Bernie Sanders: The Socialist Senator from Vermont

   Of the 100 senators who’ll set foot in Washington next year, only one has consistently voted to limit the power of government and expand individual freedom: Bernie Sanders, the socialist Representative-turned-Senator from the Great State of Vermont. He voted to stop the Patriot Act from becoming permanent, bucking a flag-waving trend that waylaid our dearest rights. He voted to stop the new bankruptcy laws that squeeze minimum payments from families in fiscal distress. He voted to approve funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons. He voted to approve human embryonic stem cell research. He voted to require DNA testing for criminals sentenced to death and maintain the right of habeas corpus in death penalty appeals. He supported a constitutional amendment to ensure equal rights by gender and voted against every attempt to limit a woman’s right to choose. He opposed legislation that allowed the government to snoop through people’s private information at casinos, car dealerships, and travel agencies, and voted to restore $98 million to the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Bernie has vowed to continue that fight in the Senate next year when he joins Ted Kennedy on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. He's committed to making health care “a right, not a privelege." He’s committed to expanding Medicare “to include prescription drugs and other…products and services.” He’s promised to expand such programs as the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP); Qualified Medicare Beneficiary (QMB), and Specified Low-income Medicare Beneficiary (SLMB). Such dialog, in itself, would be a welcome change.

  But the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee won't be the only committee graced by our friend from Vermont. He’ll also be on Jeff Bingaman’s Energy Committee, where we expect him to fight for an end to taxpayer subsidies for such cash-bloated giants as ExxonMobil, and push for wholesale, cost-based pricing of electricity and natural gas. He’ll be on the Budget Committee, where we expect him to push for a balanced budget and insist on adequate funding for social programs. He’ll be on the Veteran’s Committee, where we expect him to push for more V.A. hospitals and increased benefits for our soldiers. And he’ll be on Barbara Boxer’s Environmental Committee, where we expect him to fight further rollbacks in environmental protections, investigate the EPA’s cozy relationship with a host of polluters--including DuPont, U.S. Steel, General Electric, ExxonMobil, and Ford Motor—and recommend efforts to stem global warming.

 

   Quite a task for a 65-year old ex-carpenter.

 

  Yet of all these decisive issues, it’s the economy that bothers Bernie Sanders the most. “The first thing I want to do,” he said in a recent interview with Mother Jones magazine. “is…end this stupid discussion about how great the American economy is. The economy is not great. The economy is a disaster for the middle class.”

  Indeed it is. And no one knows that better than Bernie Sanders. The son of an immigrant paint salesman, he saw poverty first hand in the tenement slums of post-war Brooklyn. Money was tight. Workers were underpaid. Life was a constant struggle. It was there he learned to appreciate the rigors of the common man. And it was there he vowed to improve their lives.

  Bernie also takes umbrage with the glaring inequities in the distribution and influence of wealth in this country: “Nobody has seriously looked into [big money] since Wright Patman,” he insists, referring to the old Texas populist and anti-trust crusader who chaired the House Banking Committee for forty years. “Patman [investigated the] concentration of bank ownership. We can do things like that—take a hard look at who owns America.”

   

  We can, Mr. Senator. And we should.

 

   We at the Populist Review―and of course his constituents in Vermont, who’ve sent him to Congress fifteen years in a row―find such eagerness refreshing. And we look to Bernie’s next six years in the Senate with similar anticipation. It’ll take a lot of work to repair the damage wrought by this mercenary administration. But in Bernie Sanders we have the makings of a populist champion. We only hope his vision can surmount the centrist mindset of his colleagues.

                                                   

Andrea Hackett is an freelance journalist, founder of the Las Vegas Dancers Alliance in Nevada, and editor of the Populist Review. She may be contacted at andreahackett@cox.net