be the same, too: victory for those on the outside. Yet each time the pattern is confirmed, we are amazed once again. Trump’s victory was much the biggest contribution to the contours taking shape across large parts of the democratic world, but his triumph is the latest in a line of unorthodox developments. In the US, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton an unexpected fright from the left, in the battle for the Democrats’ nomination, a shock that stirred her into being a little less cautious. He partially forced her to break free of self-imposed chains, but not in a way that liberated her from a perception that she was part of an elite which had failed to deliver.

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Some propose economic policies that are rooted in an analysis framed by the 2008 financial crisis. Respected economists are often part of their entourages. Quite often, in their radical distinctiveness, they bring the cautious mainstream left to a semblance of political life. Hillary Clinton might have lost the US presidential campaign more decisively, if Bernie Sanders had not forced her to become a little more daring. And the UK’s Labour Party risked dying of boredom, before Jeremy Corbyn’s candidacy in 2015 brought a soporific leadership contest to life. In Greece and Spain mainstream left parties were languishing, before movements to the left of them forced a rethink of sorts.

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How do I win the presidential election? They are towering questions, but are less bound by the disciplines of holding together a party in non-presidential democracies. In 2016 the US staged its first presidential election campaign that was shaped by outsiders. One of the candidates for the Democrats’ nomination, Bernie Sanders, opened the year with a series of TV interviews in which he outlined a programme that was well to the left of any Democrat candidate since John McGovern in 1972 and, in terms of economic policy, more radical than even McGovern’s progressive proposals. Echoing Corbyn, Tsipras and the Podemos leadership, Sanders’ overwhelming theme was that since the financial crash there had been a huge bailout for Wall Street.

pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

So it appears also in struggles for racial justice; the Movement for Black Lives, for instance, uses cognates of cooperative forty-two times in the Economic Justice portion of its official platform, which insists on “collective ownership” of the economy, “not merely access.” Upstart politicians, such as Jeremy Corbyn of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party and Bernie Sanders in the United States, have put co-ops in their platforms as well.19 This isn’t new. The Scandinavian social democracies grew from the root of widespread co-ops and folk schools. The US civil rights struggle of the 1960s mobilized the self-sufficiency black farmers had already built through their co-ops.

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In Cleveland, a group of local “anchor institutions” like hospitals and universities helped create worker-owned laundry and green-energy co-ops; the allied Democracy Collaborative used this and other examples as the basis for national-scale transition plans. Madison, Wisconsin, voted to fund worker co-ops in late 2014; Oakland, Austin, Minneapolis, Newark, and other cities got on board in various ways. By 2017, Bernie Sanders was leading a group of Democratic senators and representatives to propose federal legislation on behalf of worker-owned businesses. Some embattled labor unions seemed ready to turn back to their roots with a newfound interest in co-ops, too. Alongside the NCBA and other older co-op organizations, these efforts tended to coalesce around the youthful, intersectional, diverse umbrella of the New Economy Coalition—founded around the time of the 2008 crash.

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She remembered her whole village waking up to the wailing of families who had lost a child to malaria. Kazadi figured that she could claim at least seven hundred signatures of the 158,831 collected by more than five hundred fellow volunteers, along with paid help, between April and October that year. Bernie Sanders rallies at the beginning and end of the process provided especially sympathetic crowds, as did Pride and Juneteenth. The campaign needed 98,492 signatures to get the issue on the ballot; the secretary of state’s office deemed 109,134 valid in the end. Thanks to people like Kazadi, medical coverage for all was a choice before Colorado voters in November 2016.

pages: 98 words: 27,609

The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It)
by Michael R. Strain
Published 25 Feb 2020

This message is fueled in large part by an effort to understand and react to the emergence of populism in both political parties. Let’s look at a few quick examples, of many. President Trump has been arrestingly clear on this point, stating directly, in June 2015: “Sadly, the American Dream is dead.”3 In May 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “American workers are some of the most overworked yet our standard of living has fallen. For many, the American Dream has become a nightmare.”4 In a December 2018 essay in The Atlantic, Senator Marco Rubio wrote, “There was once a path to a stable and prosperous life in America that has since closed off.

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The core argument that progressives are making is precisely that work is deeply honorable and valuable, and that increasing social mobility—meaning the capacity to get ahead through effort and creativity—should be a central goal of public policy. In presidential politics, those making the case for what Senator Sherrod Brown has called “the dignity of work” include everyone from both the left (among them, figures Strain might call “populist”) and the center-left: from Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Julian Castro to Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Corey Booker, and Michael Bennett. What they are arguing is that for Americans in large numbers, the rewards from work are not what they should be. Far from being “utopian,” they all stand in the practical tradition of American social reform going back to the New Deal.

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No one on the left may be saying that “absolutely nothing good has happened” since 1970. But it would be difficult to listen to the leading voices on the left in the last three or four years and not to walk away with the conclusion that economic outcomes for the majority of Americans have been declining rapidly over the past several decades. (Bernie Sanders: “For many, the American dream has become a nightmare.”) Dionne himself refers to “the long story of the decline of the American Dream” in his essay. My purpose in this book is to argue that there is not a long story of decline. Dionne criticizes my argument that some on the progressive left deny the importance of personal responsibility, the value of work, and the benefits of technological innovations.

pages: 88 words: 26,706

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right
by Michael Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2020

He could easily be hanging out with cooler people than Peterson, Shapiro, Harris, or the Weinsteins, and he sometimes does hang out with cooler people. While he’s provided an uncritical platform for some people who truly suck—including several who I’ve written about in this book, he’s recently sat down for interesting and in-depth interviews with Bernie Sanders and Cornel West. His show has exposed a lot of people to left-wing ideas they wouldn’t have heard anywhere else. It would be foolish to dismiss the appeal of Rogan’s personality and platform, a mistake to ignore that he represents the most genuinely heterodox mash-up of politics and influences in the IDW.

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Similar considerations apply to programs ranging from tuition-free public college to state-sponsored childcare schemes to reducing the workweek to 3 or 4 days. The recent reemergence of social movements around the world, from Haiti to Lebanon, Chile to Sudan and the noble effort of Jeremy Corbyn and the powerful force and potential election of Bernie Sanders to the presidency, attests to the widespread appeal of this vision. It’s important to emphasize, though, that while social democracy is an immensely valuable step in the right direction—especially in a world ravaged by decades of neoliberalism and US-led militarism—for two reasons it ultimately won’t be enough.

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The need to build transracial and transnational solidarities is important for both strategic and moral reasons. When it comes to the struggle to enact even relatively modest social democratic gains in the United States—what the historian and activist Harvey Kaye calls completing the New Deal—the electoral math makes the strategic calculation straightforward. Bernie Sanders won the Michigan primary in 2016 because he won the Arab-American vote in Dearborn. Going back to the 2016 general election, Hillary Clinton lost—despite winning the national popular vote—because traditional Democratic constituencies in places like Detroit, Flint, and Milwaukee weren’t inspired by her message and didn’t come out to vote.

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Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

The compromising information covered internal communications from January 2015 to May 2016 and was made available to the public just three days prior to the Democratic National Convention. Media coverage of the convention became distracted by conflict and conspiracies. The emails pointed to DNC suppression of the Bernie Sanders campaign, creating a third theme that Russian troll networks reinforced: that the Democratic Party was corrupt and Bernie Sanders got a raw deal, never having a chance to defeat Hillary Clinton. Revelation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s private remarks showing her favoring Clinton over Sanders led to her resignation, and the mainstream media ran wild with the leaked information.

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Only 10,700 votes in Michigan and 22,700 votes in Wisconsin separated the two candidates.6 Prior to the general election, Hillary Clinton struggled in these two states, losing both primaries to Bernie Sanders. These losses made Michigan and Wisconsin voters ripe for all three of the principal themes Russia pushed leading up to the election: Clinton’s emails, her corruption and potentially poor health, and narratives of Bernie Sanders getting a raw deal from the Democratic National Committee. A minor theme pushed by Russia’s social media operations sought to encourage Jill Stein supporters to make it to the polls, even though she had no chance of winning.

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Aggressive anti-Clinton rhetoric from state-sponsored outlets, amplified by their social media trolls, framed Clinton as a globalist, pushing democratic agendas against Russia—an aggressor who could possibly bring about war between the two countries. The trolls’ anti-Clinton drumbeat increased each month toward the end of 2015 and going into 2016. The Kremlin spotted a new, more likable alternative among the Democrats, Bernie Sanders, whose challenge to Clinton was growing each day and whose message rang with socialist themes. Meanwhile, Trump’s brash barbs against his opponents were working unexpectedly well. Kicking off 2016, the troll army began promoting candidate Donald Trump with increasing intensity, so much so their computational propaganda began to distort organic support for Trump, making his social media appeal appear larger than it truly was.

pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

.: Evidence from survey-linked administrative data,” Equitable Growth, September 7, 2016, https://equitablegrowth.org/working-papers/the-decline-in-lifetime-earnings-mobility-in-the-u-s-evidence-from-survey-linked-administrative-data/. 24 Mona Chalabi, “The world’s wealthy: where on earth are the richest Guardian, October 9, 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/oct/09/worlds-wealthy-where-russia-rich-list; Andrea Willige, “5 charts that show what is happening to the middle class around the world,” World Economic Forum, January 12, 2017, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/5-charts-which-show-what-is-happening-to-the-middle-class-around-the-world/. 25 Anna Ludwinek et al., Social Mobility in the EU, Eurofound, 2017, http://www.praxis.ee/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Social-mobility-in-the-EU-2017.pdf; Adam O’Neal, “Why Bernie Sanders Is Wrong About Sweden,” Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-bernie-sanders-is-wrong-about-sweden-11566596536; Liz Alderman, “Europe’s Middle Class Is Shrinking. Spain Bears Much of the Pain,” New York Times, February 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/business/spain-europe-middle-class.html. 26 “Germany: the hidden divide in Europe’s richest country,” Financial Times, August 17, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/db8e0b28-7ec3-11e7-9108-edda0bcbc928. 27 David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics (London: Penguin, 2017), 149–51, 183. 28 Yvonne Roberts, “Millennials are struggling.

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srnd=premium. 44 “Socialism ‘More Popular Than Capitalism’ With Brits, Germans, US Youth,” Sputnik News, February 24, 2016, https://sputniknews.com/europe/201602241035283984-socialism-popularity-britain-germany/. 45 Marco Damiani, “The transformation of Jean-Luc Mélenchon: From radical outsider to populist leader,” London School of Economics and Political Science, April 22, 2017, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2017/04/22/the-transformation-of-jean-luc-melenchon/. 46 Lucy Pasha-Robinson, “Election 2017: 61.5 per cent of under-40s voted for Labour, new poll finds,” Independent, June 14, 2017, https://www.independent. co.uk/news/uk/politics/election-2017-labour-youth-vote-under-40s-jeremy-corbyn-yougov-poll-a7789151.html; Jim Edwards, “Bernie Sanders and the youth vote: Stats and history suggest he may doom the Democrats,” Business Insider, March 4, 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/how-bernie-sanders-reliance-on-youth-vote-could-doom-democrats-2020-3. 47 Ben Knight, “Why the German urban middle class is going Green,” New Statesman, July 17, 2019, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2019/07/why-german-urban-middle-class-going-green. 48 Sohrab Ahmari, “Making the World Safe for Communism—Again,” Commentary, October 18, 2017, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/making-the-world-safe-for-communism-again/. 49 “More young people voted for Bernie Sanders than Trump and Clinton combined,” Washington Post, June 20, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/06/20/more-young-people-voted-for-bernie-sanders-than-trump-and-clinton-combined-by-a-lot/?

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pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
by Jamie K. McCallum
Published 15 Nov 2022

A major consequence of labor unrest during the pandemic was that, against great odds, essential workers helped to transform the political conversation about work in America. They even influenced the Democratic Party’s established preference for austerity in ways that were unimaginable before the pandemic arrived. Why did Joe Biden—who had built his entire career on not being Bernie Sanders—on the eve of his election promise to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen”? Why did he come out in support of Amazon workers in what was the most hotly debated union election in recent history? Or why did he immediately create a task force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment and pursue the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, groundbreaking legislation that would recast American labor law in workers’ favor?

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“Instead of protecting workers and the communities in which they work, however, Amazon seems to be more interested in managing its image.… This is not about me. This is about all of us.”3 Chris’s firing and the leaked memo attracted widespread condemnation from activists and politicians, including New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and Senator Bernie Sanders, who called the firing “disgraceful.”4 It also engendered support from other social movements. Smalls, who is Black, soon became not only a leader of a national worker movement but also key in building the bridge from the workplace to the streets as a Black Lives Matter activist. By the time I caught up with Smalls, he had been unemployed for several months yet was busier than ever.

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Attempts to copy the legislation elsewhere have always been defeated by powerful private hospital lobbies. National Nurses United was one of the first unions to officially endorse a national single-payer healthcare system. Such a system, embodied in the Medicare for All legislation introduced by Representative Pramila Jayapal and Senator Bernie Sanders in 2021, seeks, among many things, to establish safe staffing levels for healthcare workers across the country. No one knows better than nurses what they need to adequately staff hospitals, so the union has also pressured lawmakers to ensure that any political reform includes training, education, and collective bargaining rights for nurses.

pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, there was a scramble to attach culpability to the pollsters, the pundits, the Russians, the FBI, WikiLeaks, sexism, and Hillary Clinton’s egregious campaign. What mattered is that when Trump told voters things were awful, they believed him. Trump hardly was alone in being all negative all the time. In the same year, Bernie Sanders came out of left field and nearly upset heavily favored insider Hillary Clinton for the nomination of the Democratic Party via a campaign that relentlessly described contemporary America as foundering on the rocks. The United States, Sanders contended, has been “destroyed” except for the wealthiest few.

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The New York University professors Pankaj Ghemawat and Steven Altman have shown that in 2016, the year Trump declared “total devastation” caused by imports, 84 percent of goods and services consumed by American citizens were produced inside the United States. Trump went on to declare that Japanese cars “just come pouring into the country.” This statement was true in the 1980s, a period that both Trump and Bernie Sanders have extolled as a golden age—even though in the 1980s education levels and living standards were lower while disease rates, crime, and pollution were higher. By 2016, two-thirds of Japanese-marque cars sold in America were built in US factories staffed by US workers earning about $50 an hour in pay and benefits, about the same as UAW members for Detroit marques.

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The young have an easier time reaching the polls than seniors, but the latter group is the one that makes the effort. By not voting, the young allow the old to demand extra subsidies, with the invoices handed to their juniors; years along, saddled with other people’s debts, those now young will rue their mistake. The top three of the 2016 presidential race—Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders—were Social Security recipients. In that year those serving in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, and on the Supreme Court had their highest average and median ages ever. One reason American politics is gridlocked is that elderly leaders restage disputes that are decades out of date, like high school reunion couples arguing about who should have gone to the prom with whom.

pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
by Stephen D. King
Published 22 May 2017

Elsewhere, parties have either emerged from nowhere or chased electability from the political fringes – Podemos, Ciudadanos and the Junts pel Sí Catalonian separatists in Spain, Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, the Five Star Movement in Italy, the Finns Party, the Hungarian Jobbik party, the Dutch Party for Freedom and the French Front National. Meanwhile, in 2016, having won the Republican presidential nomination on an anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican platform, Donald Trump was eventually propelled, seemingly against the odds, all the way to the White House. And, for the Democrats, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money by appealing to younger voters with an offer of free college places to be funded by heavy taxes on the rich, alongside considerable opposition to free trade. In effect, the financial crisis uncovered an inherent paradox in the structure of late twentieth-century Western societies.

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In the 2016 US presidential contest, the choice ultimately came down to an increasingly grudging supporter of globalization – Hillary Clinton – and those who had always favoured an isolationist approach. Donald Trump, channelling one version of isolationism, adopted a protectionist manifesto, whilst Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s rival Democrat, was openly against globalization and its linkages with the ‘elite’. Throughout the campaign – and doubtless a reason behind her eventual defeat – Clinton struggled to convince people that she understood their concerns. An email scandal didn’t help, and nor did her many speeches to Wall Street bankers.

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POPULISTS AND RENEGADES Some argue that the problem represents no more than a growing divide between the traditional right and left. Yet a simple ‘right/left’ narrative does not work terribly well. Those on the left argue that the right thrives by exploiting divisions in society, yet the left itself is divided between those who support globalization (Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair) and those who do not (Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn).2 Meanwhile, those on the right too often misinterpret economic arguments in order to push their ‘free-market’ agendas. Ricardian comparative advantage, for example, works a lot less well in the modern era: contemporary globalization is driven more by the heightened cross-border movement of capital and labour than by trade flows.

pages: 363 words: 92,422

A Fine Mess
by T. R. Reid
Published 13 Mar 2017

(Of course, the tax burden falls on the living heir, not the decedent, but those who campaign against the “death tax” ignore this nuance.) Supporters of the tax have come up with politically charged labels of their own; they call the estate tax the “lucky rich kids’ tax” or the “Paris Hilton tax”; in his stump speeches during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Democratic contender Bernie Sanders used to remind his audiences that “Paris Hilton never built a hotel.” Under George W. Bush, opponents of the “death tax” won a temporary victory. Bush’s 2001 tax-reform plan phased out the estate tax over the following decade so that the rate fell to zero in the year 2010. For budget reasons, though, the death of the “death tax” was short-lived; the zero rate lasted only one year.

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For decades, economists and politicians from left and right have attacked the carried-interest rule as a distortion of the basic capital gains proposition. “Why should someone who does not put any of their own money at risk pay the lower tax rate that Congress intended to reward those who do win such risky bets?” argues the business professor Peter Cohan, himself a former hedge fund manager. In the 2016 presidential campaign, politicians from Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton on the left to Donald Trump and Jeb Bush on the right called for termination of this loophole. “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country,” Trump said. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky.”13 One smart line of investment that the hedge fund guys make every year is their contribution to members of Congress.

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Yes, your corner drugstore would like to take your co-pay, bill your Medicare policy, and then pay its taxes in Switzerland,” Lewis wrote. Under withering attacks from politicians, the press, and its customers, Walgreens had second thoughts and announced that it would retain its corporate presence in the United States. — ALL OF THE FIRMS cited here, and countless others, have been attacked by critics ranging from Bernie Sanders to Barack Obama to Donald Trump. They have been called “corporate traitors” and “Benedict Arnold companies” for shifting their tax burden out of the United States. They’ve been called outlaws and criminals for setting up such intricate structures to get around the tax code. In response to this calumny, the corporations reply that they are engaged in perfectly legal activity.

pages: 322 words: 87,181

Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy
by Dani Rodrik
Published 8 Oct 2017

What’s problematic is unfair inequality, when we are forced to compete under different ground rules.3 During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders forcefully advocated the renegotiation of trade agreements to reflect better the interests of working people. But such arguments immediately run up against the objection that any standstill or reversal on trade agreements would harm the world’s poorest, by diminishing their prospect of escaping poverty through export-led growth. “If you’re poor in another country, this is the scariest thing Bernie Sanders has said,” ran a headline in the popular and normally sober Vox.com news site.4 But trade rules that are more sensitive to social and equity concerns in the advanced countries are not inherently in conflict with economic growth in poor countries.

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These gains came at the expense of other countries. 3. Christina Starmans, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom, “Why People Prefer Unequal Societies,” Nature: Human Behaviour, vol. 1, April 2017: 82. 4. Zack Beauchamp, “If You’re Poor in Another Country, This Is the Scariest Thing Bernie Sanders Has Said,” Vox, April 5, 2016, http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11139718/bernie-sanders-trade-global-poverty. 5. Dani Rodrik, “Growth Strategies,” in Handbook of Economic Growth, P. Aghion and S. Durlauf, eds., vol. 1A, North-Holland, 2005: 967–1014. 6. Dani Rodrik, “Mexico’s Growth Problem,” Project Syndicate, November 13, 2014, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mexico-growth-problem-by-dani-rodrik-2014-11?

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In addition, more than five hundred bilateral and regional trade agreements were signed—the vast majority of them since the WTO replaced the GATT in 1995. The difference today is that international trade has moved to the center of the political debate. During the most recent US election, presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both made opposition to trade agreements a key plank of their campaigns. And, judging from the tone of the other candidates, standing up for globalization amounted to electoral suicide in the political climate of the time. Trump’s eventual win can be chalked up at least in part to his hard line on trade and his promise to renegotiate deals that he argued had benefited other nations at the expense of the United States.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite
by Michael Lind
Published 20 Feb 2020

Facebook ads linked to Russia cost $46,000, or 0.05 percent of the $81 million that the Clinton and Trump campaigns themselves spent on Facebook ads.6 Is it possible that the Russian memes, although mere drops in the ocean of advertising by the Clinton and Trump campaigns, were disproportionately effective in influencing American voters because of their unique sophistication? One anti-Clinton ad on Facebook attributed to Russian trolls showed a photo of Bernie Sanders with the words: “Bernie Sanders: The Clinton Foundation is a ‘Problem.’” A pro-Trump meme, presumably targeting religious conservatives, showed Satan wrestling with Jesus. Satan: “If I win Clinton wins!” Jesus: “Not if I can help it!”7 To believe the Russia Scare theory of the 2016 US presidential election, we must believe that the staff of Russia’s government-linked Internet Research Agency and other Russian saboteurs understood how to influence the psychology of black American voters and white working-class voters in the Midwest far better than did the Clinton and Trump presidential campaigns.

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As manufacturing jobs disappear overseas, disproportionately affecting the livelihoods of the working class in the heartland, more and more disaffected Americans look to leaders who promise to change the trade balance, economic orthodoxy be damned. In 2016, according to the economists David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Kaveh Majlesi, voters in US regions exposed to Chinese import competition were more likely than others to support the outsider candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders: “Trade-exposed [congressional] districts with an initial majority white population or initially in Republican hands became substantially more likely to elect a conservative Republican, while trade-exposed districts with an initial majority-minority population or initially in Democratic hands also became more likely to elect a liberal Democrat.

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These populist big-city mayors or candidates in the second half of the twentieth century combined appeals to working-class grievances and resentments with folksy language and feuds with the metropolitan press, a pattern practiced, in different ways, by later New York City mayors Ed Koch, a Democrat, and Rudy Giuliani, a Republican. In its “Against Trump” issue of January 22, 2016, the editors of National Review mocked the “funky outer-borough accents” shared by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.14 Indeed, Trump, a “white ethnic” from Queens with German and Scots ancestors, with his support in the US industrial states where working-class non-British European-Americans are concentrated, is ethnically different from most of his predecessors in the White House, whose ancestors were proportionately far more British American.

pages: 319 words: 75,257

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
by David Frum
Published 25 May 2020

As recently as 2007, future Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders opposed the Kennedy-McCain immigration reform as too likely to undercut American workers’ wages. The parties hardened their positions on these core issues only after 2008, a sign of the post-recession era’s ultra-polarization. The consequence has been the frustration of both parties’ highest hopes. The Democrats did enact the Affordable Care Act in 2010, but they have not been able to protect it from Republican sabotage at the federal and state level. Nor have they themselves clutched the program to their hearts. Through 2019, insurgent Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren criticized the Affordable Care Act almost as savagely as any Republican.

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At the second of the two Democratic debates in Miami in June 2019, co-moderator Savannah Guthrie challenged the candidates on stage: “This is a show of hands question and hold them up so people can see. Raise your hand if your government plan would provide [health-care] coverage for undocumented immigrants.” Michael Bennet, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, John Hickenlooper, Bernie Sanders, Eric Swalwell, Marianne Williamson, and Andrew Yang all signaled “yes.”3 In twelve years, the Democrats—including supposedly the most moderate of them, Vice President Joe Biden—had shifted from “no to driver’s licenses” for illegal aliens to “yes to government health coverage” for illegal aliens.

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Donald Trump cannot win reelection in 2020 by his own efforts. But the election can be thrown away by people who will not meet voters where they are. Trump and his supporters appreciate the potentially destructive power of the ultra-progressive Left better than anyone. When Steve Bannon praises Bernie Sanders and when Fox & Friends promotes Tulsi Gabbard, they are not expressing sincere admiration. They are grasping the life vest that can save them from the shipwreck. One credible poll has found that 12 percent of those who supported Sanders against Clinton in 2016 switched to Trump in the general election.23 If the ultra-progressives are thwarted from foisting an unelectable candidate upon the Democratic Party from the inside, perhaps they can be coaxed and manipulated to boost a Trump-rescuing third-party candidacy from the outside.

pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

“No one working for the wealthiest person on Earth”: Tami Luhby, “Amazon Defends Itself from Bernie Sanders’ Attacks,” CNN Business, August 31, 2018. A single parent: Ryan Bourne, “In Bernie Sanders vs. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Only Workers Lose,” USA Today, September 16, 2018. If the family incurred medical costs: “Policy Basics: Introduction to Medicaid,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/policy-basics-introduction-to-medicaid. One could imagine a scenario: Ryan Bourne, “In Bernie Sanders vs. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, only workers lose,” Opinion contributor, USA Today, September 16, 2018.

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In the days and weeks that followed, Bezos responded swiftly, drawing on his competitive spirit and displaying a series of aikido-like public relations moves that not only mitigated the damage but also, in one way, at least, turned a fraught situation to his advantage—as he’s done so many times in his career. The first shot came from Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democratic socialist from Vermont, who targeted Amazon’s CEO as a bad corporate actor. On September 5, 2018, Sanders introduced a bill called the Stop BEZOS Act, which stands for Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies. The law would require big companies like Amazon that employ people who are on federal welfare such as Medicaid and food stamps to pay back the government for the massive costs of those programs.

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Amazon’s warehouses that use these robots: Ananya Bhattacharya, “Amazon Is Just Beginning to Use Robots in Its Warehouses and They’re Already Making a Huge Difference,” Quartz, June 17, 2016. Even after installing all these robots: Author interview with Amazon’s Ashley Robinson, April 29, 2019. James Bloodworth is a British: James Bloodworth, “I Worked in an Amazon Warehouse. Bernie Sanders Is Right to Target Them,” The Guardian, September 17, 2018. He describes a workplace: Ibid. It opened its Andover: “A 360° Tour of Ocado’s Andover CFC3 Automated Warehouse,” Orcado Technology video, posted on YouTube May 10, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMUNI4UrNpM. Under each square: James Vincent, “Welcome to the Automated Warehouse of the Future,” The Verge, May 8, 2018.

pages: 412 words: 96,251

Why We're Polarized
by Ezra Klein
Published 28 Jan 2020

Then the Columnist Contacted the Provost,” Chronicle of Higher Education, August 27, 2019, chronicle.com/article/this-professor-compared-a/247013. 37 Stephens, “Dear Millennials.” 38 mediaite.com/news/bret-stephens-backs-out-of-public-debate-with-bedbug-professor-because-public-event-wouldn’t-be-closed-to-the-public/. 39 Klein, “White Threat.” 40 Matthew Yglesias, “The Great Awokening,” Vox, April 1, 2019, vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020. 41 Klein, “White Threat.” 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Aaron Zitner, Dante Chinni, and Brian McGill, “How Clinton Won,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2016, graphics.wsj.com/elections/2016/how-clinton-won. 45 “Issues: Racial Justice,” Bernie 2020, berniesanders.com/issues/racial-justice. 46 Bernie Sanders. Interview by Ezra Klein, Vox, July 28, 2015, vox.com/2015/7/28/9014491/bernie-sanders-vox-conversation. Chapter 6—The Media Divide beyond Left-Right 1 Markus Prior, “News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout,” American Journal of Political Science 49, no. 3 (July 2005): 577–92. 2 James Hamilton, All the News That’s Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 3 Ibid. 4 Douglas J.

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” The other problem is that the conversation about, and the experience of, a browning America will not be driven by demographers and social psychologists; it will be driven by politicians looking for an edge, by political pundits looking for ratings, by outrageous stories going viral on social media, by cultural controversies like Gamergate and Roseanne Barr getting fired. It will absorb even figures who might prefer not to talk much about race. Bernie Sanders is a good example here. In 2016, he centered his campaign on class and was criticized for a tin ear on race. Ultimately, he won slightly more white votes than Clinton, but was swamped by her 50-point margin among African Americans.44 In 2020, Sanders has run a more race-conscious campaign, emphasizing his past as a civil rights activist.

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After all, you can’t win a caucus on a rainy, cold night in January unless you have supporters willing to go out in the wet and spend hours caucusing for you. We’ve flipped from a system that selected candidates who were broadly appealing to party officials to a system that selects candidates who are adored by base voters. Put differently, neither Donald Trump nor Bernie Sanders would’ve had a prayer in the 1956 presidential primaries, but one of them won and the other nearly won the 2016 presidential primaries. Threaded through that change is a strange fact in American political life: we consider party officials exercising influence over party nominating processes as illegitimate.

Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy
by Andrew Yang
Published 15 Nov 2021

And in Iowa only 171,517 Iowans participated in the 2016 Democratic caucuses. This was only 5.4 percent of the 3.1 million people in the state. You could assume that the number would grow somewhat in 2020, but the field would also be much more crowded. So my projection was that if I got approximately 40,000 Iowans on board I could win. (Indeed, Bernie Sanders wound up getting the most votes, with 45,652, so my working assumption was pretty close.) Our system of electing a president operates such that each Iowan was worth his or her weight in gold. I started saying that every Iowan was worth a thousand New Yorkers or Californians, which was essentially true.

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Eventually, if you’re a candidate, you see each other’s stump speeches over and over again. Late in the cycle, I’d come to joke that Democratic fundraisers should have us draw names from a hat and deliver another candidate’s speech. Donors would pay big money to see it. By the end, I thought I could do a decent rendition of Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders giving their go-to stumps. I can imagine someone parodying my stump: “The robots are coming, we’re doomed, give everyone money right now.” In the Surf Ballroom, I heard my name called and jogged up to the stage. I talked about how our economy was transforming before our eyes, and why Iowans needed to lead the country in a new and better direction.

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After a few days, we got a response saying that they’d consider the commitment contingent on Mike’s winning the whole race and becoming president. Talks died down at that point. Joe’s momentum continued. He did well on Super Tuesday and also in the following week’s primaries. He won Washington, Missouri, Mississippi, and Idaho; most important, he won Michigan, a state that Bernie Sanders had won in 2016 and needed to win again. I was sitting at a CNN studio in Washington, D.C., that night offering commentary, and it was clear to me that Joe was going to be the nominee based upon the results of that night. It also hit me that we should unify behind him as quickly as possible; I love Bernie, but I didn’t see a path to victory for him.

pages: 128 words: 41,187

Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It
by Vivek Chibber
Published 30 Aug 2022

That frustration is being expressed in many and sundry ways, most typically inchoate, sometimes ugly, and overwhelmingly through electoral revolts rather than organized class struggle. But it is so pervasive that it feels like we are in a new political era. Oddly, the political turn has been most sharply expressed in the unlikeliest of places, the United States. An early tremor could be felt in the Occupy movement in 2011, but the real catalyst was Bernie Sanders’s historic runs for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2016 and 2020. Since his explosive entrance onto the national political stage, there has been an unmistakable revival of left anti-capitalist discourse, at a scale not witnessed in two generations. And even while his presidential runs are likely over, the thrust toward a social democratic turn in American politics has not abated—indeed, it has gathered steam.

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The Clintons deflected those demands in 1992, so that what the public got wasn’t European-style national health care, but a monstrous, top-heavy system called “managed care,” which, under the banner of “national policy,” handed health care over to the insurance industry and private hospitals. Twenty-four years later, when Bernie Sanders raised the call for a Canadian-style single-payer system, it was once again one of the Clintons who came to the status quo’s rescue. Unable to do a bait-and-switch like she had in 1992 with Bill, Hillary resorted to deflating public expectations. Hillary was the “lower your expectations” candidate.

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But, we might also ask, does this mean that, short of a mobilized labor movement, nothing can move the state in a more progressive direction? What about other forms of pressure, mass movements that are large, but in which labor might not be a central actor? This is an important question because in the recent past we’ve seen quite significant mobilizations around electoral campaigns—the Bernie Sanders phenomenon in the US and the Jeremy Corbyn campaign in the UK. These generated enormous enthusiasm and unleashed a great deal of energy, which wasn’t just confined to the narrow electoral arena. The answer is that these mobilizations do in fact have great potential in two ways. The first is that, even though they are not labor-based, they have to be reckoned with by political elites, because they can impose costs.

pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin
Published 12 Jul 2021

Levin, Plunder and Deceit (New York: Threshold Editions, 2015), 87, 88. 31 Alana Mastrangelo, “Top 10 Craziest Attacks on Campus Conservatives of 2019,” Breitbart, January 1, 2020, https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/01/01/top-10-craziest-attacks-on-campus-conservatives-of-2019/ (April 22, 2021). 32 Spencer Brown, “Conservative Voices Once Again Excluded from Commencement Season,” Young America’s Foundation, June 16, 2020, https://www.yaf.org/news/conservative-voices-once-again-excluded-from-commencement-season/ (April 22, 2021). 33 Anya Kamenetz and Eric Westervelt, “Fact-Check: Bernie Sanders Promises Free College. Will It Work?” NPR, February 17, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/02/17/466730455/fact-check-bernie-sanders-promises-free-college-will-it-work (April 22, 2021). 34 Lilah Burke, “A Big Budget from Biden,” Inside Higher Education, April 12, 2021, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/04/12/bidens-proposed-budget-increases-funding-pell-hbcus-research (April 22, 2021). 35 Stuart Shepard and James Agresti, “Government Spending on Education Is Higher than Ever.

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We can assume, therefore, that the real number of people motivated by Marxist ideas among social science professors is higher—anything up to double the Gross and Simmons number, but certainly a good deal more than one in five.”68 Ellis declares that “[i]t is safe to say that self-identified Marxists are no more than a tiny fraction of the general public of the United States, which means that there is a huge discrepancy between this very small group in the population and the very large one found among social science professors.”69 This helps explain why the Democratic Party generally, and Sen. Bernie Sanders in particular, push for free college and the cancellation of student loans. The more young people who are processed through America’s colleges and universities, the greater the chance for their revolution. CHAPTER FOUR RACISM, GENDERISM, AND MARXISM The foundational question: what is Critical Theory, from which these other Critical Theory/Marxist movements sprang?

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Cory Booker (D-NJ) puts the cost of such a program at $543 billion in its first year. Though the costs thereafter would fall, the cumulative expense over ten years would come to some $2.5 trillion. The goal of developing a universal, single payer health-care system would, according to an MIT-Amherst study of a similar plan put forward by Senator Bernie Sanders, come to about $1.4 trillion a year.”69 “Just these six of AOC’s long list of aspirations,” states Ezrati, “would then roughly cost some $2.5 trillion a year. Since Washington’s 2018 budget put spending at $4.5 trillion, the Deal would effectively increase federal spending by a touch over half again.

pages: 278 words: 74,880

A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions
by Muhammad Yunus
Published 25 Sep 2017

“Just 8 Men Own Same Wealth as Half the World,” Oxfam International, January 16, 2017, https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017–01–16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world. 3. Lauren Carroll and Tom Kertscher, “At DNC, Bernie Sanders Repeats Claim That Top One-Tenth of 1% Owns as Much Wealth as Bottom 90%,” Politico, July 26, 2016, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jul/26/bernie-s/dnc-bernie-sanders-repeats-claim-top-one-tenth-1-o/. 4. Sean Gorman, “Bernie Sanders Says Walmart Heirs Are Wealthier Than Bottom 40 Percent of Americans,” Politico, March 14, 2016, http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2016/mar/14/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-says-walmart-heirs-are-wealthier-bo/. 5. A number of experiments in developing new, better ways to measure economic growth are already under way.

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When we get to the point where one person controls a huge portion of a country’s wealth, what is to prevent that person from imposing his will on the nation? Implicitly or explicitly, his wishes will become the law of the land. It could easily happen in a low-income country like Bangladesh. But we now realize it can also happen in a wealthy country like the United States. In his 2016 presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders frequently pointed out that the richest 0.1 percent of Americans own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent—a claim supported by solid research data from sources like the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research.3 He also pointed out that the Walton family of Walmart has more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the US population—another claim that research by unbiased fact-checkers has supported.4 It is dangerous for a country to allow so much wealth and power to be concentrated in a few hands.

pages: 372 words: 100,947

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Published 12 Jul 2021

Just before the Democratic National Convention in July 2016, roughly twenty thousand emails from the DNC suddenly appeared on WikiLeaks. The emails showed DNC leaders playing favorites among the Democratic nominees for president. Most notably, DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz appeared to be pushing for Clinton over Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator from Vermont. The emails made front-page headlines, and Wasserman Schultz4 was forced to resign. Another batch of emails, this time from Clinton campaign head John Podesta, were released just as the Trump campaign was suffering one of its worst embarrassments, an Access Hollywood tape that showed then–reality star Trump speaking disparagingly about kissing, groping, and grabbing women without their consent.

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Wherever there was a “seam line issue,” a divisive position that could turn Americans against one another, there was the IRA. Gun control, immigration, feminism, race—the IRA ran accounts that took extreme stances on each of these issues. Many of their pages supported the Trump campaign and conservative groups across the United States, but they also ran pages in support of Bernie Sanders. “It was a slow, slow process, but what we found that summer, the summer of 2017, it just blew us away,” recalled one member of Facebook’s security team. “We expected we’d find something, but we had no idea it was so big.” While over the years some Facebook employees had speculated that the IRA was focused on spreading disinformation in the United States, no one had thought to go looking for a professional disinformation campaign run by the organization.

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Inside were about twelve images printed on standard 8-by-11 paper that the company representatives described as indicative of the kinds of ads they had found. The sampling suggested that the ads targeted Republican and Democratic candidates in equal measure. There were negative and positive ads on Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Trump. The committee staff were incredulous. In their own investigation, they had seen that the Russians appeared to be pushing Trump as their candidate of choice. Mauer and O’Neill pointed to an ad featuring Clinton with a woman in a hijab; “Muslims for Clinton” appeared below the photo in a font meant to mimic Arabic script.

pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

The prize-backed challenges of the eighteenth century were tremendous engines of progress, but those engines were not powered by kings or captains of industry. They were fueled, instead, by peer networks. — The premiums of the RSA are experiencing a remarkable revival in the digital age. In May 2011, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced two bills in the Senate: for the Medical Innovation Prize Fund Act and for the Prize Fund for HIV/AIDS Act. Like the Longitude Prize, the bills proposed by Sanders target a specific problem with vast economic and personal implications, namely, the cost of creating breakthrough pharmaceutical drugs.

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Each year, billions of dollars would be available to institutions that release their findings into the public domain, or at least grant royalty-free open access to their patented material. The Sanders bills set incentives that reward not just finished products but also the processes that lead to breakthrough ideas. They make open collaboration pay. — Bernie Sanders’s colleagues in the Senate may not be ready to grasp the creative value of prize-backed challenges, but RSA-style premiums are proliferating throughout the government, on both the federal and the local level. Software-based competitions—such as Apps for America or New York City’s BigApps competition—reward programmers and information architects who create useful applications that share or explain the vast trove of government data.

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In effect, the prize-backed challenge approach greatly increased the productivity of the taxpayer dollars spent: by promoting change in school districts that ultimately didn’t receive a dime of new funding, and through the free publicity generated by the competition itself. The $5 billion was slightly more than 1 percent of the overall education budget, yet Race to the Top has generated far more attention than any other Obama education initiative to date. Like Bernie Sanders’s medical-innovation bills, Race to the Top was an attempt to create market-style rewards and competition in an environment that was far removed from the traditional selection pressures of capitalism. While the federal government served as the ultimate judge of the competition (effectively playing the role of the consumer in a traditional marketplace), both the problems and the proposed solutions emerged from the wider network of state and local school systems.

pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Published 16 Jan 2018

“An old world has sunk”: Noel Cary, The Path to Christian Democracy: German Catholics and the Party System from Windthorst to Adenauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 147. The CDU offered a clear vision: Geoffrey Pridham, Christian Democracy in Western Germany (London: Croom Helm, 1977), pp. 21–66. a “Christian” society: Ibid., p. 32. “The close collaboration”: Quoted in ibid., pp. 26–28. Both Bernie Sanders and some moderates: Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, “Back to the Center, Democrats,” New York Times, July 6, 2017; Bernie Sanders, “How Democrats Can Stop Losing Elections,” New York Times, June 13, 2017; also see Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times, November 18, 2016. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein: Penn and Stein, “Back to the Center, Democrats.”

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Party gatekeepers were shells of what they once were, for two main reasons. One was a dramatic increase in the availability of outside money, accelerated (though hardly caused) by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling. Now even marginal presidential candidates—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders—could raise large sums of money, either by finding their own billionaire financier or through small donations via the Internet. The proliferation of well-funded primary candidates indicated a more open and fluid political environment. The other major factor diminishing the power of traditional gatekeepers was the explosion of alternative media, particularly cable news and social media.

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Such broad involvement is critical to isolating and defeating authoritarian governments. In addition, whereas a narrow (urban, secular, progressive) anti-Trump coalition would reinforce the current axes of partisan division, a broader coalition would crosscut these axes and maybe even help dampen them. A political movement that brings together—even if temporarily—Bernie Sanders supporters and businesspeople, evangelicals and secular feminists, and small-town Republicans and urban Black Lives Matter supporters, will open channels of communication across the vast chasm that has emerged between our country’s two main partisan camps. And it might help foster more crosscutting allegiances in a society that has too few of them.

pages: 310 words: 85,995

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
by Paul Collier
Published 4 Dec 2018

These policies proved to be so valuable that they became accepted across the central range of the political spectrum. Political parties of the centre-left and centre-right alternated in power, but the policies remained in place. Yet, social democracy as a political force is now in existential crisis. The last decade has been a roll-call of disasters. On the centre-left, mauled by Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton lost against Donald Trump; the Blair–Brown British Labour Party has been taken over by the Marxists. In France, President Hollande decided not even to seek a second term, and his replacement as the Socialist Party candidate, Benoît Hamon, crashed out with merely 8 per cent of the vote.

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This approach is popular because everyone believes in their own values and assumes that they are the right ones on which to build shared identity. The problem is that an astonishingly diverse range of values can be found within any modern society; it is one of the defining features of modernity. If we require shared values, we end up with something powerfully exclusionary: ‘if you don’t share our values, get out.’ Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are both Americans, but I defy you to find any values that they both hold, but which differentiate America from other nations. The challenge could be repeated – with appropriate substitutions of political leaders – in most Western societies. The only values that everyone in a society adheres to are so minimal that they fail to distinguish a particular country from many others, and so do not define a viable domain within which reciprocal obligations might be built.

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Populism offers an alternative bypass: charismatic leaders with remedies so obvious that they can be grasped instantly. Often, the two fused, becoming yet more potent: once-discredited ideologies refurbished with impassioned leaders peddling enticing new remedies. Hail to the herald: from the radical left, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon; from the nativists, Marine Le Pen and Norbert Hofer; from the secessionists, Nigel Farage, Alex Salmond and Carles Puigdemont; and from the world of celebrity entertainers, Beppe Grillo and Donald Trump. Currently, the political battlefield is seemingly characterized by alarmed and indignant Utilitarian and Rawlsian vanguards under assault from populist ideologues.

pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

Today there is probably more anti-business sentiment, most of all among young people, than at any other time since the radicalism of the 1960s.7 Bernie Sanders Supporters Although he did not win the Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016, Bernie Sanders arguably was the candidate who generated the second-highest amount of enthusiasm in that election cycle. As I write, he is one of the leading candidates to win the party’s nomination in 2020, though he will be seventy-eight years of age. And as the Democratic Party responds to the excesses of the Trump administration, Sanders’s progressive ideals are proving highly influential. Bernie Sanders epitomizes the anti-business left. A self-described socialist, he has called for breaking up the big banks and for the establishment of more worker-owned cooperatives.

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He blames the stagnation in living standards on the rapacious nature of American business. I think you can plausibly argue that an actual Sanders presidency might not be nearly as radical as some of his rhetoric; consider, for example, that he uses the word “socialist” in varying and often pretty generic ways. Still, ask yourself a basic question: Has Bernie Sanders said much of anything good about business in general or big business in particular? If not, why is he so unwilling to appreciate one of the most beneficial and fundamental institutions in American life? The Media (and Social Media) The media are perhaps the biggest villain when it comes to criticizing business, but it’s not mainly about newspapers or TV stations being too left-wing.

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Had banking and financial innovation not been allowed to proceed, the Western world would be a far less developed, creative, and indeed happy place. A few hundred years from now, our descendants probably will look back and say the same. But since the financial crisis of 2007–2008, attitudes have swung in the other direction and critics have hit the financial sector with virulent attacks. The 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders, which got much further than almost anyone expected, focused like a laser on banking and finance, as has Senator Elizabeth Warren. It’s remarkable how many intellectuals, internet forum contributors, and even working-class Americans profess a strong dislike for the banks, or at least for what they think the banks stand for.

pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

In the years since, the Right has veered away from its devotion to markets, instead espousing protectionism, subsidies, immigration controls, and cultural nationalism—ideas championed by Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, and other populists around the world. On the left, meanwhile, two trendsetters have been Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, both self-described “socialists.” They have been joined by energetic newcomers on the political scene such as New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who seems just as comfortable with the label. And in several polls, Americans between eighteen and twenty-nine show significantly higher support for socialism than their elders.

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These leaders implemented democratic versions of Lenin’s vision of a socialist economy, one in which the state sat atop “the commanding heights” of the economy. But when you ask what people mean by socialism now, it is not really that system at all. Today’s self-professed socialists want greater government investment, new and expanded safety nets, a “Green New Deal” to address climate change, and higher taxes on the rich. Bernie Sanders himself makes clear his dream country is not Cuba but Denmark. You can see how amorphous the label is by the fact that Elizabeth Warren supports many of the same policies as Sanders, but has also called herself “a capitalist to my bones.” Any program that can be described as both capitalist and socialist probably lies somewhere in between.

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You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.” Bernie Sanders could not have said it better. Ideologies gain appeal because they seem to address the crucial problems of the moment. In the 1930s, capitalism had run aground, causing financial panic, collapse, and mass unemployment—and it seemed unable to right itself anytime soon. Along came Franklin Roosevelt, who let the government step in where the market was failing and got the country moving again.

pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream
by Alissa Quart
Published 14 Mar 2023

Americans had come together to create cultural shifts like the legalization of gay marriage, gender equity in the workplace, minimum wage hikes, and, yes, even Trump’s election. More recently, Biden fought for a bill that centered on “human infrastructure,” a term popularized by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders to describe benefits that help ordinary folks, like welfare programs and other kinds of people-centered offerings. Even though much of it has been opposed at every turn in the Senate, his has been one of the most progressive presidential agendas in recent history, from attempting to address climate change to proposing childcare tax credit and free community college.

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(I think of what Bloomberg did on that stage as “rich mouthing,” the opposite of the idiom “poor mouthing,” where one flexes one’s own wealth, erasing the contributions of those who got you where you are—followed by the expectation of applause. It’s a surprisingly common move.) Luckily, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont was alert to this strategy and as a result was well prepared to take Bloomberg down at that debate, retorting: “Mr. Bloomberg, it wasn’t you who made all that money. Maybe your workers played some role in that as well.” Sanders knew to publicly puncture the gospel of individual success by those at the top of the income gradient.

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Toward this end, Magee directs those seeking enlightenment and relief to reflect on “microaggressions—to hold them with some objectivity and distance” and consider them with a degree of detachment, all without denying the pain they may cause and internalizing it. In YouTube videos, Magee suggested that we openly discuss this topic. It was David Forbes who led me to Magee. Forbes described himself, in a high-pitched Bernie Sanders–like Brooklyn accent, as a “professor of contemplative education,” but his more worldly title is associate professor in the school counseling program at Brooklyn College’s School of Education. He suggested that I check out the New Mindful Deal. That was his own invention, geared toward institutions that are teaching mindfulness to teenagers, police officers, soldiers, and other stress-prone groups.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
by Ben Smith
Published 2 May 2023

Facebook wasn’t a place where you’d figure out the details of what, if anything, was in those emails, or where you’d lend a sympathetic ear to Clinton’s explanations that after years of unfair scrutiny by Republicans, she’d wanted a little privacy. But Hillary sure could drive engagement. Another data set in April showed Clinton blowing away even Bernie Sanders by the measure of how many people were talking about her. The problem was that it was mostly unfavorable. But so far, she was the only candidate anyone really seemed to be talking about at all. That changed on June 16, when Donald Trump began his presidential campaign. His staff had planned remarks, but what dominated media coverage was what he said when he strayed from them: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said.

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And he told me he was puzzled by BuzzFeed. Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, he told me, based on the candidate’s political views. Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it. BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement. Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie? he asked me. Jonah had sometimes asked the same thing. He, too, saw that the energy was on the militant left, and that our staff’s sympathies—and his own—mostly leaned the same way. But our journalistic scruples, the impulse toward fairness and away from propaganda, sometimes handcuffed our drive for traffic.

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Our news operation had gone from being scorned and yoked to the social web to being well regarded among journalists, and even winning the occasional prize—but we were spending more and more money on journalism to maintain the same level of traffic, and though he and I didn’t talk about it much, Jonah and I both knew that our existing approach to news depended on the rest of the business remaining strong. But Jonah had bet on me and on that style of news, and so Jonah let me win the occasional skirmishes with our publisher, Dao Nguyen, when he eyed the traffic that a breathless Bernie Sanders fan post might get. I told Bannon that we came from a different journalistic tradition, and we valued it. That answer didn’t satisfy any of us much. After Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, and as he battled it out with Hillary Clinton for the White House, BuzzFeed published another post that stuck in Jonah’s mind, one that he thought kind of explained the whole thing.

pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

Taxpayer costs: Matt O’Brien and Spencer Raley, “The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers,” Federation for American Immigration Reform, September 27, 2017, www.fairus.org/issue/publications-resources/fiscal-burden-illegal-immigration-united-states-taxpayers. 37. Latino voters for Bernie: Lauren Gambino, “‘He’s Working for It’: Why Latinos Are Rallying Behind Sanders,” The Guardian, March 3, 2020, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/bernie-sanders-latino-voters.; cf. esp. Wilhelm Urbina Meierling, “Latinos Know Bernie Sanders’s Type,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2020, www.wsj.com/articles/latinos-know-bernie-sanderss-type-11583447697. 38. Census: Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, “The Impact of Legal and Illegal Immigration on the Apportionment of Seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020,” Center for Immigration Studies, December 9, 2019, https://cis.org/Report/Impact-Legal-and-Illegal-Immigration-Apportionment-Seats-US-House-Representatives-2020; “Exit Polls 2016,” CNN, November 23, 2016, https://edition.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls.

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They perhaps logically make the necessary political adjustments or cultural exegeses to mask the reality of their own pessimistic economic expectations and existing financial realities. All of the above is a fair stereotype of thousands of young people in Antifa-inspired demonstrations who hit the streets to commit acts of violence in spring 2020.19 The ascendance of conservative outsider Donald Trump and socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016 is a testament to dissatisfaction with the establishments of both the Democratic and Republican parties. These populist outsiders accused both conservative and liberal elites of indifference or outright hostility to the traditional concerns of the middle classes, whether by, respectively, favoring the rich or strangling the citizen through larger and grasping government.

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Nonetheless, a number of studies have tried to assess at least some of the costs to US taxpayers of the millions who enter and reside in America illegally, as offset by contributions in payroll and sales taxes paid to the government. Some studies put the direct costs of illegal immigration at well over $110 billion per year to the treasury.36 In the 2020 Democratic primaries, once front-runner but ultimately failed candidate Bernie Sanders, the avowed socialist, apparently won the majority of Latino votes in early primary races. A number of analysts were confused as to how a seventy-eight-year-old, northeastern, white-male, socialist candidate could appeal to Latinos, many of whom, or their parents, had fled from impoverished countries mismanaged by statist, neosocialist, or communist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Central America and, in some cases, would later vote in the 2020 election in sizable numbers for Donald Trump.

pages: 390 words: 109,870

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Jun 2017

Geert Wilders, ‘Let the Dutch vote on immigration policy’, New York Times, 19 November 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/opinion/geert-wilders-the-dutch-deserve-to-vote-on-immigration-policy.html. Capitalist Donald Trump wants to ‘declare independence from the elites’. Arch-socialist and Democrat candidate Bernie Sanders, thinks Americans are ‘sick and tired of establishment politics and economics’. Daniel Marans, ‘Sanders calls out MSNBC’s corporate ownership—in Interview on MSNBC’, Huffington Post, 7 May 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-asks-who-owns-msnbc_us_572e3d0fe4b0bc9cb0471df1. 4. Ingrid van Biezen, Peter Mair and Thomas Poguntke, ‘Going, going… gone? The decline of party membership in contemporary Europe’, European Journal of Political Research 51:1 (2012), pp. 24–56.

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It’s not the slow, informed and careful politicians who have thrived online; it’s the populists from across the spectrum. It’s the people with the simple, emotional, shareable messages. It’s people like Beppe. Dutch anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders, who’s compared the Qu’ran to Mein Kampf, is the most followed politician on the Dutch social networks. Bernie Sanders was propelled to within an inch of the Democratic Party nomination with help from his online #feelthebern fans and online donations. But the biggest shock of all (to pollsters and mainstream newspapers anyway) took place in 2016 when billionaire magnate, ur-populist, professional simplifier and Twitter addict Donald Trump was elected forty-fifth president of the United States.

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Most reached for the 1930s—naturally, since that after all is the only history most of us are taught in schools—and duly noted the similarities: a period of extreme economic difficulties, rising nationalism and the collapse of the moderate centre. This account implies that right-wing populism—nationalism, xenophobia and anti-elitism—is irrevocably on the march. But there are many other types of radical ideas and movements also on the move. Trump surprised almost every seasoned Washington watcher, but so did openly socialist Bernie Sanders’ close run for the Democratic Party candidacy. Jeremy Corbyn was also re-elected as leader of the UK Labour Party, promising democratic revolution and a strong left-wing agenda. In Spain the left-wing anti-austerity Podemos party, founded in January 2014 by a long-haired bearded professor, won 21 per cent of the vote in the year’s national elections, effectively ending the two-party system.

pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

Congressional bills that would prohibit state and local governments from banning municipal broadband are periodically introduced, so far without success; for example, the Community Broadband Act of 2017 (S. 742) and the Community Broadband Act of 2019 (H.R. 2785). 48, Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren … Warren plan: Elizabeth Warren, “My Plan to Invest in Rural America,” August 7, 2019. Sanders plan: Bernie Sanders, “High-Speed Internet for All,” December 2019. 49, Municipal governments also have … The DC network is called DC-Net, while the program that serves community nonprofits is called DC Columbia Community Access Network (DC-CAN); see “About DC-Net,” dcnet.dc.gov, and “DC-CAN FAQs,” dcnet.dc.gov.

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Merely removing roadblocks will hardly level the playing field, however. Even if they were no longer hamstrung by hostile state legislatures, community networks would still be going up against large firms with extensive resources at their disposal. Playing defense is not enough. Networks will not only need to be defended but extended. Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren put forward plans for doing so during the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. Warren proposed giving $85 billion in federal grants to cooperatives, local governments, nonprofits, and tribes to build infrastructure for “high-speed public broadband.” Sanders called for $150 billion in both grants and technical assistance to municipalities and states “to build publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks.”

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Shapiro, even found that polarization—defined here as a composite of eight measures, from how ideologically consistent someone’s views are to how rarely they split their votes across the two parties—has “increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use the Internet and social media,” which is to say, people older than sixty-five. The polarization frame has a further problem: it evokes a false equivalence between Left and Right. It is certainly true that left-wing movements have benefited from social media. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the candidacies of Bernie Sanders probably wouldn’t have reached the scale they did without Twitter and Facebook. The power shift from traditional media to the more distributed informational worlds of social media has created more room for social- democratic, socialist, and abolitionist ideas to circulate. But the Right has immeasurably more resources with which to exploit this shift.

pages: 523 words: 154,042

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro

See also Michelle Boorstein and Julie Zauzmer, “WikiLeaks: Democratic Party Officials Appear to Discuss Using Sanders’s Faith Against Him,” The Washington Post, July 22, 2016. “I told you a long time ago”: Hayley Walker, “Bernie Sanders Calls for Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Resign in Wake of Email Leaks,” ABC News, July 24, 2016, https://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/bernie-sanders-calls-wasserman-schultz-resign-wake-dnc/story?id=40824983. toothpaste back in the tube: Elizabeth Jensen, “How Should NPR Report on Hacked WikiLeak Emails?,” NPR, https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2016/10/19/498444943/how-should-npr-report-on-hacked-wikileaks-emails.

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Fancy Bear is a nickname for the computer hacking unit of the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie—literally, Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, Russia’s military intelligence agency). Fancy Bear wanted the password to Billy’s Gmail account. It hoped to fish out sensitive communications from the Clinton campaign about rival candidate Bernie Sanders. Billy gave Fancy Bear his password, got dressed, and went to campaign headquarters. Billy was not a Russian mole in the Clinton campaign. Nor was he the only staffer to provide his password. Rather, Billy had fallen for a ruse. The email sent by Fancy Bear looked just like a message from Google.

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An hour later, at 11:39 a.m., WikiLeaks announced the release of “1,062 documents and spreadsheets” with an accompanying link to a searchable database, so that journalists could hunt for the most damaging revelations. Most of the material was mundane campaign business. There were no major bombshells, but some messages betrayed a pro-Clinton bias, and a few even suggested ways of undermining Bernie Sanders. The most incendiary scoop was heavily promoted by WikiLeaks. The chief financial officer of the DNC had sent an email inquiring into whether the DNC might question Sanders on his atheism ahead of the Kentucky and West Virginia contests. “For KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God?

pages: 435 words: 120,574

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Published 5 Sep 2016

As luck would have it, I had one contact in Louisiana—Sally Cappel, the mother-in-law of a former graduate student of mine. It was Sally who would introduce me to the white South and, through a friend, to the right within it. A Lake Charles–based artist, Sally was a progressive Democrat who in the 2016 primary favored Bernie Sanders. Sally’s very dear friend and a world-traveling flight attendant from Opelousas, Louisiana, Shirley Slack was an enthusiast for the Tea Party and Donald Trump. Both women had joined sororities (although different ones) at Louisiana State University. Each had married, had three children, lived in homes walking distance apart in Lake Charles, and had keys to each other’s houses.

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And in that fight, did the entire federal government seem to them on the wrong—betraying—side? Maybe this was the main reason Mike was later to tell me, in reference to the 2016 presidential election and only half jokingly, that he could never bring himself to vote for the menshevik (Hillary Clinton) or the bolshevik (Bernie Sanders). As I leave, Mike hands me the jar of peaches that had been on the table when I arrived. I drive back up Crawfish Street, past tilting yards, onto the potentially sinking only exit route, and wonder what news of Bayou Corne, federal regulations, handouts, and much else he received from church or from his favorite television channel—Fox News. 8 The Pulpit and the Press: “The Topic Doesn’t Come Up” In the first ten minutes after meeting Madonna Massey for coffee at the Lake Charles Starbucks, I notice how many people seem happy to see her.

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And again, Obamacare, global warming, gun control, abortion rights—did these issues, too, fall into the emotional grooves of history? Does it feel like another strike from the North, from Washington, that has put the brown pelican ahead of the Tea Partier waiting in line? I wondered. When I talked to Cappy Brantley in Longville about the 2016 presidential election, he commented with a gentle smile, “Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders—they’re from the North.” A Different Costume “From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugarcane plantations border both sides of the river all the way . . . standing so close together, for long distances,” Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi, “that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street.”

pages: 387 words: 123,237

This Land: The Struggle for the Left
by Owen Jones
Published 23 Sep 2020

This helped to spawn Donald Trump in America; the resurgence of France’s National Front (now, National Rally); the German AfD; Britain’s UKIP and Brexit Party; Spain’s Vox party; Italy’s Lega Nord; Austria’s Freedom Party. This era also saw the ascendancy of left movements which, rather than blaming social crises on the most vulnerable, realized that responsibility lay instead with elite vested interests, and championed a radical redistribution of wealth and power. So rose the Bernie Sanders movement in the United States; the anti-austerity Podemos party in Spain; Syriza in Greece; the Left Bloc in Portugal; La France Insoumise (loosely translated as ‘France Unbowed’); Ireland’s Sinn Fein; and, of course, Corbynism. The Corbyn insurrection, then, was just one manifestation of a broader wave of political unrest across the Western world – albeit a very British one.

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Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias was ‘one of the best orators you’ve seen, had an excellent answer to every question, constantly strategizing, never slipped up, surrounded by a clique who had driven a political project for a decade, done PhDs in political communication, had built a machine. And you’d look at Bernie Sanders in the United States and see this amazing orator.’ Then there was Corbyn, who ‘came here by accident, surrounded by a fairly motley crew’. In short, Walker concluded, ‘I wasn’t sure he was up to this.’ In British politics, holding a general election was no longer – as it used to be – in the gift of the prime minister.

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‘We’d been told for decades that we didn’t want to win, that we were just purists,’ he says. ‘Actually they just defended safe seats. We wanted to win and we fought for supposedly safe Tory seats – because if we were going to win, we needed to do just that.’ In all this, the Corbyn camp looked for inspiration to Bernie Sanders’s insurgent left-wing candidacy for the US Democratic presidential nomination, and how mass rallies had spurred on his campaign, creating a buzz beyond existing core supporters, and impacting both social media and mainstream media coverage. ‘Obviously having indoor events became impossible very quickly, there weren’t enough big spaces in Britain,’ says one aide who accompanied Corbyn across the country throughout the campaign.

pages: 279 words: 100,877

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
by Jennifer Carlson
Published 2 May 2023

But in times of crisis, this trust breaks down, and the everyday work that undergirds democracy suddenly becomes visible and contentious. The populist turn in US politics during the 2016 presidential election cycle intimated such a crisis in political authority.81 Americans across the political spectrum turned to two anti-establishment figures—Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—who railed against global capitalism and political elites, while championing—albeit in strikingly different ways—everyday working people. Advocating a populist brand of law and order, a protectionist foreign policy, a return to America’s manufacturing heydays, and a disdain for inconvenient facts, Trump and his adherents retooled core conservative sentiments into an America First doctrine that gave voice to surging resentment, growing alienation, and sheer rage that was directed up at journalists, politicians, and academics, as well as down toward immigrants, racial minorities, and women.

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While excessive emotionality and panicked hysteria are stereotypically associated with women and marginalized men in society at large, for gun sellers, such behaviors were explicitly captured by the ultimate partisan insult: “liberal.” Though they were enthusiastic about new gun owners, gun sellers bemoaned the liberal and left-leaning clientele who came along with the gun purchasing surge. One California gun seller characterized the new purchasers as “flat out anti-gun people, Bernie Sanders supporters, people who six months ago wouldn’t be a mile near a gun.” Some gun sellers reasoned that while the liberal first-time gun owner might be buying a gun, what they were really doing was blindly following their friends or their political leaders in a moment of panic. One Arizona gun seller joked that the reason liberal gun buyers were buying out the 12-gauge shotguns was “because that’s what Joe Biden told them to get.”49 Another California gun seller quipped at just how out of touch the new liberal gun buyers were by labeling them liberals even among other liberals: “We saw people … leaning toward a liberal, more anti-gun kind of stance.

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Rodrigo, a white Hispanic gun seller in Florida, also explicitly connected people’s political stances to their fitness as gun owners: They are the people—all the people that [people] say shouldn’t have guns, they are the ones coming in to buy guns! Everybody else already had their gun, I hate to say it so plainly like that, but I had a kid walk into my store with a Bernie Sanders shirt on. I got a Trump 2020 poster here, I got all kinds of shit here! This kid says, “Oh I need a gun! I want to use the gun show loophole!” I had to stop him—he left out of here almost crying. I am very confident that I converted him to grow up in the little time I had him, and he actually left here thanking me for Trump [laughs].

pages: 154 words: 47,880

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
by Robert B. Reich
Published 24 Mar 2020

With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked people which candidates they found most attractive. At that time, the leaders of the Democratic Party favored Hillary Clinton to be their candidate, and the leaders of the Republican Party favored Jeb Bush to be theirs. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned either Clinton or Bush. They talked about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up” or “make the system work again” or “stop the corruption” or “end the rigging.” In the following year, Sanders—a seventy-four-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and who wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary—came within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered more than 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.

…

As political analyst Ruy Teixeira and his coauthors put it in The American Prospect, “The Democrats allowed themselves to become the party of the status quo—a status quo perceived to be elitist, exclusionary, and disconnected from the entire range of working-class concerns, but particularly from those voters in white working-class areas. Rightly or wrongly, Hillary Clinton’s campaign exemplified a professional-class status quo that failed to rally enough working-class voters of color and failed to blunt the drift of white working-class voters to Republicans.” In 2016, Bernie Sanders did far better than Clinton with blue-collar voters. He did this by attacking trade agreements, Wall Street greed, income inequality, and big money in politics. In other words, racism and xenophobia were proximate causes of Trump’s 2016 victory, and they continue to contribute to his support.

…

Acknowledgments This book has benefited from the insights of many people I’ve had the privilege to know and to work with over the years, among them Bob Edgar, Karen Hobart Flynn, John Kenneth Galbraith, Gabrielle Giffords, Tom Glynn, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Ted Kennedy, Bill Moyers, Richard Neustadt, Michael Pertschuk, Bernie Sanders, Martha Tierney, Elizabeth Warren, Paul Wellstone, Fred Wertheimer, and Tracy Weston. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, for fostering the intellectually courageous community that is my home, and to four decades of hardworking and eager students at Berkeley, Brandeis, and Harvard, who have taught me more than I ever taught them.

pages: 268 words: 76,709

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
by Barry Estabrook
Published 6 Jun 2011

In most other communities, a disaster of that magnitude would have sparked demands for immediate improvements in zoning laws. But it changed absolutely nothing in Immokalee, where one-quarter of the residences are substandard, according to county housing officials. After touring Immokalee in 2008, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) described the housing conditions there as “deplorable” and said that the shacks and trailers would never have passed a safety inspection in Burlington, the small Vermont city where he had once been mayor. To give them credit, community leaders who want to improve housing in Immokalee find themselves in a catch-22.

…

A typical one read, “The CIW is an attack organization lining the leaders pockets… They make up issues and collect money from dupes that believe their story To bad the people protesting don’t have a clue regarding the facts. A bunch of fools!” In a reply to a story in the Naples News that covered a visit to Immokalee by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), surfxaholic36 wrote: “The CIW is an attack organization and will drive business out of Immokalee while they line their own pockets. They make money through donations by attacking large companies and have attacked Yum, McDonald’s and now Burger King to get money for there own organization.

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“You can imagine yourself trying to make an honest presentation of how we saw the issues, when the rest of the table knew for sure that I was the devil incarnate, including the senators, all Democrats. There was not a friend in that hearing room. It was no good to be falsely accused and so defamed as an industry for something that we weren’t doing. But Senate hearings are an art—almost like bull baiting.” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) presided over the hearing. Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) were also present. All of them had reputations for being vehemently prolabor. In their opening statements, the senators focused on wages, honing in on two claims that the Tomato Exchange had made.

pages: 236 words: 77,546

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice
by Fredrik Deboer
Published 3 Aug 2020

Candidates are also debating various methods to dramatically expand government subsidy of higher education, the importance of paid family leave, a universal $15/hour (or higher) minimum wage, and similarly aggressive left reforms. The ultimate source of this leftward tilt from Democrats, so recently a thoroughly neoliberal/centrist party, is of course Bernie Sanders, whose candidacy for the presidential nomination galvanized a new generation of young progressives who refuse to accept the thin gruel so often offered by Democrats. For many of these young people, the Great Recession was the fire that forged their radicalism, as some of the wealthiest people and institutions in the world were bailed out to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars while regular people lost their jobs by the millions and received no help from Washington at all.

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That’s simply welfare-state liberalism, though the nationalization of the health insurance system is arguably a socialist goal. But single-payer care has the advantage of already working in several other developed countries and would meet far less resistance than nationalizing the entire medical industry. In 2017, Bernie Sanders unveiled a plan with a name that had already been popularized by health care activists: Medicare for All. Tying support of single-payer care to an established, effective, and popular program, the plan calls for an ambitious expansion in the positive rights of all Americans. The plan would ensure that everyone has access to quality health care without going bankrupt from accessing it.

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(Some tedious people point out that total higher education spending has risen in the past decades, but this is obtuse. Between 2000 and 2017 undergraduate enrollments grew by almost a third.16 Of course total expenditures went up as dramatically more people were going to school; what matters for the lives of individual students is the level of per-student support, which has indisputably declined.) Bernie Sanders has presented a plan to fix this, too. He argues that public school tuition should be free. The dollar figure he puts on this is $75 billion, which he proposes to pay for with a tax on Wall Street speculation. (Some critics, unsurprisingly, predict the cost would be far higher.) There are a few tricky aspects to this; for one, if the federal government guarantees adequate tuition dollars for every public university student, what’s to stop some states from slashing funding for state colleges, given that the feds will cover the rest?

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

“they belong to a class”: John Berger, “The Nature of Mass Demonstrations,” International Socialism 1st series, no. 34 (Autumn 1968): 11–12. “maybe somebody who doesn’t look kinda like you”: Bridget Read, “The Bernie Rally Felt So Much Bigger Than Bernie,” The Cut, October 21, 2019; Bernie Sanders, “Bernie’s Back Rally with AOC in New York,” Bernie Sanders channel on YouTube video, October 19, 2019, at 2:47:27. “all the possibilities”: Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2003), 143. Freud’s essay was originally published in 1919. “If you have never believed”: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, conversation with author, October 17, 2022.

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He knew that a large sector of unionized blue-collar workers felt betrayed by corporate Democrats who had signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures in the 1990s, and that their anger deepened when the party bailed out banks instead of workers and homeowners after the 2008 crash. He paid close attention to the ways Occupy Wall Street was dismissed and then crushed, and to how Bernie Sanders, whose left-populist 2016 presidential campaign grew out of that movement, faced all kinds of dirty tricks from the Democratic Party establishment as it closed ranks around Hillary Clinton. Bannon saw an opportunity to peel away a portion of the male unionized workforce that had always voted for Democrats—most of it white, but not all of it.

…

Many conservatives, meanwhile, oppose this kind of techno fetishism for different reasons; they see it as an affront to God’s plan. Bannon recognized similar neglect happening with regard to Big Pharma. Drug company price gouging and profiteering have traditionally been the purview of the left; they’re the kind of thing Bernie Sanders rails against. But aside from some grumbling, there was weak resistance among progressives to the way vaccine manufacturers were profiteering from the pandemic, and so Bannon became the one taking on Big Pharma’s greed—but, once again, via unfounded conspiracy theories rather than the real scandals.

pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Contrary to what the advocates of market liberalization would predict, the Bretton Woods system provided the most stable period in the history of capitalism and also its fastest growing. Source: Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff (2009). What has changed since the crisis is the opposition to capitalism. Whether it comes in the form of grassroots movements like Occupy Wall Street, the rise of the populist left through figures like Bernie Sanders in the US or Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, or the anti-globalization backlash from the supporters of Brexit and Trump, there is a growing sense that the last four decades of Western history under liberal capitalism have been a disappointment. Particularly since many of the laissez-faire policies applied during this period promised to “democratize” the economy by reigning in the state and offering opportunity and choice But it is fortunate for the defenders of laissez-faire that an alternative to capitalism has remained elusive in mainstream discourse.

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Much like the North Koreans, the defenders of liberal capitalism have threatened their critics that any major systemic changes to the economic status quo will result in unbearable economic dislocation and massive destruction of wealth for rich and poor alike. Not a day seemingly goes by without the right-wing and centrist media reminding its viewers that the economic policies espoused by “radical” left politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Jeremy Corbyn will inevitably turn their countries into Venezuela. Or that socialist and redistributive policies may work in countries like the Nordics but, for unexplained reasons, not in countries like the US (universal healthcare being the most egregious example). These arguments preclude an honest comparative discussion of economic models in mainstream discourse, which further reinforces the fear factor when policies that go against the prevailing orthodoxy are proposed.

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One that is entirely unwarranted since asset managers are using other people’s money against their interests, particularly on social and environmental matters.15 Stock Issuance This method involves forcing companies of a certain size to issue a small percentage of their equity each year as shares into an employee-ownership fund. Such a scheme is has been proposed by the UK Labour Party at 1% a year for ten years, and Bernie Sanders in the US later proposed 2% a year.16 It should be observed that businesses already do this whenever they need additional financing or when employees (usually executives) paid with stock options decide to exercise them. The downside to issuance is share dilution: existing stock owners will see their shares in the company diluted in proportion to the amount of new shares.

pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by Tyler Cowen
Published 27 Feb 2017

They fit the standard description of cosmopolitan and usually take an interest in the cultures of other countries, though, ironically, many of them have become sufficiently insulated from hardship and painful change that they are provincial in their own way and have become somewhat of a political target (from both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the recent campaigns). Because they are intelligent, articulate, and often socially graceful, they usually seem like very nice people, and often they are. Think of a financier or lawyer who vacations in France or Italy, has wonderful kids, and donates generously to his or her alma mater. I think of these people as the wealthiest and best educated 3 to 5 percent of the American population. 2.

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The underlying constitutional issues have yet to be adjudicated, but the on-the-ground reality is that Brookfield Properties and the City of New York ended up getting their way. Eventually the weather became colder, and Occupy Wall Street is now a kind of misty nostalgic footnote to history. If the ideas of that movement do take off, it likely will be through the educated and quite peaceful supporters of candidates like Bernie Sanders, not through public violence.12 Or consider the 2004 Democratic National Convention. As you might expect, there were numerous would-be demonstrators. They ended up being confined to a “Demonstration Zone,” which one federal judge described as analogous to one of Piranesi’s etchings of a prison.

…

Good matches are lots of fun, but in a country with so much social stagnation and extremely good matching, eventually we become aware that we too are most of the time being turned away at the gate. 8. POLITICAL STAGNATION, THE DWINDLING OF TRUE DEMOCRACY, AND ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AS PROPHET OF OUR TIME Anti-establishment insurgent campaigns were the talk of the 2016 presidential campaign, and both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were legitimate anti-establishment candidates. But a peek beneath the surface reveals that much of the fear and anger that drove their campaigns was based not on a hope for change in Washington but on a hope for a return to the past. Trump’s rhetoric about “making America great again” was, when you looked at the fine print, mostly a promise that in electing him, voters could avoid the forces of change that are sweeping over the rest of the world, whether it be the loss of manufacturing jobs, an increasing dependence on immigrants, or the loss of the political and cultural dominance of white men.

pages: 283 words: 87,166

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval
by Jason Cowley
Published 15 Nov 2018

And this is why Bernie Sanders was able to have far more success than anyone imagined. He was originally thought to be a fringe candidate who would maybe get five, ten per cent of the vote. And yet he fought Hillary Clinton almost to a draw in many of the Democratic primaries. No one would have imagined that. The mainstream of the Democratic Party had so embraced the financial industry that it was unable to provide an effective counterweight when it came to the financial crisis or to the aftermath, the regulatory debate. And oddly enough, Trump from the right and Bernie Sanders from the left have a good deal of overlap.

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Progressive forces, if they’re not coming at this from a strong centrist position, are likely to find themselves just enough off-centre on the debates around culture and identity, never mind the economy, where they’re going to be defeated by a populism of the right. And if you put a populism of the left against that, which is where some people want to go – it’s where the British Labour Party’s gone [and] many Democrats argue that, really, if we’d had Bernie Sanders, we’d have done better – if we go down that path, we’ll just get beaten bigger.’ * * * Is this the beginning of Tony Blair’s second act in British public life? Will enough people be prepared to listen to him, or is the stain of the Iraq misadventure and subsequent pursuit of personal wealth too pronounced?

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What he said was this: the Tories would call a snap general election in the early summer of 2017; Labour would be ready for the election and, because of the party’s hundreds of thousands of new paying members, it would have the funds to contest it well; the party would exploit its social media expertise; and Jeremy Corbyn would campaign as a Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump-style anti-establishment populist. He said Corbyn and the party would confound expectations. I remember thinking: ‘Good luck with that strategy, sir!’ Yet much of what Milne forecast happened after Theresa May called the snap election that destroyed her authority and resulted in an extraordinary surge of support for the Labour Party, which had begun the campaign adrift by more than twenty per cent in some polls (Corbyn, after a dynamic campaign and popular left-wing manifesto, delivered the biggest increase in Labour’s general election vote share since 1945, from thirty per cent in 2015 to forty per cent in 2017).

pages: 91 words: 24,469

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics
by Mark Lilla
Published 14 Aug 2017

If that is your approach to fishing, you had better become a vegan. * To repeat: nothing I say here about citizenship should be taken to imply anything about who should be granted it or how noncitizens should be treated. I am interested here only in what citizenship is. * Consider this statement Bernie Sanders made not long after the 2016 election: One of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics. I think it’s a step forward in America if you have an African-American head or CEO of some major corporation. But you know what, if that guy is going to be shipping jobs out of his country and exploiting his workers, doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot if he’s black or white or Latino. . . .

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” * American progressives’ single-minded focus on economics owes more to Marxism than to the original Progressive movement. If they want to become a major force in American politics again, it would be wise for them to look back to the movement’s founders and their generous view of the country and its destiny, rather than to the latest books from Verso Press. Teddy Roosevelt should be required reading for all Bernie Sanders voters today (though they will have to skip over the jingoistic bits). * One of the small ironies of life in the Reagan years is that conservatives, seeing that they were locked out of the university, created a parallel intellectual universe, funded by rich patrons, complete with magazines, publishing houses, student newspapers, campus organizations, and summer schools where enthusiastic committed cadres were educated and integrated into networks that are still a powerful force in Washington.

pages: 332 words: 89,668

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America
by Jamie Bronstein
Published 29 Oct 2016

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Laura Bear, “Capital and Time: Uncertainty and Qualitative Measures of Inequality,” British Journal of Sociology vol. 65 no. 4 (2014): 639–649; Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2015). 12. Jim Tankersley, “The Thing Bernie Sanders Says about Inequality that No Other Candidate Will Touch,” Washington Post, July 13, 2015, available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/13/what-bernie-sanders-is-willing-to-sacrifice-for-a-more-equal-society/, accessed July 17, 2015. 13. Leslie McCall, The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs about Inequality, Opportunity and Redistribution (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 48. 14.

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Historian Steven Fraser’s Age of Acquiescence (2015) compared the modern American public unfavorably with Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were not afraid to call out class warfare against the working poor when they saw it.11 Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich’s documentary Inequality for All (2013) reached a wide audience, with an accessible message: the prosperity of the United States hinges on the middle class having an income to spend. After all, a multimillionaire can only drive one car at a time, wear one change of clothing at a time, sleep on one or two pillows at a time. Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders made economic inequality one of the cornerstones of his unexpectedly popular campaign: “Unchecked growth—especially when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent—is absurd … Where we’ve got to move is not growth for the sake of growth, but we’ve got to move to a society that provides a high quality of life for our people.”

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Others issued a vague call for tax restructuring, or job growth through the formation of local cooperative movements using environmentally sustainable practices.41 English professor and Occupy participant Stephen Collis advocated expansion of public transit and free education and health care.42 Some form of reviving collective bargaining, although perhaps not through a traditional union movement, was also suggested.43 A slow movement overly focused on democratic process at the best of times, Occupy was open to being portrayed by the press as increasingly dirty, dangerous, unfocused, or even Marxist and laughable.44 The Occupiers were so enamored of direct democracy that they celebrated divisions within the movement rather than making progress toward some common goal.45 Nonetheless, the Occupy movement brought sustained public attention to the issue of inequality and the degree to which American politics had been captured by the wealthiest 1 percent. Awareness of the issue among young people arguably fueled Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s popularity during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. DISSATISFACTION WITH THE STATUS QUO: THE TEA PARTY A right-wing protest movement emerged a year before the Occupy movement. It was, in its own way, also a protest movement against inequality, but it defined the major issues differently.

pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy
by David Gelles
Published 30 May 2022

He called climate change: Peter Sasso, “Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch: Global Warming Skeptic,” mrc NewsBusters, July 3, 2008, https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/peter-sasso/2008/07/03/former-general-electric-ceo-jack-welch-global-warming-skeptic. “While some of America’s”: Gryta and Mann, Lights Out, 137 “General Electric was created”: Bernie Sanders meets with the Daily News Editorial Board, New York Daily News, April 1, 2016, https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/transcript-bernie-sanders-meets-news-editorial-board-article-1.2588306. “GE has been in business”: Jeffrey Immelt, April 6, 2016, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ge-ceo-bernie-sanders-says-were-destroying-the-moral-fabric-of-america-hes-wrong/2016/04/06/8499bc8c-fc23-11e5-80e4-c381214de1a3_story.html. “the imperial CEO”: James Stewart, “Metaphor for G.E.’s Ills: A Corporate Jet With No Passengers,” New York Times, November 2, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/business/ge-corporate-jets.html.

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The dividend had been cut. Stalwart businesses like plastics and appliances had been sold off. And no matter what, the stock wouldn’t rise. With the news out of GE only getting worse, Nelson Peltz, one of the original corporate raiders, bought a minority stake in the stock and began agitating for change. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who was running for president, had Immelt in his sights as well. In an interview with the New York Daily News, the senator said greedy companies were “destroying the moral fabric of the country.” When asked for an example, he cited GE. “General Electric was created in this country by American workers and American consumers,” Sanders said.

pages: 480 words: 119,407

Invisible Women
by Caroline Criado Perez
Published 12 Mar 2019

Naipaul) with what he felt he was witnessing with college students. Students today, he claimed, were so primed to focus on diversity that they ‘have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good’. Two days after this was published, ex-Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders was in Boston at a stop on his book tour84 explaining that ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, I’m a woman! Vote for me!’85 In Australia, Paul Kelly, editor of the Australian, described Trump’s victory as ‘a revolt against identity politics’,86 while over in the UK, Labour MP Richard Burgon tweeted that Trump’s inauguration was ‘what can happen when centre/left parties abandon transformation of economic system and rely on identity politics’.87 The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins concluded the annus horribilis that was 2016 with a diatribe against ‘the identity apostles’, who had been ‘over-defensive’ of minorities, and thus killed off liberalism.

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Similarly, a 2004 Indian study of local councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan found that reserving one-third of the seats for women increased investment in infrastructure related to women’s needs.5 A 2007 paper looking at female representation in India between 1967 and 2001 also found that a 10% increase in female political representation resulted in a 6% increase in ‘the probability that an individual attains primary education in an urban area’.6 In short, decades of evidence demonstrate that the presence of women in politics makes a tangible difference to the laws that get passed. And in that case, maybe, just maybe, when Bernie Sanders said, ‘It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman! Vote for me!”’, he was wrong. The problem isn’t that anyone thinks that’s good enough. The problem is that no one does. On the other hand plenty of people seem to think that a candidate being a woman is a good enough reason not to vote for her.

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This is not a groundbreaking opinion. From Anne Applebaum (‘Hillary Clinton’s extraordinary, irrational, overwhelming ambition’8), to Hollywood mogul, democratic donor and ‘one-time Clinton ally’9 David Geffen (‘God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton?’10), via Colin Powell (‘unbridled ambition’11), Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager (‘don’t destroy the Democratic Party to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions’12), and, of course, good old Julian Assange (‘eaten alive by her ambitions’13), the one thing we all seem to be able to agree on (rare in this polarised age) is that Hillary Clinton’s ambition is unseemly.

pages: 239 words: 62,005

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
by Dave Rubin
Published 27 Apr 2020

Interestingly, Donald Trump has been resetting our policy of credible deterrence quite well. When he killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in an airstrike in January of 2020, many media elites and Twitter warriors proclaimed this was the beginning of World War III. As of this writing, the war has yet to break out. Bad news for MSNBC, good news for the rest of the world. Bernie Sanders and his socialist buddies love to say that they’d avoid military action at all costs, but they ignore the fact that we’re the world’s last remaining superpower. Does Bernie know that if we constantly say we are anti-war that it might actually bring war upon us? Perhaps he should try taking a Psych 101 class once he makes college free for everyone, including old socialists.

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Captain America, The Hulk, and Luke Skywalker are all members of the hypocritical superelite. Ironically, those who do flee America are usually rich people wanting to escape being taxed to the hilt by greedy politicians and the IRS. Something that’s only going to get worse when future president Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren executes Order 66 to eliminate the remaining billionaires scattered across the galaxy. And that’s the suspicious thing about the left’s self-loathing. The worst offenders tend to be the most successful—the ones who’ve benefited most from Western values and institutions such as capitalism and pluralism.

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Instead, they amplified the feelings of Democrat senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who didn’t wait to hail the incident as “a modern-day attempted lynching.” Unsurprisingly, the hits kept coming from Democrats on Twitter, who now had an incident that could tell a story they so deeply wanted to be true. Bernie Sanders hailed it as proof of the “surging hostility towards minorities around the country.” Nancy Pelosi called it “an affront to our humanity.” And congresswoman Maxine Waters said she was “dedicated to finding the culprits and bringing them to justice.” Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, said: “New York State calls this attack on Jussie Smollett exactly what it is—a hate crime.”

pages: 359 words: 96,019

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
by Billy Gallagher
Published 13 Feb 2018

Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2016. https://www.wsj.com/articles/snapchat-debuts-political-campaign-show-1454015686 Schroeder, Stan. “Snapchat Positions Itself as Breaking News Platform with San Bernardino Coverage.” Mashable, December 3, 2015. http://mashable.com/2015/12/03/snapchat-san-bernardino/#COriFAOfl5qR Shields, Mike. “Bernie Sanders Is Running a 9-Day Snapchat Ad Campaign in Iowa.” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2016. https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-sanders-is-running-a-9-day-snapchat-ad-campaign-in-iowa-1453806001 Vincent, James. “Ted Cruz Trolled Donald Trump with a Snapchat Filter at Last Night’s Debate.” Verge, January 29, 2016. https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/29/10867830/ted-cruz-donald-trump-snapchat-filter Wagner, Kurt.

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“Think of the primaries like The Hunger Games—but with much less attractive people,” Hamby explained in the pilot episode. The result was an interesting hybrid of the professionally produced Discover and the user-generated Live Stories. Users were soon submitting photos and videos taken behind the scenes, often at events closed to the press. Hamby interviewed a cast of characters, from a canvasser for Bernie Sanders to Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie to an Iowa high schooler who registered “Deez Nuts” as a candidate. The format had its drawbacks. Hamby’s segments were shot on high-resolution cameras and allowed to run longer than ten seconds, the limit Snapchat traditionally imposed. But user-submitted snaps were shot on smartphones and subject to the normal limitations of the app, so it was often difficult to hear exactly what a candidate was saying.

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Soon the candidates started using Snapchat’s geofilters as well, paying to have custom filters at debate halls and rallies. In January 2016, Ted Cruz mocked Donald Trump’s absence at the final Republican debate with a filter asking, “Where is Ducking Donald?” accompanied by a yellow duck sporting a Trump haircut. Bernie Sanders’s campaign ran a different geofilter every day for nine straight days leading up to the Iowa caucus. Most urged voters to “Feel the Bern” and get out to vote on caucus night. In May 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign placed a geofilter at the Anaheim Convention Center, the site of a Trump rally.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

At the outset of the snap general election, he cheerfully reminded critics of this fact before confounding their expectations yet again. Everything Corbyn, his allies, and his supporters have achieved has been against the odds – against all odds. August 2017 Introduction: Against All Odds There’s Something about Jeremy Early 2016, and Tony Blair is ‘baffled’. What with Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, and Bernie Sanders in the United States, he sighs: ‘I’m not sure I fully understand politics right now.’1 His confusion is to be expected. He had warned Labour, to no avail: ‘if your heart is with Jeremy, get a transplant’. His former confederate Peter Mandelson joined in, telling that bastion of Labour values the Financial Times that: ‘The Labour Party is in mortal danger.’

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What is at stake here is a generational change that, though it has been seen in other countries first, is now intersecting with Britain’s democratic decline to produce this challenge to the status quo. From the first ruptures of the anti-capitalist movement to Occupy; from Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela to Spain, Portugal and Greece; Leftist success has been propelled in large part by new movements of the young. Even in the United States, hardly a typical case in other respects, Bernie Sanders’s support is overwhelmingly concentrated among the under thirties.36 Much is written, not wholly incorrectly, of how these activists are shaped by ‘post-materialist’ values – support for peace and gay rights, for example. But far more fundamentally, this generation is the one to suffer the most from the consolidation of neoliberalism, as they are paying more for access to higher education, have far less access to diminished public services and welfare, and suffer far higher rates of unemployment.

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Television and online news coverage of the Labour Party in crisis’, Media Reform Coalition and Birkbeck University of London, July 2016; Jane Martinson, ‘BBC Trust says Laura Kuenssberg report on Corbyn was inaccurate’, Guardian, 18 January 2017; Justin Lewis, ‘Newspapers, not BBC, led the way in biased election coverage’, The Conversation, 15 May 2015; Tom Mills, ‘The General Strike to Corbyn: 90 years of BBC establishment bias’, Open Democracy, 6 May 2016; Tom Mills, ‘Post-democratic broadcasting’, LRB blog, 18 May 2017; Stephen Cushion, ‘The Tories are the big winners in the TV airtime war’, The 650, 12 May 2017; ‘Media coverage of the 2017 General Election campaign’, Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, Loughborough University, April–June 2017. 12Teemu Henriksson, ‘World Press Trends 2017: the audience-focused era arrives’, World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, 8 June 2017. 13‘Newspapers: daily readership by age’, State of the News Media 2016, Pew Research Centre, 15 June 2016; Jasper Jackson, ‘National daily newspaper sales fall by half a million in a year’, Guardian, 10 April 2015; Roy Greenslade, ‘Suddenly, national newspapers are heading for that print cliff fall’, Guardian, 27 May 2016; Roy Greenslade, ‘Popular newspapers suffer greater circulation falls than qualities’, Guardian, 19 January 2017; David Bond, ‘UK newspapers team up to combat falling revenues’, Financial Times, 23 October 2016; Teemu Henriksson, ‘World Press Trends 2017: the audience-focused era arrives’, World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, 8 June 2017; Peter Preston, ‘TV news faces a threat familiar to newspapers’, Guardian, 17 April 2016. 14Teemu Henriksson, ‘World Press Trends 2017: the audience-focused era arrives’, World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, 8 June 2017; Peter Kellner, ‘The problem of trust’, YouGov, 13 November 2012; James Grierson, ‘Britons’ trust in government, media and business falls sharply’, Guardian, 16 January 2017. 15Tom Mills, The BBC: Myth of a Public Service, Verso: London, 2016 16Matti Littunen, ‘An analysis of news and advertising in the UK general election’, Open Democracy, 7 June 2017; Jim Waterson and Tom Phillips, ‘People on Facebook only want to share pro-Corbyn, anti-Tory news stories’, Buzzfeed, 7 May 2017; Giles Turner and Jeremy Khan, ‘U.K. Labour’s savvy use of social media helped win young voters’, Bloomberg, 11 June 2017. Introduction: Against All Odds 1David Smith, ‘Tony Blair admits he is baffled by rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn’, Guardian, 23 February 2016. 2‘Tony Blair: If your heart’s with Jeremy Corbyn, get a transplant’, Guardian, 22 July 2015; Peter Mandelson, ‘The Labour Party is in mortal danger’, Financial Times, 27 August 2015; Rowena Mason and Josh Halliday, ‘Gordon Brown urges Labour not to be party of protest by choosing Jeremy Corbyn’, Guardian, 17 August 2015. 3Robert Mendick, ‘Tony Blair gives Kazakhstan’s autocratic president tips on how to defend a massacre’, Telegraph, 24 August 2014. 4Tony Benn, Office Without Power: Diaries 1968–72, London: Arrow, 1989. 5Tony Benn, speech to the Engineering Union, AUEW Conference, May 1971.

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The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Published 7 Jan 2020

Quoted in Raymond Lonergan, “A Steadfast Friend of Labor,” in Irving Dillard, ed., Mr. Justice Brandeis, Great American (St. Louis: Modern View Press, 1941), 42. 7. Brookings Institute, “An Economic Agenda for America: A Conversation with Senator Bernie Sanders” (February 9, 2015), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/20150210_sanders_economic_agenda_transcript.pdf, accessed July 28, 2018. 8. Franklin Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message to Congress” (January 11, 1944). 9. Bernie Sanders, “Speech at Syracuse, New York” (April 12, 2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3W9SthxzsI, accessed July 30, 2018. 10. Claudia Goldin and Robert A. Margo, “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure of the United States at Mid-Century,” National Bureau of Economic Research (August 1991). 11.

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Indeed, by the twenty-first century, the values that Trump embodied had become as thoroughly and authentically American as any of those specified in the oracular pronouncements of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt. Trump’s critics saw him as an abomination. Perhaps he was. Yet he was also very much a man of his time. Bernie Ignites But we begin with the candidate who was in some respects Trump’s polar opposite and in others his doppelgänger. Like Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders was born in New York City in the 1940s. Biographical similarities pretty much end there. Sanders, after all, became a Vermonter, a self-professed socialist, and a career politician. In his contribution to the politics of 2016, Sanders reprised the role that former vice president and inveterate New Dealer Henry Wallace had played back in the election of 1948.

pages: 210 words: 65,833

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

The Conservative right is about to discover that, for multinational corporations located in Britain, there is one thing worse than being regulated by Brussels, and that is not being regulated by Brussels. Secondly, there are those uber-elite individuals who still dwell in Blair’s fin de siècle bubble of a single open global society, including Blair himself. Blair has said that he cannot understand the rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.8 Presumably he is even more flummoxed by the Brexit vote, and especially by how it sucked in quasi-Blairites such as Michael Gove. Blair’s myopia has many possible explanations. But one is that people like him do genuinely now inhabit a borderless global space, in which laws, regulations and policies are only ever things to be viewed from above, and never things one is forced into accepting.

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It will all come out anyway. It is also telling that these successful populists are significantly older than your average 1990s ‘Third Way’ politician. Where the latter was a man in his early forties (now re-enacted by Emmanuel Macron), in recent years we have witnessed the unforeseen rise of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump, the oldest man ever to become president. These men have lurked on the margins of public life for decades, and a stockpile of images and stories has accumulated around them. Both Corbyn and Sanders have an impressive archive, appearing in photographs as young men being manhandled by police as they protested against racial segregation.

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Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Verso, 2014. 6 T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014. 7 ‘Consultants reap rewards of Whitehall’s Brexit scramble’, Financial Times, 7 June 2019. 8 ‘Tony Blair admits he is baffled by rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn’, Guardian, 23 February 2016. 9 Esther Addley, ‘Study shows 60% of Britons believe in conspiracy theories’, Guardian, 23 November 2018. 10 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, 2006. 11 H. Jones et al., Go Home: The Politics of Immigration Controversies, Manchester University Press, 2017. 12 H.

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Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

I had first become seriously concerned about Facebook in February 2016, in the run-up to the first US presidential primary. As a political junkie, I was spending a few hours a day reading the news and also spending a fair amount of time on Facebook. I noticed a surge on Facebook of disturbing images, shared by friends, that originated on Facebook Groups ostensibly associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign. The images were deeply misogynistic depictions of Hillary Clinton. It was impossible for me to imagine that Bernie’s campaign would allow them. More disturbing, the images were spreading virally. Lots of my friends were sharing them. And there were new images every day. I knew a great deal about how messages spread on Facebook.

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Anyone can start a Group, and there is no guarantee that the organizer is the person he or she claims to be. In addition, there are few limits on the names of Groups, which enables bad actors to create Groups that appear to be more legitimate than they really are. I hypothesized to Senator Warner that some of the pro–Bernie Sanders Groups I encountered in early 2016 may have been part of the Russian campaign. We hypothesized that the Russians might have seeded Facebook Groups across a range of divisive issues, possibly including Groups on opposite sides of the issue to maximize impact. The way the Groups might have worked is that a troll account—a Russian impersonating an American—might have formed the Group and seeded it with a number of bots.

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In a world where web traffic anywhere can be monetized with advertising and where millions of people are gullible, entrepreneurs will take advantage. There had been widespread coverage of young men in Macedonia whose efforts to sell ads against fabricated news stories mostly failed with Clinton voters but worked really well with fans of Trump and, to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders. On its face, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory is unbelievable. A pedophilia ring associated with the Democratic Party at a pizza parlor in DC? Coded messages in emails? And yet people believed it, one so deeply that he, in his own words, “self-investigated it” and fired three bullets into the pizza parlor.

pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages
by Annelise Orleck
Published 27 Feb 2018

Perhaps the opposite. Offering a different vision, Bello ran for the Philippine Senate in 2016, demanding justice for low-wage workers and small landholders. American observers, noting the impassioned rhetoric and the devotion of his young supporters, compared him to Vermont’s democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders, then running for president of the United States. Though both were ultimately unsuccessful, supporters believe that their campaigns sowed seeds that continue to sprout.8 In Mexico, rebellion against the damages of globalization and neoliberalism has been ongoing since the 1990s. Historian Iain Boal compared the breakup of Mexico’s ejido common lands and the displacement of millions of Mexican peasants in the 1980s and 1990s to the industrialization of England four centuries earlier, when enclosures of “the commons” sparked decades of rebellions, land occupations, and the rise of early labor unions.9 The Zapatistas weren’t quite the machine-smashing Luddites, but they offered indigenous community and traditional knowledge as resistance and solution.

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Sixty percent of Latinx workers in the US earned less than $15 an hour in 2016. Half of African American workers did.3 With so many working people living at, or just above, the poverty line, the speed with which the living-wage movement caught fire in the 2010s should not have surprised anyone. Nor should the growing appeal of populist politicians from Bernie Sanders, Walden Bello, and Jeremy Corbyn on the left to Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, and Marine Le Pen on the right. Bleu Rainer and Keegan Shepard insist that broad coalition-building represents the only real solution. For we are all fast-food workers now. CHAPTER 14 DAYS OF DISRUPTION, 2016 NOVEMBER 29, 2016: Picketers appeared with the first light.

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On April 5, 2017, they delivered a petition signed by twelve thousand faculty, students, New Haven residents, and elected officials calling on the university to negotiate. Messages of support came in from New Haven’s mayor, both of Connecticut’s US senators, numerous state representatives, and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Yale appealed the NLRB decision, bargaining that board members appointed by Trump would reverse the ruling.20 Comparative literature student Julia Powers refused to budge. “As contingent and replaceable workers . . . we’re very vulnerable,” she said. She was fasting to show that this was a communal struggle.

pages: 618 words: 179,407

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023

FTX Future Fund: Reynolds, “Team Behind Sam Bankman-Fried’s Charity FTX Future Fund Have Quit over Possible ‘Deception or Dishonesty”; Tracy Wang, “Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Empire ‘Was Run by a Gang of Kids in the Bahamas,’” Fortune, November 11, 2022, https://fortune.com/2022/11/11/sam-bankman-fried-crypto-empire-ftx-alameda-run-gang-kids-bahamas-who-all-dated-each-other/. Bernie Sanders’s proposal: Thomas Kaplan, “Bernie Sanders Proposes a Wealth Tax: ‘I Don’t Think That Billionaires Should Exist,’” New York Times, September 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/us/politics/bernie-sanders-wealth-tax.html. “I think billionaires shouldn’t exist”: Mikaela Loach, Twitter, September 22, 2022, https://twitter.com/mikaelaloach/status/1572854129684541440?lang=en. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Bill Gates has been a focus of my reporting since 2018, when I pitched an investigative reporting project on the Gates Foundation and won an Alicia Patterson reporting fellowship.

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You’re saying they’re immoral although they have undoubtedly already saved … several million lives, perhaps more than any other living person today.” Variations on this winning argument have long played counterpoint to any criticism of the billionaire class. As high-profile political figures in U.S. politics—from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—challenge the very existence of billionaires, they do so with considerable vulnerability. Because what they’re arguing for is an end to the Gates Foundation and, by extension, the deaths of millions of children. This talking point has become something of a conventional wisdom in the mainstream discourse on Gates, cited by so many people for so many years that it has become understood alongside the law of gravity and the certainty of death and taxes.

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This means putting an end to the tax avoidance strategies of multibillionaires and multibillionaire corporations, making Bill Gates (and Big Pharma and Big Tech and everyone else) pay their fair share. My own view is that with the richest people on earth, like Bill Gates, the currently proposed wealth tax—even Bernie Sanders’s proposal to take eight percent a year from the very richest people—doesn’t go far enough. A wealth tax would limit Bill Gates’s ability to become richer, but it would not change the fact that he is obscenely rich. Addressing our Bill Gates problem requires us to consider far more aggressive taxation measures, either a much higher wealth tax or a different mechanism.

pages: 595 words: 143,394

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections
by Mollie Hemingway
Published 11 Oct 2021

Right before the Iowa caucuses, something ominous happened. Pollster Ann Selzer, who was legendary in the polling world for producing the most accurate polls of her home state, withheld the results of her final Iowa poll because an interviewee complained that former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg was not given as an option. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s supporters speculated that the poll had been killed because it showed him ahead. The results were later leaked to Twitter, showing Sanders in the lead with 22 percent, followed by Warren with 18 percent, Buttigieg with 16 percent, and Biden with 13 percent. The last days of campaigning in Iowa were intense.

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One of Acronym’s founders, Tara McGowan, was married to Buttigieg strategist Michael Halle. Further, Shadow had recently been paid to do work for both the Biden and Buttigieg campaigns. Even setting aside these suspicious relationships and the vote-counting failures, the undeniable fact was that Bernie Sanders had emerged from Iowa with the most votes and somehow ended up with fewer delegates that would count toward securing the nomination. Sanders’s supporters were understandably grumbling that the fix was in. “It was like we were back in 2016,” one of Sanders’s Iowa campaign volunteers told Rolling Stone.

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When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo backed President Trump’s suggestion that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, the New York Times was upset and said that “intelligence agencies say they have reached no conclusion on the issue.”181 But despite a growing pattern of evidence that China needed to be held to account for unleashing a deadly virus on the world, Democrats remained laser-focused on blaming the Trump administration. Bernie Sanders made it clear: “There are legitimate questions we must ask about the Chinese government’s inability to contain the virus. But Pompeo’s incitement is a blatant effort to distract us from questions about Trump’s own disastrous failure.”182 * * * Unlike the Chinese government’s unduly praised pandemic response, the Trump administration’s effort to produce a vaccine was already evaluating mRNA technology that looked promising.

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Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream
by Arianna Huffington
Published 7 Sep 2010

Partisanship pop quiz time.75 See if you can identify the bleeding-heart liberal who said this: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” Noam Chomsky? Michael Moore? Bernie Sanders? No, it was that unrepentant lefty five-star general Dwight Eisenhower, in 1953, just a few months after taking office—a time when the economy was booming and unemployment was at 2.7 percent.76 Yet today, while America’s economy sputters down the road to recovery and the middle class struggles to make ends meet—with more than twenty-six million people unemployed or underemployed and record numbers of homes being lost to foreclosure—the “guns versus butter” argument isn’t even part of the national debate.77 Of course, today, the argument might be more accurately framed as “ICBM nukes, predator drones, and missile-defense shields versus jobs, affordable college, decent schools, foreclosure prevention, and fixing the gaping holes in our social safety net.”

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Because fees account for 39 percent of credit card issuers’ revenue, the banks will keep dreaming up new ways to trick us that are not covered, or even contemplated, by existing laws.65 And the new law doesn’t prevent banks from gouging their credit card customers with sky-high interest rates.66 Senator Bernie Sanders, whose attempts at capping credit card interest rates have been voted down by his colleagues, says, “When banks are charging thirty percent interest rates, they are not making credit available.67 They are engaged in loan sharking”—also known as usury. Throughout history, usury has been decried by writers, philosophers, and religious leaders.

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Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas, 8 May 2010, www.defense.gov. 54 Cramdown legislation, facing intense opposition: Arthur Delaney, “Durbin Considers Cramdown-Related Amendment as Part of Wall Street Reform,” 17 May 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com. 55 Some, including Bank of America and Citigroup: Shahien Nasiripour, “Bank of America Now Supports Cramdown, Giving Judges Authority to Modify Home Mortgages,” 13 Apr. 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com. 56 We should also make it mandatory that homeowners and lenders: Arlen Specter, “Nation’s Economic Repairs Must Include Homeowners,” 24 Oct. 2008, www.philly.com/inquirer. 57 Currently, many homeowners don’t even talk: Margo Irvin, “Homeowners Seeking ‘Making Home Afforable’ Loan Modifications Frustrated by Inefficiency,” 22 Jun. 2009, www.huffingtonpost.com. 58 “I’ve been to the City Hall courtroom where the mediation …”: Bob Casey, in conversation with the author, 16 Feb. 2009. 59 Judge Annette Rizzo, who has been working hard: Dan Geringer, “The Miracle of Courtroom 676: Saving Lives, One Address at a Time,” 28 Jan. 2009, www.philly.com/dailynews. 60 The foreclosure prevention program has worked: Ibid. 61 Until we do, we’ll need to rely on officials: Michael Powell, “A ‘Little Judge’ Who Rejects Foreclosures, Brooklyn Style,” 30 Aug. 2009, www.nytimes.com. 62 For example, the new law still allows promotional teaser: Max Alexander, “Credit Card Tricks and Traps,” Mar. 2010, www.readersdigest.com. 63 As Elizabeth Warren sees it: “That’s exactly …”: “Elizabeth Warren on Credit Card ‘Tricks and Traps,’ ” NOW, 2 Jan. 2009, www.pbs.org. 64 According to the new law, the credit card issuer: Max Alexander, “Credit Card Tricks and Traps,” Mar. 2010, www.readersdigest.com. 65 Because fees account for 39 percent: Ibid. 66 And the new law doesn’t prevent: Ibid. 67 Senator Bernie Sanders, whose attempts at capping: Jeff Plungis, “Senate Nears Completing Credit Card Bill, Blocks 15% Rate Cap,” 14 May 2009, www.bloomberg.com. 68 Aristotle called usury the “sordid love of gain”: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Minneapolis: Filiquarian, 2007), 87. 69 Thomas Aquinas said it was “contrary to justice”: St.

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The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future
by Andrew Yang
Published 2 Apr 2018

Martin Luther King Jr., 1967: Martin Luther King Jr., “Final Words of Advice,” Address made to the Tenth Anniversary Convention of the SCLC, Atlanta, on August 16, 1967. Richard Nixon, August 1969: Richard Nixon, “324—Address to the Nation on Domestic Programs,” American President Project, August 8, 1969. Milton Friedman, 1980: “Brief History of Basic Income Ideas,” Basic Income Earth Network, 1986. Bernie Sanders, May 2014: Scott Santens, “On the Record: Bernie Sanders on Basic Income,” Medium, January 29, 2016. Stephen Hawking, July 2015: “Answers to Stephen Hawking’s AMA Are Here,” Wired, July 2015. Barack Obama, June 2016: Chris Weller, “President Obama Hints at Supporting Unconditional Free Money Because of a Looming Robot Takeover,” Business Insider, June 24, 2016.

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Richard Nixon, August 1969: “What I am proposing is that the Federal Government build a foundation under the income of every American family… that cannot care for itself—and wherever in America that family may live.” Milton Friedman, 1980: “We should replace the ragbag of specific welfare programs with a single comprehensive program of income supplements in cash—a negative income tax… which would do more efficiently and humanely what our present welfare system does so inefficiently and inhumanely.” Bernie Sanders, May 2014: “In my view, every American is entitled to at least a minimum standard of living… There are different ways to get to that goal, but that’s the goal that we should strive to reach.” Stephen Hawking, July 2015: “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.

Paint Your Town Red
by Matthew Brown
Published 14 Jun 2021

But in the last few years, these same sectors have been emerging as militant and organising successfully — the UK alone has seen actions in defence of pay and conditions by workers at Deliveroo, Greggs, Picturehouse Cinemas, McDonald’s and Wetherspoons. Responses to the pressures and exploitation of precarious and gig-economy work, by the workers directly affected by it, show the potential for positive change — even in conditions where ordinary people seem relatively powerless. Similarly, the unprecedentedly high support in the US for Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism, for the Corbyn project in the UK, and the general political volatility that has seen established centrist parties lose ground across Europe, show that people are actively seeking alternatives to business as usual. The fact that the Sanders and Corbyn “moments” did not result in conclusive electoral success for either figurehead does not negate the significance of the movements behind them and the popular support they inspired.

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Corbynism’s offer of an alternative to the status quo allowed Labour to galvanise the unfocused resentment and dissatisfaction that had built up over past decades, but it was also able to identify working-class issues of austerity, low wages, job insecurity and the underfunding of public services as priorities, rather than focusing on the strawman of race and immigration pushed both by the Conservative government and during the previous year’s referendum on EU membership. Corbyn’s leadership saw Labour membership grow to over 500,000, bringing back many lapsed members, as well as resonating with younger first-time voters and with those who considered themselves disenfranchised by mainstream politics.4 As Bernie Sanders failed to secure his party’s nomination as a presidential candidate, it is impossible to say how well he would have fared against Donald Trump. But, like Corbyn, what was remarkable about Sanders was his unapologetic democratic socialism — something unprecedented in recent history for mainstream US politics — even though in contexts outside the US his radicalism would be regarded as mild.

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Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
by Joshua Green
Published 17 Jul 2017

The Times piece cited Schweizer’s still-unpublished book as a source of its reporting, puzzling many readers and prompting a reaction from the paper’s ombudswoman, Margaret Sullivan, who grudgingly concluded, while acknowledging that no ethical standards were breached, “I still don’t like the way it looked.” The effect on Clinton’s popularity was profound: the percentage of Americans who thought she was “untrustworthy” shot up into the 60s. Worse for Clinton was that the Democratic primary offered an attractive alternative. Bernie Sanders was an anti–Wall Street, good-government populist whose liberal purity put Clinton’s ethical shortcomings into sharp relief. For Bannon, the Clinton Cash uproar validated his personal theory about how conservatives had overreached the last time a Clinton was in the White House and what they should do differently.

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Bannon disagreed, and, as always, had a historical analogy to explain why. What he was really pursuing was something like the old Marxist dialectical concept of “heightening the contradictions,” only rather than foment revolution among the proletariat, he was trying to disillusion Clinton’s natural base of support. Bernie Sanders’s unexpected strength suggested to him that it was working. He was sure that Sanders’s rise was destined to end in crashing disappointment. Having thrilled to his populist purity, his supporters would never reconcile themselves to Clinton, because the donors featured in Clinton Cash violated just about every ideal liberals hold dear.

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“Trump,” Bannon proclaimed, “is the leader of a populist uprising. . . . What Trump represents is a restoration—a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism. Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans.” Bernie Sanders had tried to warn them, but the Democrats hadn’t listened and didn’t break free of crony capitalism. “Trump saw this,” Bannon said. “The American people saw this. And they have risen up to smash it.” For all his early-morning bravado, Bannon sounded as if he still couldn’t quite believe it all.

pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

And so Toh Han Li, like Gary Reback, is waiting for Margrethe Vestager to take the lead. Where she goes, they will follow. What she accomplishes, therefore, will help fix the future not only in Europe, but also in the United States and Singapore. In a memorable exchange in their October 2015 Democratic Party presidential primary debate, Bernie Sanders told Hillary Clinton that America had much to learn from Scan-dinavian societies. “We should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn what they have accomplished for their working people,” Sanders argued. “We are not Denmark,” Clinton lectured Sanders with the kind of tone-deaf arrogance that may have cost her the 2016 election.

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“In the West, especially after World War II, the government came to be seen as so successful that it could fulfill all the obligations that in less modern societies are fulfilled by the family . . . In the East, we start with self-reliance. In the West today, it is the opposite. The government says give me a popular mandate and I will solve all society’s problems.”27 Bernie Sanders, you’ll remember, was more complimentary about this style of socially responsible government. And in contrast with Singapore, which became independent only in 1965 and thus had fewer legacy institutions or traditions, Europe—and specifically Scandinavia—developed a social welfare system in the late nineteenth century.

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And the so-called Scandinavian model, as it evolved, featured relatively high levels of public expenditures, high-quality public services, and a significant level of direct state participation, including interventionist politicians like Margrethe Vestager unashamedly working for the common good. Before we tar all American tech entrepreneurs with the same utopian laissez-faire free market brush, it’s also important to remember that there are some who agree with Bernie Sanders about the role of government in stimulating innovation. For example, Steve Case, the founder of AOL and the most celebrated internet entrepreneur of the 1990s, now believes in what he calls a “Third Wave” of innovation, in which government needs to play a much more central role in the digital economy.

pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, in Venezuela, the authoritarian populist Hugo Chávez and his disciple Nicolás Maduro initiated a similar policy of massive spending, corruption and nationalization. The difference was that Chávez had control over the world’s largest oil reserves at a time when oil prices were soaring, so he received almost $1,000 billion that could keep that policy afloat for a little longer. That was enough for Chávez to be the left’s favourite demagogue for a while. Bernie Sanders said that the American dream was more alive in Venezuela than in the US. Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn praised Chávez for showing that ‘the poor matter and wealth can be shared’. Oxfam called Venezuela ‘Latin America’s inequality success story’. In an open letter to ‘Dear President Chávez’, luminaries of the Left such as Jesse Jackson, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn and others state that they ‘see Venezuela not only as a model democracy but also as a model of how a country’s oil wealth can be used to benefit all of its people.’36 On paper, that $1,000 billion was enough to make every extremely poor individual in Venezuela a millionaire.

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That’s why it’s so frustrating every time someone says that successful entrepreneurs have to ‘give something back to society’ in order to compensate for their profits. The fact that they have made profits is a sign that they have given something to society. In a free market, you make a profit if you have given others something they want, whatever it may be. Sure, I am a millionaire, the slightly embarrassed left-wing Democrat Bernie Sanders told The New York Times: ‘I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.’4 Profits are not something you take from others, but a small share you get to keep of the value you create for others. How small a share? Nobel laureate and economist William Nordhaus has studied the profits that innovators and entrepreneurs make in addition to the normal return on investment when they introduce new goods, technologies and methods into the economy.

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Khandelwal, ‘Measuring the unequal gains from trade’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol.131, no.3, 2016. 4. In defence of the 1 per cent 1. Ung Vänster, Facebook, 28 January 2018. 2. Jagdish Bhagwati, Essays in Development Economics: Wealth and poverty, MIT Press, 1985, p.18. 3. August Strindberg, Tjänstekvinnans son II, Bonnier, 1919, chap.9. 4. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, ‘Bernie Sanders, now a millionaire, pledges to release tax returns by Monday’, The New York Times, 9 April 2019. 5. William D. Nordhaus, ‘Schumpeterian profits in the American economy: Theory and measurement’, NBER Working Paper no.10433, 2004. 6. Compare with Frédéric Bastiat’s reasoning on the invention of the printing press, Bastiat 1964, pp.37f. 7.

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American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History
by Casey Michel
Published 23 Nov 2021

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar and Matthew Stephenson, “Taming Systemic Corruption: The American Experience and Its Implications for Contemporary Debates,” Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 20-29, 23 October 2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3686821. 41. Zephyr Teachout, Corruption in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 42. Alex Ward, “Read: Bernie Sanders’s Big Foreign Policy Speech,” Vox, 21 September 2017, https://www.vox.com/world/2017/9/21/16345600/bernie-sanders-full-text-transcript-foreign-policy-speech-westminster. 43. Bernie Sanders, “Sanders Speech at SAIS: Building a Global Democratic Movement to Counter Authoritarianism,” 9 October 2018, https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-speech-at-sais-building-a-global-democratic-movement-to-counter-authoritarianism. 44.

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Combined with new anticorruption legislation, increased election finance transparency, pro-transparency reforms in the lobbying sector, and beefed-up regulatory oversight bodies, the U.S. lurched from the bog of the Gilded Age into a more equitable—and more transparent—time. One that we now know as the Progressive Era. Toward the end of the 2010s, the calls for a New Progressive Era became impossible to miss. In the U.S., the calls manifested themselves in a revitalized left, fired by the presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders and a new roster of congressional leaders. While Sanders’s campaigns eventually flamed out, his imprint on broader policy will long outlast him. An entire slate of policy proposals, all centered on rising wealth and income inequality, have glommed on to American political discourse, and have proved impossible to dislodge.

pages: 554 words: 167,247

America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System
by Steven Brill
Published 5 Jan 2015

So their willingness to work together was, in itself, seen by Capitol Hill insiders as a sign that the issue was gathering momentum. Kennedy’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—called HELP—was stocked with some of the Senate’s leading liberals, including Iowa’s Tom Harkin, and Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born Vermont senator who called himself an independent but caucused with the Democrats. The Finance Committee, on the other hand, had more moderate Democrats, such as Baucus and North Dakota’s Kent Conrad. Among the many reasons the Clinton healthcare reform push had died on Capitol Hill in 1993 was that the Finance Committee, then chaired by New York centrist Democrat Pat Moynihan, had stiff-armed Kennedy and his HELP Committee.

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The group Kennedy’s staff assembled, mostly HELP Committee staffers and friendly healthcare reform policy advocates, were all Democrats. But they had been directed by Kennedy to come up with a package that could pass a Senate with Republican votes. Democrats had only fifty-five votes in 2008, even assuming the support of their most conservative members, plus the presumed vote of independent Bernie Sanders. Getting something through the Senate would require a sixty-vote margin to survive a filibuster. At the same time, Fowler and her staff—pushed by Baucus in meetings that seemed to happen every other day or so—charted a more public course. As Baucus had instructed, they organized witnesses to testify at Finance Committee hearings in the late spring.

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That kind of bill enabled a Senate process called budget reconciliation. Under Senate rules, budget reconciliation bills required only 51 votes, not the 60 needed to override a filibuster. The November 2008 elections had just boosted the Senate Democratic vote tally to 58 (including the independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont). Still, 58 was not 60, and two Senate Democrats, Kennedy and Robert Byrd, were now so ill they soon might not be able to get to the floor for a vote. Reconciliation was not an ideal way around a Republican roadblock because much of the envisioned healthcare reforms might not pass the financial issues–only smell test.

pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

Republican Representative Richard Pombo might be the worst recent offender in the country; he used his office to funnel money to all sorts of family and friends. Not to pick only on Republicans, Democratic Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson awarded thousands of dollars in college scholarships to four of her relatives and two of her top aide's children.Even Bernie Sanders has paid family from campaign donations, and he's a socialist. It's not all big government, either. One study of Detroit libraries found that one in six staffers had a relative who also worked in the library system. And Rupert Murdoch's News Corp was sued in 2011 by shareholders for nepotism when it bought his daughter's company

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Technology aids in both of those: travel technology to allow people to move around, communications technology to allow better coordination and cooperation, and information technology to allow information to move around the organization. The fact that all of these technologies have vastly improved in the past few decades is why organizations are growing in size. (17) Senator Bernie Sanders actually had a reasonable point when he said that any company that is too big to fail is also too big to exist. (18) The people who use sites like Google and Facebook are not those companies’ customers. They are the products that those companies sell to their customers. In general: if you're not paying for it, then you're the product.

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Representative Richard Pombo League of Conservation Voters (2005), “Rep. Richard Pombo's Family & Friends Network.” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson Todd J. Gillman and Christy Hoppe (28 Aug 2010), “Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson Violated Rules, Steered Scholarships to Relatives,” Dallas Morning News. Even Bernie Sanders Vermont Guardian (21 Apr 2005), “Nepotism Crosses Party Lines,” Vermont Guardian. one in six staffers Christine MacDonald (6 May 2011), “Nepotism Rampant at Detroit Libraries: 1 in 6 Staffers Have Relatives Who Work in Strapped Department,” The Detroit News. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp Mark Sweney (17 Mar 2011), “Rupert Murdoch's News Corp Sued Over ‘Nepotism’ in Buying His Daughter's Firm: Investors Allege Group Is Overpaying in $675m Deal to Acquire Elisabeth Murdoch's TV Production Business Shine,” The Guardian.

pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

In 2011, years before progressives started talking about free college, Thiel was warning about rising tuition prices, calling the higher education industry a bubble more troubling than the one in real estate. He helped to jumpstart the backlash against big tech in 2014 when he called Google a monopoly—years before Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders would. And then, of course, came his destruction of Gawker and the election of Trump. In 2018, I started interviewing former employees, business partners, and other associates—in Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere—to try to understand how this had happened. Thiel had come to the tech industry with little in the way of money and no engineering ability to speak of.

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By the end of April 2019 there were twenty declared candidates for the Democratic Party’s nomination, including several front-runners who seemed especially eager to rein in Facebook. In May, Kamala Harris, the California senator who’d previously been seen as friendly to the tech industry, told CNN that Facebook was “essentially a utility that has gone unregulated, and as far as I’m concerned that’s gotta stop.” Bernie Sanders had promised “vigorous antitrust legislation in this country,” singling out Facebook. “We deal with it every day,” he said. “They determine who we can communicate with. They have incredible power—over the economy, over political life in this country—in a very dangerous sense.” Radical as these ideas might have sounded during the Obama presidency, neither candidate was the most hawkish about Facebook in the presidential field.

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Facebook allowed it, with Zuckerberg explaining that although he disagreed with the president, “I believe people should be able to see this for themselves, because ultimately accountability for those in positions of power can only happen when their speech is scrutinized out in the open.” He continued to speak regularly with Jared Kushner, and Thiel continued to emphasize, publicly and privately, that Facebook was less bad than its competitors. By early March 2020, the plan seemed to be working. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris’s campaigns had crashed, Bernie Sanders had sputtered, and Joe Biden, whom Thiel regarded as weak, seemed poised to win the nomination. Trump was seen, especially among conservatives, as likely to win reelection, and Thiel’s influence on the right was more pronounced than it had ever been. It would take something totally unexpected—apocalyptic even—to throw off the plan he’d set in motion at Facebook four years earlier.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 28 Jun 2020

Ivan Penn, “The $3 Billion Plan to Turn Hoover Dam into a Giant Battery,” New York Times, July 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com. It describes a specific pumped-hydroelectric proposal of the type that would be repeated on a massive scale in Jacobson’s plan. 15. In a Guardian column in 2017, Professor Mark Jacobson and U.S. senator Bernie Sanders announced new energy legislation based on Jacobson’s work. Bernie Sanders and Mark Jacobson, “The American People—Not Big Oil—Must Decide Our Climate Future,” The Guardian, April 29, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com. 16. Christopher T. M. Clack, Steffan A. Qvist, Jay Apt et al., “Evaluation of a Proposal for Reliable Low-Cost Grid Power with 100% Wind, Water, and Solar,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 26 (June 27, 2017): 6722–27, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1610381114.

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And only nuclear can accommodate the rising energy consumption that will be driven by the need for things like fertilizer production, fish farming, and factory farming—all of which are highly beneficial to both people and the natural environment. And yet the people who say they care and worry the most about climate change tell us we don’t need nuclear. Consider the case of climate activist Bill McKibben. Along with Vermont senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, he urged Vermont legislators in 2005 to commit to reducing emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, and 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2028, through the use of renewables and energy efficiency.32 Vermont’s main electric utility helped customers go “off-grid” with solar panels and batteries,33 and the state’s aggressive energy efficiency programs ranked fifth best in the nation for five years in a row.34 But instead of falling 25 percent, Vermont’s emissions actually rose 16 percent between 1990 and 2015.35 Part of the reason emissions rose in Vermont is that the state closed its nuclear power plant, something McKibben advocated.

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The water would be stored as long as necessary, and then released to flow downhill back through turbines to produce electricity when needed.14 Jacobson’s studies and proposals became the basis of the energy plans of many American states, as well as that of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders.15 But in 2017, a group of scientists pointed out that Jacobson’s proposal rested upon the assumption that we can increase the amount of instantaneous power from U.S. hydroelectric dams more than ten-fold when, according to the Department of Energy and other major studies, the real potential is just a tiny fraction of that.

pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
by Zeynep Tufekci
Published 14 May 2017

Meanwhile, new movements are popping up, from Brazil to Ukraine to Hong Kong, as hopeful communities flood the streets in protests and occupations. Some protests have even transformed, at least partially, into electoral forces, like Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and the surprisingly strong effort to elect Bernie Sanders as the Democratic Party nominee for president in the United States, supported by many members of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Like all human stories, the evolution of modern protest has deep historical and cultural roots. But studying it also requires new ways of understanding the fragility of the power of these new movements.

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Even that most horizontal form of organization was seen as too hierarchical by many protest participants. Like protesters in Gezi, Occupy protesters were also unable to advance a next-phase agenda after the Zuccotti Park protest was forcibly expelled. The movement largely dispersed until an external event—the 2016 presidential election—mobilized many of them in support of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders’s candidacy. Sanders’s campaign ultimately fell short, but, as a testament to the power of movements once they do get moving, what started as a quixotic effort by a senator from a small U.S. state turned into a campaign that mounted a significant threat to an otherwise institutionally strong candidate, Hillary Clinton.

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There were a few other attempts that grew out of Occupy, like a debt collective that undertook creative acts to bring together student or medical debtors to “strike” against unjust debt. These, however, remained relatively small compared to Occupy’s original reach.37 Occupy’s most direct engagement with the electoral sphere would come many years later, in 2016, after Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator from Vermont, would launch a seemingly-quixotic challenge for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. His bid was not successful, but it re-mobilized many people who had been part of the Occupy movement earlier, showing the fact that the underlying energy and the legitimacy of the demands had been there, though not matched by proportional electoral or institutional capacity in the 2011 incarnation.

pages: 301 words: 90,362

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
by Priya Parker
Published 14 May 2018

Consider the case of a feverish political rally that could have been so much more. On April 6, 2016, Bernie Sanders, a senator from Vermont and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, held a massive rally in Philadelphia. The line to get into the Philadelphia “Future to Believe In” Rally wrapped around the block. For security reasons, many people were in the stadium for close to three hours before the candidate ever appeared. When I hear that, I think: What an incredible gathering opportunity—three hours of ushering that could have been used not only to gear people up for the rally that day but also to build the Bernie Sanders movement. Only it wasn’t. Instead, thousands of people sat in the 10,200-seat arena and waited.

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Having worked with organizers, I can imagine exactly why these ones left this time unfilled: In their mind, the event hadn’t started yet. This time probably wasn’t on their “run of show.” It was time outsourced to the security people, not the hosts. So let us imagine what could have been done with that time. A few thousand fans of Bernie Sanders, a few hours, no candidate on-site. They could have had some volunteers work as facilitators to get people to sit in groups, or turn to a stranger, and talk about why they were there, what they believed the country most needed, and why they believed Sanders was the answer. They could have set up story circles where clusters of eight sat and shared their own experiences of being on the wrong end of America’s economic divide.

pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

“I don’t want it to be onerous where you block low-income people, but I don’t want them to buy too many lottery tickets.” Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev and Citadel’s Ken Griffin both were asked at the February 18 congressional hearing whether free trading would be jeopardized if a 0.1 percent financial-transactions tax were instituted. Both demurred but said they didn’t support such a measure. Politicians such as Bernie Sanders who have proposed such a tax seem more interested in wielding it as a way to redistribute wealth rather than to discourage excessive speculation or rein in a stock bubble. Critics have pointed out that it would be a drag on the likes of pension funds.[22] But costs could be capped, and an individual would have to buy about $7,000 worth of stock to pay the $7 commission that was typical before Robinhood appeared.[23] That hardly seems egregious compared with what individual investors paid before Mayday.

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“On the face of it, it seems to favor a handful of rich, influential players at the expense of ordinary citizens and ordinary traders,” he later said to reporters.[8] Donald Trump Jr. weighed in as well: “It took less than a day for big tech, big government and the corporate media to spring into action and begin colluding to protect their hedge fund buddies on Wall Street. This is what a rigged system looks like, folks!”[9] Back on the left, Bernie Sanders told an ABC morning talk show that weekend that the incident confirmed his dim view of high finance: “I have long believed that the business model of Wall Street is fraud. I think we have to take a very hard look at the kind of illegal activities and outrageous behavior on the part of the hedge funds and other Wall Street players.”[10] Robinhood explained in tweets and blog posts the technical details of why it had to act, stressing that it faced a huge increase in regulatory capital requirements.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Jordan Fabia, Erik Wasson, and Daniel Flatley, “Ocasio-Cortez Urges Scrutiny of Robinhood Curbs on GameStop,” Bloomberg, January 28, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Kathryn Krawczyk, “Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Agree on This 1 Thing,” The Week, January 28, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Egberto Willies, “Senator Bernie Sanders and Politics Done Right Agrees: The Business Model of Wall Street Is Fraud,” DailyKos, February 1, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 Josh Hawley, “Calling Wall Street’s Bluff,” RealClear Politics, February 3, 2021. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11 Mohamed El-Erian, interview by Sara Eisen, Closing Bell, CNBC, February 2, 2021.

pages: 301 words: 90,276

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing
by Andrew Ross
Published 25 Oct 2021

Since their workplace is located in one of the nation’s most expensive housing markets, at least a third of them were undertaking hour-long commutes.15 In the wake of the report, stories emerged of workers living in their cars; almost inevitably, news circulated that one of them had died in her vehicle, undetected for several days.16 Bernie Sanders and other high-profile politicians jumped on the report, excoriating Disney for paying starvation wages as it was raking in more than $12 billion in annual profits and rewarding executives with stratospheric salaries. Worker testimony was heartbreaking. “Since I started working for Disney, because my wages are so low, I had to move my 16-year-old daughter out of the house,” an employee at Disney’s Grand California Hotel recounted.

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Subsidies typically carry a sunset provision allowing units to revert to market-rate rents after ten, fifteen, or twenty years, so they are only temporarily affordable.15 Nonetheless, talk about national rent caps and government housing was in the air even before the pandemic. New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed such a cap in 2019, and national rent control was on the campaign platform of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential bid, along with promises to build ten million new units of public housing through his and Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal for Public Housing. Other presidential candidates, while less ambitious than Sanders, also proposed a variety of programs aimed at reducing some of the housing cost burdens, ranging from universal housing allowances and stronger tenant rights to reparations for residents of redlined neighborhoods.

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By Night, an Uneasy Sleep in a Car,” New York Times, February 27, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/27/us/disneyland-employees-wages.html; Paulina Velasco, “Cinderella Is Homeless, Ariel ‘Can’t Afford to Live on Land’: Disney Under Fire for Pay,” The Guardian, July 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/17/disneyland-low-wages-anaheim-orange-county-homelessness. 17. Bernie Sanders, “Disneyland Workers Face Ruthless Exploitation. Their Fight Is Our Fight,” The Guardian, June 7, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/07/disneyland-workers-living-wage-disney-inequality. 18. Gabrielle Russon, “Disney World Workers Endure Tourists Who Scream, Punch and Even Grope Them,” Orlando Sentinel, September 23, 2019, https://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/os-bz-disney-employees-abuse-20190923-zy7o3lka3fhmhfeohjicftx74a-story.html. 19.

pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth
Published 9 Feb 2021

And soon, as Guccifer 2.0 promised, WikiLeaks began to dribble out tens of thousands of emails and other stolen goods, which were immediately picked up by the Guardian, the Intercept, Buzzfeed, Politico, the Washington Post, and my colleagues at the Times. The Russians saved their most damaging revelations for the days ahead of the Democratic National Convention, when party members were due to come together, leaking emails that showed the DNC had secretly favored Hillary Clinton over her primary opponent Bernie Sanders. Party officials had deliberated how best to discredit Sanders. Some questioned Sanders’s Jewish faith and argued that painting the candidate as an atheist “could make several points difference” this late in the primaries. Others proposed publicizing an incident in which Sanders’s staff allegedly stole Clinton’s campaign data.

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Trump’s “build the wall” hard-liners seized on one speech in which Clinton advocated for “open borders.” Each leak was disseminated, maligned, and hashtagged by Russia’s IRA troll army, who aimed the leaks at an already cynical American populace. Months after Sanders ended his campaign and endorsed Clinton, several activists who ran Facebook pages for Bernie Sanders began to note a suspicious flood of hostile comments aimed at Clinton. “Those who voted for Bernie will not vote for corrupt Hillary!” they read. “The Revolution must continue! #NeverHillary.” “The magnitude and viciousness of it,” one Facebook administrator told my colleague Scott Shane, suggested that this was the work of a cold-blooded adversary with an agenda, but the sheer idea that any of this was a Russian campaign still struck many Americans as crazy Cold War–speak.

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Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, made it clear that he would not sign onto any bipartisan statement blaming the Russians; he dismissed the intelligence, admonished officials for playing into what he wrote off as Democrats’ spin, and refused to warn Americans about efforts to undermine the 2016 election. Into the void stepped candidate Trump. “I love WikiLeaks!” Trump declared at one of his rallies. He promoted Russia’s hacks at every opportunity. “Leaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders … Really vicious. RIGGED,” he tweeted. In another tweet, he joked that he hoped the DNC hackers had breached Clinton’s personal email server as well. All the while, Trump refused to call out the Russians by name. At rally after rally, he expressed doubts that Russia was involved. In a September interview with the Russian television network RT, Trump said it was “probably unlikely” that Putin had ordered the DNC hacks.

pages: 212 words: 49,544

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency
by Micah L. Sifry
Published 19 Feb 2011

“It is common for staﬀers to get more and better information from blogs, and for hearings to be driven by the conversation online, than from the Congressional liaison group at the Fed.”19 Ultimately activists ranging from followers of libertarian Ron Paul on the right to supporters of Grayson and Senator Bernie Sanders on the left also succeeded in 2010 in forcing Congress to adopt a new law requiring the Federal Reserve to detail all the recipients of bailout funding during the banking crisis. 82 MICAH L. SIFRY That last victory was substantial. The Wall Street Journal editorial page praised the results of the Federal Reserve’s new transparency, writing: Lender of last resort indeed.

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The Federal Reserve pulled back the curtain yesterday on its emergency lending during the ﬁnancial panic of 2008 and 2009, and the game to play at home with the kids is: who didn’t get a bailout? If you can ﬁnd a big ﬁnancial player who declined the Fed’s cash, you’re doing better than we did yesterday afternoon. The documents aren’t another WikiLeaks dump but are due to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who insisted that the Dodd-Frank ﬁnancial bill require more transparency about how the Fed allocated capital during the panic. The release of this data on some 21,000 Fed transactions over the last three years is one of the rare useful provisions in Dodd-Frank, but kudos to our favorite Socialist for demanding it.

pages: 443 words: 98,113

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

Then governments continue just as before, blithely making claims about growth, the number of jobs or ‘balancing books’, blaming their predecessors, disputing the statistics or just ignoring the findings. If protests erupt, a blast of condemnation comes from defenders of the status quo, dismissing the victims or protestors as lazy, irresponsible and inadequate. As ever more evidence on the deleterious impact of inequality is produced, we are in danger of becoming immune to the shock. When Bernie Sanders started to gain support in the US presidential primaries by focusing on inequality, Hillary Clinton dismissed him as a ‘one-issue’ candidate. Yet establishment politicians have done nothing about it, instead aligning with financial institutions that are at the heart of the problem. As Sanders reminded his audiences, Clinton had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Goldman Sachs just for speaking.

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From 2008 to 2012, $4.6 trillion was spent in bailing out nearly 1,000 banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions, while guarantees from the Treasury, Federal Reserve and other agencies totalled $16.9 trillion. Europe followed. In 2012–13, the ECB lent €1 trillion to Eurozone banks to avert a funding crisis. At its peak, UK government support to prop up ailing banks totalled £133 billion in cash and £1 trillion in guarantees and indemnities. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who campaigned for the presidential nomination in 2016, listed twenty profitable corporations that had received taxpayer bailouts while operating subsidiaries in tax havens to avoid taxes and even receiving tax rebates. Bank of America received $1.9 billion as a tax refund in 2010, even though it made $4.4 billion in profits.

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Disaffection with old parties is shown by the steady decline in voting, especially by youth and the precariat in general. Over a third of the US electorate does not vote in presidential elections, and in most democracies winning parties have been gaining little more than a third of the votes cast. When even flawed but well-meaning options become available, such as Bernie Sanders in the USA, a surge of enthusiasm occurs. Timid establishment types will not succeed, but bolder souls should take heart. Energies can be turned into re-engagement. RIGHTS AS DEMANDS ‘They don’t call it class warfare until we fight back.’ Occupy Wall Street poster Rights always begin as class-based demands, made against the state.

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Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
by Conor Dougherty
Published 18 Feb 2020

“threat of displacement”: Michael Hankinson, “When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism,” American Political Science Review 112, no. 3 (2018): 473–93. just begun surging: Joe Garofoli and Lizze Johnson, “Bernie Sanders to Campaign for Jane Kim in SF,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 14, 2016, www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bernie-Sanders-to-campaign-for-Jane-Kim-in-SF-9972390.php. a 157-unit project: Joe Rivano Barros, “In Stunner, City Strikes Down Major Mission Project,” Mission Local, November 16, 2016, https://missionlocal.org/2016/11/in-stunner-city-strikes-down-major-mission-project/.

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Jane Kim was a member of the local progressive faction who was in favor of the moratorium as well as cooler than Scott Wiener. She did Tae Kwon Do in her campaign commercials, used to play bass in an indie band called Strangely, and was a former community organizer who’d earned a reputation for extracting affordable housing from for-profit developers. The Kim campaign even got Bernie Sanders, whose national reputation had just begun surging, to fly to California and campaign for her. Wiener had more money and better local endorsements, but the Bernie surge was real, and his multipoint lead shriveled, allowing Kim to eke out a win in the summer primary. That would have been it for Scott Wiener in a lot of states, but California has an open primary system in which all voters, not just Democrats and Republicans, vote in the election’s first round.

pages: 398 words: 96,909

We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation
by Eric Garcia
Published 2 Aug 2021

(During one of our interviews, I noticed a sign in Bascom’s office from those protests that said PLEASE SAVE OUR HEALTH CARE SO WE CAN STOP MAKING PHONE CALLS. ) Many Democratic candidates consulted autistic self-advocates like Ne’eman and Bascom along with other disability rights advocates during their campaigns. Bascom said she was consulted by candidates ranging from mainstream Democrats, like Senator Cory Booker and Mayor Pete Buttigieg, to progressives, like former San Antonio mayor Julián Castro, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and self-described democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders. This level of inclusion was a culmination of years of work by autistic people to be accepted as legitimate by the larger disability rights movement. In the early years of ASAN, Ne’eman said the organization focused on ending restraint and seclusion on students, not only because it was an important issue for autistic people but because it established ASAN as an advocacy organization that could represent the needs of autistic people in political discourse.

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Ironically, despite Biden’s frequent invocations of his time as Barack Obama’s vice president, many of the most vocal advocates, like Ne’eman—and other disability rights advocates, like Rebecca Cokley and Maria Town—were alumni of the Obama administration. Biden finally released a disability policy platform in June 2020, long after his biggest opponent, Bernie Sanders, had dropped out of the race. Like many of Biden’s other policies, his plans were not as aspirational as Warren’s, Sanders’s, or Castro’s. But his approach did support phasing out subminimum-wage labor and asking the U.S. Justice Department to review guardianship laws and promote alternatives like supported decision-making.

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Benham has won their endorsement: Hannah Lynn, “Pittsburgh LGBTQ Political Advocacy Group Announces Primary Election Endorsements,” Pittsburgh City Paper, February 10, 2020, https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/pittsburgh-lgbtq-political-advocacy-group-announces-primary-election-endorsements/Content?oid=16731149. she won her primary: Julia Terruso, “Bernie Sanders Is Done but His Fans in Pa. Keep Winning Primaries,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 16, 2020, https://www.inquirer.com/news/nikil-saval-rick-krajewski-progressive-2020-pennsylvania-primary-harrisburg-20200616.html. 2. “In My Mind, I’m Going to Carolina” about the decline of the coal industry: Kris Maher, “In Pro-Trump West Virginia Coal Country, the Jobs Keep Leaving,” Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-pro-trump-west-virginia-coal-country-the-jobs-keep-leaving-11572269967.

pages: 181 words: 52,147

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever
Published 2 Apr 2017

At the end of the day, you will realize that I am an optimistic at heart. I sincerely believe that we will all learn, evolve, and come together as a species and do amazing things. With that, let the journey begin. PART ONE The Here and Now 1 A Bitter Taste of Dystopia The 2016 presidential campaign made everybody angry. Liberal Bernie Sanders supporters were angry at allegedly racist Republicans and a political system they perceived as being for sale, a big beneficiary being Hillary Clinton. Conservative Donald Trump supporters were furious at the decay and decline of America, and at how politicians on both sides of the aisle had abandoned them and left a trail of broken promises.

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The 2016 presidential campaign was the national equivalent of the Google-bus protests. The supporters of Donald Trump, largely white and older, wanted to turn back the clock to a pre-smartphone era when they could be confident that their lives would be more stable and their incomes steadily rising. The Bernie Sanders supporters, more liberal but also mostly white (albeit with great age diversity), wanted to turn back the clock to an era when the people, not the big corporations, controlled the government. We have seen violent protests in Paris and elsewhere against Uber drivers. What sorts of protests will we see when the Uber cars no longer have drivers and the rage is directed only at the machine itself?

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Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by Richard V. Reeves
Published 22 May 2017

This frustrated, discontented class has spent a decade with their noses pressed up against the glass, watching the winners grab more and more for themselves, seemingly at the upper middle class’s expense.9 Hayes may be right about the frustration and discontent. Much of the political energy behind both the Bernie Sanders left and the Tea Party right came from the upper middle class. But Hayes is wrong to imply that the frustration is warranted, or that the very rich are gaining “at the upper middle class’s expense.” As the 2016 election helped us to see, the real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else.

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They are created and destroyed in our communities, relationships, and institutions. Individual success relies on collective investments. The individualist ethos frustrates many on the American left, but I see little sign of it losing its grip on the collective imagination. Many liberals wish America were more like Europe—and often specifically Scandinavia. Bernie Sanders, after all, was effectively the Danish candidate for president. But America’s problem is not that we are failing to live up to Danish egalitarian standards. It is that we are failing to live up to American egalitarian standards, based on fair market competition. The main challenge is to narrow gaps in human capital formation, especially in the first two decades of life.

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The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks
by Ann Pettifor
Published 27 Mar 2017

While politicians try to persuade electorates that ‘there is no money’, something quite different happened under the guise of quantitative easing. Central bankers created trillions of dollars ‘out of thin air’ and did so essentially overnight to bail out the banking system. And I mean trillions. The American senator Bernie Sanders directed the US Government Accountability Office to undertake an audit of the amount of ‘state money’ created by the US Federal Reserve and supported by governments during the crisis. The conclusion was that $16 trillion ‘in total financial assistance’ had been mobilised for ‘some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world’.2 Please note that not a cent of these trillions of dollars was raised by taxing Americans, although the liquidity created by the Federal Reserve is backed by US taxpayers.

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Private and public debts accumulate, and deflationary forces bear down on advanced economies. In these contemporary contexts, emerging authoritarianism is rationalized by many as reflecting the weakness and ineptitude of western democracy in the wake of this terrible crisis. With the exception of campaigns like that of US Senator Bernie Sanders’ bid for the US presidency in 2016, the immensity of the power of the finance sector – Wall Street the City of London – has not been contested to any material extent by either the wider Left, social democratic parties, or indeed even by the reactionary forces in society. Keynes today The power of Keynes’s ideas is of a scale that has no precedent.

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Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy
by Jamie Raskin
Published 4 Jan 2022

But I also spent a lot of my time daydreaming about Tommy, whom I saw pretty much everywhere and in everything. Every time I looked at Sen. Bernie Sanders, I thought about Tommy, because Tommy loved telling the story of how he had left work one day at the Friends Committee on National Legislation and passed the senator, who was walking alone on the street. Tommy waved and greeted him with a compliment: “Hey, Bernie, great job. Stop the war in Yemen,” and Bernie gruffly said, “Uh, yeah.” Tommy’s Bernie imitation was priceless. I think he had a lot of affection for Bernie Sanders and the way his famously brusque demeanor one-on-one masked a true universal commitment to the welfare of humanity.

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“We may object to Trump’s condescending rhetoric and galling outbursts about so-called ‘shithole’ countries, but at the end of the day, we share in his general indifference to the preventable horrors that befall many inhabitants of those countries,” he wrote in one essay. “Following our lead, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and other leftist heroes highlight the struggles of American students and low-wage workers—as they should—while saying very little about the millions of afflicted foreigners who will die this year in the absence of wealth transfers from the West.” Tommy simply refused to take the easy way out by equating Trump with unprecedented presidential evil and his progressive critics with moral virtue and political perfection.

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Catherine Cortez-Masto a kind of visionary and dreamy look, as if she could imagine a day when all of this would be just a dismal memory and democracy would be riding high again. Certain people caught my eye as we waited for the vote to begin: Senator Gillibrand; the two new senators from Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, who had a glow of destiny around them; Elizabeth Warren; and even Bernie Sanders looked connected. I thought about Tommy and Hannah and Tabitha. I thought about Sarah. I thought about my parents, neither of them with us for so long now. I was flooded with feeling. I began to think of all the more comprehensive things I had not said because I had been improvising at the end and not following any of my various scripts and drafts still floating around—about the practice of nonviolence and democracy; the demagogic disrespect for the primacy of Congress; and all of Michael’s finer points about taking adverse inferences seriously when a witness skips town.

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
by Thomas Rid

After about a week of spying on the DCCC, on April 18, the GRU got lucky: they intercepted the log-in and password credentials of another DCCC employee, who was also authorized to log in to the network of the Democratic National Committee.11 The GRU could now pivot directly from the DCCC network over to the DNC. The GRU finished the design of its DCLeaks logo on April 20, 2016. Once inside the DNC, the intruders again searched for particularly interesting machines that held files related to the hotly contested presidential campaign. Bernie Sanders had just won the Wyoming caucus, and Hillary Clinton was about to prevail in the New York primary. Back in Moscow, the officers were working the DNC from the inside, equipping thirty-three machines with a customized X-Agent tool kit. The attack seriously compromised the Democratic Party’s internal and external communications.12 The clandestine intruders also accessed the DNC’s telephone systems, giving the military intelligence officers access to phone calls and even voice mail inside the Democratic headquarters, all while an election campaign was in full swing.13 Just one day after compromising the DNC, on April 19, the GRU registered yet another website, DCLeaks.com, using the same Romanian hosting company, and paying for the new site out of the same pool of bitcoin.

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They searched for “worldwide known,” “some hundred sheets,” “think twice about,” and “company’s competence,” among other phrases. The Russian intelligence officers were googling for “dcleaks,” probably to check whether anybody had already picked up their clumsily surfaced site from a week earlier.2 Nobody had. Agitated by leaked emails, Bernie Sanders supporters protest against the DNC and Hillary Clinton. (John Minchillo / AP) Late on June 15, just after 7:00 p.m. Moscow time, a post by “Guccifer 2.0” went online. The rambling text dismissed the conclusions reached by the “worldwide known” company CrowdStrike. Instead, Guccifer 2.0 insisted that the DNC had been “hacked by a lone hacker.”

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“Ok … i see,” responded the GRU, clearly not following Assange’s reasoning. The WikiLeaks founder slowed down, and explained some of the intricacies of U.S. primary politics. Assange understood that Hillary Clinton would become the nominee in about three weeks, and that she then would have to reach out to intra-party opponents who had supported her main rival, Bernie Sanders, “so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting,” Assange explained. Some of the first file transfer attempts had failed. Another week later, on July 14, Guccifer 2.0 finally sent an email to WikiLeaks that included an attachment with detailed instructions, titled “wk dnc link1.txt.gpg.”

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Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

In the 1988 primary, Jesse Jackson ran as a full-on leftist, calling for single-payer healthcare, free community college, a big federal jobs program, and the cancellation of Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich—and by sweeping the black South and winning everywhere among voters under thirty, he beat Joe Biden and Gore and came in second to Dukakis, but…he was never going to be nominated. A Vermont mayor who’d endorsed him, Bernie Sanders, was elected to the House in 1990 as a socialist, cute, but really, so what? He was a quirky retro figure, some Ben & Jerry’s guy who didn’t realize the 1960s were over and was channeling Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas from the ’20s and ’30s. In 1992, when Clinton won the nomination, his only serious competitors were two fellow New Democrats, Brown and Tsongas.

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Of course, in any real-life version of this fantasy, payments would be adjusted up and down depending on the size of the household and how many adults and children each one had, and so on. It’s an illustration of how rich the country is, not a plan. During a Democratic primary debate in 2015, with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders the only Democrats who had a chance, Sanders was asked by the moderator if calling himself a socialist was politically wise. Well, he replied, he thought the United States “should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished” with their economies.

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At that moment as well, the star economist Thomas Piketty, French rather than Austrian, was starting to focus people’s attention on the very rich—“transforming the economic discourse,” Krugman has said, especially after his remarkable 2014 bestseller Capital in the Twenty-first Century. In the 1970s the right coined (and still repeats endlessly) the genius term unelected bureaucrats to focus populist antigovernment blame. The economic left did something similar with the 1 percent (and unelected billionaires) in the 2010s. In 2016 Bernie Sanders came close to winning the Democratic nomination, and in 2019 the CEOs of the Business Roundtable felt obliged to issue a new “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation,” more or less disavowing their adoption of the Friedman Doctrine decades before. The force awakened. And now? Perhaps the pandemic and/or the resulting recession and/or the protests against racist policing will become triggering crises.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence
by Amy B. Zegart
Published 6 Nov 2021

q=ruppersberger+rogers+bipartisan+best&sxsrf=ALeKk02awWc7vASdOuVbEEOxGqLztTLM6A:1600720489909&ei=aQ5pX_-IN4jz-gS665fYDw&start=0&sa=N&ved=2ahUKEwi_4b3BjPvrAhWIuZ4KHbr1Bfs4ChDy0wN6BAgMEC0&biw=1397&bih=701. 130. Morell, Intelligence Matters. 131. Interview by author, August 12, 2020. 132. Saxby Chambliss, Lawfare podcast, March 23, 2019. 133. Gregory Krieg, “Bernie Sanders: GOP Senator James Inhofe Is a Friend,” CNN, March 13, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/13/politics/bernie-sanders-james-inhofe-friends/index.html. 134. See, for example, Chambliss, Lawfare podcast. Another key difference is the role of the vice chairman. In the House, the majority party always runs the show. If the chairman cannot run a hearing, the next most senior majority party committee member serves in her absence.

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In the Senate, you have to compromise and build relationships across the aisle; the incentives for bipartisanship are greater. Senators know they have to work together to get anything done, and the Senate’s slower campaign tempo enables them to do it. “You become friends,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA).132 When Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was asked who his favorite Republican was, his answer was surprising: conservative Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe. “Jim is a climate change denier. He is really, really conservative, but you know what, he is a decent guy and I like him,” said Sanders, who joked that revealing their friendship might ruin Inhofe’s career.133 Committee rules both reflect and reinforce these differences.

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In 2020, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the NSA’s telephone metadata program violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may have been unconstitutional. United States v. Moalin, 973 F.3d 977 (9th Cir. 2020). 33. “Edward Snowden did this country a great service. Let him come home,” Guardian, September 14, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/14/edward-snowden-pardon-bernie-sanders-daniel-ellsberg (accessed April 22, 2020); Michael German, “Edward Snowden Is a Whistleblower,” ACLU, August 2, 2013, https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/secrecy/edward-snowden-whistleblower (accessed April 22, 2020). 34. PBS NewsHour, Former Def. Sec. Gates Says Edward Snowden Is a Traitor, January 14, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

Like David Cameron’s ill-fated Remain campaign in the UK, Clinton eventually settled on ‘Stronger Together’. But she failed to articulate why. It seemed more like a game of demographic addition than a reason to govern. Meanwhile, much of her presumed base – the college-educated millennials – had defected to Bernie Sanders. One widely shared meme crystallised their view of Mrs Clinton. It showed a fake poster comparing the two candidates on the issue of whether they would dine at Olive Garden – a soulless restaurant chain that is popular in the suburbs. ‘Only when I’m high,’ says Sanders’s caption. ‘An authentic Italian restaurant for the whole family!’

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Jones, ‘In US, new record 43% are political independents’, Gallup, 7 January 2015, <http://www.gallup.com/poll/180440/new-record-political-independents.aspx>. 16 Mair, Ruling the Void. 17 Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin, Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (Routledge, New York, 2014 (ebook)). 18 Müller, What Is Populism? 19 Quoted in Ford and Goodwin, Revolt on the Right. 20 Edward Luce, ‘Tony Blair warns US Democrats against supporting Bernie Sanders’, Financial Times, 23 February 2016, <https://www.ft.com/content/9c70cae8-da55-11e5-98fd-06d75973fe09>. 21 Julia Carrie Wong and Danny Yadron, ‘Hillary Clinton proposes student debt deferral for startup founders’, Guardian, 29 June 2016, <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/28/hillary-clinton-student-debt-proposal-startup-tech-founders>. 22 <https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/>. 23 William H.

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Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

CHAPTER 3 Advertising and Its Discontents Back in November 2017, a year after the election of Donald Trump, Americans got a first look at the ads that Russian groups had bought on Facebook in order to sow the political discontent that may have tipped the election in Trump’s favor.1 They made for sickening viewing. Russian-linked actors had created animated images of Bernie Sanders as a superman figure promoting gay rights, and pictures of Jesus wrestling with Satan along with a caption that had the Antichrist declaring that “If I win Clinton wins!” There were calls for the South to rise again emblazoned on a Confederate flag, and yellow NO INVADERS ALLOWED signs protesting a supposed onslaught of immigrants at the border.

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“I first became seriously concerned about Facebook in February 2016 in the run-up to the first U.S. presidential primary,” he told me in 2017, which is around the time he began work on Zucked, his book about the topic. As a political junkie, McNamee “was spending a few hours a day reading the news and also spending a fair amount of time on Facebook,” he writes. “I noticed a surge on Facebook of disturbing images, shared by friends, that originated on Facebook Groups ostensibly associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign. The images were deeply misogynistic depictions of Hillary Clinton. It was impossible for me to imagine that Bernie’s campaign would allow them. More disturbing, the images were spreading virally. Lots of my friends were sharing them. And there were new images every day.”9 McNamee was becoming increasingly concerned about the effect of social media on election outcomes.

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CHAPTER 13 A New World War In 2018, I experienced something quite odd during a day of reporting on the growing U.S.-China trade and technology conflict. I was talking to a variety of politicians and advisers in Washington to get a better sense of how various political factions felt it should be dealt with. I spoke to, among others, a former Bernie Sanders staffer who was now advising a new crop of progressives like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I also spoke to a high-level Defense Department official. Their views—that China was indeed an existential threat, and that America needed to ring-fence some of its supply chain and prepare for what might be a long-term tech and trade war—were oddly similar, given the divergent political factions that they represented.1 Both sources recommended the same book to me: Freedom’s Forge, which lays out the way in which the U.S. auto industry helped the country during the Second World War.2 The industry, including not just big automakers but also their suppliers, had been marshaled by government officials to ramp up production and aid in the war effort, creating synergies across supply chains that were later leveraged to great effect in the postwar period, when American industry was dominant relative to Europe and Asia—for at least a couple of decades.

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Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy
by Richard Murphy
Published 14 Sep 2017

If there are no longer opposing sides to a debate on how to run a country, there can be no democratic choice. The electorate has come to realise this, with surprising results. In every quarter of the West there has been a rise in political expression further removed from the political centre-ground. Donald Trump for the Republicans and Bernie Sanders for the Democrats offer evidence of this trend in the United States and it is notable that both came from outside their current parties to challenge the prevailing thinking of each of them. The Austrian presidential election run-off of 2016, which included no representative of either of the parties that had ruled that country, without interruption, since 1945, provides similar evidence for that country.

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This perception has largely been fuelled by a very clear-eyed, and accurate understanding that those elites have been using tax havens to hide their wealth, while the companies that they control have been using them to avoid tax. If there is a political movement towards the extremes as a consequence – as represented, for example, by the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the United States, the UK vote to leave the European Union, and the growth of far-right parties in a number of European countries – then the role of tax havens in disguising the activities of elites has had a significant role to play. The fact that many of the politicians who have exploited these situations have explicitly embraced anti–tax haven positions provides some indication of the power of this narrative.

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The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire
by Neil Irwin
Published 4 Apr 2013

It’s one thing to make an unpopular move knowing you’ll have to explain yourself in a congressional hearing a few months later, quite another to know that investigators will soon subpoena every document that was created in the course of reaching that decision. To Paul, Audit the Fed was just a way to add a bit more democracy to an antidemocratic body. Three hundred twenty of 435 representatives—nearly three quarters of the House—eventually signed on as cosponsors of the Federal Reserve Transparency Act. Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, the lone socialist in the U.S. Congress, took up the cause in the Senate, and by the spring of 2009 the effort to audit the Fed was picking up momentum. • • • With the Fed under attack, the man at its helm was called to become a politician himself. It wasn’t a natural fit. Ben Bernanke wasn’t born to be a Washington operator.

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In a tense meeting, the more liberal members of the party, and even some of more middle-of-the-road temperament, were livid that at a time when voters were furious about the economy and Wall Street bailouts, legislators were being asked to confirm a guy who was responsible for both. “Massachusetts was kind of a wake-up call to many Democrats,” said Bernie Sanders that week. “People are disgusted and furious with Wall Street and with the state of the economy, and a number of Democrats have been scratching their heads, saying, ‘Why do we want to reappoint a guy who was a member of the Bush administration?’” Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, no liberal bomb thrower, came out in opposition to Bernanke.

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Their tone was warm and friendly, free of the vicious anger that had characterized discussions of the Fed over the past year. The message, the reserve bank presidents concluded, had finally gotten through. • • • Audit the Fed may have passed overwhelmingly in the House, but in the Senate finance reform bill that Chris Dodd put forward, it was nowhere to be found. Bernie Sanders wanted to change that, drafting an amendment that largely tracked with Ron Paul’s. Bernanke and Geithner both saw dire consequences if it was enacted: There would be intense new political pressures on the Fed’s monetary policy, which would inevitably make policymakers more reluctant to make hard but necessary decisions.

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Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future
by Jean M. Twenge
Published 25 Apr 2023

Kennedy (1925) Cesar Chavez (1927) Walter Mondale (1928) Martin Luther King Jr. (1929) Sandra Day O’Connor (1930) Ted Kennedy (1932) Diane Feinstein (1933) Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933) Gloria Steinem (1934) Ralph Nader (1934) Geraldine Ferraro (1935) John McCain (1936) Antonin Scalia (1936) Madeleine Albright (1937) Colin Powell (1937) Nancy Pelosi (1940) Dick Cheney (1941) Jesse Jackson (1941) Bernie Sanders (1941) Joe Biden (1942) Mitch McConnell (1942) John Kerry (1943) Angela Davis (1944) Athletes and Sports Figures Arnold Palmer (1929) Mickey Mantle (1931) Roberto Clemente (1934) Wilt Chamberlain (1936) Jack Nicklaus (1940) Muhammad Ali (1942) Arthur Ashe (1943) Joe Namath (1943) Billie Jean King (1943) Journalists, Authors, and People in the News Harper Lee (1926) Hugh Hefner (1926) Erma Bombeck (1927) Maya Angelou (1928) Barbara Walters (1929) Neil Armstrong (1930) Tom Wolfe (1930) Toni Morrison (1931) Dan Rather (1931) Susan Sontag (1933) Philip Roth (1933) Joan Didion (1934) Charles Kuralt (1934) Carl Sagan (1934) Phil Donahue (1935) Ken Kesey (1935) Judy Blume (1938) Peter Jennings (1938) Joyce Carol Oates (1938) Jerry Rubin (1938) Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1939) Tom Brokaw (1940) Anthony Fauci (1940) Sue Grafton (1940) Ted Koppel (1940) Ed Bradley (1941) Nora Ephron (1941) Martha Stewart (1941) Michael Crichton (1942) Erica Jong (1942) John Irving (1942) Bob Woodward (1943) Carl Bernstein (1944) The Equality Revolution Trait: Pioneers in Civil Rights Imagine hopping into a time machine and stopping at two different times, just seven years apart: 1963 and 1970.

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Silents were getting by, just as they have always done—a clear example of generational differences winning out even as the generation faced down a killer virus. The 2020s will see the last of the Silent generation retire from business, entertainment, science, and politics. If they are still alive, by 2029 Warren Buffett (b. 1930) will be 98, Mitch McConnell will be 86, Bernie Sanders (b. 1941) will be 87, Nancy Pelosi will be 88, and Anthony Fauci will be 89. By the end of the decade, the elder statesmen and women will be almost exclusively Boomers—in 2029, the oldest Boomers will turn 83, and the youngest will be 65. Figure 2.17: Percent of U.S. adults with significant anxiety, Silents vs. younger generations, 2019–2022 Sources: National Health Interview Survey (2019) and U.S.

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In the 2020 Democratic presidential primary races, the Gen X contenders—Cory Booker (b. 1969), Julián Castro (b. 1974), Kirsten Gillibrand (b. 1966), Beto O’Rourke (b. 1972), and Andrew Yang (b. 1975)—all dropped out by the end of February, leaving two Millennials (Pete Buttigieg, b. 1982, and Tulsi Gabbard, b. 1981), two Boomers (Amy Klobuchar, b. 1960; Elizabeth Warren, b. 1949) and four Silents (Joe Biden, b. 1942; Michael Bloomberg, b. 1942; Bernie Sanders, b. 1941; and Bill Weld, b. 1945). Of course, the presidency is one office—in scientific terms, a low sample size. If we want to document generational shifts in political leaders more comprehensively, we should probably look elsewhere, like at the U.S. Senate. In 2005, when the average Boomer was 50 years old, 46 of the 100 U.S. senators were Boomers.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

Are We Talking About the Same Thing?,” BBC News, July 20, 2010, www.bbc.com/news/world-10658070. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT frequently labeled “liberals”: For a version of this argument, see David Greenberg, “Stop Calling Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Liberals,” Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/12/stop-calling-bernie-sanders-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-liberals/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 14: A Response to the Identity Synthesis The movement, Richard Delgado: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 3rd ed.

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Objectively speaking, hard-core identity politics and simplistic socialism performed incredibly well on Facebook during this period.” This gave seasoned journalists an incentive to cultivate an interest in these topics and allowed younger writers who were true believers in the identity synthesis to outcompete their colleagues. “So you ended up with this whole cohort of discourse structured around ‘Is Bernie Sanders perfect in every way or is it problematic to vote for a white man’ as the only possible lens for examining American politics.” These commercial incentives led to a remarkable explosion in first-person content at major news outlets over the course of the last ten years. They also help to explain the growing emphasis on other journalistic content that, executives at media ventures believed, was especially likely to appeal to members of particular identity groups.

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The members of the Squad all hail from deep blue districts and have views that place them on the far left of the Democratic Party. Davids, who represents Kansas’s Third District, comes from a much more politically heterogeneous part of the country. She ran on a moderate platform, is a member of the centrist New Democrat Coalition, and secured her nomination in a tough primary contest against a candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Part of the explanation for why the members of the Squad have become the face of the Democratic congressional delegation, while most Americans have never heard of Davids, is that their views are more similar to those of editors, producers, anchors, and opinion writers at the country’s most influential left-of-center news outlets.

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How the World Works
by Noam Chomsky , Arthur Naiman and David Barsamian
Published 13 Sep 2011

Boards of directors are allowed to work together, and so are banks and investors and corporations in alliances with one another and with powerful states. That’s fine. It’s just the poor who aren’t supposed to cooperate. Corporate welfare In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the only Independent member of Congress, wrote, “If we’re serious about balancing the budget in a fair way, we must slash corporate welfare.” You’ve said you’re very uncomfortable with the term corporate welfare. Why? I like Bernie Sanders, and that was a good column, but I think he starts off on the wrong foot. Why should we balance the budget? Do you know a business—or a household—that doesn’t have any debt?

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See also India Bermuda Bernard, Elaine Bernstein, Dennis “bewildered herd,” Bible, intellectuals in biblical prophecies biotechnology birth control bishops’ conferences Bitter Paradise black market in India blacks, US. See racism Blowback BMW B’nai B’rith (Anti-Defamation League) Boeing Bolivia Bolshevik coup Bolshevism Bombay slums. See also India book publishing Bosch Bosnia Boston Boston City Hospital Boston Globe Bernie Sanders op-ed in on East Timor May Day headline in Schanberg op-ed in on semiconductors on Vietnam War Boulder (CO) Boutros-Ghali, Boutros Boyer, Paul Bradley Foundation Brady, Robert brainwashing at home Brazil brutal army of capital flight from “economic miracle” in economy fine, people not favelas films in Nova Igauçu (Rio favela) foreign debt of IMF impact on independent media in Landless Workers’ Movement left journal in loans made to media in military coup in more open-minded than US racism in rich out of control in rural workers in US domination of Workers’ Party breast cancer Bretton Woods system Bridge of Courage Brière, Elaine British East India Company Egypt invaded by in India in Ireland in Israel merchant-warriors opium trafficking by British, continued protectionism British Columbia Brown, Ron Bryant, Adam Buchanan, Pat budget, balancing the federal Buenos Aires “buffer zone,” Bundy, McGeorge bureaucrats, pointy-headed Burma Burnham, Walter Dean Burundi Bush administration attitude toward biotechnology Baker Plan Gulf war during Haiti policies of human rights abuses during Joya Martinez silenced by National Security Policy Review of Panama invasion during pro-Israel bias of protectionist policies reliance on force by unemployment during war on drugs by Bush, George antisemitic remarks by Bosnia and Somalia compared by “Bou-Bou Ghali” mistake Japan visit by “linkage” opposed by “new world order,” OSHA weakened by personality type of Somalia and “what we say goes,” business.

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We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published 2 Oct 2017

“We know from long experience that if they can’t find work, or a home, or help, they are much more likely to commit crime and return to prison.” As we enter the 2016 presidential-election cycle, candidates on both sides of the partisan divide are echoing Bush’s call. From the Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders (“To my mind, it makes eminently more sense to invest in jobs and education, rather than jails and incarceration”) to mainstream progressives like Hillary Clinton (“Without the mass incarceration that we currently practice, millions fewer people would be living in poverty”) to right-wing Tea Party candidates like Ted Cruz (“Harsh mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes have contributed to prison overpopulation and are both unfair and ineffective”), there is now broad agreement that the sprawling carceral state must be dismantled.

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“These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts,” wrote Senator Barack Obama in 2006: Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy. Obama allowed that “blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends”—but not so much because of racism but for reasons of geography and job sector distribution. This rendition—raceless anti-racism—marks the modern left, from New Democrat Bill Clinton to socialist Bernie Sanders. With few exceptions, there is little recognition among national liberal politicians that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions. III In 2016, Hillary Clinton offered more rhetorical support to the existence of systemic racism than any of her modern Democratic predecessors.

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And though much has been written about the distance between elites and “Real America,” the existence of a trans-class, mutually dependent tribe of white people is evident. From Joe Biden, vice president: They’re all the people I grew up with….And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist. To Bernie Sanders, senator and candidate for president: I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from. To Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times: My hometown, Yamhill, Ore., a farming community, is Trump country, and I have many friends who voted for Trump.

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Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

DataSetCode=TUD>. 88 Ben Tarnoff, ‘The Making of the Tech Worker Movement’, Logic Magazine, 4 May 2020 <https://logicmag.io/the-making-of-the-tech-worker-movement/full-text/> [accessed 3 April 2021]. 89 Irina Ivanova, ‘Amazon Picks Twitter Fight with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren amid Union Campaign’, CBS News, 26 March 2021 <https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-union-vote/> [accessed 29 March 2021]. 90 Bethan Staton, ‘The Upstart Unions Taking on the Gig Economy and Outsourcing’, Financial Times, 18 January 2020 <https://www.ft.com/content/576c68ea-3784-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3cba4> [accessed 12 January 2021]. 91 ‘Table 5.

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This was still true as we entered the Exponential Age: the workforces of the digital superstars were completely un-unionised. The tech industry has been anti-union since its inception – Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel, declared that ‘remaining non-union is essential for survival for most of our companies’.88 Today’s biggest companies have arguably picked up this mantle. American senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have long accused Amazon of heavy-handed attacks on workers who try to unionise.89 Throughout the last decade, workers at tech companies who try to organise have run into many obstacles – in some cases because they didn’t get the widespread support that they needed, and in others because of active interference by their employers.

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump
by James Naughtie
Published 1 Apr 2020

One was Roger Stone and the other Alex Jones, prince of the conspiracy theorists, who believes, among other things, that 9/11 was a put-up job, the federal government planted the Oklahoma City bomb that killed 168 people in 1995, the Sandy Hook massacre of schoolchildren in 2012 was an elaborate hoax, and that elements of the moon landing were faked for some dark bureaucratic purpose. That scene summed up the weirdest of conventions. Hillary Clinton’s, by contrast, was a traditional affair. Her nomination, however, had involved another street fight, this time with the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, determined to push the Democrats leftwards. He stirred up a movement that had spirit, beating Clinton in New Hampshire and announcing that he’d see it through to the end, which he did, although it became clear early on that he would not be nominated. He played a similar role to Clinton’s own in 2008, when she refused to concede the nomination to Obama until the end.

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So you go do the leadership around the world stuff, and I’ll save the economy.” ’ You might describe that as a straightforward brief. When her turn came to run, four years after the end of her term as secretary of state, she believed she had found the language that Democrats needed. But then came, first, Bernie Sanders from the left, with an assault on ‘the system’ and then Donald Trump from the right, with the opposite solutions but the same complaint that the economy and society more broadly were rigged against the powerless. An imbalance epitomised in the halls of Congress. For Clinton, the conundrum she’d wrestled with all her adult life: how to distil the liberal case to its essence.

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Hardly anyone in the hall would have walked down the block to hear Cruz, and the senator wouldn’t have regarded that campus as a place where he was likely to prosper. However, O’Rourke was still a striking lanky figure, an apparently fresh face. There was nothing particularly radical about his politics – he comes across as a centrist and could never be mistaken for a devotee of Bernie Sanders – but he was skilled in taking on the orthodoxy of the right. He spoke about a revival of community, about finding connections that had once been strong but were severed. Around that time, there was circulating on social media a video of his encounter with a group of veterans, who were infuriated by the ‘taking a knee’ protest being staged by many African American football players, led by Colin Kaepernick, demonstrating against police brutality by refusing to stand to attention for the national anthem when it was played before every game.

pages: 1,172 words: 114,305

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

In some countries, inequality is at such extreme levels that these taxes could raise enormous sums in aggregate. For example, US senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a US wealth tax targeted at the 75,000 US households with over $50 million in assets, which would raise $275 billion a year for ten years.28 Senator Bernie Sanders would raise $435 billion annually from 180,000 households.29 Each of these plans could fund important social programs. By contrast, if the Sanders plan’s $435 billion were simply divided up among all 333 million Americans, they would receive an annual basic income of about $1,300. This would certainly improve the finances of many households—particularly those with children—but would not be a serious candidate for actually replacing occupational income.

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Ofcom, “Children and Parents: Media Uses and Attitudes Report: 2018,” January 29, 2019, 11, https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/134907/children-and-parents-media-use-and-attitudes-2018.pdf; Gwenn Schurgin O’Keeffe and Kathleen Clarke-Pearson, “The Impact of Social Media on Children,” Pediatrics 127, no. 4 (2011): 800, 802. 84. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a plan that would aid colleges in such a digital transition by directing funds away from sports and toward “activities that improve instructional quality and academic outcomes.” College for All Act of 2019, S.1947, 116th Cong. (2019). 85. Todd E. Vachon and Josef (Kuo-Hsun) Ma, “Bargaining for Success: Examining the Relationship between Teacher Unions and Student Achievement,” Sociological Forum 30 (2015): 391, 397–399.

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Elizabeth Warren United States Senator for Massachusetts, “Senator Warren Unveils Proposal to Tax Wealth of Ultra-Rich Americans,” press release, January 24, 2019, https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senator-warren-unveils-proposal-to-tax-wealth-of-ultra-rich-americans. 29. “Tax on Extreme Wealth,” Issues, Friends of Bernie Sanders, accessed May 13, 2020, https://berniesanders.com/issues/tax-extreme-wealth/. 30. Karl Widerquist, “The Cost of Basic Income: Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations,” Basic Income Studies 12, no. 2 (2017): 1–13. 31. Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). 32.

pages: 361 words: 110,233

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
by Steven W. Thrasher
Published 1 Aug 2022

Even when tens of millions had no income, we largely accepted that rent had to be paid to landlords (and when financial government assistance came in the United States, it often just passed through those in distress to landlords and holders of debt). And even when the right to health care was more obvious than ever in America, during the 2020 Democratic primary, voters did not rally behind Bernie Sanders, the candidate who’d championed Medicare for All; they chose Joe Biden, who does not believe in universal health care. Mr. Kim may have killed his boss in Parasite, but he also became locked in the basement as a literal member of the underclass, living beneath yet another wealthy family. Usually, being suspended in a state of false consciousness allows the ruling class to run off with the car keys and leave the underclass holding the bag

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A self-described “former hot-metal printer and former newspaperman” who’d “destroyed both industries,” Ward wrote in his Twitter profile that “Every day I try to write part of Trump’s obit.” In early 2020, he posted critically and daily about his nation’s president, his state’s governor, and the unfolding coronavirus crisis. His penultimate post was a retweet of Senator Bernie Sanders: “When Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine 65 years ago, he understood its tremendous benefit to all of humanity and he refused to patent it.… Any coronavirus treatment must be made free for everyone.” An Oklahoma native, Ward lived just outside New York City’s outer boroughs, on Long Island, not far from where COVID-19 had recently taken the life of Lorena Borjas.

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Mbembé and Libby Meintjes, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11–40, muse.jhu.edu/article/39984. 9: Disability as Disposability “write part of Trump’s obit”: Ward Harkavy (@WHarkavy), “Former Hot-Metal Printer and Former Newspaperman: Destroyed Both Industries,” Long Beach, NY, joined July 2009. “be made free for everyone”: Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders), “When Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine 65 years ago, he understood its tremendous benefit to all of humanity and he refused to patent it. Today, we must put human life above corporate profit. Any coronavirus treatment must be made free for everyone,” tweet, Twitter, March 25, 2020, 7:28 a.m., https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1242820633412722690.

pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

Democratic senators talked up Hillary’s accomplishments and speakers like Khizr Khan—the Gold Star father of a fallen Muslim army captain—excoriated Trump.22 When Hillary made a surprise appearance to embrace Obama, the convention hall erupted in cheers.23 There was a video showing all the presidents, followed by Hillary symbolically “breaking” a glass ceiling.24 Yet there was also a disconcerting undercurrent. Just a few days before the Democratic convention, the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks dumped a number of emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee, some of which seemed to show the DNC’s preference for Hillary over her main primary rival, Bernie Sanders.25 The emails fueled intraparty feuds at a moment when the Democrats most hoped to be coming together. The WikiLeaks dump merged with the media’s merciless, seemingly 24/7 discussion of “Hillary’s emails,” the controversy over Hillary’s decision to use a private email account and server while secretary of state.

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For a conservative user, the opposite is true.16 Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist of technology at the University of North Carolina, has documented how YouTube’s “recommender” algorithms serve up increasingly extreme content. She found that after viewers watched videos of Trump rallies, YouTube’s “Up Next” feature often began to suggest and autoplay White supremacist content. Bernie Sanders videos often led to left-wing conspiracy theories. Tufekci’s worrying conclusion is that YouTube—and by extension many of the algorithms that govern our online lives—“may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”17 Thanks to social media, it has become easier than ever to connect with the people who share our views.

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Forty percent of the IRA’s Instagram accounts were what marketers consider “micro-influencers” (over 10,000 followers), while twelve accounts—including ones like “blackstagram” and “American.veterans”—were full-blown “influencers” (more than 100,000 followers).44 The Russians were even on Pokémon GO, the popular mobile game that uses augmented reality to enable players to collect fantastical creatures.45 On each of these platforms, Putin’s digital combatants sought to sow division and doubt. The trolls posted about Black Lives Matter and Confederate history, about feminism, immigration, and Syria. They heckled and harangued, pitting Christians against Muslims; Bernie Sanders and third-party candidate Jill Stein against Hillary; Hillary against Trump.46 When there were opportunities to elevate WikiLeaks or tear down James Comey, they seized them. Mostly, the trolls were assholes. But they were assholes with an agenda. As remarkable as the scale of the Russian effort was its sophistication.

pages: 391 words: 123,597

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

Shortly after I was asked to strategically edit my response to the ICO, I’d gotten a message on LinkedIn from someone named Paul Hilder. Paul had an impressive résumé. He was a writer, a political organizer, and a social entrepreneur who believed that Big Data could be used to power grassroots movements. Though British born, he had spent much of 2016 embedded in the Bernie Sanders campaign, and he had found me, strangely enough, via a video in which I made a brief and impromptu cameo and which someone at Cambridge had posted online. The video was part of a strange phenomenon: one of our data scientists had been keeping a vlog on YouTube, chronicling his life, including his work at Cambridge, for 365 days.

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The video would later become rather infamous because, in it, one of my colleagues toasted Alexander, saying of him that he was the sort of person “who could sell an anchor to a drowning man,” a less-than-complimentary comment that would outlive even the company, but what Paul had noticed was something else. The video was filmed during the company’s involvement in the Cruz campaign, and at one point that afternoon someone on the Cambridge Cruz team had yelled out, “Who’s going to win the election?” and I had been the lone voice that called out Bernie Sanders’s name. That’s how Paul had found me. He’d likely googled the SCL Group, because he was in the midst, like so many other people, of trying to understand what had happened in the United Kingdom and the States and to chart a way forward. He had long been an advocate of the left’s use of social media as a means to organize and had founded something called Crowdpac, a grassroots alternative to super PACs.

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And I explained to Lewis how I had given up my vote and contributed in no small part to the general lack of support for Hillary in the primaries and even the animosity toward her in the general election—all of which had led ineluctably to her defeat. I had flown to Chicago expressly to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Then, in November, I told myself I was too busy to fly back there again for the general. I had just been there to see my father. I hadn’t had time to get an absentee ballot. Besides, Illinois wasn’t a swing state. It hadn’t occurred to me to register to vote in Virginia, which was not only a swing state but also where our Cambridge Analytica “DC” apartments had been.

pages: 50 words: 15,155

Women & Power: A Manifesto
by Mary Beard
Published 2 Nov 2017

A notorious recent case was the silencing of Elizabeth Warren in the US Senate – and her exclusion from the debate – when she attempted to read out a letter by Coretta Scott King. Few of us, I suspect, know enough about the rules of senatorial debate to know how justified this was, formally. But those rules did not stop Bernie Sanders and other senators (admittedly in her support) reading out exactly the same letter and not being excluded. But there are unsettling literary examples too. 9. Photographed in 1870, when she was over seventy, Sojourner Truth is here made to look anything but radical – instead, a rather sedately venerable old lady.

pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

As Nigel Farage, a figurehead for the Brexit movement, triumphantly declared on the night, ‘This is a victory for ordinary people, for good people, for decent people … the people who’ve had enough of the merchant bankers.’ Yet even the shock of Brexit paled in comparison to events just a few months later when Donald Trump, a well-known businessman and reality TV star, was elected president of the United States. Winning the Republican primary earlier that year had already caused a shock – and with Bernie Sanders pushing Hillary Clinton close for the Democratic nomination, the signs were there for an upset. Which was precisely what ensued as Trump took previously democrat-held ‘Rust Belt’ states on his way to the White House. The President-elect’s victory speech was reminiscent of Farage’s, as he told ‘the forgotten men and women of our country’ that they would be ‘forgotten no longer’.

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Britain now displayed both key features of the new political landscape: massively increased polarisation, and uncertainty as to whether the politics of the left or right would ultimately prevail. While they might not share much politically, Trump and Corbyn, along with Brexit and the emergence of Podemos, Bernie Sanders and Syriza, indicate the era of capitalist realism is over. And yet there is also a deeper story at play, one which remains largely unremarked upon. While the events of the last several years are both historic and unexpected, they are a response to an economic crisis, beginning in 2008, which itself only represents the first stage of a prolonged period of global disorder.

pages: 555 words: 80,635

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital
by Kimberly Clausing
Published 4 Mar 2019

When workers’ wages fall short of expectations, people often express their discontent by turning to populist solutions.13 Figure 2.7: Debt in US Households is Still Rising Steadily Notes: This is total household debt per capita in US dollars. Student loan debt was not included until 2003. Data sources: New York Federal Reserve Bank and World Bank. The rise of populists like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump speaks to the depth of public dissatisfaction. Political polarization extends beyond the 2016 election in both time and space. The US Congress is nearly synonymous with dysfunction, in large part due to ever-increasing polarization. In Europe, both far-left and far-right parties are ascendant.14 The shrinking importance of moderate political groups likely generates several costs: more policy variability, more policy uncertainty, more difficulty enacting policy, and more extreme policies.

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Chinese imports account for about 1 million of the 5.8 million (net) job losses in manufacturing over the period 1999 to 2011—and if indirect effects on other industries are included, the number of job losses attributable to trade with China is twice as large.5 As it turns out, these intense “China shock” zones overlap heavily with the voting precincts that most heavily favored Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. This election followed a long campaign season in which Trump (and Bernie Sanders, competing for the Democrats’ nomination) frequently lambasted Hillary Clinton for promoting international trade through such agreements as the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA)—given her affiliation with former President Clinton, who brought NAFTA into force in 1994—and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), negotiated by the Obama administration she served as Secretary of State.

pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

Going in, the CEOs recognized that public support for the capitalist system was waning. Brexit had just passed in the UK over the objections of nearly every business leader. Donald Trump had triumphed after a campaign attacking the globalization that these companies had driven. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, had nearly been defeated for the Democratic nomination by Bernie Sanders, who openly embraced democratic socialism. Polls showed that among young people, a majority did not favor capitalism. Clinton later told me she thought that declaring she was in favor of capitalism might have hurt her in the primary campaign. Pope Francis himself was also a symbol of the rising discontent.

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The 2008 shakeup led to a cascade of events, including Brexit—a bold and potentially disastrous rejection of corporate and political common sense—and the advent of leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, who flouted centuries of conventional wisdom without replacing it with any stable alternative. And just as real was the backlash on the Left, personified in the United States by Bernie Sanders. Sanders launched two presidential campaigns that, while ultimately unsuccessful, harnessed the impressive energy and influence of the younger population and pulled the Democratic party in his direction. Corporations were viewed as bastions of privilege, with CEOs who were paid hundreds of times more than their average worker.

pages: 262 words: 69,328

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

In other words, on average, people in the United States are basing their idea of normal weather on what has happened in the last handful of years.” The Democratic Party’s gradual moves to the left followed the classic Overton window formula: The centrist “third way” policies of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1990s gave way to Barack Obama’s more progressive vision for the country, and in 2016, Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” rattled the Democratic establishment by winning impressive numbers of young and independent voters and ending up with 1,831 pledged delegates to Hillary Clinton’s 2,220. Buoyed by Sanders’s popularity, progressive groups tried to push the Democratic Party to the left.

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Like the Tea Party on the right, Occupy was a response to the financial crash of 2008 and its fallout on the working and middle classes, and as inequality snowballed across the world, its cry of “we are the 99 percent” went from being a left-wing meme circulating on social media to a trope increasingly used by politicians, journalists, even TV and ad copy writers. The long-term effects of the Occupy movement would become apparent only in retrospect, as its alumni helped staff Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign and started an array of progressive groups intent on nudging the Democratic Party to the left. “For everything that Occupy got wrong,” the journalist Michael Levitin wrote in his 2021 book, Generation Occupy, “the movement radicalized a generation of activists who forced social, economic, racial and climate justice to the center of the conversation, inaugurating a new era of protest.”

pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi
Published 14 May 2020

In February 2017, the then Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the 2016 federal policy to phase out the use of private prisons.34 This set in motion the start of new bidding processes for additional facilities in private immigrant detention centers.35 A memorandum sent by the Federal Bureau of Prisons followed. It noted that to alleviate overcrowding “and to maximize the effectiveness of the private contracts,” federal prisons should send low-security (and the higher-profit margin) nonviolent inmates to private prisons.36 Commenting on the reversal, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “Private prison companies invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and today they got their reward.”37 Other senators were similarly dismayed.38 Part of the change may be attributed to successful lobbying from the leading for-profit operators who, naturally, were not willing to give up on a multibillion dollar sector without a fight.

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Over time we learn more how Russia used Facebook, Google, and Twitter to “sow discord in the US political system.” According to an internal Russian document, the operatives were instructed to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary [Clinton] and the rest (except [Democratic Primary Candidate Bernie] Sanders and [Republican candidate Donald] Trump—we support them).”146 Russia’s campaign likely reached 126 million people on Facebook, 20 million more on Instagram, and countless more on YouTube.147 Yet, we cannot negotiate better terms, because the Gamemakers are so powerful.148 What can we do? Tell Google and Facebook to stop tracking us across our devices and Internet?

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“Unless you have scale and power in the marketplace and with the consumer, you’re just out there scrambling on your own,” an executive at AT&T Inc. said after the federal court allowed it to acquire media conglomerate Time Warner.9 The alignment between big government and big business will continue as long as money and corporate help with reelection remain top-of-mind concerns for so many government officials. This means that we can expect many governmental policies to remain skewed toward helping the wealthy and powerful under the façade of competition, and against regulation in the name of freedom. Writers and thinkers as diverse as Martin Luther King, Jr., Senator Bernie Sanders, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., have inveighed against this state of affairs, which they describe as socialism for the rich (meaning government policy that sees to it that most resources go to the rich, their powerful corporations, and our financial institutions) and capitalism—or as King put it, “rugged individualism”—for the poor (meaning that they are left to struggle on their own).

pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

This is not to say that Betsy DeVos is a religious zealot or a billionaire simply because her family members are, but it has to make it more difficult to really understand the plight of American families that are struggling to make ends meet and desperately depend on the government to provide adequate schooling for their children. When Senator Bernie Sanders asked her about working to provide free college tuition to all Americans during her confirmation hearing, she described it as a nice idea, but she was unsure how that cost would be paid for. When Senator Sanders proposed that reducing the tax breaks currently granted to millionaires and billionaires would easily cover the tuition costs, she simply tried to change the subject.

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The Clinton Foundation and the recently defunct Clinton Global Initiative, an enterprise that was shut down the day after the 2016 election when it became clear to the world that the influence-peddling was no longer an option for the second-place finisher in the American election, have been described by Ortel as the largest criminal enterprise on the planet, and that is really saying something considering the drug cartels, mafia, and the CIA are in competition.178 Did the media question the flimsy story of the death of Seth Rich, a DNC staffer that was allegedly murdered during a robbery, even though his wallet, his phone, his watch, and his gold necklace were all left by the thief? It does not take a seasoned FBI investigator to realize that the story simply did not add up, especially once one factors in the reality that he was the leaker that provided Kim Dotcom with information from the DNC that proved that Bernie Sanders’ nomination was suppressed by Hillary Clinton and others in the Democratic National Convention.179 This information was sent to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, and leads to another story that lacked in substance, but was universally portrayed to be of a legitimate origin: the narrative that Russia hacked the 2016 election.

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Michael Hastings wrote a scathing article about General Stanley McCrystal that got him fired from running the Iraq War, then his car blew up after hitting a tree at 100 mph on San Vicente Blvd at 4 am in Los Angeles, only hours after he told his friends that he had to get out of town to lay low. There was the alleged robbery and murder of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee analyst that provided proof that the DNC conspired to suppress votes for Bernie Sanders so that Hillary Clinton could be the nominee. He downloaded information to a thumb drive that was given to Kim Dotcom, who in turn made the information available to Wikileaks and Julian Assange. He was murdered in an alleged robbery in a park in Washington D.C., except that the robbers forgot to take his wallet, his watch, his gold necklace, or his cell phone.

pages: 469 words: 137,880

Seven Crashes: The Economic Crises That Shaped Globalization
by Harold James
Published 15 Jan 2023

Measures to restrict monopoly or monopsony power alone—or indeed, to restrict globalization or technological change—would do little to reverse the trend.118 Summers was skeptical of aspects of the Trump fiscal package, in particular of discussions of raising the amount paid in stimulus checks that would boost consumption but ran the risk of overheating the economy. The checks were a “pretty serious mistake.” They were the product of a merging of the thought of Trump and left-wing Democrats, and in particular the Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders: “When you see the two extremes agreeing, you can almost be certain that something crazy is in the air. . . . When I see a coalition of Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump getting behind an idea, I think that’s time to run for cover.”119 In February 2021, at the beginning of the Biden presidency, Summers continued that run for cover: it looked as if there was another Summers U-turn.

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Summers, “The Declining Worker Power Hypothesis: An Explanation for the Recent Evolution of the American Economy,” NBER Working Paper No. 27193, May 2020. 119. Shawn Langlois, “Will You Be Getting $2,000?” Market Watch, December 27, 2020, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/will-you-be-getting-those-2–000-checks-well-when-bernie-sanders-and-donald-trump-agree-something-crazy-is-in-the-air-former-treasury-secretary-says-11609085310. 120. Lawrence H. Summers, “The Biden Stimulus Is Admirably Ambitious. But It Brings Some Big Risks, Too,” Washington Post, February 4, 2021. 121. Ibid. 122. John Harwood, “Larry Summers Sends Inflation Warning to White House: Dominant Risk to Economy Is ‘Overheating,’” CNN, May 12, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/12/politics/inflation-worries-larry-summers/index.html. 123.

pages: 676 words: 203,386

The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific
by David Bianculli
Published 15 Nov 2016

And as the presidential campaigns of 2015 and 2016 kept imploding or succeeding unexpectedly, the Kings had to adjust not only their stories, but their visuals, accordingly. Green-screen TVs were used on set so their images could be inserted in postproduction, which allowed for some subsequent replacement of what was planned to be on the TV screens in political back rooms and TV control rooms. Reflecting real-life events, that meant less Ted Cruz, more Bernie Sanders. As for the freedom offered by writing and presenting the political satire of BrainDead during the presidential campaign year of 2016, Michelle says, “You only feel as though you can never go too extreme. Nothing is off the table.” Robert King concludes, with a chuckle, “If it ends up being where we want it to be, it’s somewhere between Paddy Chayefsky and Roger Corman.”

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LANDMARK TV SERIES: Saturday Night Live, 1984–85, NBC; Seinfeld, 1989–98, NBC; Curb Your Enthusiasm, 2000–, HBO. OTHER MAJOR CREDITS: Broadway: Writer and star, Fish in the Dark, 2015. Movies: Woody Allen’s Radio Days, 1987, New York Stories, 1989, and Whatever Works, 2009. TV: Clear History, 2013, HBO; Saturday Night Live (guest starring as Bernie Sanders), 2015–16, NBC. Larry David’s television debut was as a founding member of the repertory company of Fridays, a late-night variety sketch series broadcast live by ABC in 1980. That’s a surprisingly high board from which to dive into TV for your first experience—a live, national TV show—and even David himself was surprised to be there, or to be a part of the entertainment world at all.

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David did a bit from the audience, talking with Seinfeld, who was taking questions from the stage, and managed to poke fun at his own short run at Saturday Night Live while noting his subsequent success—much to the delight of the studio audience. “I was actually surprised by the reaction to it,” David admitted. Here, too, there was one final twist ending. After that SNL special, later in 2015, Larry David returned to play the Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders—a live sketch comedy role bigger, better, and more warmly received than anything he’d done on Fridays or Saturday Night Live. It became a recurring role, and as the real Sanders maintained his presence deep into the primary season, so did his comic alter ego. Each time David appears as Bernie, he’s greeted by a rousing ovation before he even begins speaking.

pages: 82 words: 21,414

The Myth of Meritocracy: Why Working-Class Kids Still Get Working-Class Jobs (Provocations Series)
by James Bloodworth
Published 18 May 2016

One can still find sexism, racism and homophobia on the left as easily as one can find it in wider society. In an article for Slate about the US Democratic primaries, Michelle Goldberg wrote in late 2015 about a cultural phenomenon of so-called Bernie Bros – male supporters of US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders who ‘seem to believe that their class politics exempt them from taking sexism seriously’.102 The sexual assault allegations that embroiled the British Socialist Workers’ Party in 2013 paints an even grimmer picture of self-proclaimed egalitarians who see no contradiction in using their power as men to belittle and abuse women.

Basic Income And The Left
by henningmeyer
Published 16 May 2018

Second, technological developments imply that the number of jobs will be significantly reduced, Broad Constituency Of Support Lined up behind the idea are a large number of internationally renowned political philosophers, but also sections of many Green and left-wing political parties in Europe as well as a not insignificant number of internationally prominent politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and, surprisingly, several high profile IT entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The proposals about the size of this unconditional universal basic income vary, but if it is going to be at all possible to live on this income, suggestions of around £800 per month have been put forward: what you can get from a student loan to pay for living expenses .

pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

Sort of, but one that’s more analogous to school shootings than to the political clashes of the 1930s or the 1960s, in the sense that it involves disturbed people appointing themselves as knights-errant and going forth to slaughter, rather than organized movements with any kind of strategy or concrete goal. Internet-era political derangement is obviously partially responsible for all kinds of horrors, from the white supremacists talking one another into shooting sprees on the extremist website 8chan, to the Bernie Sanders supporter who tried to massacre Republicans at a congressional baseball game in 2017. But these cases are terrible and also exceptional; they have not yet established a pattern that looks anything like the Year of our Lord 1969, when there were more than three thousand bombings across the continental United States.

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This would require accepting that the postwar boom isn’t coming back, accepting that the space race was mostly just Cold War posturing, accepting that we’re an aging society that can’t afford vast socialist experiments or growth-chasing supply-side fantasies, accepting that we aren’t going to spread democracy by force of arms—accepting, in other words, that the discontents motivating idealists of the center and populists of the right and left are just differing forms of nostalgia, which can be managed but never satisfied, and which are ultimately just impediments to achieving contentment in our civilization’s old age. I think it’s fair to see this view, however underarticulated, as one of the important premises of the last American presidency’s policy making. Like Trump and Bernie Sanders eight years later, Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 as a critic of decadence, as a yes-we-can idealist promising a return to the 1960s New Frontier, and he certainly made forays into liberal utopianism during his eight years in office. But his real temperament was technocratic and managerial, and the management of decadence—a “Don’t do stupid shit” approach to everything from financial capitalism and globalization, to China and the Middle East—was an essential feature of Obaman governance.

pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Published 15 Mar 2016

Consider the innovation remarks of Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, a company that in 2015 dramatically raised the price of an old drug it had acquired. Asked Shkreli of Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate who had criticized him, “Is he willing to sort of accept that there is a tradeoff, that to take risks for innovation, companies have to invest lots of money and they need some kind of return for that, and what does he think that should look like?” See David Nather, “Bernie Sanders Rejects Donation from Drug Company CEO,” Boston Globe, October 15, 2015. Another good example of this sort of thinking can be found in a 2003 speech by Sidney Taurel, then the CEO of Eli Lilly, at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
by James Bridle
Published 18 Jun 2018

More often than not, the distinction didn’t even matter: as we’ve seen, all sources look the same on social networks, and clickbait headlines combined with confirmation bias acted on conservative audiences in much the same way that YouTube algorithms responded to ‘Elsa Spiderman Finger Family Learn Colors Live Action’ strings. Repeated clicks just pushed such stories higher in Facebook’s own rankings. A few brave teens tried the same tricks on Bernie Sanders supporters, with less impressive results. ‘Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,’ said one. ‘They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.’16 For a few brief months, headlines claiming that Hillary Clinton had been indicted or that the Pope had declared his support for Trump brought a trickle of wealth to Veles: a few more BMWs appeared in its streets, and more champagne was sold in its nightclubs.

pages: 244 words: 81,334

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality
by Laurence Scott
Published 11 Jul 2018

In 1944 he wrote that ‘the really frightening11 thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits “atrocities” but that it attacks the objective concept of truth’. Today, because the ‘story’ carries such central cultural importance, the role that storytelling plays in political dissimulation is especially vivid and alarming. The corrupt deployment of inaccurate stories is now talked about with explicit, often helpless cynicism. In an interview with Bernie Sanders following the passing of the 2017 US tax-reform bill, CNN’s Chris Cuomo said that the media’s correcting of the facts ‘doesn’t matter’ because Donald Trump has ‘won the narrative of a big tax cut that is going to help everybody’. Politically we have moved past putting a spin on the truth to telling the best story.

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De Dreu et al., ‘Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism’, PNAS, 108 (4), 25th January 2011; ‘It should be …’, see Xiaolei Xu et al., ‘Oxytocin biases men but not women to restore social connections with individuals who socially exclude them’, Scientific Reports, No. 40589, 12 January 2017. 11 ‘the really frightening …’, George Orwell, column in Tribune, 4th February 1944; ‘doesn’t matter’, Chris Cuomo interview with Bernie Sanders, Cuomo Prime Time, CNN, 11th January 2018. 12 ‘built into the …’, see Lily Rothman, ‘Margaret Atwood on Serial Fiction and the Future of the Book’, www.entertainment.time.com, 8th October 2012. 13 ‘were like dreams …’, Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986). 14 ‘They cannot see …’, ‘Trompe l’Oeil’, Westworld, dir.

pages: 317 words: 87,048

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

For outlets like Fox News, the ability to spend a summer saying ‘Hillary Clinton’ in proximity to the word ‘emails’ was enough – it could imply a connection to Clinton operating her own email server, even though that was nothing to do with this hack.39 The fact of the emails made news again in the race when the FBI declared it would check disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop for classified emails40 – again creating a false connection in people’s mind with Clinton’s leaked emails.41 The very fact of the email leaks was significantly damaging to the Clinton campaign, and so hugely helpful to Trump. The trouble was that once you looked closely, there wasn’t really anything all that interesting in their contents. The DNC emails raised questions for Bernie Sanders supporters as to whether they’d shown bias in favour of Clinton in the primaries, but didn’t reveal any secret crimes.42 The Podesta emails revealed even less of interest. Other people’s emails – even when they work for presidential candidates – are nearly as boring as our own, it turns out. Yet this was a huge cache of online documents, published by a reputable but thoroughly anti-establishment outlet, about perhaps the ultimate US establishment insider, Hillary Clinton.

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Tim became a believer in the ‘birther’ conspiracy – the idea that Obama was secretly born in Kenya, rather than Hawaii, and so was ineligible to be president, a conspiracy heavily boosted by Donald Trump throughout Obama’s presidency. As the 2016 election approached, Karen thought her brother would get behind Bernie Sanders as an anti-establishment candidate, only to find him supporting Trump. Soon, he was volunteering strange ideas such as that Australia had, years before, been ‘sold’ to the USA – a trope quite common in QAnon circles and affecting multiple different countries.15 Tim even, according to Karen, came to believe the David Icke theory that the Queen of England was secretly an alien lizard – and that there were pictures to prove it.

pages: 667 words: 149,811

Economic Dignity
by Gene Sperling
Published 14 Sep 2020

Barack Obama: “Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.” White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President in the State of the Union Address,” February 12, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/remarks-president-state-union-address. Bernie Sanders: “We must ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty by increasing the minimum wage to a living wage.” Bernie Sanders, Facebook, November 10, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/berniesanders/photos/a.324119347643076/927934470594891/. 18. See discussion in Cass Sunstein, Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 37–38. 19.

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While conservatives sought to frame and deride the EITC and the concept of refundable tax credits as “welfare” for “lucky duckies,” Clinton was able to frame the case for the EITC expansions by rooting it deeply in the values of a two-way social compact of contribution.15 He pledged to “ensure that no one with a family who works full-time has to raise their children in poverty.”16 In doing so, he was essentially asking middle-class voters to see a shared value in the struggles and aspirations of lower-income families, disproportionately of color, that would motivate middle-class support for a big EITC increase even though it went by definition to lower-income workers. Clinton’s frame has also been used by progressives from Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders, and had lasting benefits.17 Beyond the EITC battles of the 1990s, winning the definition of the EITC as tax relief connected to work and caring for family has dramatically reduced the partisan attacks on it, set the frame for expansion of refundable relief in child tax credits, and even led to some Republican policymakers now embracing at least targeted expansions.

pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

“What I teach and preach inside Amazon is [that] when you’re criticized, first look in a mirror and decide, are your critics right?” he said in an onstage interview in Berlin in 2018. “If they’re right, change. Don’t resist.” Amazon employed this strategy in late 2018, when another of its loudest critics, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, extended his ongoing criticism of Bezos’s wealth by unleashing a blistering critique of Amazon’s compensation of its warehouse workers. He then unveiled what he theatrically called the “Stop BEZOS” bill (for “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies”), which proposed a new tax on companies based on the number of their employees that relied on public assistance programs such as food stamps.

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His colleagues knew all too well though that Bezos wasn’t really leading but reading—in this case, the rising criticism of the company by politicians and the press over what they characterized as penurious wages for warehouse workers. Bezos’s habit of only responding on an issue when public protests mounted would soon repeat itself. After the pay raise was announced, Bernie Sanders tried to get Bezos on the phone to thank him. When the senator was routed to Carney instead (“a frequent disappointment, I’m afraid,” Carney said), he thanked the S-team member and quizzed him on reports that some tenured workers might end up making less in the new compensation scheme. Carney assured him that no employees would emerge worse off.

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reports that some tenured workers: Krystal Hu, “Some Amazon Employees Say They Will Make Less After the Raise,” Yahoo! Finance, October 3, 2018, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-employees-say-will-make-less-raise-174028353.html (January 25, 2021). returning to Twitter to harangue the company: Bernie Sanders, Tweet, December 27, 2019, https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1210602974587822080 (January 25, 2021). “Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise”: “Amazon ‘Getting Away with Murder on tax’, says Donald Trump,” Reuters, May 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/amazon-getting-away-with-on-tax-says-donald-trump (January 25, 2021).

pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

The scorn is increasingly bipartisan; while liberals take them to task for amassing monopoly power and for the poor labor conditions at their companies, conservatives accuse them of political bias and censorship. For every Elon Musk fan, there’s a critic trying to bring him back to earth. Twitter threads and op-eds and a growing cohort of politicians, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the left, and Josh Hawley and Ron DeSantis on the right, bemoan the outsized power of the tech monopolists. As it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the anger is especially acute toward those running the new factories. FEAR FACTORIES REDUX Christian Smalls March 2020 At the beginning of March 2020, an assistant warehouse manager named Christian Smalls at Amazon’s JFK8 facility noticed that more and more of his fellow employees were showing up to work pale and fatigued.

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Yet out of everyone who walked out from the Staten Island facility that day, he was the only employee terminated. “It’s a shame on them,” Smalls told Vice News. “This is a proven fact of why they don’t care about their employees, to fire someone after five years for sticking up for people and trying to give them a voice.” The firing set off a ripple of outrage. Bill de Blasio, Bernie Sanders, and New York State’s attorney general, to name a few, all spoke out in support of Smalls and called for a National Labor Relations Board investigation into the termination, which seemed retaliatory. Much like Uber and the rideshare companies, Amazon seems intent on finding out just how hard it can push its increasingly distressed workforce before those workers decide to fight back, in ways perhaps more forceful than organizing walkouts.

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“And this is not easy… when your opponents are using weapons of mass destruction, like using $200 million to our $12 million.” There was little wallowing. Moore was right; Uber, Lyft, InstaCart, and DoorDash had outspent them 20-to-1, embraced deeply suspect and misleading campaign tactics, like sending out mailers insinuating that Bernie Sanders supported Prop 22, and blanketed billboards, mailboxes, and YouTube with pro–Prop 22 advertisements. “I look around and I see warriors,” Moore continued, and a pulse returned to the Zoom. “Some of the hardest-working warriors I know. And know I can’t turn my back on anyone in this room. We went out there and fought and proved that we could get in the streets.”

pages: 320 words: 90,526

Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America
by Alissa Quart
Published 25 Jun 2018

She had a visceral disgust for the anxious competitiveness of other middle-class mothers on the playgrounds and in the preschools. “Who cares what skills my kids have mastered?” she told me. Over the years I watched as this modest oppression politicized Bellamy. Now forty-five and the mother of an eight-year-old and a four-year-old, she had become an intense Bernie Sanders supporter during the 2016 election, going to his rallies in the Bronx, scrambling to pay for day care for her hours working for the campaign, phone banking for the candidate, going door to door. “He’s been saying things I’ve been feeling for so long that no one else will really say,” she explained as she pushed her daughter in a swing on a Harlem playground.

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Would she be able to pass on the social class standing she had created for herself? Would they even be able to get the same fine education she’d gotten as a bright and dedicated young woman, vaulting into the Ivy League after growing up deeply religious and attending an equally devout college? Still a Bernie Sanders supporter a year after the election, Bellamy bristled at the memory of the 2016 primaries. She was now researching her new book project, “Jyeshtha, the Hindu God of Misfortune.” Misfortune was indeed a subject that for her would seem apropos for our times. THERE ARE BOTH SMALL AND LARGE REMEDIES FOR THE PLIGHT OF the hyper-educated working poor—those earning around $36,000 a year, with kids, and just getting by, only a few false moves away from the poverty line.

pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
by Matthew C. Klein
Published 18 May 2020

Instead of violence, however, the modern regime depends on the English-speaking countries’ political commitment to open markets. This is a choice, but in democracies, the people have the option to change their mind. We may already be starting to see this. In the 2016 election, all of the major U.S. presidential candidates disavowed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Bernie Sanders warned that it would “make it easier for corporations to throw American workers out on the street” and would “reward some of the biggest human-rights violators in the world.” Hillary Clinton was concerned the agreement failed to address the problem of currency manipulation and gave too much protection to pharmaceutical patents.

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Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Penguin, 2014); Nicholas Crafts, “Walking Wounded: The British Economy in the Aftermath of World War I,” VoxEU, August 27, 2014, https://voxeu.org/article/walking-wounded-british-economy-aftermath-world-war-i; Barry Eichengreen, “The British Economy between the Wars,” in The Cambridge History of Modern Britain, ed. Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 314–43. Conclusion 1. Bernie Sanders, “Sanders: Party Platform Still Needs Work,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 2016; “Hillary Clinton Says She Does Not Support Trans-Pacific Partnership,” PBS News Hour, October 7, 2015, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/hillary-clinton-says-she-does-not-support-trans-pacific-partnership; Larry Summers, “A Setback to American Leadership on Trade,” Financial Times, June 14, 2015. 2.

pages: 307 words: 93,073

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023

Those receipts become your unassailable weapon. And they can even become your signature weapon. In the fall of 2019, at a live taping of my then podcast, Deconstructed, in front of an audience in Washington, DC, I began by asking one of my guests, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, why she was supporting Bernie Sanders over Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic presidential primaries. Of course, I had plenty of context to bring to the table. In an interview with me, only a year earlier, she’d been against Sanders. I asked her why. Hadn’t she said that the “ship might have sailed” on a Sanders candidacy and that she had always thought of herself “as part of the Warren wing of the party”?

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I’ve done the same myself when I’ve been invited as a guest on other people’s TV shows. In 2020, I appeared on Cuomo Prime Time, on CNN, and I was asked a question by host Chris Cuomo about a story in the news that was framed in a way that I didn’t think was fair. The story centered on the Democratic presidential primaries, when candidate Bernie Sanders was demanding that candidate Joe Biden disown and apologize for a proxy’s offensive remarks. Cuomo was arguing that the proxy, Hilary Rosen, was not formally employed by the Biden campaign and therefore Biden was under no obligation to throw her under the bus, So, what did I do in response? I challenged the premise behind his line of questioning; I turned it around and reframed our discussion.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

Raghav Rao, “Information Control and Terrorism: Tracking the Mumbai Terrorist Attack Through Twitter,” Information Systems Frontiers 13, no. 1 (2011): 33–43. 64 Indian government had said: Busari, “Tweeting the Terror.” 64 “Die, die, die”: Ibid. 64 begging for blood donations: Noah Schatman, “Mumbai Attack Aftermath Detailed, Tweet by Tweet,” Wired, November 26, 2008, https://www.wired.com/2008/11/first-hand-acco/. 64 spread word of tip lines: Tamar Weinberg, The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web (O’Reilly, 2009), 127. 64 to work collectively: Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired, June 1, 2006, https://www.wired.com/2006/06/crowds/. 65 $218 million: Clare Foran, “Bernie Sanders’s Big Money,” The Atlantic, March 1, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/bernie-sanders-fundraising/471648/. 65 “to crowdfund their war”: “Why an Ordinary Man Went to Fight Islamic State,” The Economist, December 24, 2016, https://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21712055-when-islamic-state-looked-unbeatable-ordinary-men-and-women-went-fight-them-why. 65 fundamentalist donors: Elizabeth Dickinson, “Private Gulf Donors and Extremist Rebels in Syria” (panel presentation, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, December 19, 2013). 65 “financial jihad”: Lisa Daftari, “Hezbollah’s New Crowdfunding Campaign: ‘Equip a Mujahid,’” The Foreign Desk, February 9, 2017, http://www.foreigndesknews.com/world/middle-east/hezbollahs-new-crowdfunding-campaign-equip-mujahid/?

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Sometimes, crowdsourcing might be about raising awareness, other times about money (also known as “crowdfunding”). It can kick-start new businesses or throw support to people who might once have languished in the shadows. It was through crowdsourcing, for instance, that septuagenarian socialist Bernie Sanders became a fundraising juggernaut in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, raking in $218 million online. Of course, like any useful tool, crowdsourcing has also been bent to the demands of war. A generation ago, Al Qaeda was started by the son of a Saudi billionaire. By the time of the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS, the internet was the “preferred arena for fundraising” for terrorism, for the same reasons it has proven so effective for startup companies, nonprofits, and political campaigns.

pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

Both parties were split in their support of the candidates: First Lady, senator, and secretary of state Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, and insurgent political newcomer, reality TV star, and real estate mogul Donald Trump for the Republicans. Clinton had engaged in a bitter primary competition with a self-declared socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who usually functioned as an independent in Congress and was something of a populist himself. Donald Trump had never been part of the Republican Party and had once been registered as a Democrat in New York. He was the last man standing from a huge field of seventeen candidates representing the Republican Party’s mainstream.

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As secretary of state under President Obama, Clinton was particularly outspoken about Russian foreign and domestic policy and critical of Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 after a four-year term as prime minister. Russia’s operation sought to weaken her. Russian propaganda efforts promoted both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as well as third-party candidates like Jill Stein of the Green Party. Russian operatives from the military intelligence services, the GRU, were later revealed to be behind efforts to penetrate Clinton’s personal emails and the “hack and release” of the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) emails.

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“No politician in history”: Lauren Gambino and Tom McCarthy, “Trump: ‘No politician in history has been treated more unfairly,” Guardian, May 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/17/donald-trump-presidency-media-coverage-russia-scandal. This was “socialism”: David A. Graham, “Trump’s New Red Scare,” Atlantic, February 20, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/trump-socialism-venezuela-bernie-sanders-ocasio-cortez/583135/. top-down approach: Katie Lobosco, “Employers commit to train 3.8 million workers under Trump executive order,” CNN, July 19, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/19/politics/trump-executive-order-job-training/index.html. ephemeral: Brooks Jackson, “Trump’s Numbers January 2020 Update,” Factcheck, January 20, 2020, https://www.factcheck.org/2020/01/trumps-numbers-january-2020-update/.

pages: 307 words: 96,543

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn
Published 14 Jan 2020

The United States has been much more hostile to private labor unions than other countries have been, with fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers now in a union—one reason almost half of American jobs pay less than $15 an hour. Consider this sentiment: “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Was that said by Karl Marx, Eugene Debs, Bernie Sanders or another socialist? Actually, it was said by Abraham Lincoln, in his first State of the Union address. Yet in recent decades, the political system has become more pro-business and suspicious of labor. “This country is the cesspool of labor relations,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told us.

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Conservative writers like Charles Murray and David Brooks have explored these chasms, with Brooks arguing that “the central problem of our time is the stagnation of middle-class wages, the disintegration of working-class communities and the ensuing fragmentation of American society.” On the left, Senator Elizabeth Warren and many other Democrats have made similar arguments. Remarkably, this pain in white working-class America helped account for the rise of both Donald Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left. What went wrong? For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the United States had pioneered efforts to create opportunity. The Homestead Acts, beginning in 1862, were a self-help program that gave American families 160 acres of land each if they farmed it productively or improved it over five years.

pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

They decided that the best move was to toss the pieces in the air and see where they might land. The move might not win the game, but it might start a new one with different rules. Americans and the British wanted change, even if it meant a leap into the unknown. If Trump had not won, it might well have been Bernie Sanders, an antiestablishment candidate who beat Hillary Clinton in dozens of states. He was a socialist most of his career. In America, according to Gallup polls, being a socialist is right beneath atheism and Islam as a disqualifying trait in a political candidate. In Britain, the Labour Party had voted for a far-left-wing leader.

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He had once demanded the “complete rehabilitation” of Leon Trotsky, a Marxist revolutionary. Once Corbyn became Labor leader, he declared, “The people who run Britain have rigged the economy and business rules to line the pockets of their friends. The truth is the system simply doesn't work for most people.” Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump couldn't agree on anything, but they both told their followers that the US economy was rigged, and voters loved them for it. On the campaign trail Trump said, “It's not just the political system that's rigged, it's the whole economy,” President Trump told voters while campaigning.

pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

This general approach to change jibed with what Clinton had stood for while in power: the championing of globalization, the embrace of markets, compassion, the declared end of labor/capital conflict, the promise of the rich and poor rising together—the insistence that loosened regulations good for Wall Street would also be good for Main Street; the marketing of trade deals craved by large corporations as being ideal for workers. The country was two months away from a referendum on Clintonism. Hillary Clinton had beaten Bernie Sanders, who spoke of putting the “billionaire class” in their place in order to make the working class thrive, whereas Clinton had spoken of wanting everyone to do better. Now she found herself up against the ultimate win-losey opponent, though this time of the race-baiting, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist sort.

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He said this as though it were impossible to imagine how the opportunity to earn tens of millions of dollars after a presidency might affect a president’s fight-picking decisions while in office. In our present age of anger, so many people seemed to intuit that their leaders becoming fellow travelers of billionaires and millionaires did have some effect on what they believed. That intuition had hamstrung his own wife’s campaign. It had helped Bernie Sanders’s unlikely primary challenge, and then Donald Trump’s unlikely election victory—made all the stranger by the fact that Trump incarnated the very problem he named. Was it inevitable that the leaders of a democracy should affiliate mostly with plutocrats after their time in public office? Was that not related to the problems of mistrust and alienation and social distance that lurked behind the anger now confronting elites?

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Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce
by Natalie Berg and Miya Knights
Published 28 Jan 2019

On the far right, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon has called for tech giants to be regulated like public utilities since they have become so essential to 21st-century life; while Democratic Party leaders pushed for a wider antitrust crackdown in 2018 as part of their ‘Better Deal’ economic platform. ‘We’re seeing this incredibly large company getting involved in almost every area of commerce and I think it is important to look at the power and influence Amazon has’, said Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders in 2018.3 Khan argues that predatory pricing and vertical integration are highly relevant to analysing Amazon’s path to dominance – and that current doctrine underappreciates the risk of such practices. The playing field has been tilted since day one, from the moment that Bezos convinced his early investors that a growth-over-profits strategy would yield results in the long run.

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Available from: http://www.startribune.com/best-buy-and-amazon-partner-up-in-exclusive-deal-to-sell-new-tvs/480059943/ [Last accessed 2/11/2018]. 2 Khan, Lina (2017) Amazon’s antitrust paradox, Yale Law Journal, 3 January. Available from: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5785&context=ylj [Last accessed 7/7/2018]. 3 CNN (2018) Sen. Bernie Sanders: Amazon has gotten too big, YouTube, 1 April. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxDWoR_zaQ&feature=share [Last accessed 8/7/2018]. INDEX Note: Chapter notes are indexed as such page numbers in italic indicate figures or tables Ackerman, D (CNET senior editor) 218 Ahrendts, A (SVP of Apple Retail) 187, 199–200 AI and voice: the new retail frontier (and) 147–64 AI’s ability to improve ROI instore/online 161 supply chain complexity (and) 150–53 Amazon Go 152–53 ‘Just Walk Out’ technology system 152 the untapped potential of voice (and) 153–63 see also Alexa competitive landscape 160–63 first-mover advantage 154–55 retail technology smarts 158–60 voice as the next frontier 155–58 the value of recommendation 148–50 AI (artificial intelligence) 23, 133, 136, 139, 148–50, 161, 175, 237 AI-powered concierge GWYN (Gifts When You Need) 179 Aldi 33, 51, 122, 203 Alexa (and) 14, 20, 23, 32, 71, 77, 96, 97, 102, 136, 143, 147, 153–58, 160–61, 213, 217 see also research ‘Ask Peapod’ skill for 157 -based store customer service system (HIT Sütterlin) 180 in BMW and Toyota cars 161 Home Skills API 158 International 10, 19 see also McAllister, I prioritizes search results 125–26 top Alexa-enabled commands 155 voice-enabled Connected Home ecosystem 237 Alibaba (and) 39, 46, 63, 75, 76, 111, 135, 136, 230, 234–35 see also Alipay Ant Financial Services 183 Buy+VR mall 71 in China 150 China Smart Logistic Network (Cainiao) 234 food delivery app Ele.me 238 food delivery drones for China 238 Hema Supermarkets 183, 191 its market share in China 234 leases containers on ships 234 Logistics 234 ‘Singles Day’ shopping festival (2016) 150 AliPay 183, 214 AlixPartners 53 and underreported costs of trading online 72–73 Amazon (and) 63, 179–80 see also Alexa; Amazon Books; Amazon flops: Amazon’s grocery ambitions; Prime 2.0; Prime ecosystem; a private label juggernaut and WACD 3D printer patents 231–32 acquires Kiva Systems 229–30 acquires Quidsi 97 acquires Ring 237 acquires Whole Foods Market 3, 37, 82, 103, 235–36 advertising 124 ‘Amazon Prime Delivers More’ 216 AI development 237 AI framework DSSTNE 149 Air 231 Amazon.com 224 Amazon Remembers 173 ASOS: creating versions of trying before you buy 198 AWS 11, 14 Basics range 123 Body Labs 128 Business (Amazon Supply 2012–15) 232 Cash 39 Cash (US)/Amazon Top Up (UK) 39 checkout and payment strategy 215 China: ocean freight services 231 Cloud Cam security camera 237 cloud computing/storage services (AWS) 19 customer touchpoints – Alexa and Dash 96, 97 Dash 153 Dash Buttons 143–44, 147, 213 Dash replenishment scheme 96 Destinations 10 Echo 11, 14, 37, 71, 112, 121, 153–54, 237 Echo Look 128 Effect 5, 39, 46–47, 65, 212 see also retail apocalypse Elements brand 128 Family (Mom) 97 Fire 121 Fire Phone 140–41, 154, 173 Firefly app 140–41, 173 Flex 74, 223–24 Flex Android-based app 224 Flow (camera search feature) 173 Fresh 94–95, 124, 219, 223, 226, 227 and Solimo 124 Fresh Pickup 237 fulfilment strategy 235 Go 68, 152–53, 166, 182, 214 at inflection point 3 Instant Pickup 237 ‘Just Walk Out’ technology 152, 182 Key In-Car 237–38 Key in-house and in-car deliveries 237 Kindle 14, 20, 37, 140, 237 Fire HD device 173 Kohl’s, partners with 81, 233 Leadership Principles 9, 135, 137 leasing patterns 228 Local 10 Lockers 70, 77, 80, 208–09, 216, 237–38 see also lockers/collection lockers in UK and Europe 209 Logistics 224 logistics warehouse investment facilities 228–29 Maritime, Inc. and US Federal Maritime Commission operating licence 231 market share 234 Marketplace 142 the middleman 232 as number one destination for online product search 66 Pantry 219, 223 Pay 232 Pay with Amazon service 142–43, 147 Payments (online payments gateway) 213 Prime see subject entry refunds 234 Restaurants 219 returns process 233 Robotics 230 ‘SLAM’ line (scan, label, apply, manifest’ 223 Stellar Flex 232 Studios 20 Subscribe & Save 96 Super Saver 210 sues Barnes & Noble over ‘1-click’ patent 141–42 testing delivery drones in UK (Prime Air) 151 third Leadership Principle – ‘invent and simplify’ 136 top-performing clothing brands 127 see also reports Treasure Truck 236–37 truck drivers, first app for 231 as ultimate disruptor 21 Vine 125 Wand 213 working conditions 229 Amazon Books (and) 80–81, 80, 169–70 criticisms of store 169 its objective 170 pricing 81, 169, 213 utilitarian look and feel of 169 ‘The Amazon Effect’ 5 Amazon flops Amazon Destinations 10 Amazon Local 10 Amazon Wallet 10 Fire phone 10 Amazon Web Services (AWS) 135 an Amazon world – notes 1–4 Amazon’s grocery ambitions (and) 86–106 see also Amazon factors correlating to online grocery adoption and profitability 88 food: the final frontier and importance of frequency 90–92 2022: the online grocery tipping point?

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

“It’ll sure be ironic if the reason our correspondence lands on the government’s radar,” one group member emailed Andreessen, was because “their algorithms were triggered by our sarcastic use of the word ‘junta.’ ” * * * — IN EARLY SUMMER OF 2016, the Russia narrative started bubbling up. In mid-June, Guccifer 2.0 leaked documents that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee. A week later, just three days before the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks published thousands of stolen emails, opening rifts between Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned almost immediately. And, of course, Nix eventually began asking around about Clinton’s emails at the behest of Rebekah Mercer, eventually offering Cambridge Analytica’s services to WikiLeaks to help disseminate the hacked material.

…

We settled on an alternative plan—a trip to Berkeley for a conference focused on data and democracy, where we could aim for a discreet chat with a couple of White House officials who we knew would be there. The other person I had talked to extensively about all this was Ken Strasma, Obama’s former targeting director. I had met with Strasma in New York and told him about Cambridge Analytica’s data targeting. Since his firm had just provided microtargeting services for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, naturally he was interested. After Clinton clinched the nomination, in late July, Strasma called me and said, “Now that we’ve lost, I’m going to see if I can talk with Hillary’s data team.” He asked whether I’d be interested in meeting with them to outline my suspicions about what was happening with the Trump campaign.

pages: 493 words: 98,982

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
by Michael J. Sandel
Published 9 Sep 2020

His moral voice muted, Obama placated rather than articulated the seething public anger toward Wall Street. Lingering anger over the bailout cast a shadow over the Obama presidency and ultimately fueled a mood of populist protest that reached across the political spectrum—on the left, the Occupy movement and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders; on the right, the Tea Party movement and the election of Trump. The populist uprising in the United States, Great Britain, and Europe is a backlash directed generally against elites, but its most conspicuous casualties have been liberal and center-left political parties—the Democratic Party in the U.S., the Labour Party in Britain, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in Germany (whose share of the vote reached a historic low in the 2017 federal election), Italy’s Democratic Party (whose vote share dropped to less than 20 percent), and the Socialist Party in France (whose presidential nominee won only 6 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2017 election).

…

It is a potent ingredient in the volatile brew of anger and resentment that fuels populist protest. Though himself a billionaire, Donald Trump understood and exploited this resentment. Unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who spoke constantly of “opportunity,” Trump scarcely mentioned the word. Instead, he offered blunt talk of winners and losers. (Interestingly, Bernie Sanders, a social democratic populist, also rarely speaks of opportunity and mobility, focusing instead on inequalities of power and wealth.) Elites have so valorized a college degree—both as an avenue for advancement and as the basis for social esteem—that they have difficulty understanding the hubris a meritocracy can generate, and the harsh judgment it imposes on those who have not gone to college.

pages: 116 words: 34,937

The Life of a Song: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World’s Best-Loved Songs
by David Cheal and Jan Dalley
Published 20 Sep 2017

On the album, ‘Dark Was the Night’ is sung by Rickie Lee Jones. She reinstates the words to the hymn, written in 1792 by English clergyman Thomas Haweis; it’s haunting. David Cheal 40 THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND When he joined members of Vampire Weekend on stage in Iowa in January 2016 to sing ‘This Land Is Your Land’, Bernie Sanders (mercifully off-mic) was following in a long political tradition. The Vermont senator might be surprised to learn, however, that Woody Guthrie’s song – widely regarded as an alternative national anthem for the US – has been co-opted by Republicans as well as Democrats since the bard of the Great Depression first put pen to paper in February 1940.

pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future
by Alec Ross
Published 13 Sep 2021

Top Statutory Personal Income Tax Rates,” Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, accessed July 21, 2020, https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLE_I7. Nordic governments also generate: Elke Asen, “Insights into the Tax Systems of Scandinavian Countries,” Tax Foundation, February 24, 2020, https://taxfoundation.org/bernie-sanders-scandinavian-countries-taxes/. The corporate tax rate in each of the Nordic states: “Corporate Tax Rates Table,” https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/services/tax/tax-tools-and-resources/tax-rates-online/corporate-tax-rates-table.html; Asen, “Corporate Tax Rates around the World, 2019,” https://taxfoundation.org/publications/corporate-tax-rates-around-the-world/.

…

Morgan, June 24, 2019, https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/global/pb/en/insights/eye-on-the-market/lost-in-space-the-search-for-democratic-socialism-in-the-real-world-and-how-i-ended-up-halfway-around-the-globe-from-where-i-began.pdf. Companies are permitted to hire and fire: Fareed Zakaria, “Bernie Sanders’s Scandinavian Fantasy,” Washington Post, February 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanderss-scandinavian-fantasy/2020/02/27/ee894d6e-599f-11ea-9b35-def5a027d470_story.html; Matt Bruenig, “Fareed Zakaria Is Completely Ignorant about the Nordics,” People’s Policy Project, March 2, 2020, httxtps://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/03/02/fareed-zakaria-is-completely-ignorant-about-the-nordics/.

pages: 363 words: 105,039

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 5 Nov 2019

The documents, now with WikiLeaks’ stamp of credibility, began to be picked up by news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Politico, BuzzFeed, and The Intercept. The revelations were very real: It turned out the DNC had secretly favored the candidate Hillary Clinton over her opponent Bernie Sanders as the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, despite the committee’s purported role as a neutral arbiter for the party. DNC officials had furtively discussed how to discredit Sanders, including staging public confrontations about his religious beliefs and an incident in which his campaign’s staff allegedly accessed the Clinton campaign’s voter data.

…

In other words, as the controversy around Russia’s role in his election victory began to grow, it seemed that Trump had no interest in discussing any sentence that contained the words “Russian” and “hacker,” no matter the context. (The White House never answered my multiple requests for comment on Lee’s description of those events.) If Trump sensed the news could be used against him politically, he was right. In late June 2017, eighteen Democratic senators and Independent Bernie Sanders signed a letter to the president, citing Dragos’s work and demanding Trump direct the Department of Energy to conduct a new analysis of the Russian government’s capabilities to disrupt America’s power grid. They also asked for an exploration of any attempts the Kremlin had already made to compromise America’s electric utilities, pipelines, or other energy infrastructure.

pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster
by Nick Timiraos
Published 1 Mar 2022

The Fed’s actions “are a major reason why the US economy is now outperforming those of other advanced nations,” he said. He pointed to the fact that other central bankers were now following “some of the same bold steps undertaken much earlier by the Fed.” The more conservative and populist Republicans in Congress, together with left-wing detractors such as Bernie Sanders, didn’t share Powell’s positive appraisal. They pushed proposals to give a government-oversight authority the power to review the Fed’s monetary-policy decisions—something the Fed feared would simply give its critics another way to drum up opposition to its policies. As the lone Republican on the board, Powell became a forceful defender of the Fed’s approach—a reprise of his role in the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011.

…

But no one knew that at the time, and the story drew thousands of responses on social media. “This is bullshit,” wrote Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democratic congresswoman.1 The CARES Act was proving especially unpopular with progressive Democrats, who were upset that the Senate had unanimously approved the measure. “The almost pervasive refusal to hold either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren accountable for supporting the worst bill in 25 years is a great example of what is broken on the American left,” wrote one prominent progressive commentator on Twitter.2 After the CARES Act passed, Warren asked Mnuchin and Powell to tie strings to the programs. Her requests went far beyond what Congress had required and included maintaining 95 percent of a firm’s pre-pandemic workforce, providing a $15 minimum wage, and giving a seat on the board of directors to workers.

pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
by Adam Tooze
Published 31 Jul 2018

Four years later Obama was out of the picture and the Republican field was wide open. As a result, the presidential race of 2016 turned out to be more about the financial crisis of 2008 than 2012 had been. The upshot was explosive and unpredictable. I The most obvious mark of the financial crisis of 2008 on the election of 2016 was the fact that Bernie Sanders was a serious contender for the Democratic Party nomination. Sanders wasn’t even a member of the party. He was a self-declared democratic socialist. He was a confirmed foe of Wall Street. In 2008 he had voted against TARP. He called for the big banks to be broken up. He wanted bankers jailed and a return to New Deal–era banking regulations.

…

For conventional commentators it was jaw-dropping. Did the president-elect not understand that the success of American business depended precisely on their ability to deploy labor and capital globally? As several commentators remarked, his threatening tone was “more like the populism of Hugo Chavez than even something Bernie Sanders would say. It’s the kind of threat that would find its ultimate expression in currency controls—that favored instrument of economic dictators around the world.”49 Had a left-winger engaged in such provocation, barring intervention by the Treasury and the Fed, the markets would surely have plummeted.

…

No one in the West was sure that they knew how to read Beijing.16 In December 2015, on the basis of America’s own improving jobs market, the FOMC went ahead and raised rates. It was the first rate increase since 2006.17 Yellen’s announcement made clear that the Fed intended to set a signal that the recovery had consolidated. But on both wings of American politics it was hotly contested. Bernie Sanders supporters rallied outside the New York Fed building demanding to know “What Recovery?” Millions of Americans were still a long way from where they were in 2008. On the other hand, conservative opinion, eventually joined by Donald Trump, was irate that Yellen had not moved sooner. The message from the markets was similarly mixed.

pages: 122 words: 38,022

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
by Angela Nagle
Published 6 Jun 2017

While the alt-right regard these and the Guardian, BBC and CNN as the media of ‘the left’, espousing ‘Cultural Marxism’, it became obvious when the possibility of any kind of economically ‘left’ political force emerged that liberal media sources were often the most vicious and oppositional. Liberal feminist journalist Joan Walsh called Bernie Sanders’s supporters ‘Berniebot keyboard warriors’, while Salon was one of the main propagators of the Berniebro meme with headlines like, ‘Bernie Bros out of control: Explosion of misogynist rage…’ and, ‘Just like a Bernie Bro, Sanders bullies Clinton…’ Meanwhile Vice, a magazine that made its brand on the most degenerate combination of vacuous hipster aesthetics and pornified transgression, published things like ‘How to spot a brocialist’.

pages: 113 words: 37,885

Why Wall Street Matters
by William D. Cohan
Published 27 Feb 2017

But if they are pressed, their instinct would likely be to agree with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher, who once said that “finance” is “a slave’s word,” while the profession itself is nothing more than “a means of making pilferers and traitors, and of putting freedom and the public good upon the auction block.” The modern-day equivalent of this sentiment can be found in the musings of Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont and former Democratic presidential candidate, whose stump speeches during the 2016 presidential campaign condemned Wall Street relentlessly. “Greed, fraud, dishonesty and arrogance, these are the words that best describe the reality of Wall Street today,” he said in January 2016.

pages: 137 words: 38,925

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 17 Jul 2018

The Trump campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, recounted how they used Facebook’s advertising tools to micro-target potential supporters with customized ads, making some fifty to sixty thousand ads a day, continually tweaking language, graphics, even colors, to try to elicit a favorable response. The campaign also used so-called dark posts (visible only to the recipient) and launched three voter-suppression operations, according to a senior campaign official quoted in Bloomberg Businessweek: one was targeted at Bernie Sanders supporters; one at young women (who, the campaign thought, might be offended by reminders of Bill Clinton’s philandering—odd, given Trump’s own scandals with women); and one at African Americans (who the campaign thought might not vote for Clinton if reminded of her use of the term “super predators” in 1996, referring to her husband’s anticrime initiative)

pages: 360 words: 113,429

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence
by Rachel Sherman
Published 21 Aug 2017

In 2014 French economist Thomas Piketty’s 700-page book on inequality became a bestseller in the United States. Strikes by fast-food workers and prominent debates about raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars per hour also put the spotlight on low-wage workers in this period. The 2016 presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, despite their differences, kept outrage about economic disparities in the public eye. The language of class, especially the “working class,” appeared in political discourse often in the period both before and after Trump’s election. Public opinion critical of inequality has increased since 2000 as perceptions of the possibility of upward mobility have grown gloomier.27 INVESTIGATING AFFLUENCE Given these contradictory ideas about wealthy people, how do the beneficiaries of growing inequality feel about and manage their privilege?

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Rowling is a billionaire—regardless of how she came by her fortune, how she spends it, or whether she gives it away—just on the basis of the idea that such wealth is inseparable from extreme inequality, which is both pernicious to society and itself immoral? To some extent recent public discourses critical of inequality emerging from the Occupy movement, the Fight for Fifteen struggle for a $15 minimum wage, and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign have raised exactly these questions. As we have seen, the people I talked with sometimes responded quite negatively to these critiques, interpreting them as personal judgments, as when high earners reacted defensively after President Obama advocated repealing high-wage tax cuts.

pages: 423 words: 118,002

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
by Russell Gold
Published 7 Apr 2014

But for those outside, information can be tough to come by. This veil of secrecy has fallen only one time, and the snapshot of the investors and traders setting energy prices in the summer of 2008 showed that McClendon and several close associates were among the largest participants. US Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, pulled the curtain back when he released a confidential list of futures market speculators compiled by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a disclosure that sent futures traders into conniptions. The list of who held the natural gas contracts was a who’s who of global capitalism and energy.

…

For more information about Arnold, see “The Reckoning of Centaurus Billionaire John Arnold,” by Leah McGrath Goodman in the February 1, 2011, edition of Absolute Return. Some of McClendon’s quotes about Chesapeake having four main inputs and the number of leasing transactions come from an interview he gave on January 5, 2012, to my Wall Street Journal colleagues Daniel Gilbert and Ryan Dezember. Senator Bernie Sanders, in August 2011, released a snapshot of participants in natural gas and oil futures markets. The information was made available on his Senate website, www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=e802998a-8ee2-4808-9649-0d9730b75ea4. (Last accessed August 2013.) I downloaded the data, put it into spreadsheets, and analyzed it to come up with the rankings of largest natural gas market participants.

pages: 479 words: 113,510

Fed Up: An Insider's Take on Why the Federal Reserve Is Bad for America
by Danielle Dimartino Booth
Published 14 Feb 2017

But had the predominantly liberal Fed leadership not facilitated the bad behavior of the elite by encouraging them to borrow at virtually no cost, their wealth and power would never have become as concentrated as it is today. The ostentatiousness with which the so-called one percent has flaunted its wealth has fueled the rise of anger and extremism, leading to the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right. And politicians wonder about the genesis of a deeply divided and dispirited populace. Central bankers have invited politicians to abdicate their leadership authority to an inbred society of PhD academics who are infected to their core with groupthink, or as I prefer to think of it: “groupstink.”

…

And finally, the Money Market Investor Funding Facility (MMIFF). These Fed-created facilities put a floor under the shadow banking system and finally checked the run. (These didn’t include the various programs created by the FDIC, the Treasury, or Congress.) The loans the Fed made were secret. Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist who in 2015 launched a run for president as a Democrat, later sponsored legislation that compelled the Fed to disclose financial details of its extraordinary efforts to save Wall Street. Released in late November 2011, the data, which covered twenty-one thousand Fed emergency loans totaling $3.3 trillion, revealed for the first time how close some of the biggest names on Wall Street came to the brink of disaster.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

In the recent past in the U.S., mid-tier grocers like A&P have been driven to bankruptcy, squeezed by Walmart, Costco, Aldi, Amazon, and others entering the grocery business on the lower end, and Whole Foods, Wegmans, and others on the higher end. Politicians often face a two-front war in which they are fighting on both sides of the political spectrum, with attacks from both the political right and left. A recent example is Hillary Clinton’s 2016 U.S. presidential candidacy, where she faced a tough primary fight on the left from Bernie Sanders, and then in the general election she was still fighting for those voters while at the same time courting more-centrist voters. You should be wary of fighting a two-front war, yet you probably do so every single day in the form of multitasking. When discussing intuition in Chapter 1, we explained that there are two types of thinking: low-concentration, autopilot thinking (for saying your name, walking, simple addition, etc.) and high-concentration, deliberate thinking (for everything else).

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As we explored in Chapter 8, a person in just the right role can produce amazing results, and an organizational strategy attuned perfectly to its culture can be a quick and resounding success. Similarly, a message can strike just the right tone for a specific audience such that it will deeply resonate. You see this phenomenon repeatedly in politics when certain candidates hit a nerve with a segment of the population, as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump did in the U.S. 2016 presidential election cycle. A model that captures these phenomena is resonant frequency. This model comes from physics and explains why glass can break if you play just the right note: Each object has a different frequency at which it naturally oscillates.

pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
by David E. Sanger
Published 18 Jun 2018

It was clear that morning that the hack was not simply about campaign intelligence gathering. It was intended to be the cyberattack equivalent of broadcasting the conversation about Ukraine between Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt. There was only one explanation for the purpose of releasing the DNC documents: to accelerate the discord between the Clinton camp and the Bernie Sanders camp, and to embarrass the Democratic leadership. That was when the phrase “weaponizing” information began to take off. It was hardly a new idea. The web just allowed it to spread faster than past generations had ever known. Anyone who had followed the Russian hacking groups knew that there was little chance that Guccifer 2.0 was simply a savvy, lone hacker.

…

And not coincidentally, the deluge started just days after our interview with Trump, and right before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The most politically potent of the emails made clear that the DNC leadership was doing whatever it could to make sure Hillary Clinton got the nomination and Bernie Sanders did not. To anyone watching the nomination process, that was hardly surprising; while the DNC was supposed to be neutral, it was understood in the Democratic leadership that this was Clinton’s turn. She had the name recognition and the money and the experience, and many in the party felt she had been denied her chance when Obama came along in 2008.

pages: 691 words: 203,236

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

For our purposes, what jumps out is Wauquiez’s politicization of the term ‘taboo’, a frequent refrain of conservative politicians going back to Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands and William Hague in Britain in the early 2000s. This is true even on the left, where some, like David Blunkett in Britain and Bernie Sanders in America, have criticized political correctness. Taboos are underpinned by both negative and positive liberalism. While negative liberalism delimits a narrower scope for the anti-racism taboo focusing on verbal attacks on minorities, positive liberalism seeks to expand the definition of racism to protect symbolic policies such as multiculturalism and large-scale immigration.

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‘I will assess the facts plainly and honestly,’ promised Trump in his acceptance speech: ‘We cannot afford to be so politically correct any more.’ Whenever opponents questioned his outrageous remarks on gender or race, Trump was able to deflect these as examples of political correctness. The Democratic contender Bernie Sanders agreed that Trump won in part because of this. ‘[Trump] said he will not be politically correct,’ said Sanders. ‘I think he said some outrageous and painful things, but I think people are tired of the same old politically correct rhetoric. I think some people believe he was speaking from his heart and willing to take on everybody.’43 Sanders was subsequently criticized for these remarks by many in the media and his own party and forced to recant.

…

Thiel, The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, Oakland, Calif., 1995: The Independent Institute; N. Glazer, We are All Multiculturalists Now, Cambridge, Mass., 1997: Harvard University Press. 43. Aaron Colton, ‘The problem with political correctness is not the content – it’s the delivery’, Paste Magazine, 30 November 2016; Brandon Morse, ‘Bernie Sanders explains why anti-political correctness helped win Trump the election’, The Blaze, 13 December 2017. 44. Ryan Maloney, ‘Most Canadians say political correctness has gone “too far”: Angus Reid Institute Poll’, HuffPost (Canada), 29 August 2016. 45. Tom Clark, ‘Free speech? New polling suggests Britain is “less PC” than Trump’s America’, Prospect, no. 264 (February 2018). 46.

Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now
by Guy Standing
Published 19 Mar 2020

Appendix B: Why a job guarantee would be no alternative The claim made in this book is that a basic income would promote social justice, freedom and basic security while combating the eight giants, in ways that other possible policies would not. Among the policies advocated as alternatives is a job guarantee for everyone, or for everyone ‘able to work’.1 In the United States, several prominent Democrat senators and possible candidates for the 2020 presidential election have said they support the idea, including Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand. In Britain The Guardian has endorsed it unequivocally as ‘a welcome return to a politics of work’.2 The Guardian claimed that a job guarantee policy ‘would secure a basic human right to engage in productive employment’. Throughout history, the vast majority of people would have found that a very strange ‘human right’.3 Having a job is to be in a position of subordination, reporting to and obeying a boss in return for payment.

pages: 134 words: 41,085

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

It may also allow some populists in democracies to grab some unjustified powers. But it will not convince the people of the West to give up on elections. The bigger question is what will those people now vote for—and we fear the answer is larger, more nationalist governments. THE EVEN GREATER SOCIETY The Coronavirus arrived just as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, the two most left-wing people in the Anglosphere’s recent history, were bowing off the political stage. Having seen their ideas comprehensively rejected by voters in Britain’s general election and the Democratic primaries, and knowing their parties had chosen pragmatic leaders, you might have imagined the old firebrands would be a bit downcast, even humbled.

pages: 756 words: 120,818

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

In the United States, the first inkling of discontent came in 2014 with the shocking unseating of the House majority leader Eric Cantor by the Tea Party in the Republican primary ahead of the congressional elections by a relatively unknown economics professor named Dave Brat. Then the drift of blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party to the right and the appeal of nonestablishment candidates like Bernie Sanders to younger voters became new political trends. We can now say, without controversy, that Americans have lost faith in politics and politicians. For example, Gallup polls show that Americans rate members of Congress at the very bottom of professions (only 7 percent believed members of Congress had high ethical standards), just above car salespeople and well down in the ranking from nursing, the top profession.44 It is also worth mentioning that in the United States, according to Gallup, nearly 45 percent of voters now identify themselves as independents, and two groups of close to 25 percent each identify with the Democrats and Republicans, respectively.

…

La République En Marche, formed in 2016 as the political vehicle for now-president Emmanuel Macron, is a centrist, liberal party that now dominates the French Assemblée nationale. And the far-right euroskeptic party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), founded in 2013, after surviving a number of leadership changes, now has 12 percent of the seats in the German Bundestag. The popularity of Bernie Sanders and the appeal of Donald Trump are also manifest proof of the demand for new political forces. A countervailing, generally more positive and more recent trend is the emergence of new political candidates. One powerful case is the rise in the number of women entering politics in the United States (in 2018, 23 percent of the candidates contesting congressional primary elections were women, mostly Democratic and many of them political novices).

Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order
by Noam Chomsky
Published 6 Sep 2011

For Beverly, the outcome is largely irrelevant, since discovery demands alone severely damage Professor Bronfenbrenner and her university, and may have a chilling effect on other researchers and educational institutions. 14. White House letter, January 20, 1998. I am indebted to congressional staffers, particularly the office of Representative Bernie Sanders. 15. Jane Bussey, “New Rules Could Guide International Investment,” Miami Herald, July 20, 1997; R.C. Longworth, “New Rules for Global Economy,” Chicago Tribune, December 4, 1997. See also Jim Simon, Seattle Times, “Environmentalists Suspicious of Foreign-Investor-Rights Plan,” Seattle Times, November 22, 1997; Lorraine Woellert, “Trade Storm Brews over Corporate Rights,” Washington Times, December 15, 1997.

pages: 165 words: 47,193

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job
by John Tamny
Published 6 May 2018

Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order (Roseville: Forum, 2001), 581. 5.Ibid., 575. 6.Eric Hoffer, “Notable & Quotable: The Young,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2017. 7.Mike Isaac, “Upstarts Raiding Giants for Staff in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, August 19, 2015. 8.John Tamny, “Fear Not, Millennials Are Not Embracing Bernie Sanders Style Socialism,” Forbes, August 3, 2016. 9.Adam Shell, “In Quest for Millennials, Financial Firms Try to ‘Crack the Code,’” USA Today, May 10, 2017. Chapter Seven: My Story 1.Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then (New York: Crown Books, 1999), 200. 2.Mark Bechtel, “Farewell,” Sports Illustrated, December 28, 2015. 3.Steve Forbes, “Powerful Antiterror Weapon,” Forbes, October 6, 2006. 4.George F.

pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis
Published 16 Mar 2021

Taylor had seen a similar dynamic in his work for the Obama campaign that year, which had him up in the Canton area, in charge of organizing supporters in Alliance and Minerva. But in 2016, something else was happening. Taylor saw a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm for Obama’s anointed successor, Hillary Clinton. In the primaries, he noticed Democrats drifting to Bernie Sanders. And as time went on, he saw more and more people who had voted for Obama drifting in a more unfathomable direction, to Donald Trump. Taylor Sappington was appalled by this drift, but also understood why it was happening. He saw the ugly veins that Trump was tapping into. But he also saw what else Trump was tapping into—the sense that this part of the country had been left far behind the rising islands of prosperity.

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And it was a pay level that the company was already approaching in many parts of the country as it struggled to find workers in a tight labor market. “Aren’t you excited? Come on, clap!” an HR manager said after announcing the raise at one of Amazon’s many warehouses in the San Bernardino Valley. In response, workers started a slow clap. But the announcement undermined efforts by Bernie Sanders, among others, to force the company to raise wages through legislation, and it signaled to consumers that they could continue to buy goods cheaply online with a clean conscience. So did the announcement nine months later that the company, which already offered tuition assistance for employees seeking vocational or associate’s degrees on the side, would now also retrain 100,000 employees by 2025 to help them advance to higher-level work at the company.

pages: 371 words: 137,268

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

These groups aren’t only helping working-class people resist their oppression today; they’re also demonstrating the feasibility of a debt jubilee: a critical measure to democratize our financialized economy. The networks that emerged out of the Occupy movement also provided the foundation for the revival of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and for Bernie Sanders’s bid for the presidency. Those involved in the UK’s smaller Occupy movement were also involved in the anti-austerity movement from 2010, out of which emerged a network of activists who became involved in the campaign for Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for leadership of the Labour Party. These bids for state power did, of course, end in failure—both as a result of issues with their internal organization and due to coordinated campaigns to crush them.

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Monica Nickelsburg, “Amazon’s $1.45M Fails to Upend Seattle City Council, but Tech Giant Wins Small Victories,” GeekWire, November 5, 2019, https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazons-1-45m-effort-upend-seattle-city-council-yields-mixed-results-early-reporting/. 42. Moon lost, but Sawant won, and the makeup of the city council did not change substantially, dealing a major blow to Amazon’s political maneuvers. Amazon’s loss came in part thanks to interventions from democratic socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders, and came just a few years after Amazon was forced to cancel the construction of a new second headquarters in Queens, New York, after democratic socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushed back against the plans. 43. Stephanie Denning, “Why Jeff Bezos Bought the Washington Post,” Forbes, September 1920, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniedenning/2018/09/19/why-jeff-bezos-bought-the-washington-post/. 44.

pages: 181 words: 50,196

The Rich and the Rest of Us
by Tavis Smiley
Published 15 Feb 2012

Between 2003 and 2008, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, reportedly much of the $40 billion in cash sent to Iraq for the reconstruction and restructuring of government services was stolen, misappropriated, or mysteriously lost.71 It is because of these travesties that the 2011 deficit-reduction debate and the fallout over increasing the nation’s debt ceiling—which left Congress in a state of paralysis for months—were such shams. House Speaker John Boehner’s $1.2 trillion deficit-reduction plan included no cuts in Afghanistan and Iraq war spending but drastic cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs that help the economically vulnerable and desperately poor. As progressive Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) argued in a blistering July 2011 Wall Street Journal editorial, the plan offered by Democrats rendered almost as much harm to the poor as Boehner’s proposal: “The plan by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, which calls for $2.4 trillion in cuts over a 10-year period, includes $900 billion in cuts in areas such as education, health care, nutrition, affordable housing, child care, and many other programs desperately needed by working families and the most vulnerable.”

pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Political leaders evolve, albeit slowly and imperfectly, to fit the medium through which they reach the people. The latest iteration, and the first bona fide politician of the social media age, is Twitter addict and world-class simplifier Donald Trump. He is the leading act in a new cast of populists who have found the internet a revelation for their style of politics, including Nigel Farage, Bernie Sanders, Dutch anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders, Italian comedian and Five Star Movement founder Beppe Grillo and others. Some of them are left wing, some are right wing, but all are ‘system one’ leaders who became popular by promising easy solutions to complicated questions. Trump is the strong man, the tribal leader who trades on outrage.

pages: 721 words: 238,678

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem
by Tim Shipman
Published 30 Nov 2017

He’s a socialist leader who wants to fundamentally change society so that wealth and power rest with the majority and not with the elite. Anyone who thinks that is always going to get shitcanned. I don’t think you can have a conventional leadership strategy for an unconventional leader.’ Trickett’s colleagues would have preferred him to brief the Guardian that Corbyn was seeking to emulate Bernie Sanders, the left-wing populist who ran Hillary Clinton close for the Democrat nomination, rather than Trump. They were also annoyed that Trickett had placed the notion of a relaunch in the public domain when the process had been intended to be gradual. ‘There wasn’t ever the idea for a full-blown relaunch, let alone a Donald Trump relaunch,’ one colleague said.

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With hundreds outside unable to get into the packed church, he declared, ‘Hope that it does not have to be like this, that inequities can be tackled, that austerity can be ended … This is the new mainstream, and we have staked it out and made it our own, together.’ One of his aides said, ‘We have hugely shifted the centre of gravity of politics in this country.’ The enthusiasm Corbyn generated was given more practical effect because Momentum arranged for organisers from Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign for the US Democratic nomination to hold training sessions for volunteers, drafting in Bostonian Erika Uyterhoeven, Sanders’ national director for outer-state organising, among others. ‘The right can throw money at elections – we throw people,’ Uyterhoeven said.8 Adam Klug said, ‘They delivered short talks and training on canvassing techniques.

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v=slBGDqCjE5M, Copa90, 31 May 2017 2. Election 2017: What Just Happened?, BBC2, 12 June 2017 3. The Inside Story of Election ’17, Radio 4, 26 July 2017 4. Ibid. 5. Inside Corbyn’s campaign team, Influence, 13 July 2017 6. Ibid. 7. Election 2017: What Just Happened?, BBC2, 12 June 2017 8. The US Bernie Sanders campaigners lending Jeremy Corbyn a hand, Guardian, 30 May 2017 9. Ibid. 10. Inside Corbyn’s campaign team, Influence, 13 July 2017 11. Hamish McFall: Tellers’ work wasted. Invaded privacy. Computers that spewed gibberish. How CCHQ bungled this election campaign, ConservativeHome, 16 June 2017 12.

pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money
by George Gilder
Published 23 Feb 2016

They and Bill Clinton’s labor secretary Robert Reich and most university faculty members insist that today’s technological innovation is little more than the fruit of some obscure 1950s research program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. Bernie Sanders wants to quadruple tax rates on investment, taking 90 percent of the yields of innovation. Hillary Clinton wants to double the capital gains tax. Most Democrats see robotics and other advancing computer technologies as job killers rather than job creators, as if more workers would be employed if they were less productive.

pages: 172 words: 54,066

The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive
by Dean Baker
Published 1 Jan 2011

Many grassroots libertarians are wary of the Fed, often because they view it as an instrument of Wall Street banks. Progressives can find allies among libertarians for at least some actions related to the Fed, most importantly measures that increase accountability. In the last session of Congress, Ron Paul, one of its most conservative members, and Alan Grayson and Bernie Sanders, two of its most progressive, introduced bills requiring greater disclosure of the Fed’s lending practices. Despite the opposition of the Democratic leadership, the Paul-Grayson bill won the support of the majority of the House, as most Republicans and about one-third of Democrats signed on as co-sponsors.

American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup
by F. H. Buckley
Published 14 Jan 2020

It seceded from Britain in 1777 and took its time joining the United States. It played off Canada and the Continental Congress for better terms, and only joined the United States in 1791. Not even Texas was independent for a longer period of time. Vermont isn’t much like the rest of the country. It’s rural but liberal, and it sends Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy to Washington. It’s the least religious state in the country, and also the whitest. The Vermont secession movement gathered steam when George W. Bush was president. In 2004, Kirkpatrick Sale drafted a “Middlebury Declaration” that was positively anti-American. “The national government has shown itself to be clumsy, unresponsive, and unaccountable,” it said.

End the Fed
by Ron Paul
Published 5 Feb 2011

That’s what the spontaneous tea parties organized around the country are all about. This is not a conservative or liberal issue; it’s not a Republican or Democratic issue. It is pervasive, across the political spectrum. I introduced a Federal Reserve audit bill, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, HR 1207, which Progressive/Socialist (and friend) Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced in the Senate. I’m convinced that if we had an up-or-down vote on this bill in the House, very few would vote against it. That is a reflection of the concerns the American people hold and how the members of Congress are starting to get the message. Although it may appear that Congress ignores the people, when the people speak loudly and clearly enough, the political animals in Washington respond.

pages: 173 words: 55,328

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
by George Packer
Published 14 Jun 2021

Early in the campaign, I spent time with a group of white and Black steelworkers in a town near Canton, Ohio. They had been locked out by the company over a contract dispute and were picketing outside the mill. They faced months without a paycheck, possibly the loss of their jobs, and they talked about the end of the middle class. The only candidates who interested them were Trump and Bernie Sanders (one of the workers was reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century). No one even mentioned the two establishment favorites, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. A steelworker named Jack Baum told me that he was supporting Trump. He liked Trump’s “patriotic” positions on trade and immigration, but he also found Trump’s insults refreshing, even exhilarating.

pages: 157 words: 53,125

The Fifth Risk
by Michael Lewis
Published 1 Oct 2018

The New Jersey governor had dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016 and thrown what support he had behind Donald Trump. In late April he saw the article. It described meetings between representatives of the remaining candidates still in the race—Trump, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders—and the Obama White House. Anyone who still had any kind of shot at becoming president of the United States apparently needed to start preparing to run the federal government. The guy Trump sent to the meeting was, in Christie’s estimation, comically underqualified. Christie called up Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to ask why this critical job hadn’t been handed to someone who actually knew something about government.

pages: 194 words: 56,074

Angrynomics
by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth
Published 15 Jun 2020

You and I think they can be dramatically improved, but the evidence is overwhelming that in competitive, deregulated, developed economies, printing money to stave off deflation and prevent recessions is costless in terms of inflation. MARK: That’s a very strong claim and sounds similar to some of the ideas held by a number of US economists who advised Bernie Sanders and known as modern monetary theory (MMT). They argue for aggressive fiscal spending given structurally low inflation. ERIC: In the absence of inflation, it is true that we have a great deal more fiscal and monetary flexibility. MMT economists don’t have a credible explanation of why inflation is dead.

pages: 470 words: 148,444

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House
by Ben Rhodes
Published 4 Jun 2018

“But, you know,” I said, “like you, we need people to break for the safer choice.” * * * — BACK HOME, AN ANTSY Obama had to wait until the end of a bitter Democratic primary before he could get out and start campaigning—like a basketball player waiting by the scorer’s table to check into a game. Bernie Sanders had come to meet him after Clinton clinched the race, and I got some inkling of the challenge she had faced: The steps of the EEOB were filled with young Obama White House staffers, craning their necks, trying to get a glimpse of their populist hero. Our first rally with Clinton was in Charlotte, and the crowd was familiar: Obama people, thousands of them, a sea of white, black, and brown faces, waiting to erupt into applause when he walked on stage.

…

But just before the Democratic convention, Wikileaks dumped thousands of DNC emails into the public domain in an effort to sow discord within the Democratic Party. This was new, something of far greater scale and consequence than releasing intercepted phone calls in Ukraine. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had resigned as chair in the face of outrage from Bernie Sanders supporters who saw, in the emails, that she’d shown favoritism for the Clinton campaign. The leaks continued throughout the summer, a steady release of the kind of gossipy emails designed to draw attention from the political press, popping up on platforms with names such as DC Leaks and Guccifer 2.0.

pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

‘Social media’ is a pallid catch-all phrase which equates in most minds to the ephemeral postings on Twitter and Facebook. But ‘social media’ is also empowering people who were never heard, creating a new form of politics and turning traditional news corporations inside out. It is impossible to think of Donald Trump; of Brexit; of Bernie Sanders; of Podemos; of the growth of the far right in Europe; of the spasms of hope and violent despair in the Middle East and North Africa without thinking also of the total inversion of how news is created, shared and distributed. Much of it is liberating and inspiring. Some of it is ugly and dark.

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Paul Lewis, by now based in the US, pronounced himself aghast at the conspiracies and fake news people relayed to him as fact – Sandy Hook was a hoax; Obama’s parents were CIA agents; the Clintons secretly murdered one of Bill’s accusers; Muslims controlled Europe; climate change was a fraud; three million Bernie Sanders votes were suppressed; there were Chinese sleeper cells spread across America. These fictions had gone mainstream. When it came to the really important news, what would the wisdom of the crowd look like? Were the multitude of Facebook users more interested in dispassionate facts or in promoting versions of the world that support their prejudices?

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

Due perhaps to Poe’s law of online ambiguity, there was no telling whether this content was mocking or earnest (one Reddit community manager believed it was begun as the former and quickly transformed to a den only welcoming to ardent Trump supporters). Growth was slow initially, which made sense—Bernie Sanders had seemed to be Reddit’s candidate of choice early in the 2016 election cycle. In December 2015, r/The_Donald was still a mostly mild place, though infused with some of the wall-building rhetoric spouted by the candidate himself. Its extensive set of rules, maintained by the moderators, forbade most bigotry and racism, with the exception of Islamophobia, which it expressly permitted.

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While most of the accounts’ efforts were ineffective, a few were successful; one posted a sex video that falsely claimed to include Hillary Clinton, and it received more than one hundred thousand upvotes. As the 2016 campaign season wore on, Donald Trump’s big tent on Reddit was his largest online supporter group, and it included a constituency of: racists; the 4chan migrants, largely in it for the keks; alt-righters; Gamergaters contributing sexism and conspiracy theories; some former Bernie Sanders supporters; Russian propagandists; and anyone lured by the promise of a place that tolerated Islamophobia. R/The_Donald was their clubhouse, a thriving “safe space” that blossomed into one of the most absurdist and influential communities in all of Reddit. With all this in mind, perhaps it makes sense that by mid-2016, The_Donald had become a two-hundred-thousand-strong community producing a steady stream of far-right talking points, coded racism, casual misogyny, Islamophobia, and the now-well-established alt-right “free speech” and hatred of the mainstream media.

pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

After watching jogging videos, she found the recommendation algorithm suggested increasingly intense workouts, such as ultramarathons. Vegetarian videos led to ones on hard-core veganism. And in politics, the extremification was unsettling. When Tufekci watched Donald Trump campaign videos, YouTube began to suggest “white supremacist rants” and Holocaust-denial videos; viewing Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton speeches led to left-wing conspiracy theories and 9/11 “truthers.” At Columbia University, the researcher Jonathan Albright experimentally searched on YouTube for the phrase “crisis actors,” in the wake of a major school shooting, and took the “next up” recommendation from the recommendation system.

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Even the ad networks of social media were used by foreign actors looking to monkey-wrench American politics. In the spring of 2018, US special investigator Robert Mueller revealed that “Russian entities with various Russian government contracts” had bought social-network ads for months, attacking Hillary Clinton and supporting Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, her primary rivals. But it wasn’t hard to understand why they’d find this route useful. Google, Facebook, and Twitter’s ad tech is designed specifically to help advertisers microtarget very narrow niches, making it the perfect way to reach the American citizens they wanted to hype up with conspiracies and disinfo: disaffected, angry, and racist white ones, as well as left-wing activists enraged at neoliberalism.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

Indeed, Americans who live in the top-income counties enjoy on average twenty years more of life than those living in the poorest counties, wrote Senator Bernie Sanders, and that is at least partly due to what he termed “grossly unequal access to quality healthcare.” B. Sanders, “Most Americans Want Universal Healthcare. What Are We Waiting For?,” Guardian, August 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/14/healthcare-a-human-right-bernie-sanders-single-payer-system. 22. In fact, the Patient Factor lists at the top of the world’s health care systems (courtesy of the World Health Organization) the following countries: (1) France, (2) Italy, (3) San Marino, (4) Andorra, (5) Malta.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
by Amitav Ghosh
Published 16 Jan 2018

In effect, the countries of the West are now in many senses ‘post-political spaces’ that are managed by apparatuses of various kinds. For many, this creates a haunting sense of loss that manifests itself in an ever-more-desperate yearning to recoup a genuinely participatory politics. This is in no small part the driving force behind such disparate figures as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, on the one hand, and Donald Trump, on the other. But the collapse of political alternatives, the accompanying disempowerment, and the ever-growing intrusion of the market have also produced responses of another kind—nihilistic forms of extremism that employ methods of spectacular violence. This too has taken on a life of its own. 3 The public politics of climate change is itself an illustration of the ways in which the moral-political can produce paralysis.

pages: 192 words: 59,615

The Passenger
by AA.VV.
Published 23 May 2022

Ads were on constant rotation on television and radio, in print and public spaces, with language like “Prop 22 will provide guaranteed earnings and a healthcare stipend” and “Prop 22 is Progress.” The Yes on Prop 22 campaign was effective despite the litany of progressive and liberal names endorsing the No on Prop 22 campaign, including Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and former US secretary of labor Robert Reich. The Yes on Prop 22 campaign outspent its opponents by more than ten to one, and the investment paid off on election day when it passed with 59 per cent of the vote. Where Uber largely flew under the radar in its early days, discreetly picking up passengers in private cars, Lyft drivers announced themselves with an oversized fuzzy pink mustache affixed to the front of their cars that seemed to mock cabbies as they swooped in to collect fares for themselves.

pages: 218 words: 62,889

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business
by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan
Published 28 Jan 2020

On the other hand, tertiary costs stemming from inefficient and ineffective governance structure of too big and unruly banks could be socialized. There are other kinds of financial support that banks are structurally positioned to gain from the state. A report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), released in late 2017 in the US under pressure from Senator Bernie Sanders, details the extent to which America’s largest banks have benefited from the de facto ‘free money’ supplied by the Federal Reserve during the meltdown. Altogether, the Fed lent more than $3tn to financial institutions, on very generous terms, in exchange for taxpayer-backed loans; junk-rated securities were pledged as collateral.

pages: 219 words: 62,816

"They Take Our Jobs!": And 20 Other Myths About Immigration
by Aviva Chomsky
Published 23 Apr 2018

Or was the working class a multiethnic and multiracial entity that had been failed by Democrats’ corporate and neoliberal path in recent decades? Analysts were still trying to sort it all out in mid-2017, but a few facts are clear and complicate the notion that working-class racism and anti-immigrant sentiment were the major force behind Trump’s victory. First, Bernie Sanders’s economic populism had mobilized significant portions of the Democratic base, but the higher-ups in the Democratic Party recoiled from this approach. Second, people of color in general, and immigrants in particular, are over-represented in the working class, so any analysis of the working class must take its diversity into account.

pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Published 5 Mar 2019

Indeed, ancient planning was at the service of an economic system created for the benefit of a small coterie of elites who were motivated to maintain their wealth and power. Sound familiar? Despite the persistent inequalities that stretch back to the Ancient World, there are nevertheless reasons for hope today, including the millions whose curiosity has been piqued by references to socialism by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential primary, and more recently by a series of contenders for political office across the United States. In the UK too, as of this writing, an unabashed socialist, Jeremy Corbyn, heads Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. As the political debate becomes more polarized, young people on the whole, even in the Anglo-American center of the capitalist order, now view socialism more favorably than they do capitalism.

pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

Most tellingly, Stiglitz observed, “In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places,” and asked of the popular uprising, “When will this come to America?” The Occupy Wall Street protesters were eventually cleared out of their encampments, but the questions they asked continue to resonate through our politics. Will the future provide opportunity for all of us? Or will it crush most of us even further underfoot? “The 1%” was a key feature of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, and Donald Trump rode the message of blowing up the incumbents all the way to victory over Hillary Clinton’s defense of the status quo. By all appearances, though, President Trump has little in the way of a policy solution to the fundamental problem that Stiglitz outlined, that the 1%, or more properly, the .01%, have translated their financial power into political power, turning what was once a vibrant democracy and a vibrant economy into a staggering colossus, a platform that no longer works for the benefit of its participants.

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Top managers in the company go along with this plan because their compensation is also tied to that rise in stock price and because they will lose their jobs if they don’t deliver on it. This is a forced wealth reallocation from one set of stakeholders in the company to another. That’s why there is so much anger at Wall Street from the followers of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, populists of the right and of the left. The system is rigged. Companies are forced to eliminate workers not by the market of real goods and services where supply and demand set the right price, but by the commands of financial markets, where hope and greed too often set the price. Most people unthinkingly use the term the market to refer to these two very different markets.

pages: 566 words: 160,453

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

Colgan and Keohane summed it up well: Working-class Americans didn’t necessarily understand the details of global trade deals, but they saw elite Americans and people in China and other developing countries becoming rapidly wealthier while their own incomes stagnated or declined. It should not be surprising that many of them agreed with Trump and with the Democratic presidential primary contender Bernie Sanders that the game was rigged. (2017, 40) People Compare Themselves to Others Some social scientists, prominently the economist James Duesenberry (1949) nearly seventy years ago, argued that human beings care mainly about relative, rather than absolute, income. In a well-known essay my Dartmouth colleague Erzo F.

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In a new Gallup poll taken in February 2018 an astonishing 48 percent of Americans support this idea. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won a surprise primary election in New York and called for a universal jobs guarantee, under which the federal government would provide a job for every American. This has support from Bernie Sanders. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) has introduced legislation that would see a three-year pilot project set up to guarantee jobs in fifteen regions of high unemployment. Among the bill’s co-sponsors is Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who tweeted in support of the policy in April. The premise, as Laura Paddison notes, is that everyone should be entitled to a good job, one that pays at least $15 an hour and comes with health and other benefits.53 These would potentially improve the lot of ordinary working folk, but unless there is a major move to the left these plans have little chance of being implemented.

Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic
by Scott Gottlieb
Published 20 Sep 2021

In response to a question from ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos, HHS Secretary Alex Azar would state, “Well, we’ve already tested over 3,600 people here in the United States. I’m not sure what he meant when he said there’s no lab kit, because we, with historic speed, the CDC developed a lab test.” See ABC, “‘This Week’ Transcript 3-1-20: Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Alex Azar,” March 1, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-20-joe-biden-sen-bernie-sanders/story?id=69320081; US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Previous Testing Data Aug 27, 2020”; and Knvul Sheikh, “U.S. Plans ‘Radical Expansion’ of Coronavirus Testing,” New York Times, March 3, 2020. 14.Anne Schuchat, “An Emerging Disease Threat: How the U.S.

pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

The democratization of Iraq released ethnic tensions that, however brutally, had been held in check by Saddam Hussein. In Britain, this disaster turned centrist Tony Blair’s reputation toxic and transformed Jeremy Corbyn from a marginal crank into the leader of the Labour Party from 2015 to 2020. In America, the Iraq debacle helped to promote both the Democratic left and the nationalist right, energizing Bernie Sanders’s campaign, embarrassing Hillary Clinton’s and empowering the Trumpists. For all their faults, the neoconservatives had been the flagbearers of both intellectualism and global engagement in the Republican Party. Their collapse helped to propel the rise of both anti-intellectualism and nativism.

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The post-Brexit Conservative Party continues to be more of a working-class than a middle-class party: a Survation poll in December 2019 showed that 50 per cent of degree-holders supported Labour, compared with 28 per cent who supported the Conservatives while 30 per cent of people with no qualifications supported Labour, compared with 45 per cent who supported the Conservatives. The Trump presidency also radicalized the left to a degree that hasn’t been seen since the late 1960s, with Bernie Sanders making a prolonged bid for the Democratic nomination and young radicals such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez trying to set the tone of the Congressional Democratic Party. The killing of an unarmed African-American, George Floyd, by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, on 25 May 2020 provoked angry riots across America, particularly in the big cities, and turned Black Lives Matter into one of the most powerful forces in the country.

pages: 257 words: 64,763

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street
by Robert Scheer
Published 14 Apr 2010

A key example of the enduring influence of one firm would be on display in March 2009, when Obama picked former Goldman partner Gary Gensler for the position as head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the position once held by Brooksley Born, the stalwart consumer watchdog back in the Clinton years who had stood for regulation of the derivatives that would humble the world’s economy. Gensler was confirmed but only after jumping over a hurdle constructed by Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, an independent in spirit as well as party label. Sanders placed Gensler’s nomination on hold. Sounds like a minor issue to get worked up about, but the senator was right. Gensler helped create this financial crisis when he was pushing for deregulation in the Treasury Department back in the Clinton era, when bipartisan cooperation with Wall Street lobbyists was all the rage.

pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever
by Alex Kantrowitz
Published 6 Apr 2020

Facebook, Google, and Amazon all employ sizable numbers of contractors, with many working as hard as full-time employees but without the same benefits and salaries. These contractor armies are growing fast, and advocates are starting to take note and push for better terms: Google’s employee walkout, for instance, made improving contractor treatment core to its protest. Bernie Sanders took on Amazon’s lack of transparency regarding its contractors as he pushed the company toward a fifteen-dollar-per-hour wage floor. And in February 2019, The Verge’s Casey Newton exposed how Facebook was paying some contract moderators $28,000 per year while paying its full-time employees $240,000 on average (Facebook subsequently raised its moderator wages).

pages: 224 words: 71,060

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream
by Yuval Levin
Published 21 Jan 2020

This increasingly unmolded political culture then sets raw partisanship loose upon society. In the 2016 presidential election, for instance, both parties saw genuine outsiders—candidates who had not even been members of the party in the very recent past—pursue their presidential nominations. The Democratic Party was barely able to hold back such a challenge from Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, and the Republican Party handed its nomination to Donald Trump. In both cases, most party elites wanted badly to resist the incursion, but found themselves in a situation in which it seemed almost illegitimate for the party to insist on its prerogatives as an institution—leaving it instead to accept its altered role as an open platform for democratic expression.

pages: 288 words: 64,771

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey
Published 12 Oct 2017

In the recent election, though, we witnessed the broad public embrace of a very different explanation of rising inequality—namely, that the powerful have rigged the economic game in their favor. Elites have conspired to hoard opportunity, manipulating the rules and their control of the political system to generate wealth for themselves, even as living standards for everyone else stagnate or decline. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump owed the unexpected strength of their insurgent campaigns to the appeal of this classically populist message. This folk theory of inequality should not be dismissed as the ranting of ignorant rubes. As with much popular wisdom, the specific mechanisms of elite self-enrichment that the public has latched onto—immigration and trade in the case of Trump supporters, campaign finance for supporters of Sanders—are not well chosen.

pages: 270 words: 71,659

The Right Side of History
by Ben Shapiro
Published 11 Feb 2019

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”49 Drawing on Marx’s writings about armed revolution, Lenin suggested a revolutionary terror, to be followed by “true democracy”—a dictatorship of the proletariat. Sounding a lot like Bernie Sanders, Lenin wrote in 1917, “Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society.” Instead, Lenin sought on the one hand “immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags,” and on the other hand, “a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists.

pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
by Jacob Goldstein
Published 14 Aug 2020

With this abundance, they said, the government could do much more. Perhaps most important, they argued, the government could and should offer a job to any American who wanted one. If inflation starts to rise, the government can cool things off by raising taxes to take money out of the system. In 2015, Stephanie Kelton’s work caught the eye of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Sanders didn’t seem that interested in the details of MMT. But he liked the idea of the government being able to spend lots of money on things like a jobs guarantee. Kelton became Sanders’s economic advisor and started telling reporters about MMT. The theory got another boost when Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives two years later, and a newly elected congresswoman drew on MMT to suggest that maybe the government could start doing lots more stuff without worrying about how to pay for it.

pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020

The account describes her male colleagues calling her “Airbags” because of her breasts and guzzling £800 bottles of wine over lunch. A decade later, another woman in the firm’s New York office would publicly blast the frat-boy culture she endured—including a boss who told her to “be respectful” when she complained of a colleague who shit in her Bernie Sanders coffee mug. None of this, though, seemed to impair Cantor Fitzgerald’s reputation as an A-list banking and brokerage firm for many of the world’s wealthiest and most sophisticated companies. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has designated it as one of a handful of firms to act as a market maker for federal securities, which means acting as Uncle Sam’s bond broker.

pages: 212 words: 68,649

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
by Amanda Montell
Published 27 May 2019

A different study found that 78 percent of Trump’s vocabulary was made up of monosyllabic words, and that his most frequently used lexical items included (in the following order) I, Trump, very, China, and money. Those reports aren’t exactly flattering; then again, it’s not as if the folks likening Clinton’s laugh to a witch were conducting empirical studies. Not to mention, there are countless men in power besides Trump—men whose eccentric speech styles are surely worth a look (Bernie Sanders, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, John Oliver)—who have largely escaped the careful attention paid to so many female public figures. (And when attention is paid, it’s often in the form of praise for their “passionate” delivery.) The subject of attention leads to the fundamental reason why Clinton’s and Thatcher’s voices are as repellent to many listeners as Scarlett Johansson’s is sexy.

pages: 242 words: 67,233

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser
Published 8 Jul 2019

Even though one of his districts swung Republican in 2016 after losing nineteen thousand manufacturing jobs, he is wary of speaking the language of class struggle. “You’re not going to make me hate somebody just because they’re rich,” Ryan told moderate Democrats in 2018, distancing himself from socialists like Bernie Sanders. “I want to be rich!”21 If he were to run for president, Ryan would prefer to speak to yoga practitioners, who are estimated to number tens of millions. He might find this turns workers off. For now, he’s trying to sell himself to both. “I think once you meet me, you realize I’m not necessarily some soft yoga guy,” he says.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs
by Kerry Howley
Published 21 Mar 2023

It was a “close reading” of these emails, a creative take on their “hidden messages,” that led to Pizzagate, the conspiracy Joe Biggs is best known for promoting. In the summer, just before the Democratic convention, WikiLeaks published 20,000 emails about Clinton, some of which showed the DNC pushing for Hillary over Bernie. There was for instance an email suggesting the DNC go hard against Bernie Sanders’s faith. (“Does he believe in a God,” asked a party official. “This could make several points difference with…my peeps.”) Fans of the DNC would have liked to believe the party was neutral, but the emails made that difficult. The Democrats’ response was to drive attention away from the embarrassing content of the emails, which hurt the candidate they’d been revealed to prefer, to the motivation for the leak.

pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism
by Rick Wartzman
Published 15 Nov 2022

While I genuinely thought the company’s ever-improving treatment of its hourly employees hadn’t gotten the attention it deserved, and this book would be a way to rectify that, I wasn’t going to pull any punches. I told the company that I’d be reaching out to its staunchest antagonists, including United for Respect, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and Senator Bernie Sanders, who’d introduced a bill that would prevent large companies from buying back their own stock (often to bid up the price) unless they paid all of their workers at least $15 an hour. The name of the legislation: the Stop WALMART Act. This would be no corporate hagiography. I set some other parameters, as well.

pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

In America and Europe, the major political parties have been locked in backward-looking agendas developed in response to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal, the Cold War, civil rights movements, and the early information technology revolution. Their current coalitions and internal compromises may not be able to deal with the age of accelerations. The crack-up has already begun within the Republican Party, which, among other things, denies even the reality of climate change. But Bernie Sanders’s success in attracting many young Democrats suggests that the Democratic Party will not be immune to fracture, either. The same process is under way in Europe. The United Kingdom’s vote to withdraw from the European Union has opened deep cracks in both the Conservative and Labour Parties, and the rising challenge of immigration from the World of Disorder is stressing other long-established parties everywhere on the continent.

…

So no one was giving people the right diagnosis of what was happening in the world around them, and most established political parties were offering catechisms that were simply not relevant to the age of accelerations. Into this vacuum, this empty room, stepped populists with easy answers—the Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders promised to make it all right by taking down “the Man,” and Donald Trump promised to make it all right by personally holding back the hurricane of change because he was “the Man.” Neither the center-left nor the center-right in America or Europe had the self-confidence required for the level of radical rethinking and political innovating demanded by the age of accelerations.

pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
by Philip Mirowski
Published 24 Jun 2013

Or, alternatively, suppose we consult an eminent proponent of globalization analysis, Saskia Sassen, prognosticating “The End of Financial Capitalism”: “The difference of the current crisis is precisely that financialized capitalism has reached the limits of its own logic.”17 David Harvey more tentatively and cautiously asked whether it was “really” the end of neoliberalism.18 Some members of the faculty at Cambridge and Birkbeck declared, “The collapse of confidence in financial markets and the banking system . . . is currently discrediting the conventional wisdom of neo-liberalism.”19 Various politicians temporarily indulged in the same hyperbole: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia openly proclaimed the death of neoliberalism, only to succumb to his own untimely political demise at the hands of his own party; Senator Bernie Sanders prognosticated that as Wall Street collapsed, so too would the legacy of Milton Friedman. Yet, unbowed, the University of Chicago solicited $200 million in donations to erect a monument in his honor, and founded a new “Milton Friedman Institute.”20 “Wakes for Neoliberalism” were posted all about the Internet in 2008–9; a short stint on Google will provide all the Finnegan that is needed.

…

Indeed, as time passes, it begins to appear that Bernanke presides over little more than a cabal of bankers using public funds to keep themselves in power and riches. Simon Johnson has highlighted the role of Jamie Dimon as benefiting tremendously from the forced and subsidized purchase of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan while he was on the Board of the New York Fed, which was orchestrating the deal. Senator Bernie Sanders has released a list of eighteen other Fed directors who received substantial funding from the Fed during the crisis.59 It appears that “saving the economy” was tantamount to flooding their own banks (and pockets) with liquidity. As more details are leaked, it appears Bernanke provides a thin veneer of academic imprimatur to what can only be regarded as a vast morass of insider dealing.

pages: 280 words: 73,420

Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market Into a Casino
by Jim McTague
Published 1 Mar 2011

When Hillary Clinton made a run for her party’s presidential nomination in 2008, Gensler became her chief fundraiser. When she lost, he joined the Obama campaign and later became head of the president-elect’s SEC transition team. President-elect Obama named Gensler CFTC chairman in December 2008. But the appointment was not a slam dunk. A Senate floor vote on the nomination in March 2009 was blocked by Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a socialist who most often votes with the Democrats. Senator Sanders was steamed about Gensler’s opposition to regulation of the collateralized debt securities (CDS) market all those years ago. He stated, “At this moment in our history, we need an independent leader who will help create a new culture in the financial marketplace and move us away from the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior which has caused so much harm to our economy.”

pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

Such “emergent democracy” can be seen in certain aspects of the Arab Spring that roiled Middle Eastern authoritarian governments in 2011, though it sadly failed to move beyond the coup to the creation of a government. The hacktivist group Anonymous—highly potent, yet completely leaderless—may be the purest expression of emergent democracy. Elements of emergent democracy were a prominent feature in the 2016 presidential campaign; one could easily sense that neither Bernie Sanders nor Donald Trump “led” their respective movements so much as surfed them, hoping and praying the electorate’s collective id would eventually lead safely back to shore. The science writer Steven Johnson, whose book Emergence introduced many of these ideas to a general audience, compares the evolution of new ideas to slime mold—a single-celled organism that gathers together to form a kind of super-organism when food is in short supply.

pages: 260 words: 79,471

A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea
by Richard Phillips and Stephan Talty
Published 5 Apr 2010

That’s when Lea decided to speak to the press herself. There was a constant flow of people through our house. Letters and postcards from strangers poured into our mailbox. The Boy Scouts came by and cleaned up our yard, without anyone asking them to. Vermont’s two senators, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders, called, along with our local representatives and town officials. Even Ted Kennedy left his number and asked if there was anything he could do. Everyone was extremely supportive, including a couple from the local Somali community who came by to hand-deliver a note saying they were praying for Andrea and our family.

pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

With all these experiments bubbling up, the concept of UBI has become a favourite media topic, but it is controversial. Many opponents – especially in the US – see it as a form of socialism, and the US has traditionally harboured a visceral dislike of socialism. (The strong performance of Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, in the race to become the Democratic Party's candidate in the 2016 Presidential election is a striking departure from this norm of US politics.) This concern is what seemed to leave Martin Ford somewhat dispirited at the end of his book “The Rise of the Robots”.

The Fix: How Bankers Lied, Cheated and Colluded to Rig the World's Most Important Number (Bloomberg)
by Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch
Published 22 Nov 2016

Although he didn’t know it at the time, Gensler also inherited the CFTC during the early stages of what would become one of the biggest Escape to London 71 investigations into financial malfeasance ever undertaken by a government agency: Libor. Not everyone backed him to do a good job. Of the 30 presidential appointees put before the Senate that year, Gensler was the last to be approved. His selection as head of the CFTC was blocked for months by Democrat Maria Cantwell and independent Bernie Sanders, who questioned whether he was the right person to help “create a new culture in the financial marketplace” after the crisis. It wasn’t just Gensler’s background in banking that provoked skepticism. As an undersecretary to Rubin, Gensler had played a prominent role in pushing through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which exempted over-the-counter derivatives such as interest-rate swaps and credit default swaps from regulation.

pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey
Published 10 Jul 2018

It is becoming more diverse. It is by some measures becoming more unequal. And on the left, support has grown dramatically for huge redistributive and universal programs. Gone are the careful means-testing proposals and incremental boosts of the Clinton and Obama presidencies, where the wonks reigned. Bernie Sanders is pushing for Medicare for All. The Center for American Progress, arguably the most influential think tank on the left, is pushing for a federal jobs guarantee. Seeing the tides changing, Hillary Clinton’s team was even quietly at work on a proposal to turn welfare into a kind of UBI for kids.

pages: 263 words: 79,016

The Sport and Prey of Capitalists
by Linda McQuaig
Published 30 Aug 2019

The American Bankers Association slammed the inspector general’s report, dismissing postal bank loans as the “worst idea since the Edsel.” But the cause of postal banking — dubbed “a central bank for the poor” — has gained ground among influential progressives. It could become an issue in the 2020 election campaign, since it’s being championed by a number of potential Democratic presidential contenders, including Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand.28 If the notion of the Canadian government running a successful bank sounds overly ambitious, it shouldn’t. Not only do we have the example of the ATB in Alberta, but our federal government also already owns and operates a number of successful banks for special purposes.

pages: 264 words: 76,643

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling
Published 30 Jan 2018

Free university education, for example, might seem like an unaffordable economic sacrifice, but if you were measuring the stock of wealth rather than the flow, all those additional educated people might look like an increase in your nation’s wealth, not a diminishment of its growth. The same goes for investing in infrastructure, say high-speed rail, in anticipation of future returns on investment. How one accounts for these things matters. In the US independent senator Bernie Sanders and in the UK Jeremy Corbyn, the opposition Labour leader, both want to increase public funding and scrap student fees. Their policies look less radical—and therefore more plausible—from a wealth-accounting perspective. The second reason for counting assets is that today’s actions have an impact on future generations.

pages: 245 words: 72,893

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman
Published 9 May 2018

It is unlikely that Mullin ever imagined Corbyn would be the person who might put his fiction to the test. Both men were acolytes of Tony Benn, who was for many years the British left’s best hope. Benn never came that close to becoming prime minister. As I write, the prospect of a Corbyn prime ministership is very real. Something like it will happen somewhere eventually. Bernie Sanders came close in the 2016 US presidential election. Jean-Luc Mélenchon came close in the French presidential election of 2017. At some point a President or Prime Minister Leftist will win an election in a leading democracy and challenge the political establishment to do its worst. When that occurs, will we get a very American, a very French or a very British coup?

pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader
by Colin Lancaster
Published 3 May 2021

Confirmed cases outside China have tripled over the past week and officials today locked down all of Italy, where the virus is currently killing more people than anywhere else. We now know it’s a mysterious pathogen capable of harming the body in a myriad of unexpected, and sometimes lethal, ways. And more bad news for Bernie Sanders. Biden swept him last night in Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, and Idaho. This is a serious blow to Bernie, and Biden now has the momentum. Bernie didn’t even make a speech at the end of the night. He headed to his cabin in Vermont to hide out. Not a good sign. It seems just yesterday that Bernie was hitting jackpots in Vegas, and now he’s on the ropes, and Vegas is closed for business.

pages: 337 words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 8 May 2017

For a doppelganger search to be truly accurate, you don’t want to find someone who merely likes the same things you like. You also want to find someone who dislikes the things you dislike. My interests are apparent not just from the accounts I follow but from those I choose not to follow. I am interested in sports, politics, comedy, and science but not food, fashion, or theater. My follows show that I like Bernie Sanders but not Elizabeth Warren, Sarah Silverman but not Amy Schumer, the New Yorker but not the Atlantic, my friends Noah Popp, Emily Sands, and Josh Gottlieb but not my friend Sam Asher. (Sorry, Sam. But your Twitter feed is a snooze.) Of all 200 million people on Twitter, who has the most similar profile to me?

pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

By comparison, virtual reality goggles, curing death, laying fiber, self-driving cars, and other business opportunities represent much longer odds. If people make it clear, with their clicks, likes, and postings, that they hate certain things and love others, those people are easy to sell to. Clear as day. Easy as oil in Arabia. If I go into Facebook and click on an article about Bernie Sanders and “love” one about Chuck Schumer, the machine, expending almost no energy, can throw me in a bucket of liberal die-hards. If it wants to devote a little more computing energy to the process, just to be extra sure, it can see that I have the term Berkeley in my bio. So, it delivers me, with great confidence, into the tree-hugger bucket.

pages: 273 words: 87,159

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
by Peter Temin
Published 17 Mar 2017

The poor whites were unnoticed collateral damage until this campaign, but their anger dominated meetings where Trump spoke. Violence may have been stimulated when the candidate alluded to the majority minority oxymoron and assured the audience they were better than African Americans and Latino immigrants. Bernie Sanders, an insurgent Democratic candidate, appealed to another branch of the low-wage sector, those who were trying to move into the FTE sector. As described in chapter 4, they more often did not make it and had to deal with massive student debts. Only time will tell how these attempts to wake this sleeping giant will affect America.2 The FTE sector makes plans for itself, typically ignoring the needs of the low-wage sector.

pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All
by Martin Sandbu
Published 15 Jun 2020

Democratic contender Senator Elizabeth Warren made a net wealth tax a flagship policy of her campaign. She has proposed that Americans with more than $50 million in net worth pay an annual 2 per cent tax on the amount of their net wealth above this threshold, while billionaires would pay an extra 1 per cent on their wealth above their first billion. Her rival on the left, Bernie Sanders, followed her with a net wealth tax proposal of his own. This rekindled interest is unusual. The lack of familiarity with net wealth taxes and their abandonment in many countries make them a hard sell. But I will argue here that they are a central part of the tax reforms needed for a new economy of belonging.

pages: 309 words: 81,243

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

The argument put forth by the new intersectional coalition—the argument that any failures within the American system are due to the inherent evils of the system, not to individual failures within that system—now predominates throughout instruments of politics, government, and law. Joe Biden’s unity agenda with Bernie Sanders pledged, “On day one, we are committed to taking anti-racist actions for equity across our institutions, including in the areas of education, climate change, criminal justice, immigration, and health care, among others.” By anti-racist policy, of course, Biden means policy designed to level all outcomes, no matter the individual decision making at issue.

pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

It’s hard to imagine, during a conversation or train ride, repeatedly pulling out one’s smartphone and irritably navigating to the Ello app to check the notifications. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. There are democratic potentials in the internet. Even if it is in essence a commercialized system of surveillance and controls, there have always been ways of writing against the grain. Radical movements, from Bernie Sanders’ campaign in the United States to the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party, have used professional social media campaigns to outflank and subvert the old media monopolies. Even in the People’s Republic of China, the spread of online communications technologies has created new enclaves outside of the state’s and companies’ control.

pages: 307 words: 82,680

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing
Published 3 May 2017

Restricting migration and putting up trade barriers will ultimately hurt the very people the populists claim to represent. That could open up new political possibilities for basic income. So far, Third Way timidity has held up thinking. For example, defeated Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton, speaking before the US presidential election, said she was ‘not ready to go there’ on basic income. By contrast, Bernie Sanders, whom she defeated for the Democratic nomination, said he was ‘absolutely sympathetic’ to the idea. Meanwhile, Donald Trump steamrollered his way to the presidency by promising to bring jobs back to the US and stop American firms from transferring jobs abroad. Yet with the introduction of protectionist measures, production costs will rise, automation will accelerate, and the next scapegoat will be the robots ‘taking American jobs from American workers’.

pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Published 3 Jun 2019

Russia also had a substantial presence in Anonymous. In retrospect, it is interesting that some Anonymous members would later go on Moscow’s payroll. One of them, Cassandra Fairbanks, moved from real-world Anonymous demonstrations, to attending and writing about Black Lives Matter protests, to avidly supporting Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries. With more than a hundred thousand Twitter followers, she then took a job at the Russian propaganda outlet Sputnik and switched to full-throated support for Trump through the 2016 general election and afterward. Just before the November vote, she appeared on Alex Jones’s YouTube conspiracy channel, saying it was “pretty likely” that emails hacked from Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s Gmail account contained coded references to pedophilia.

pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

National reporters generally focus on the presidential race plus key state races. Regardless, the system lets you select which races and candidates you care about. These are shown in the favorites list when you log in. Figure 11.1 shows what a reporter sees if she has favorited 2016 presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders. Clicking one of the names takes you to a page that shows a candidate. Each candidate files a series of financial reports with the FEC. A reporter can use Bailiwick to scroll through and read the individual financial reports or see the financial report totals organized in a convenient way. Figure 11.1 Bailiwick splash screen customized to show three 2016 US presidential candidates.

pages: 327 words: 84,627

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 9 Sep 2019

The committee would set a one-year deadline to create an industrial plan to address climate change, decarbonize the economic infrastructure within ten years, create new business opportunities, and employ millions of disadvantaged workers in an emerging green economy—a bold “aspirational” proposal far beyond anything yet put forward by America’s cities, counties, and states.5 In the new term, congressional leadership equivocated on the proposal and ultimately established a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis with little power to act. Meanwhile, on February 7, 2019, Ocasio-Cortez in the House and Ed Markey in the Senate introduced a Green New Deal resolution. One hundred and three members of Congress have already cosponsored it, including several of the major presidential contenders within the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand.6 Democratic presidential hopefuls Julián Castro and Beto O’Rourke have also lent their support to a Green New Deal. So have former vice president Al Gore and three hundred state and local government officials from across the country, including South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, another Democratic presidential aspirant.

pages: 444 words: 84,486

Radicalized
by Cory Doctorow
Published 19 Mar 2019

It takes a lot of talented, dedicated people to make a book, and it’s always a leap of faith. Thanks for inspiration to Matt Taibbi, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Alex Steffen and the outquisition, and everyone who fights for justice: #blacklivesmatter, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Erika Garner, Bernie Sanders, and the millions in the streets. This isn’t the kind of fight you win, it’s the kind of fight you fight. About the Cory Doctorow CORY DOCTOROW is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger–the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of many books: most recently In Real Life, a graphic novel; Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, a book about earning a living in the Internet age; and Homeland, the award-winning, bestselling sequel to the 2008 YA novel Little Brother.

pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives
by David Sumpter
Published 18 Jun 2018

On the contrary, young people use online communication to launch campaigns on specific issues – such as environmentalism, vegetarianism, gay rights, sexism and sexual harassment – and to organise real-life demonstrations.10 While very few people are actively blogging about CCTV cameras or widescreen TVs, there are lots of very sincere people writing about politics. On the left-wing, campaigns like Momentum within the Labour Party in the UK and Bernie Sanders’ presidential 2016 campaign are built through online communities. On the right, nationalists organise protests and share their opinions online. You or I might not agree with all of these opinions, and the bullying and abuse that occurs on Twitter is unacceptable, but most of the posts that individual people make relate to how they genuinely feel.

pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

But goddammit I drew the line at fascists. It was not as though all the tech dudes in Silicon Valley—or even a double-digit minority of tech dudes—would’ve cheered along at that fascist rally I stumbled across. Indeed, rank-and-file tech company workers, like many in their age cohort, proved to constitute an important base for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. But as heartening as it was to see the youthful peons of Google and Apple kicking in $25 or $100 to support an avowed democratic socialist, a harrowing countercurrent was gaining force. Indeed, as I discovered from months of deep and unsettling research into the seedier corners of the internet, a nerdy sociopathic cabal of reactionary insurrectionists, some in positions of influence, groused that Hitler got a bad rap and dreamed of goose-stepping jackboot parades along the Embarcadero.

pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

This principle was institutionalised in the Hebrew Law of Jubilee, which decreed that debts should be automatically cancelled every seventh year.46 Indeed, debt cancellation became core to the Hebrew concept of redemption itself. There are dozens of proposals for how we might do this in today’s economy. The US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders laid out a clear plan for cancelling student debts, which in 2020 stood at a staggering $1.6 trillion. Academics at King’s College London have published a plan for how governments could write off not just student debts but also other unjust debts: mortgage debts created by housing speculation and quantitative easing, old debts whose lenders have been bailed out by governments, and unpayable debts that are devalued on secondary markets.47 We know it’s possible.

pages: 265 words: 80,510

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy
by Frank Vogl
Published 14 Jul 2021

Western governments and Western businesses cannot ignore these developments, nor can they ignore the growing impatience in Western democratic countries themselves, as evidenced by the opinion polls noted above. It would be wrong to underestimate the degree to which US public support for the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in 2020 was due to the forthright anti-corruption views of these candidates. I believe the voices of impatient citizens will be heard and that an increasing number of politicians in Western democracies will listen and recognize that they must respond with more than the old rhetoric.

pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

They flooded users and drivers with pro–Proposition 22 notifications; paid off prominent figures to support the ballot measure, including the leader of the California branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, who later resigned over conflicts of interest; and sent out fake mailers making it seem as though Proposition 22 was supported by progressive groups associated with Senator Bernie Sanders. As a result, the initiative passed with more than 58 percent support—but in the weeks that followed, many voters said they were misled into believing it would help drivers, not deny them employment rights. Within a few months of the vote, the companies had raised their prices, despite claiming they would not have to do so if Proposition 22 passed, and workers said their pay had actually fallen.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

It’s an attitude reminiscent of Barack Obama’s response after Donald Trump’s win in 2016: of disbelief at the perceived irrationality of others, a fear that passion has overtaken reason. Small ‘l’ liberal views seem to be going out of fashion on the economic and cultural fronts, discredited by figures such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn on the left and by Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Jair Bolsonaro and the like on the right. Famously, Theresa May said in October 2016 “if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.” That seems to us like an almost direct critique of the subjects of this book.46 Although elites are rarely popular, the 2010s have seen antielite discourse become increasingly commonplace.

pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by Richard Florida
Published 9 May 2016

It is critical that we get this right. 10 URBANISM FOR ALL When was the last time you heard a national politician talk thoughtfully about cities and urban policy or make them an integral part of his or her agenda? Former president Barack Obama grew up in cities and clearly cares deeply about them, but even his administration failed to make any substantial moves on urban policy. The 2016 Democratic primary featured two former mayors, Bernie Sanders from Burlington, Vermont, and Martin O’Malley from Baltimore; and a third, former Richmond mayor Tim Kaine, eventually joined the Democratic ticket as Hillary Clinton’s running mate. Aside from O’Malley’s invocations of urban policy, which I helped craft, cities and urban policy were rarely, if ever, mentioned during the 2016 primaries or presidential campaign.

pages: 407 words: 90,238

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

Three years later, the actual president,6 Barack Obama, joked about the event at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner, saying: “Just recently, a young person came up to me and said she was sick of politicians standing in the way of her dreams—as if we were actually going to let Malia go to Burning Man this year. Was not going to happen. Bernie [Sanders] might have let her go. Not us.” If the President of the United States is moved to comment on the event, and Elon Musk is claiming it’s central to Silicon Valley culture, then perhaps there’s more going on than just a weeklong party. And that’s the second thing to explore in our assessment—why so many creative and talented people go so far out of their way to congregate there once a year.

pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

The first is to increase government spending on R&D: spending more on university research, public research institutes, or research undertaken by businesses. Paying for research is one of the least ideologically controversial types of investment a government can make to promote growth: it is popular with Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders on the left, Peter Thiel on the right, and a significant number of politicians and pundits in between. The rationale harks back to one of our four S’s of intangibles: spillovers. Because returns on R&D are not always captured by the person or business investing in it, businesses do less R&D than is optimal for the economy as a whole, and therefore government has a legitimate role in stepping in, either funding research in universities or institutes or paying firms to do R&D with grants or tax breaks.

pages: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 14 Feb 2017

This goes even deeper: as Sebastian Junger points out in his book Tribe, we are the first modern society in human history where people live alone in apartments and where children have their own bedrooms. The gradual decline of trust in societal institutions over the years, meanwhile, from business to government, accelerated in the wake of the Great Recession, making people more receptive to a “fringe” idea than they might otherwise have been (see Bernie Sanders and President Donald Trump). Add on a growing sense of unease over geopolitical risk and the sense that horrible and unpredictable things are happening in the world, and the urge to connect with others becomes an unarticulated desire in all of us. Whatever you think about “belonging,” these forces really were a large part of what made people more open to trying this new, quirky, affordable travel experience.

pages: 291 words: 91,783

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
by Matt Taibbi
Published 15 Feb 2010

The fact that a goofball like Michele Bachmann has a few dumb ideas doesn’t mean much, in the scheme of things. What is meaningful is the fact that this belief in total deregulation and pure capitalism is still the political mainstream not just in the Tea Party, not even just among Republicans, but pretty much everywhere on the American political spectrum to the right of Bernie Sanders. Getting ordinary Americans to emotionally identify in this way with the political wishes of their bankers and credit card lenders and mortgagers is no small feat, but it happens—with a little help. I’m going to say something radical about the Tea Partiers. They’re not all crazy. They’re not even always wrong.

pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith
Published 17 Aug 2015

To develop better approaches to accountability and to create laboratory schools for new approaches to learning, teacher training, and assessment, we must have a massive investment in educational R&D. The U.S. federal budget is awash in spending on research and development. In fiscal year 2013, we spent $72 billion on military R&D. With the exception of Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul, you can’t find a politician in our country at the national level who doesn’t assert, “State-of-the art military technology is vital to our long-term national security.” As a side note, our military spending outpaces the second most aggressive nation, China, by a 4.1-to-1 ratio.

pages: 326 words: 88,905

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco
Published 7 Apr 2014

Oh God for one more breath. Ellen remember me as long as you live. Goodbye darling.” 4 DAYS OF SLAVERY Immokalee, Florida In America today we are seeing a race to the bottom, the middle class is collapsing, poverty is increasing. What I saw in Immokalee is the bottom in the race to the bottom. —SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS Hoping for work in the La Fiesta parking lot, Immokalee, Florida. RODRIGO ORTIZ, A TWENTY-SIX-YEAR-OLD FARMWORKER—A SHORT man in a tattered baseball cap and soiled black pants that are too long—stands forlornly in the half-light in front of the La Fiesta Supermarket on South 3rd Street in Immokalee, Florida.

pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

So, too, is a more radical left. This new left, however, has not yet enjoyed as much electoral success as the radical right. The hard-left Jeremy Corbyn shook the British establishment by taking control of Britain’s Labour party, but he has not been able to wrest control of the government from the Tories. Bernie Sanders, a long-time socialist senator from Vermont, mounted a surprisingly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, yet ultimately fell short of the mark. Some radical left parties have done somewhat better. The anti-austerity leftists of Greece’s Syriza party, for example, won control of parliament in early 2015 and attempted to win a reprieve from the austerity policies imposed on Greece by its European creditors (who were, in their defence, helping to finance Greece’s unaffordable debts).

I Love Capitalism!: An American Story
by Ken Langone
Published 14 May 2018

And apparently Madoff cornered the market on Swiss Miss—bought up the prison’s entire supply—and was gouging his fellow prisoners if they wanted it, because he had it all. The guy can’t stop! * * * Capitalism gets a bad rap these days. Madoff didn’t help; the financial crisis didn’t help. When Bernie Sanders campaigned for the presidency in 2016, I’m afraid he got a lot of college kids to believe that capitalism is bad and that America is headed, or should be headed, toward something that, in my mind, resembles socialism: Guaranteed income. Free college tuition. Single-payer health care. I disagree.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent
by Nesrine Malik
Published 4 Sep 2019

Even though he was David Duke, a man whose name is synonymous with the KKK, the logic cited for him losing the election by a nose was along the same lines as in 2016: a working-class post-recession revolt, an angry message from the disenfranchised to the elites of Washington. No one seems to ask why this anger can only be expressed by voting for a KKK grand wizard or a man who wants to ban Muslims or build a wall around Mexico, as opposed to, say, Bernie Sanders. This is the excepting of group white behaviour from its obvious animus – racial entitlement – and ascribing benign, even sympathetic, qualities to it. And the left-behind story again is, simply, not true. Duke picked up the majority of the white vote, and the middle class was split evenly between him and his opponent.

pages: 257 words: 90,857

Everything's Trash, but It's Okay
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 15 Oct 2018

Just a few weeks prior, I was all “hell to the no” about seeing him in Portland, yet there I was hunched over a trash can, trimming my pubes because I didn’t want to be hanging out with #BritishBaekoff while in a swimsuit that’s showing off my wild, down-there hair looking like it’s doing its best Bernie Sanders/Doc Brown cosplay. #IHopeMyParentsHaveStoppedReadingThisBookByNow. Long story short, #BritishBaekoff and I had such a magical weekend in Portland that he flew to NYC to be with me until I left for Belgrade, Serbia. And by the end of the New York trip, he DTR aka defined the relationship, and we officially became boos.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 6 Apr 2020

One can start, of course, with Paul Manafort, whose entire career was dedicated to the pursuit of blood money, including his years in the 2010s spent working as an operative in Ukraine alongside GOP consultant (and now convicted felon) Rick Gates in order to benefit a pro-Kremlin candidate, while doing the bidding of Russian oligarch Deripaska on the side. Manafort was not the only campaign manager from the 2016 election to engage in this activity. Multiple political operatives from both sides of the aisle have worked for Kremlin allies, oligarchs, and mobsters, including Bernie Sanders’s chief strategist Tad Devine, liberal lobbyist Tony Podesta (the brother of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman John Podesta), and Lanny Davis, a family friend of and former consultant for the Clintons. In 2018, Davis, an attorney, was simultaneously representing oligarch Dmitry Firtash, who has been indicted on racketeering and worked with Mogilevich, and Michael Cohen, who is linked to Mogilevich through his family’s business connections.40 Then there is the FBI.

pages: 307 words: 88,085

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

His resignation signalled not only his aversion to a potentially violent eviction, but also his deep intellectual and moral sympathy for the spirit of the Occupy movement itself. For Fraser, the protests were not just about the profound economic and social injustices of our ‘rigged economy’, as Bernie Sanders would later phrase it, but about ‘the kind of society we actually want; the kind of values we want to live by’. As these sorts of questions dominated the discussions among protesters, perhaps it was inevitable that Fraser would soon find himself on similar ground to that I encountered in Zuccotti Park: what effects was late capitalism having on our emotional, moral and mental lives – was it transforming how we understood and related to our suffering, and if so in what ways?

pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World
by David Sax
Published 15 Jan 2022

“It is not a conversation. You’re telling jokes, and they’re laughing or groaning or walking out. It’s a democratic art form where you really get a sense of how people are thinking or feeling.” Friedman told me a story from her last tour before the pandemic, in 2019, when she was heckled onstage by a Bernie Sanders supporter, who didn’t like a joke she made about his hero. Friedman got mad, first slinging insults at the Bernie Bro, but then she expertly diffused the situation by predicting they’d hook up after the show, which got big laughs from the whole room, including the aggrieved bro. Later, back at her hotel, Friedman went online and saw that a video of the exchange was circulating on social media, and the conversation around it grew heated and crazy.

pages: 285 words: 91,144

App Kid: How a Child of Immigrants Grabbed a Piece of the American Dream
by Michael Sayman
Published 20 Sep 2021

I said that there were a million students in the country competing to be the best at the same things—from Presidential Physical Fitness Tests to the SATs—and that I’d long ago decided instead to be the best at my own thing. Between gulps from my fifth bottle of water, in a conference room with bright purple chairs, a man in his fifties—a Bernie Sanders type with wild white hair—asked me the weirdest question: “What will be the solution to the VR problem twenty years from now?” “Which problem is that?” I asked, leaning forward in my chair. “Obviously,” said the man, “the problem will be the world itself. How would you design it better?”

pages: 315 words: 87,035

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do About It
by Alex Edmans
Published 13 May 2024

They’re simply fabricated out of the blue, not a reference in sight – but if they’re extreme, people often believe them without asking for proof. As the saying goes, ‘You couldn’t make it up,’ so they think it must be true. Some statements mention no source at all, not even a vague reference like the one to Section 1233. Senator Bernie Sanders claimed: ‘Wall Street CEOs who helped destroy the economy, they don’t get police records. They get raises in their salaries.’ He didn’t give any evidence, and people didn’t ask – it seems so outrageous to be rewarded for crushing your company that it must be correct. In fact, the CEOs of both Bear Stearns and Lehman each lost nearly $1 billion when their companies went under.

pages: 364 words: 99,613

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class
by Jeff Faux
Published 16 May 2012

The Republican Party was born in the late 1850s in reaction to the inability of the existing parties to deal with the issues that led to the Civil War. But that was 150 years ago. Since then we have had dozens of attempts to breach the Democrat-Republican political duopoly. From time to time populist, socialist, and, more recently, the Green Party win local elections, and independents, such as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, win election to Congress. Nationwide, some third parties have made a difference in presidential elections. In 1912 Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party split the Republican vote and elected Woodrow Wilson. In 1992, Ross Perot drained votes from George H. W. Bush to give the election to Bill Clinton.

pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth
by Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato
Published 31 Jul 2016

Her research expertise is in Federal Reserve operations, fiscal policy, social security, international finance and employment. She is best known for her contributions to the literature on Modern Monetary Theory. Her book, The State, The Market and the Euro (Edward Elgar, 2003) predicted the debt crisis in the eurozone. She served as Chief Economist on the US Senate Budget Committee and as an economic advisor to the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign. She was Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the top-ranked blog ‘New Economic Perspectives’ and a member of the TopWonks network of America's leading policy thinkers. She consults with policy-makers, investment banks and portfolio managers across the globe, and is a regular commentator on national radio and broadcast television.

pages: 831 words: 98,409

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World
by Sandra Navidi
Published 24 Jan 2017

“Class traitors” such as George Soros, Nick Hanauer, and Paul Tudor Jones have warned of the potentially dramatic consequences of inequality and suggested measures to reduce it. Even Asher Edelman, the real-life Gordon Gekko on whom the movie Wall Street’s ruthlessly greedy protagonist was partly modeled, has turned dissident, arguing for the self-proclaimed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders as the best option for the U.S. economy.18 The economic discontent has led to unprecedented political polarization, pitting the “have-nots” against the “haves,” the proletariat against the intellectual elite, and the young against the old. People are acutely aware of the democratic deficit resulting from the undue collusion of the financial, corporate, and political sectors, and many feel that the system has been hijacked and rigged by special interests.

pages: 550 words: 89,316

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Published 14 May 2017

In 1999, Garret John LoPorto had a plan to save the world via Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.53 When word got out that founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were facing an acquisition by the international conglomerate Unilever, LoPorto, then a 23-year-old tech upstart, decided to fight back. His “Save Ben & Jerry’s” grassroots campaign, involving Vermont governor Howard Dean, Congressman Bernie Sanders, and thousands of other activists, used the mantra “Don’t Sell Out” and protested against the bullying by globalization and capitalism of a small Vermont-based company that (at least in their view) should stay that way.54 Cohen and Greenfield didn’t want to sell. Founded in Burlington, Vermont in 1978, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream operated locally and under a wider philosophy of social responsibility, environmental awareness, and bohemian sensibilities.

pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
by Amy Webb
Published 5 Mar 2019

Based on the judgment of the second AI, the first one goes back and makes tweaks to its process. This happens again and again, until the first AI is automatically generating all kinds of images of Kim Jong-un that look entirely realistic, but never actually happened in the real world. Pictures that show Kim Jong-un having dinner with Vladimir Putin, playing golf with Bernie Sanders, or sipping cocktails with Kendrick Lamar. Google Brain’s goal isn’t subterfuge. It’s to solve the problem created by synthetic data. GANs would empower AI systems to work with raw, real-world data that hasn’t been cleaned and without the direct supervision of a human programmer. And while it’s a wonderfully creative approach to solve a problem—it could someday be a serious threat to our safety.

pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

Conflict Given that leftists have long criticized “trickle-down economics,” it would be natural to expect a leftist populist backlash to stagnequality and a subsequent move to redistribute income. To some extent this prediction has been confirmed by recent events, as summarized in table I.1. Bernie Sanders nearly won the US Democratic primary despite identifying as a socialist earlier in his life and running for president as a social democrat. In the UK, Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is the most left-wing leader of Britain’s Labor Party with a serious chance of victory since World War II, and left-wing movements in France and Italy have achieved unusual political success.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

Political scientists crunching the polling data said that the Kochs’ two signature laws (the attempted repeal of Obamacare and the successful tax “reform” package) were the “most unpopular pieces of major domestic legislation of the past quarter-century,” the journalist Michael Tomasky points out. Of the nine most popular recent laws, he observes, “eight pursued what could broadly be defined as liberal goals, like gun control and environmental protection.”13 For the last few years, America’s most liked politician, by far, has been a socialist, Bernie Sanders, who campaigned on the antilibertarian slogan “Not Me, Us,” and who holds up Scandinavia as a model. Denmark and Sweden and Norway, of course, are what this “balance” I’ve been describing looks like in practice: a market system with a strong commitment to social justice, the lowest levels of inequality on the planet, and, by most measures, the happiest citizens, people leading private lives, but not leaving others behind.

pages: 337 words: 101,440

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation
by Sophie Pedder
Published 20 Jun 2018

A razor-tongued former Trotskyist, with a taste for revolutionary-style Mao jackets and a weakness for Latin American autocrats, he advocated a top income-tax rate of 100 per cent during the 2017 campaign, described America as a ‘dangerous power’, and called for a ‘Bolivarian’ alliance alongside Venezuela and Cuba. This seemed to be just what young people wanted to hear, and the 65-year-old Mélenchon turned into a sort of French Bernie Sanders. He also dug deep into the Socialist vote, securing working-class support in industrial cities and areas that were losing jobs. The seven million votes that Mélenchon drew in the first round of the 2017 presidential election were only 600,000 short of Marine Le Pen’s score. Between the pair of them alone, they scooped up a massive 41 per cent of the first-round vote.

pages: 350 words: 98,077

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 14 Oct 2019

Karpathy, “What I Learned from Competing Against a ConvNet on ImageNet,” Sept. 2, 2014, karpathy.github.io/2014/09/02/what-i-learned-from-competing-against-a-convnet-on-imagenet. 18. S. Lohr, “A Lesson of Tesla Crashes? Computer Vision Can’t Do It All Yet,” New York Times, Sept. 19, 2016. 6: A Closer Look at Machines That Learn 1. Readers who followed the 2016 U.S. presidential election will recognize the pun on Bernie Sanders’s supporters’ tagline, “Feel the Bern.” 2. E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, “The Business of Artificial Intelligence,” Harvard Business Review, July 2017. 3. O. Tanz, “Can Artificial Intelligence Identify Pictures Better than Humans?,” Entrepreneur, April 1, 2017, www.entrepreneur.com/article/283990. 4.

pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson
Published 27 Apr 2020

It’s easy to be cynical about the potential for the private sector to play a role in driving systemic change. Indeed one interpretation of the German experience is that we need the equivalent of a world war to change business attitudes. Fortunately the Danish experience suggests that this is not necessarily the case. Denmark: Business Responds to National Weakness Bernie Sanders’s championing of Denmark has led many business leaders to roll their eyes. But Denmark is not a socialist country, if by socialism is meant state ownership of the means of production. Its economy is a strongly pro-business system in which business, labor, and government work closely together to sustain economic growth—within a structure that was championed by the private sector.

pages: 329 words: 100,162

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following
by Gabrielle Bluestone
Published 5 Apr 2021

* * * The Bloomberg campaign kicked off in February 2020 with a meme-and influencer-based approach that offered anyone who wanted to get involved $2,500 a month to promote Bloomberg online and directly to friends and family. The organizers did not discriminate in its selection of its “deputy field organizers,” according to the Los Angeles Times, which noted that the group included among its ranks “a vocal Bernie Sanders supporter,” “a Chicagoan with zero followers on Twitter,” and “a dozen registered Republicans.”226 Many of the Twitter accounts backing Bloomberg’s bid had been opened within the past two months, triggering Twitter’s fraud alerts as hundreds of uninspired human users began tweeting like bots by using copied and pasted messages like “A President Is Born: Barbra Streisand sings Mike’s praises.

pages: 338 words: 101,967

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth
by Noa Tishby
Published 5 Apr 2021

Even though they were actually a small part of the establishment of the country, only 8 percent of the general population, the kibbutzim made a huge impact both on the ethos of the country to be and its industry. They paved the way for the basic economic system under which Israel still operates today—capitalist yet also a light social democracy. Like Warren Buffett spiced with a dash of Bernie Sanders. The kibbutzim also paved the path for Herzl’s vision of gender equality. In the Zionist movement, women got equal voting rights to men by the Second Zionist Congress in 1898; however, in the early days of the kibbutz, the men were certain that they would be able to transfer the Old World misogynistic way of living to the New World and leave the gals to cooking, cleaning, and childcare.

pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

“Globally, demand for fossil-based power has declined while demand for renewable power has risen.” Few were as unsurprised by the accelerating shift as Bob Litterman. Indeed, he’d bet millions on it. In April 2021, Litterman once again faced ranks of lawmakers in the U.S. Senate. The venue this time was the Senate Budget Committee, chaired by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Litterman was testifying beside Nobel Prize−winning Columbia University economics professor Joseph Stiglitz and author David Wallace-Wells, whose 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth spelled out in hair-raising fashion the extreme risks posed by a changing climate. “In my view, we are living through a pivotal moment not only in the history of our country, not only in the history of the global community, but in the history of humanity,” Senator Sanders said in his opening statement.

pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans
by Eben Kirksey
Published 10 Nov 2020

Disadvantaged community members were unable to fight prolonged battles with government bureaucrats and insurance agents to secure medical care and housing. But even as utopian dreams seemed impossible for impoverished people on the margins of society, lofty ideals were gaining ground on a national level. When Bernie Sanders began championing “Medicare for all” in his 2016 presidential campaign, chronically ill HIV patients throughout the country began hoping for a national policy fix that would guarantee their access to medical care. While many looked to political leaders to solve difficult problems, local health care advocates like Jay Johnson continued to work tirelessly to translate social justice principles into reality

pages: 307 words: 101,998

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives
by Chris Stedman
Published 19 Oct 2020

But it’s not. Twitter is not America. Frequent social media use can put distance between the most online among us and an accurate perception of the world. A common refrain that began on Twitter in 2016 and saw another spike in the run-up to the 2020 election was that supporters of politician Bernie Sanders were largely white, aggressive, male “Bernie bros”—a narrative that erases that in the 2020 Democratic primary season Sanders had a broader range of support from young, working-class people of color than any of the other candidates, who largely had whiter, wealthier bases. Yet the “Bernie bro” perception itself is a result of the internet’s problem of proportion.

pages: 362 words: 97,473

Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It
by John Abramson
Published 15 Dec 2022

To the left of the public option — and rapidly fading as a realistic policy goal in the foreseeable future — is “Medicare for All.” This plan would fund health care for all Americans through a tax-financed Medicare-like publicly administered program as advocated by presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont). Many health-care progressives favor Medicare for All because it could achieve universal coverage for all Americans, cut the cost of health care by creating a consolidated purchaser with tremendous negotiating power, and save money on the wasteful administrative cost of our current disjointed hodgepodge of health-care coverage.

pages: 362 words: 103,087

The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters
by Eric J. Johnson
Published 12 Oct 2021

Online dating is now the most common way that long-term heterosexual couples report meeting, with 39 percent meeting online, as opposed to 20 percent through friends, and 27 percent in a bar or restaurant.15 While there may be a handful of major dating sites in the United States, there are more than five thousand worldwide, many made for very specific audiences. For example, there are sites for fans of Disney (Mouse Mingle), clowns (Clown Dating), farmers (Farmers Only), and hip-hop fans (Bound 2). During the 2016 election there was even a dating site dedicated to followers of Bernie Sanders.16 BernieSingles had about 13,500 members and claimed to “help connect progressives beyond social media to inspire chemistry among folks who share similar visions of the future.” Further, they claimed, ironically perhaps in retrospect, that “the 1% are not the only ones getting screwed this election season.”

pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

Back in June, the Hillary Clinton campaign issued its official Spotify playlist, packed with on-message tunes (“Brave,” “Fighters,” “Stronger,” “Believer”). Ted Cruz live-streams his appearances on Periscope. Marco Rubio broadcasts “Snapchat Stories” along the trail. Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham produce goofy YouTube videos. Even grumpy old Bernie Sanders has attracted nearly two million friends on Facebook, leading the New York Times to dub him “a king of social media.” And then there’s Donald Trump. If Sanders is a king, Trump is a god. A natural-born troll, adept at issuing inflammatory bulletins at opportune moments, he’s the first candidate optimized for the Google News algorithm.

pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 15 Nov 2016

It is more efficient for the state to pay the worker $30,000. The net to the worker is the same, and an inefficient pretense of private salaries and public taxation is eliminated. Schumpeter’s suggestion has found new life in policy proposals for a Basic Guaranteed Income championed in various forms by Bernie Sanders on the left and Charles Murray on the right. The expansion of food stamps, disability payments, Obamacare, Medicare, and the earned income credit are all forms of government income maintenance, evidence of a movement toward true socialism. Schumpeter said democracy was not an ideology in which the will of the people was fulfilled.

pages: 437 words: 105,934

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 7 Mar 2017

People might find the reposted articles less interesting, and if so, there are fewer clicks, making for a less attractive product. (I speculate that the third reason might be the most important.) It is entirely reasonable for Facebook to take these points into account. But we should not aspire to a situation in which everyone’s News Feed is perfectly personalized, so that supporters of different politicians—Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, someone else—see fundamentally different stories, focusing on different topics or covering the same topics in radically different ways. Facebook seems to think that it would be liberating if every person’s News Feed could be personalized so that people see only and exactly what they want.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 2 Jan 2009

It was as if those at the very top simply assumed that the government could do all these things, without ever asking whether that assumption made any sense. 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 281 8/12/08 1:56:13 AM 282 REMI X What made this all the more weird was that the very people who were operating upon this vision of regulatory omnipotence were the same people who, in a million other contexts, would have been most skeptical about the government’s ability to do anything. We’re not talking about FDR here. Or even the socialist member of the United States Senate, Bernie Sanders. We’re talking about people who don’t believe the government can run a railroad. But if a government can’t run a railroad, how is it to run a whole society? What possible reason is there to think that we had anything like the capacity necessary to do this? For though many predicted resistance, the presumption behind our government actions was that force could always quell resistance.

pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business
by Ken Auletta
Published 4 Jun 2018

This meeting commenced with a report on BofA’s finances. Bank profits rose from $4 billion in 2014 to $16 billion; the bank’s liquidity was four times as large as in 2008. But this good news was drowned out by the background noise of an angry presidential campaign where expected Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and her challenger, Bernie Sanders, and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump, vied to criticize big banks. Surveys reveal that support for banks dropped five points, Finucane said. “My concern is Bank of America should not be a focus of the conversation when the talk is about Dodd-Frank.” Pollster Joel Benenson said Sanders enjoyed broad support when he declared, “We have a rigged economic system.”

pages: 300 words: 106,520

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

When former Labour leader Ed Miliband debated the notion on his podcast, it was subtitled ‘Free Money for All!’ and he called it ‘a trust fund for all’. Even broadly sympathetic people still find it necessary to frame the idea humorously like this as if to admit that it is essentially nuts or at least crazy, new-fangled, snowflake thinking. So when you hear that Bernie Sanders supports it, you think, ‘That figures.’ When you hear that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Richard Branson support it, you wonder what’s in it for those creepy rich hippies/high-minded technocrats. But when you find out that the idea begins with Thomas Paine and came very close to being implemented in 1969 as US government policy by one Richard Nixon (rich and creepy maybe, but certainly no hippie and certainly no Thomas Paine) you begin to think again.

pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang
Published 6 Feb 2018

The Uber example, for Sheff, represents how this evolution in various types of relationships can lend cover for a new type of sexual harassment. “That’s not polyamory; that’s fucked up,” she told me when we discussed Fowler’s story. “It’s just inappropriate to put people in that position in the workplace. You may think you’re Steve Jobs, but really you’re Roger Ailes or Bill O’Reilly with a Bernie Sanders tattoo.” Even a woman who is nonmonogamous herself could have problems. “If a woman is known to be polyamorous, then there is this assumption, like, of course she’ll date,” Sheff says. “And if she won’t engage, then she’s a frigid bitch. Women can be at a double disadvantage around this because they still get the sideways looks from other women and from men who think, ‘Well, you’re slutty—why don’t you fuck me?’”

pages: 332 words: 106,197

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions
by Jason Hickel
Published 3 May 2017

In 2016 the World Bank’s top inequality expert, Branko Milanović, published new data showing that inequality between countries – corrected for population – had declined dramatically over the past few decades, from a Gini index of 63 in 1960 down to 47 in 2013, with a precipitous drop beginning in the 1980s.44 The story ricocheted through the media. Just days after Milanović’s data was released, conservative commentator Charles Lane wrote a celebratory column in the Washington Post. He criticised Pope Francis and US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for making such a big deal about inequality at the time. Yes, the world’s richest 1 per cent have seen their incomes skyrocket, but that’s OK, he argued, because the very system that is delivering them their extraordinary wealth is also reducing inequality globally. The US model of free-market globalisation isn’t causing inequality, as its critics claim – on the contrary, it is reducing it.

pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

In what follows, I will leave the lump sum idea to one side and instead analyze payment of a regular income. Basic jobs But before we get to the main issue, there are two other variants to consider, namely the idea of a basic jobs guarantee (BJG), and the provision of “universal basic services” (UBS). In the USA Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand have pressed for a BJG to be trialed. This idea aims to head off one of the criticisms of UBI but immediately undermines one of its key appeals. Clearly, the proposal responds to the critique that a UBI would reduce the supply of labor and undermine the work ethic (which I will discuss in a moment).

pages: 368 words: 108,222

Parkland: Birth of a Movement
by Dave Cullen
Published 12 Feb 2019

So here’s my challenge to you: allow me to be the first Volunteer to take a seat at the table with you guys to advocate for a cause that has affected everyone at MSD regardless of race. After all, as has been previously stated in the media, ‘these parkland kids are eloquent and outspoken,’ and just like you, I fall into that category.” She tagged various cable news anchors, Bernie Sanders, and several of the MSD kids. It drew a lot of responses and nearly four hundred retweets. Five days later, Tyah-Amoy joined a group of eight African American Douglas students conducting a press conference outside the school to chastise both MFOL and the media for ignoring them. “I am here today with my classmates because we have been sorely underrepresented and in some cases misrepresented,” Tyah-Amoy said.

pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

That much is simple enough. But crony capitalism 2.0 is far trickier. It uses a different playbook from that used by version 1.0—one that’s designed to escape public notice. In January 2020, when David Solomon, first issued the Goldman’s diversity proclamation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it was at a time when Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two of the biggest critics of the US government’s 2008 bailout of Goldman Sachs, were presidential frontrunners. Having supplicated to the swamp uni-party of crony Republicans and centrist Democrats for decades, the moment had arrived for Goldman Sachs to begin placating the identity-politics-obsessed far left, just as that wing of the Democratic party had begun to accrue greater political power.

pages: 404 words: 106,233

Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
by Brett Chistophers
Published 25 Apr 2023

The furthest that Starmer’s Labour has been willing to go is to promise a single publicly owned renewable-energy start-up, the comically named Great British Energy, which, if it ever came to fruition, would struggle to be more than a gnat on the hide of the huge beast that is the UK’s wholly private energy sector. Labour’s, then, is now more or less the same, pale imitation of a GND to which the governing Conservative Party has itself occasionally given lip service.52 Similarly, in the United States, Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign for the Democrats’ presidential nomination incorporated GND proposals containing explicit public-ownership commitments, albeit in his case only of renewable-energy infrastructure and not also of transportation and water assets. Yet the man who beat him to the nomination, and in early 2021 became president, has performed a Starmer-like reformulation.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
by David Callahan
Published 9 Aug 2010

Planned Parenthood had given him a rating of 100 percent, as did the AFL-CIO, Citizens for Tax Justice, the NAACP, the National Education Association, the Children’s Defense Fund, PeacePac, and the National Organization for Women. Summing up Obama’s voting record, National Journal had given him a “composite liberal score” of 95.5 percent in 2007—the highest score of any senator that year, including Bernie Sanders, the Socialist from Vermont. Meanwhile, Obama had gotten consistently low marks from conservative groups. Some of his lowest ratings were from business and antitax organizations. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce calculated that Obama had voted against its interests 67 percent of the time in 2007, and the National Federation of Independent Businesses said that he had been against that organization 88 percent of the time.

pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants
by Scott Patterson
Published 2 Feb 2010

“The growing array of derivatives and the related application of more sophisticated methods for measuring and managing risks had been key factors underlying the remarkable resilience of the banking system, which had recently shrugged off severe shocks to the economy and the financial system.” Now Greenspan was turning his back on the very system he had championed for decades. In congressional testimony in 2000, Vermont representative Bernie Sanders had asked Greenspan, “Aren’t you concerned with such a growing concentration of wealth that if one of these huge institutions fails it will have a horrendous impact on the national and global economy?” Greenspan didn’t bat an eye. “No, I’m not,” he’d replied. “I believe that the general growth in large institutions has occurred in the context of an underlying structure of markets in which many of the larger risks are dramatically—I should say fully—hedged.”

pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

drawn from the dystopic: Serge Kovaleski, Julie Turkewitz, Joseph Goldstein, and Dan Barry, “An Alt-Right Makeover Shrouds the Swastikas,” New York Times, December 11, 2016. “Contrary to what”: Todd Gitlin, “What Will It Take for Black Lives to Matter?,” American Prospect 28, no. 4 (Fall 2017): 23. all were forced to apologize: See the discussion about the three—Hillary Clinton, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley—in Wesley Lowery and David Weigel, “Democrats Struggling to Connect with Black Activists,” Washington Post, July 23, 2015. One of them: Chris Moody, “O’Malley Apologizes for Saying ‘All Lives Matter’ at Liberal Conference,” CNN, July 19, 2015. Online at cnn.com.

pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics
by Ben Buchanan
Published 25 Feb 2020

WikiLeaks promised to distribute it with a higher profile and impact than Guccifer could. On July 6, the group reached out to Guccifer again, highlighting the upcoming Democratic convention and asking for any information related to the Clinton campaign. Time was of the essence, the message said, because the damaging material had to leak before Hillary Clinton could win over Bernie Sanders supporters in her run toward the general election.32 On July 14, the GRU provided WikiLeaks with a large encrypted batch of hacked files in an email with the subject “big archive” and the message “a new attempt.”33 After all the discussion, Assange delivered for the GRU. On July 22, just three days before the Democratic convention that would officially nominate Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks posted the largest and most significant trove of DNC files.

pages: 386 words: 113,709

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 8 Jun 2020

It would take families hiking, to the movies, to fitness clubs and sporting events. Imagine it has as one of its missions the mixing of different classes. For example, in sponsoring cruises it would allocate cabins based on a lottery, without reference to social status. This is not a utopian proposal of Bernie Sanders; it was actually accomplished by KdF, the leisure organization of the German Labor Front. KdF had more than seven thousand paid employees and 135,000 volunteers by 1939, and had sent about 25 million Germans on vacations. The initials stand for “Kraft durch Freude,” which means “strength through joy.”

pages: 358 words: 118,810

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk
Published 15 Mar 2022

It took no time at all for me to feel this urgently, for my own life to feel quite pale and un-thought-through in comparison to what was going on here, despite how foreign and alienating it felt to me. Laura and Dorothy started to talk vaguely about politics: they were devastated by Donald Trump’s election, but skeptical that Bernie Sanders would be able to successfully campaign against him in 2020 or that there was anyone else who might run in his place. “And we just couldn’t support Hillary,” Dorothy clucked, but didn’t say why. The only media they referred to having recently read, though, were books published by Plough, and Plough magazine.

pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Published 2 Oct 2017

After months of hemming and hawing over the Keystone XL pipeline, in September 2015 she finally came out against it, saying it was a distraction from other issues. Six months later, she did the same on fracking. “By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place,” Clinton said in a debate against Bernie Sanders. “My answer is a lot shorter. No. I do not support fracking,” Sanders responded.22 It signaled an extraordinary retreat from reality—the reality of lower energy prices; of all the jobs, incomes, and GDP generated by fracking; of the transformation of America from hydrocarbon importer to exporter; of the geopolitical advantage America has gained over Russian president Vladimir Putin and the downgrading of the importance of the Persian Gulf; and of a prodigious achievement of American capitalism.

pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, attributes some of the discontent to globalization: Globalization combined with technology combined with social media and constant information have disrupted people’s lives in very concrete ways – a manufacturing plant closes and suddenly an entire town no longer has what was the primary source of employment – and people are less certain of their national identities or their place in the world … There is no doubt [this] has produced populist movements both from the left and the right in many countries in Europe … When you see a Donald Trump and a Bernie Sanders – very unconventional candidates who had considerable success – then obviously there is something there that is being tapped into: a suspicion of globalization, a desire to rein in its excesses, a suspicion of elites and governing institutions that people feel may not be responsive to their immediate needs.1 So, is globalization in trouble?

pages: 394 words: 112,770

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
by Michael Wolff
Published 5 Jan 2018

Between that first encounter and mid-August 2016, when he took over the Trump campaign, Bannon, beyond a few interviews he had done with Trump for his Breitbart radio show, was pretty sure he hadn’t spent more than ten minutes in one-on-one conversation with Trump. But now Bannon’s Zeitgeist moment had arrived. Everywhere there was a sudden sense of global self-doubt. Brexit in the UK, waves of immigrants arriving on Europe’s angry shores, the disenfranchisement of the workingman, the specter of more financial meltdown, Bernie Sanders and his liberal revanchism—everywhere was backlash. Even the most dedicated exponents of globalism were hesitating. Bannon believed that great numbers of people were suddenly receptive to a new message: the world needs borders—or the world should return to a time when it had borders. When America was great.

pages: 389 words: 119,487

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

Consider a typical Tea Party supporter who somehow squares an ardent faith in Jesus Christ with a firm objection to government welfare policies and a staunch support for the National Rifle Association. Wasn’t Jesus a bit more keen on helping the poor than on arming yourself to the teeth? It might seem incompatible, but the human brain has a lot of drawers and compartments, and some neurons just don’t talk to one another. Similarly, you can find plenty of Bernie Sanders supporters who have a vague belief in some future revolution, while also believing in the importance of investing your money wisely. They can easily switch from discussing the unjust distribution of wealth in the world to discussing the performance of their Wall Street investments. Hardly anyone has just one identity.

pages: 450 words: 114,766

Milk!
by Mark Kurlansky

It is central to the Cornell philosophy that “larger herds are indicative of better managers.” They even encouraged economic policies to help ease small-scale farmers out of dairying, which would completely undo the rural culture, even the landscape, of a number of states such as New York and Vermont. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders wrote in 2012, “There is something very wrong when large processors reap large profits, and family farmers … can barely survive, or must sell their farms.” Between 1970 and 2006, about 573,000 dairy farms in the United States closed, but there was not a corresponding drop in U.S. milk production.

pages: 354 words: 118,970

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Published 9 Sep 2019

It was a further blow to Hoffman’s relationship with the Democratic Party when it came out that another political organization he cofounded, called Investing in US, had contributed to a Russian-style campaign on Facebook that deliberately disseminated misleading information to help elect a Democrat from Alabama named Doug Jones to the U.S. Senate. At one of Hoffman’s meetings with Obama, the president had warned him that the middle of the country was feeling disenfranchised. The 2016 campaign provided a demonstration: the main surprise was that in both parties, the most populist candidate—Trump in the Republicans’ case, Bernie Sanders in the Democrats’—did far better than anyone had expected by tapping into that feeling in very different ways. Even before the campaign, there were warning signs about the lack of general enthusiasm for the economic future that seemed to be emerging. One of Hoffman’s Silicon Valley friends, Mike Maples, Jr., who runs a venture capital fund and is, like Peter Thiel, one of the Valley’s rare Republican conservatives, went to Dallas to talk with Glenn Beck, the right-wing talk-show host, whom he admires.

pages: 407 words: 116,726

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
by Steven Strogatz
Published 31 Mar 2019

It conveys the right idea that these numbers are qualitatively different, even though they are neighboring powers of ten. Anyone who appreciates the difference between a five-figure and a six-figure salary knows that one extra zero can matter a great deal. When the words for powers of ten sound too much alike, we are led astray. During the 2016 US presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders frequently railed against the exorbitant tax breaks going to “millionaires and billionaires.” Whether you agreed with him or not about the politics, he unfortunately made it sound like, in terms of wealth, millionaires and billionaires were comparable. In fact, billionaires are much, much richer than millionaires.

pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

pages: 391 words: 112,312

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
by Lawrence Wright
Published 7 Jun 2021

“We have the votes,” he curtly decreed, but Alexander insisted, “We have a constitutional duty to hear the case.” “The House managers had prepared as if it was the trial of their lifetime, and the president’s lawyers hadn’t prepared at all,” Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat of Colorado, lamented. “It was overwhelmingly depressing.” Like three other senators in the room—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar—Bennet was still running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Kamala Harris had dropped out of the race in early December, followed by Cory Booker in January. For the remaining candidates, impeachment created havoc, coming as it did right before the Iowa caucuses.

pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made
by Ben Rhodes
Published 1 Jun 2021

“But there’s something missing when Bernie talks about it,” he added. “A spiritual component, a national identity that’s not nationalist.” He briefly ticked through the ways in which the other candidates had tried to fuse an adequate critique of what had gone wrong with an affirmative expression of national identity. Some, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, were closer on the critique. Others, like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, were better at offering a vision of national unity without speaking as directly to the dislocation people felt. This was through no fault of their own; it wasn’t an easy thing to do. “What Bobby Kennedy was doing,” he said, searching for a historical analogy and landing on this brief 1968 campaign, “had that spiritual component.”

pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

This isn’t surprising when in the United States 93 percent of congresspeople and 99 percent of senators hold at least bachelor degrees, compared to a national US average of 32 percent, and more than 90 percent of British MPs are graduates, up from less than half in the 1970s. Politicians of all stripes make the same point. In his celebrated speech about inequality at Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama said that “a higher education is the surest route to the middle class.” Left Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren go even further and demand “college for all.” Not everyone can be a winner, however you design the game. In some fields such as law, medicine, technology, and some corners of business, “winner-takes-all” markets have provided exceptional rewards to exceptional people—people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk—who have both high cognitive skills and practical knowledge of something that gives them a big first-mover advantage in new digital markets.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
by Timothy Snyder
Published 2 Apr 2018

In March and April, Russia hacked the accounts of people in the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign (and tried to hack Hillary Clinton personally). On July 22, some 22,000 emails were revealed, right before the Democratic National Convention was to be held. The emails that were made public were carefully selected to ensure strife between supporters of Clinton and her rival for the nomination, Bernie Sanders. Their release created division at the moment when the campaign was meant to coalesce. According to American authorities then and since, this hack was an element of a Russian cyberwar. The Trump campaign, however, supported Russia’s effort. Trump publicly requested that Moscow find and release more emails from Hillary Clinton.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993), 1707-91. 14.Lou Cornum, “Burial Ground Acknowledgements,” The New Inquiry, October 14, 2019, https://thenewinquiry.com/burial-ground-acknowledgements/. 15.Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Fastest Growing Occupations,” September 4, 2019, www.bls.gov/ooh/fastest-growing.htm; Campbell Robertson and Robert Gebeloff, “How Millions of Women Became the Most Essential Workers in America,” New York Times, April 18, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/us/coronavirus-women-essential-workers.html#click=https://t.co/oaw9tHAwiE. 16.Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 109. 17.Seraj Assi, “Why Kibbutzism Isn’t Socialism,” Jacobin Magazine, August 20, 2016, www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/kibbutz-labor-zionism-bernie-sanders-ben-gurion. 18.Rosa Vasilaki, “How Greece Became Europe’s “Shield” against Refugees,” Jacobin Magazine, March 10, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/greece-refugees-european-union-migrants-turkey-border. 19.Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 179. 20.Donald Trump quoted in Josh Boak, “AP Fact Check: Trump Plays on Immigration Myths,” PBS, February 8, 2019, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ap-fact-check-trump-plays-on-immigration-myths. 21.Caroline Mortimer, “Brexit Campaign Was Largely Funded by Five of UK’s Richest Businessmen,” Independent, April 24, 2017, www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-eu-campaign-arron-banks-jeremy-hosking-five-uk-richest-businessmen-peter-hargreaves-a7699046.html. 22.Matthew Goodwin and Catlin Milazzo, “Taking Back Control?

pages: 390 words: 115,303

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
by Ronan Farrow
Published 14 Oct 2019

And there he was, deepening his long-standing ties to the Democratic Party politicians for whom he had long been a major fund-raiser. All year, he’d been part of the brain trust around Hillary Clinton. “I’m probably telling you what you know already, but that needs to be silenced,” he emailed Clinton’s staff, about messaging from Bernie Sanders’s competing campaign to Latino and African American voters. “This article gives you everything I discussed with you yesterday,” he said in another message, sending a column critical of Sanders and pressing for negative campaigning. “About to forward some creative. Took your idea and ran,” Clinton’s campaign manager responded.

pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane
by Emily Guendelsberger
Published 15 Jul 2019

I haven’t really been following the election—keeping up with the news lately feels even more like work than my shame-pile of unread books. It’s on mute, but Republican front-runner Donald Trump appears to have issued a Christmas tweet demanding credit for an Obama initiative to deport hundreds of families who’d fled violence in Central America. In other news, Bernie Sanders called Trump vulgar for saying Hillary Clinton “got schlonged” in the 2008 primaries. God, 2016 is really going to suck, I think. I recognize Akasha the instant she walks in. She sometimes led stretches at standup; I’d mentally nicknamed her Happy Goth. She looks much younger than her age, thirty-eight, and the best description I can come up with is that she almost certainly owns a Harley Quinn costume.

pages: 389 words: 111,372

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis
by Beth Macy
Published 15 Aug 2022

The protest targeted owners of the Harlan, Kentucky–based Blackjewel Coal Company, after it closed without notifying its workers or paying them wages owed. Paychecks bounced. People were on the verge of losing their homes. Prosperino and fellow activists supplemented the work of union officials and evangelical preachers alike, supplying the miners with food and organizing donation campaigns. Then-candidate Bernie Sanders sent pizzas. Eventually, after it seemed like the miners would really pull it off, even Mitch McConnell lent support. Local musicians set up and played songs, including the old labor tune written for another Harlan labor battle nearly a century before: Until the battle’s won, which side are you on?

pages: 396 words: 113,613

Chokepoint Capitalism
by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
Published 26 Sep 2022

Rachel Louise Ensign, “No One Wants to Hire the Fired Wells Fargo Branch Staffers,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 14, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-one-wants-to-hire-the-fired-wells-fargo-branch-staffers-11568453400. 25. Julie Cohen, Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 7. 26. Bradley Thomas, “Why Bernie Sanders’s Universal Job Guarantee Is Fool’s Gold,” Foundation for Economic Education, Oct. 25, 2019, https://fee.org/articles/why-universal-job-guarantees-are-fool-s-gold. 27. Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal (New York: Penguin, 2019). 28. Mark Paul, William Darity Jr., and Darrick Hamilton, “The Federal Job Guarantee—A Policy to Achieve Permanent Full Employment,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Mar. 9, 2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/full-employment/the-federal-job-guarantee-a-policy-to-achieve-permanent-full-employment. 29.

pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

The program’s principal benefactor is David Rubenstein, a white male billionaire who made his fortune as the cofounder and CEO of Carlyle Group, the private equity giant. Rubenstein is known for his charitable giving but also for his fierce resistance to closing the carried interest loophole, which enables Rubenstein and other finance moguls to avoid $180 billion in taxes every decade. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump all campaigned against the loophole, but efforts to close it were defeated by the American Investment Council, a lobbying organization that was chaired at the time by one of Rubenstein’s lieutenants.1 The measure died three votes short of the majority it needed in 2010—and the loophole advantage hasn’t been seriously challenged since then.

pages: 413 words: 120,506

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017
by Rashid Khalidi
Published 28 Jan 2020

Democrats were thus torn between the inclinations of their older leaders and many big donors to support any act of the Israeli government, and the party’s rank and file, which began pushing hard for a change. This was evident in the unconventional positions on Israel and Palestine taken by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primary campaign and in floor fights over the party platform at the convention that year. The split was on display as well in the party leadership struggle that followed the 2016 elections, with the front-runner, Representative Keith Ellison, subjected to smears and innuendo in part because of his outspoken position on Palestine.

pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

“What are they going to do? They can’t fire me, I don’t have a job anymore.” Her first media interview took an hour, and she said she “was very tearful. It was very, very raw.” The same organizer from United for Respect then wrote her to ask if she’d like to come to Washington, DC, and meet with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. She called her friend MJ, who had moved to Texas from New York and had also worked at Toys “R” Us. “She said, ‘Are you sure?’ I said, ‘I’ve spoken to them on the phone twice. I have to trust my gut instinct.’ She said, ‘Tell her to call me.’” On the basis of Reinhart’s gut, she and MJ went to DC with United for Respect.

pages: 572 words: 124,222

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 11 Oct 2021

By 1971, African Americans were two-thirds of all people arrested for homicide and robbery, despite being less than 10 percent of the population.26 In 1975, black people were murdered at a rate nearly seven times higher than white people.27 The Congressional Black Caucus worked with then-senator Joe Biden, President Bill Clinton, and Senator Bernie Sanders to pass the 1994 crime bill.28 “[H]ow racist can a law be which the Congressional Black Caucus vigorously supported and even considered too weak?” asked Columbia University professor John McWhorter. “If we had asked these black congresspeople in 1986 why they supported these laws, they would have said that they were aimed at breaking the horror of the crack culture, which had turned inner cities into war zones by the mid-1980s.”29 Drug overdoses are today the number one cause of accidental death in the United States as a result of America’s historic addiction and overdose epidemic.* Overdose deaths rose from 17,415 in 2000 to 93,330 in 2020, a 536 percent increase.30 Significantly more people die of drug overdoses today than of homicide (13,927 in 2019) or car accidents (36,096 in 2019).31 The overdose crisis is worse in San Francisco than in other cities.

pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
by David Graeber
Published 14 May 2018

To take a random example, the famous March on Washington in 1963, at which Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, was officially called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: demands included not just antidiscrimination measures but also a full-employment economy, jobs programs, and a minimum-wage increase” (Touré F. Reed, “Why Liberals Separate Race from Class,” Jacobin 8.22.2015, www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-civil-rights-movement/), accessed June 10, 2017. 9. David Sirota, “Mr. Obama Goes to Washington,” Nation, June, 26, 2006. 10. Of course, some might argue that Obama was being disingenuous here, and downplaying the political power of the private health industry, in the same way that politicians justified bank bailouts by claiming it was in the interest of millions of minor bank employees who might otherwise have been laid off—a concern they most certainly do not evince when, say, transit or textile workers are faced with unemployment.

pages: 531 words: 125,069

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
Published 14 Jun 2018

JOHN RAWLS, A Theory of Justice1 Here’s a quirk about American politics: the majority of white Americans vote for Republicans for president, unless they were born after 1981 or between 1950 and 1954. Why those who were born after 1981 vote differently is easy to understand. They are Millennials or iGen; they lean left on most social issues and many economic ones (as Bernie Sanders discovered). They are less religious than previous generations, and the Republican Party turns them off in a variety of ways. But what’s the story for those born from 1950 to 1954? They strongly favored Democrats through the 1980s and have been roughly evenly divided since then, with a slight lean overall toward the Democrats.

pages: 390 words: 120,864

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari
Published 25 Jan 2022

TV teaches you that the world is fast; that it’s about surfaces and appearances; that everything in the world is happening all at once. This made me wonder what the message is that we absorb from social media, and how it compares to the message that we absorb from printed books. I thought first of Twitter. When you log in to that site—it doesn’t matter whether you are Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or Bubba the Love Sponge—you are absorbing a message through that medium and sending it out to your followers. What is that message? First: you shouldn’t focus on any one thing for long. The world can and should be understood in short, simple statements of 280 characters. Second: the world should be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly.

pages: 454 words: 127,319

Billionaires' Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers
by Katherine Clarke
Published 13 Jun 2023

Even in Manhattan, where obsessive real estate market tracking trumps most other popular pastimes, the transaction drew an inordinate amount of press interest. It called attention to the vastness of one man’s wealth at a time when the very existence of billionaires was being called into question by political heavyweights like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Sanders, who threw his hat in the ring for the presidential nomination for the 2020 election just a few weeks later, was drawing attention for his Democratic Socialist viewpoints, lashing out at “greedy” billionaires and at the growing wealth inequality in the United States, which he argued was eroding the American middle class.

pages: 513 words: 141,153

The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History
by David Enrich
Published 21 Mar 2017

Gensler’s nomination encountered stiff resistance from liberal senators. “At this moment in our history, we need an independent leader who will help create a new culture in the financial marketplace and move us away from the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior which has caused so much harm to our economy,” Senator Bernie Sanders said as he announced his intention to block Gensler’s appointment. Gensler, fifty-one at the time, knew what he had to do: Cleanse himself of his now-toxic centrist credentials. He launched an offensive to convince his doubters that, if confirmed, he would embrace a tough-on-Wall-Street approach, transforming the sleepy CFTC into a force to be reckoned with.

pages: 452 words: 134,502

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
by David Moon , Patrick Ruffini , David Segal , Aaron Swartz , Lawrence Lessig , Cory Doctorow , Zoe Lofgren , Jamie Laurie , Ron Paul , Mike Masnick , Kim Dotcom , Tiffiniy Cheng , Alexis Ohanian , Nicole Powers and Josh Levy
Published 30 Apr 2013

Every Senate Democrat rejected this resolution, which would have invalidated the regulations, and from the outside, you would have concluded that the caucus favored the principles of Internet freedom and rejected corporate profiteering of the World Wide Web. This actually represented an advance; Senate Democrats weren’t always explicitly on board with net neutrality, and to hold the entire caucus, from Bernie Sanders to Ben Nelson and everyone in between, is quite a legislative feat on anything of consequence. But at the exact same time as Senate Democrats voted down net neutrality repeal, many of them were scheming to bring so-called anti-piracy legislation to the floor. The two bills coming up at the same time represents a common, devious tactic: make a big show of solidarity with a community or interest group on one bill, while selling them out on the side.

pages: 483 words: 143,123

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 5 Nov 2013

“I thought that our employees and most importantly, our investors, needed to see me as a strong leader believing one hundred percent in what our company stood for,” he said.1 Indeed, the caution he expressed to Swanson proved fleeting. Both McClendon and Tom Ward were so bullish that by June each controlled nearly identical wagers on natural gas derivatives worth around $2.3 billion, according to trading data later disclosed by U.S. senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and later reported by Reuters. Among three hundred banks, hedge funds, energy companies, and other traders identified by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, only four held bigger gas bets than McClendon and Ward. McClendon held additional contracts on oil worth another $240 million, according to the data.2 McClendon had vowed to rein in the company’s spending, but a buzz was growing about two new plays.

pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

Brexit Party found themselves in limbo, unable to find any allies in the European Parliament with whom to work: first they were a tragedy, and now they are a farce. Immediate commentary on political events quickly dates. By the time you read this, Jeremy Corbyn will certainly no longer be U.K. Labour Party leader. And if you live outside of the United Kingdom you may not have heard of him. If so, imagine that Bernie Sanders had become the U.S. Democratic Party presidential nominee. In the United Kingdom in 2017 this was said by political progressive outriders who supported Corbyn, whose unexpected electoral success denied the Conservatives a working majority: “Let’s face it, we’ve all been on a high but looking at the shifting Overton window shows that we’ve been hallucinating new possibilities into existence.

pages: 458 words: 136,405

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party
by David Kogan
Published 17 Apr 2019

The longer people watched the video the less overlap there was. Momentum also added to the official campaign by creating apps to direct people to different constituencies and training new recruits in canvassing techniques. The guru for this was Beth Foster-Ogg: During the general election, I brought in four Bernie Sanders organisers, and we did the persuasive conversations training. My job was to get it done in as many marginals as possible. So, I had to coordinate these four Americans, one of whom had never left the US before, going around the country. Every day we trained a different large group in a marginal, then came back, gave feedback and sent them out again.

pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

Some say this is a process that has also been going on in the Democratic Party, but there are fundamental differences. The extremists in the Republican Party have managed a takeover of the party. In the House, the Tea Party has been sufficiently strong to block legislation that it opposed. Even Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are mainstream “social democrats,” little different (and in many cases slightly to the right) of European social democrats. 39.As political scientist Russell J. Dalton and his coauthors have pointed out, there is a long history of disenchantment with the party system, but the reality is that it is essential to the functioning of American democracy.

pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

Loneliness and the politics of distrust As early as 1992, researchers began to pick up on a correlation between social isolation and votes for the far-right Front National’s Jean-Marie Le Pen in France.23 In the Netherlands, researchers crunching data gathered from over 5,000 participants in 2008 found that the less people trusted that those around them would look after their interests and not deliberately do them harm, the more likely they were to vote for PVV, the Netherlands’ nationalist right-wing populist party.24 Across the Atlantic, a 2016 poll by the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy asked 3,000 Americans whom they would turn to first if they needed help with challenges ranging from childcare to financial assistance, to advice on relationships, to getting a ride. The results were revealing. Donald Trump voters were significantly more likely than supporters of either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders to have replied not with reference to neighbours, community organisations or friends, but simply with ‘I just rely on myself’.25 They were also more likely to report having fewer close friends, fewer acquaintances and to spend fewer hours a week with both. Other researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute investigating the traits of Republican supporters in the final stages of the Republican primaries in 2016 found that supporters of Donald Trump were twice as likely as those of his main opponent, Ted Cruz, to have seldom or never participated in community activities like sports’ teams, book clubs or parent–teacher organisations.26 The corollary also holds true.

pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

It is not clear what will happen to Americans’ trust in democracy if the 2020 election is a more convincing, more determined rerun of 2016. What is clear is that the 2020 election is being targeted. In February, intelligence officials informed the U.S. House Intelligence Committee that Russia was intervening to support President Trump’s reelection. In March, the FBI informed Bernie Sanders that Russia was trying to tip the scales on his behalf. Intelligence officials have warned that Russia has adjusted their playbook toward newer, less easily detectable tactics to manipulate the 2020 election. Rather than impersonating Americans, they are now nudging American citizens to repeat misinformation to avoid social media platform rules against “inauthentic speech.”

pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

Just as the Romans made a desert and called it peace, the stasists make a plan and call it progress. Often the lines blur completely. Sometimes the grand plan for the future is entirely backwards-looking, trying to recreate an imagined better and more stable past, and is supported by both the stasist Left and Right. Bernie Sanders has said that he ‘would be delighted to work with’ Trump on implementing trade barriers to reduce the restructuring of the economy. Nationalist Fox TV host Tucker Carlson praises Elizabeth Warren’s interventionist plan for the economy, saying ‘she sounds like Donald Trump at his best’.28 Their common enemy is ‘market fundamentalists’ and ‘libertarian zealots’, who don’t know what the solution is but think the chance to find it increases if millions, not just a few people at the top, are looking for it.

pages: 601 words: 135,202

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis
by Jeanna Smialek
Published 27 Feb 2023

People in power didn’t like the Fed, and at least some especially didn’t like Bernanke’s version of it. The idea that the Fed needed to be “audited” went from crackpot suggestion to rallying cry, with Representative Ron Paul and his son, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, repeatedly introducing bills that would review central bank monetary policy decisions. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent, championed the movement on the political left. The Fed’s financial statements were already audited, but the movement to subject its monetary policy decisions and other internal deliberations to review captured the deep ill will. In a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation, one version of the bill passed the House in 2014 with votes from both parties—333 lawmakers voted for it, 106 of them Democrats.

pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

Once again, the insurgent heart of the city has a beat. And so, as I write this in unstable and uncertain January 2017, I dare to hope. Today’s violent convulsions may be signs that the New Gilded Age is thrashing in its death throes. Over the past few years, the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, and Bernie Sanders have energized a new generation of activists. The mainstream media finally started talking about economic inequality. Even the International Monetary Fund, a major champion of neoliberalism, admitted that free-market policies hinder growth, concluding, “The evidence of the economic damage from inequality suggests that policymakers should be more open to redistribution.”

pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

But posts in which an out-group member says something objectionable reliably grab their attention. Frequently, they’ll rebroadcast those posts as proof of the other side’s depravity. A Hillary Clinton supporter during the 2016 Democratic primary, for example, might not even notice most tweets from Bernie Sanders supporters. Until one crosses a line. “Bernie bros are so sexist,” the user might tweet, attaching a screenshot of a twenty-three-year-old barista calling Clinton “shrill.” People, as a rule, perceive out-groups as monoliths. When we see a member of an opposing clan misbehave, we assume this represents them all.

Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
by Branko Milanovic
Published 9 Oct 2023

The first aspect to emphasize is Smith’s critical attitude toward the rich and the way they have gained their wealth, and especially his frequently expressed opinion that the interests of businessmen run so counter to those of the society that they must not be allowed to impose their narrow and peculiar interest on the rest. This is not merely a “left-of-center” Adam Smith, whose many quotes could easily be reprised by Bernie Sanders without many people’s realizing that they come from one of the founders of political economy. This is an Adam Smith who comes very close to what is termed a “socialist” critique of capitalism in today’s United States. Second, however, while Smith was skeptical of the rich, he was equally skeptical of big government.

pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change
by Bharat Anand
Published 17 Oct 2016

So we looked to social media. We had little idea of its eventual power. After we won Iowa, all of us on the team looked at one another and thought—maybe we can win this thing.” Eight years later the trend toward “connected campaigns” would continue on both sides of the political spectrum. One presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, raised more money per month and in total through $27 donations from people connected through social media than rivals who took in the $2,700 maximum per-person donation. Donald Trump didn’t wait for news outlets to cover him—he called them, and tweeted at a prodigious rate. Sanders’s donations exceeded $200 million; Trump’s earned-media coverage exceeded $4 billion.

pages: 519 words: 155,332

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It
by Steven Brill
Published 28 May 2018

However, by 1970—the year before the U.S. would fall into what would become a perpetual and growing trade deficit—the unions’ position had jelled into outright opposition to the Kennedy Round of trade liberalization. In May 1970, the AFL-CIO circulated a paper around Washington that read like a 2016 Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders speech. “The United States position on world trade deteriorated in the 1960’s, with an adverse impact on American workers, communities, and industries,” the union paper declared. Citing “managed [foreign] national economies with direct and indirect government barriers to imports and aid to exports,” a “skyrocketing rise of investments by U.S. companies in foreign subsidiaries and the spread of U.S.

pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems
by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 12 Nov 2019

This is also the environment, something we all enjoy, and society should be ready to pay for it, just as it is willing to pay for trees. SMART KEYNESIANISM: SUBSIDIZING THE COMMON GOOD In 2018, a very different approach based on subsidizing work is gaining ground in the US Democratic party. In 2019, presidential candidates Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren have all proposed some kind of federal guarantee, whereby any American who wanted to work would be entitled to a good job ($15 an hour with retirement and health benefits on par with other federal employees, childcare assistance, and twelve weeks of paid family leave) in community service, home care, park maintenance, etc.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
by Daniel Yergin
Published 14 Sep 2020

Climate became a major issue in the Democratic primaries. Some candidates called for a ban on fracking. Climate now polled as a major issue, especially for millennial voters. During the primary campaigns, candidates vied over climate action plans. Joe Biden’s $1.7 trillion program and Elizabeth Warren’s $4 trillion paled next to Bernie Sanders’s $16.3 trillion. Sanders’s long list of would-be initiatives included $35 billion for people to reforest their front lawns or turn them into “food-producing spaces” as well as “ensure fossil fuels stay in the ground” and ban both exports and imports of oil. But how you ban imports and exports of oil and at the same time ban domestic production of oil—and still have a functioning economy and society—was left unexplained.

pages: 492 words: 152,167

Rikers: An Oral History
by Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau
Published 17 Jan 2023

Meanwhile, on June 27, 2019, a twenty-seven-year-old transgender woman, Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco, died alone in a solitary confinement cell in the woman’s jail on Rikers after an epileptic seizure. She was being held on $500 bail. Her death highlighted a series of systemic failures and spurred calls from people like the U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to end solitary entirely. — MARCUS GRICE, detained multiple stints, 1994 to 2017: My first time incarcerated in Rikers Island, I was fifteen. I was not supposed to hit Rikers Island, but they sort of finagled it, so I didn’t go to juvenile. I spent a year there.

pages: 557 words: 154,324

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024

Though it comes in various recommended guises, all of them frame the GND as a modern, green successor programme to the original New Deal, which entailed a vast programme of national infrastructure renewal in the US in the mid-1930s designed to drag the country out of the depths of the Great Depression, and in which almost all the new infrastructure was funded and owned publicly. Notably, public ownership specifically of renewable energy has been the kernel of all significant contemporary GND proposals, including both that on which the UK Labour Party campaigned in the 2019 general election, and that on which Bernie Sanders campaigned for the US Democrats’ presidential nomination the following year. Generally, the main argument that GND-type proposals have marshalled in favour of state ownership and control of relevant infrastructure – and, no less explicitly, against a capital-centric model hinging on markets and private actors – has been an essentially Keynesian one.

pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve. As I’ve said, there are left-wing believers in nonexistent conspiracies and other fantasies, but they’re not nearly as numerous or influential. During the 2016 Democratic primaries, after Bernie Sanders did better in some election-day exit polls than he did in the voting, some of his supporters were convinced a conspiracy had falsified the results. (In fact, exit polls always tend to oversample younger voters.) And while you might have considered Sanders’s leftism unrealistic or its campaign rhetoric hyperbolic (“the business model of Wall Street is fraud”), the campaign wasn’t based on outright fantasies.

pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

In other post-crisis environments, the electorate may demand something more like retribution, rather than reform, if they are angry over rising inequality or fearful of foreign threats. That is the mood in many countries now, the United States included. To an extent not seen in many decades, the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign has been dominated by populists, led on the right by the real estate billionaire Donald Trump and on the left by Bernie Sanders, who is calling for a political revolution against the “billionaire class.” The language of class warfare rarely bodes well for an economy, especially if it pushes mainstream candidates to adopt more radical positions. Many of the Republican presidential candidates are vying with Trump to stake out the most hard-line positions on issues such as immigration, which could undermine the advantage the United States enjoys as a magnet for foreign talent.

pages: 561 words: 163,916

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris
Published 19 Feb 2019

“That’s crazy . . .” Talk of the First Amendment soon segued into talk about the Second (which Luckey strongly believed in for constitutional reasons; Chen, too, for grew-up-in-Texas reasons), and then eventually the conversation spiraled into the upcoming presidential election. “Am I correct to assume that Bernie Sanders is superpopular these days over at the Commune?” Chen asked. Luckey laughed. “Yes, you would be correct.” “And you?” “Well,” Luckey began, “I think there’s a lot to like about Bernie. But personally, I’m pretty jazzed about Donald J. Trump.” “Wait. What?!” Joe Chen asked, taken aback. “Did you say Trump?”

pages: 581 words: 162,518

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
by Adam Winkler
Published 27 Feb 2018

The opposition crossed party lines, with 85 percent of Democrats, 76 percent of Republicans, and 81 percent of independents saying Citizens United was wrongly decided. Even five years after the ruling, an overwhelming majority of Americans polled, 78 percent, said the ruling should be overturned. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the two main Democratic candidates in the 2016 presidential race, both said that overturning Citizens United would be a litmus test for their Supreme Court nominees—a level of opposition known to only a handful of notorious cases in American history, such as Roe v. Wade, the abortion decision.69 Perhaps the most visible manifestation of the public reaction to the Citizens United decision came in 2011 with Occupy Wall Street, a series of populist political protests against income inequality and the role of money in politics that began in New York and, according to the Washington Post, quickly “spread like wildfire around the country.”

pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

At the risk of caricature, left-wing populists tend to see everyone other than the dominant elite as the oppressed. Their aim is not to overturn the system, but to get a greater share of the benefits for the masses. They do not seek revolution, only a reorientation of the system, with the government typically doing more and the market less. A left-wing populist leader like Bernie Sanders, who ran for the Democratic Party nomination in the 2016, saw free trade as hurting the American people. He wanted less of it. He also campaigned for universal health care and free public college education, and for more humane treatment of immigrants. Left-wing populists do not distinguish among people in the country; they typically want a better deal for all the oppressed.

pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

Social media undoubtedly became an important channel that allowed the Trump campaign to tap into people’s discontents, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal bears witness, but it was not in itself the cause of people’s concerns. The New Luddites Globalization has moved to center stage of the political debate. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both made blistering assaults on trade agreements a main theme of their campaigns. Trump’s win was in part attributable to the adverse impacts of trade on parts of the labor market, and it stands to reason that his campaign promises to renegotiate trade deals, which he claimed had benefited other countries at the expense of American workers, appealed to those who felt that they had lost out to globalization.

pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter Isaacson
Published 9 Mar 2021

As if to make sure that he stoked enough controversy, Watson added that gene-editing could also be used to enhance people’s looks. “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”2 Watson considered himself a political progressive. He supported Democrats from Franklin Roosevelt to Bernie Sanders. His advocacy for gene editing, he insisted, was because he wanted to improve the lot of the less fortunate. But as the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel noted, “Watson’s language contains more than a whiff of the old eugenic sensibility.”3 It was a whiff that was particularly odious wafting from Cold Spring Harbor, given the lab’s long history of fomenting that eugenic sensibility.

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
by Greta Thunberg
Published 14 Feb 2023

But none of the instalments of American pandemic relief put climate spending at the centre. When President Biden finally got around to it, the total outlay was only in the hundreds of billions of dollars – a far cry from the 5 per cent of GDP suggested by Michael Bloomberg and Hank Paulson, no climate radicals, and even further from proposals championed by Senators Ed Markey and Bernie Sanders. What was perhaps most striking about this failure was that, for the first time, it was enacted by politicians who were at least speaking the language of climate alarm, and asking to be judged – in forum after forum, conference after conference – by its existential standards. By those standards, of course, they have failed, letting the 1.5°C target slip further and further from reach, watching emissions stockpile in the atmosphere year after year as they give ever more heated speeches about the stakes of inaction.

pages: 593 words: 189,857

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises
by Timothy F. Geithner
Published 11 May 2014

Around that time, Senate majority leader Harry Reid—the only politician I knew who could match my clipped brevity on the phone—invited me to attend the regular lunch of the Senate Democratic caucus, our supposed allies on the Hill. But liberal populists dominated the room, and they didn’t display much affection toward me. I remember Senator Bernie Sanders, the lefty firebrand from Vermont, yelling about how the President had only Wall Street people around him. I listed some of the progressive economists on the President’s team, including Christy Romer, Jared Bernstein, Gene Sperling, and Alan Krueger, my chief economist at Treasury. I explained that I had never worked on Wall Street.

pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

After the Second World War, every additional dollar of borrowing produced around 50 cents of new investment. In recent decades, investment has fallen to below 10 cents for every dollar borrowed. 38. Cited by Foroohar, Makers and Takers, p. 145. 39. Transcripts of the Meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, 12–13 September 2012, pp. 178–9. 40. Data cited by Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders, ‘Schumer and Sanders: Limit Corporate Stock Buybacks’, New York Times, 3 February 2019. An article in The Atlantic claimed that total stock buybacks over the previous decade totalled $6.9 trillion; see Nick Hanauer, ‘Stock Buybacks are Killing the American Economy’, The Atlantic, 8 February 2015. 41.

pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

Wealth Taxes. Wealth taxes, imposed on those above a certain wealth threshold, have started to gain traction over the last decade. For example, in 1989 President Mitterrand introduced a tax in France on wealth levels above €1.3 million, which was reduced in scope by President Macron in 2017. In the US, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who both ran for president in 2020, have proposed wealth taxes. Sanders’s 2020 plan was to impose a 2 percent wealth tax on households with wealth in excess of $50 million, rising gradually to 8 percent for those whose wealth exceeds $10 billion. Warren’s most recent proposal is to impose a 2 percent wealth tax on households with wealth above $50 million and a 4 percent tax on those with wealth in excess of $1 billion.

pages: 924 words: 198,159

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
by Jeremy Scahill
Published 1 Jan 2007

“Private contracting companies have forfeited their right to represent the United States,” Schakowsky said, asserting that they “put our troops in harm’s way, and resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many innocent Iraqi civilians. They have become a liability instead of an asset.”200 Only a small fraction of the 435 legislators in the House signed on to support her bill and, as of spring 2008, only two senators—Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and New York’s Hillary Clinton. Because of the Bush administration’s refusal to hold mercenary forces accountable for their crimes in Iraq and the Democrats’ unwillingness to effectively challenge the radically privatized war machine, the only hope the victims of Nisour Square have for justice lies in the lawsuit they filed against Blackwater in Washington, D.C.

pages: 775 words: 208,604

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Published 17 Jan 2017

These sentiments are widely shared. Within eighteen months of its publication in 2013, a 700-page academic tome on capitalist inequality had sold 1.5 million copies and risen to the top of the New York Times nonfiction hardcover bestseller list. In the Democratic Party primaries for the 2016 presidential election, Senator Bernie Sanders’s relentless denunciation of the “billionaire class” roused large crowds and elicited millions of small donations from grassroots supporters. Even the leadership of the People’s Republic of China has publicly acknowledged the issue by endorsing a report on how to “reform the system of income distribution.”

pages: 821 words: 227,742

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution
by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum
Published 19 Sep 2011

I come from a middle-class background; my dad’s in the military. I went to college to get a job, not to get an education. As a freshman, I was already trying to find a place to work. In New York, I’d covered Ed Koch’s mayoral campaign. When I was in Vermont, I’d covered a gubernatorial race, as well as Bernie Sanders running for the House of Representatives. I had mayoral, gubernatorial, and congressional races under my belt. Dave Sirulnick was interested in having serious news, so I suggested we cover the presidential campaign. He said, “I’d have to have people who are really passionate about doing it.” And I said, “That would be me.”

pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

The Romney-Ryan ticket that Obama defeated to win reelection presented the country with alternatives that, familiar partisan disagreements aside, could hardly have been more congenial to the incumbent ruling class. In all these ways, Barack Obama’s 2012 victory set a high-water mark for American meritocracy. The crisis had not passed, however, and meritocracy’s redemption proved illusory. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—openly populist candidates who campaigned aggressively against the status quo—seized the initiative in both primaries leading up to the 2016 presidential election. When defensive political insiders dismissed the populist uprisings as a “summer of silliness,” they betrayed their own wrong-footed confusion.

pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

As Clinton’s campaign got off the ground and her press pack grew, Cramer got a rare opportunity to spend time with the candidate alone for a profile. “I walked into a pin factory in New Hampshire with her, and the other reporters saw me and they hated me,” she said. BuzzFeed’s correspondent would have to make the most of that shot, because soon after, when Bernie Sanders won the Iowa primary, the Clinton campaign abruptly cut off access. They deemed the risk of bad press worthwhile only if the interview was going to be on TV. Cramer had hoped to cover Clinton as her father had covered the 1988 presidential candidates in his classic book What It Takes, considered by many the best campaign narrative ever written.

pages: 848 words: 227,015

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

So let me explain what I assume his rationale is: (1) economic growth reduces global poverty, and (2) AI will produce very rapid economic growth, therefore (3) “poverty really does just end.” Claim 1 has been empirically correct so far—severe poverty has been greatly reduced over the past century as global GDP has risen—although AI-driven growth could be different if it’s an especially winner-take-all technology (or if our AI overlords behave more like Ayn Rand than Bernie Sanders). Claim 2 is harder to assess; in fact, one rationale for pursuing AI is that GDP growth is stagnating, meaning that the world needs AI just to keep up with its previous pace and shouldn’t expect to achieve some permanently higher growth rate. Claim 3 follows logically enough if both 1 and 2 are true, but they might not be

pages: 1,034 words: 241,773

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

If so, the explosion of wealth documented in the previous chapter would no longer be worth celebrating, since it would have ceased contributing to overall human welfare. Economic inequality has long been a signature issue of the left, and it rose in prominence after the Great Recession began in 2007. It ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and the presidential candidacy of the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016, who proclaimed that “a nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little.”2 But in that year the revolution devoured its children and propelled the candidacy of Donald Trump, who claimed that the United States had become “a third-world country” and blamed the declining fortunes of the working class not on Wall Street and the one percent but on immigration and foreign trade.

pages: 913 words: 299,770

A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Published 2 Jan 1977

Another disabled Vietnam veteran, a professor of history and political science at York College in Pennsylvania named Philip Avillo, wrote in a local newspaper: “Yes, we need to support our men and women under arms. But let’s support them by bringing them home; not by condoning this barbarous, violent policy.” In Salt Lake City, hundreds of demonstrators, many with children, marched through the city’s main streets chanting antiwar slogans. In Vermont, which had just elected Socialist Bernie Sanders to Congress, over 2000 demonstrators disrupted a speech by the governor at the state house, and in Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, 300 protesters walked through the downtown area, asking shop owners to close their doors in solidarity. On January 26, nine days after the beginning of the war, over 150,000 people marched through the streets of Washington, D.C., and listened to speakers denounce the war, including the movie stars Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

Lonely Planet Ireland
by Lonely Planet

They're run out of Dalkey Castle & Heritage Centre. oDalkey Book FestivalLITERATURE (www.dalkeybookfestival.org; hmid-Jun) Salman Rushdie is an acknowledged fan, which must help its organisers, Sian Smyth and David McWilliams, to always draw some big award-winning names – in 2017 Louis de Bernières, Marlon James and Bernie Sanders were speakers. 5Eating & Drinking Dalkey's culinary credentials are excellent, mostly because its affluent population wouldn't stand for anything else. There's a good choice of everything from healthy cafe bites to fine dining. oSelect StoresHEALTH FOOD€ ( GOOGLE MAP ; www.selectstores.ie; 1 Railway Rd; mains €4-12; h8am-6pm, closed Sun Oct-Apr; dDalkey) This long-established food emporium has been transformed into a one-stop shop for all things good for you: the award-winning kitchen rolls out veggie burgers, fresh juices, salads and, in the mornings, a range of healthy breakfasts.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Aug 2020

He called twenty phone numbers randomly, asking the recipient to fill in the blank: “The presidential election campaign so far has been mainly _______.” Sixty percent used the same word as Commoner’s commercial. The Citizens got even fewer votes than the Libertarians. Though in the college town of Burlington, Vermont, a Marxist gadfly with a thick Brooklyn accent named Bernie Sanders won an unlikely mayoral victory. Although, on the other side of the country and the ideological spectrum, the new state senator from the western San Fernando Valley would be Ed Davis—the sheriff of Los Angeles County who published a pro–death penalty open letter declaring “all-out war against you who have been literally getting away with murder,” proposed “hang ’em at the airport” as a solution to hijacking, and complained that the “federal government was out to force me to hire four-foot-eleven-inch transvestite morons” when he was sheriff of Los Angeles County