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bernie sanders
Beware the Faux Populism of Corporate Democrats
For the Democrats to become a truly populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. But that won't just happen. A movement must be built and harnessed.
Jan 08, 2025
Donald Trump’s victory is causing James Carville, the outspoken raging Cajun who was Bill Clinton’s campaign manager in 1992, to call for the Democratic Party to go all in on a populist agenda. He wrote recently in the New York Times,
“Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress, and force them [Republicans] to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.”
Is Carville really agreeing with the Center for Working Class Politics, which in October published the results of their YouGov survey, “Populism Wins Pennsylvania?” That report found that:
“… working-class Pennsylvanians responded most favorably to populist messages and messages that emphasized progressive economic policies. What’s more, we found little evidence that focusing on economic populism risks decreasing voter enthusiasm among core Democratic constituencies outside the working class.”
Ezra Klein, another Democratic Party influencer, picked up on that survey just before the election in November, but then dismissed it as an outlier: “Surveys like that should be treated with some skepticism”, he wrote. “The Harris team is running plenty of its own polls and focus groups and message tests.”
But the results of elections matter, and there is now a chorus of Democratic Party nouveau populists, including Rahm Emanuel, Bill Clinton’s close advisor, who went on to earn tens of millions on Wall Street.
It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class. As former Senator Sherrod Brown discovered in Ohio, to this day, workers still blame the Democrats for NAFTA, the 1994 trade deal that Clinton, Carville, and Emanuel pushed that ended up costing millions of U.S. jobs.
It’s time to take a deep breath and recall how these recently minted populists helped to create the very conditions that crushed the working class.
Emanual seems these days to have become a closet Sanders supporter, claiming that Obama was way too soft on the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008:
Not only was no one held accountable, but the same bankers who engineered the crisis were aggrieved at the suggestion of diminished bonuses and government intervention. It was a mistake not to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some called for at the time.
Some did, at the time, but Emanuel did not. Buy hey, people do change, don’t they? Why shouldn’t we believe that the old Democrats can become real populists?
Let’s start with an understanding of how that Harris polling could have been so wrong. Why did their results cause them to shy away from the kind of strong populism that the Center for Working Class Politics found attracted the most working-class support in Pennsylvania? A state Harris had to win.
I don’t know the Harris pollsters personally, but I do know how the Center for Working Class Politics operates. They are meticulous. They know that their polls will be ripped apart by establishment academics and party gatekeepers, so they can’t make mistakes. They can’t let their own personal beliefs tilt the survey towards what they’d like to believe is true. Their goal is to ask the questions others aren’t asking, to better reflect the opinions of people of all types about working class values and beliefs.
Not so with the pollsters who cashed in on the Harris campaign. They know what their client wants to hear (and is capable of hearing). And it’s not that a strong anti-Wall Street message sells, and therefore that she should mercilessly attack what Sanders calls “the billionaire class.” After all, Harris made a public point of holding a Wall Street fundraiser in the middle of her campaign, and her staff made clear that Wall Street helped to shape her agenda. Her brother-in-law, Tony West, was special adviser to her election campaign, and has deep ties to Wall Street through Uber and Pepsico.
It’s not that Democratic Party pollsters cooked the books. They just knew to ask questions that hovered within the corporate Democratic comfort zone. They didn’t ask the strongest populist questions because they didn’t think those results would be welcomed within the campaign.
I once saw this process in action. I was watching a focus group through a one-way mirror. The topic was healthcare in the leadup to Obamacare, but it was stunning to see how the discussion was shaped by the types of questions the facilitators asked. They limited them to various types of health insurance and avoided more radical reforms of the healthcare system.
At one point a younger Black man expressed his frustration: “Why all this talk about insurance? I’m interested in health care and getting access to it.” He was thanked for his comment and then ignored, while I yelled at the mirror, “Talk about Medicare for All!” It didn’t happen because the group paying for the focus group, as well as the pollster, didn’t think Medicare for All was feasible, and therefore refused to discuss it.
Today, the Democratic elites not only run away from Medicare for All, but they refuse to acknowledge their financial ties to Wall Street. They are more than comfortable, however, accepting large consulting and speaking fees from what should be the targets of their populism. This goes back to Bill and Hillary Clintons’ tone-deaf acceptance of $153 million in speaking fees, including 39 speeches from the very banks that crashed the economy in 2008. During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign she collected $1.8 million for eight speeches to Wall Street banks.
For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all...
It's not hard to understand. The Wall Street barons who pay the speaking fees are the same kind of people who went to Yale with Hillary and Bill. They’re all from the same newly minted class of highly successful strivers. If there were any working-class roots in their backgrounds, they withered long ago. Nearly all Democratic Party elites are swathed within this moneyed class. During their leadership of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, author David Halberstam called them “the best and the brightest.” Now they are just the richest. In this milieu, light years away from the working class, getting $225,000 per speech seems like a trifle.
But let’s try to be fair. Can’t the party change its stripes now that Democratic influencers are talking populism in the wake of Trump’s victory?
Unfortunately, I don’t think their talk is credible. It’s doubtful that Carville, Klein, and Emanuel are capable of offering a sustained anti-Wall Street message. They are different from Bernie Sanders, and not just because of their word choices. It’s about their entire careers, the things that made them who they are, their entire way of being. Sanders has been an overt social democrat all his adult life. It’s obvious that he means what he says. He says it over and over again. He really couldn’t care less what Wall Street thinks about him.
As for the nouveau populists, I’m waiting for Carville to say, “Look I was dead wrong when I helped Bill Clinton undermine unions through NAFTA.” Or for Emanuel to confess that “I was wrong to take millions in Wall Street fees while workers were losing their jobs through mergers, leveraged buyouts, and stock buybacks.” Or for Ezra Klein to admit in print that the Center for Worker Class Politics, “were right about populism. The Harris pollsters were wrong, and I was at fault for dismissing their solid work.”
Or maybe the Democrats could finally show some outrage about Wall Street-induced mass layoffs that are destroying the livelihoods of working people. (For more information, please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
For the Democrats to become a populist party, an entirely new wave of working-class candidates must come to the fore. And for that to happened, we need a working-class movement that forms outside of the two parties and demands economic justice for all, as the original American populists, the Peoples Party, did in the 1880s. Today, that might look like a sustained, organized version of Occupy Wall Street, which fights against mass layoffs caused by Wall Street’s greed and for a $20 federal minimum wage.
Meanwhile, get ready for more faux populism from Democratic Party elites while Wall Street feasts on the riches Trump showers upon them.
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Sanders Pledges to 'Do All That I Can' to Block Biden's $8 Billion Arms Sale to Israel
"The U.S. must not send more bombs to Netanyahu's extremist government," said U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Jan 07, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders vowed late Monday to do everything in his power to block the Biden administration's newly proposed $8 billion arms sale to the far-right Israeli government, which has used American weaponry to commit atrocities across the Gaza Strip over the past 15 months.
"The U.S. must not send more bombs to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's extremist government, which has already killed 45,000 people; destroyed Gaza's housing, healthcare, and educational systems; and caused starvation by blocking humanitarian aid," Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote on social media. "I will do all that I can to block these arms sales."
The State Department formally notified Congress of the proposed sale late last week, and reports indicate that the latest weapons package Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), missiles for attack helicopters, and 500-pound bombs.
The new sale adds to the tens of billions of dollars worth of arms and other military assistance the U.S. has provided Israel since its large-scale assault on the Gaza Strip began in the wake of the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack. In at least two cases, the Biden administration bypassed Congress to deliver the weapons to Israel.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is seen at a press conference on his effort to block U.S. arms sales to Israel on November 19, 2024. (Photo: Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Sanders is one of the few members of Congress who has vocally opposed continued offensive weapons sales to Israel and attempted to block the transactions, arguing that they violate U.S. laws prohibiting arms transfers to countries blocking American humanitarian aid.
Late last year, the U.S. Senate rejected a Sanders-led effort to thwart a sale of JDAMs, tank rounds, and other weaponry.
The newly proposed $8 billion weapons sale comes just days before U.S. President Joe Biden is set to leave office, which Haaretz correspondent Ben Samuels called "a fitting end to four years of policy that seemed to please no one and antagonize anyone unhappy with the status quo."
"The proposed arms sale is yet another wrinkle after a series of missed opportunities to press the Israeli government as hostages remain captive and Gaza's humanitarian crisis worsens," Samuels wrote.
In a statement on Monday, a top United Nations humanitarian relief official said that "despite our determination to deliver food, water, and medicine to survivors, our efforts to save lives are at breaking point."
Tom Fletcher, the U.N.'s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, pointed to several recent Israeli attacks on aid operations in Gaza, including a strike "at a known food distribution point where a partner of the World Food Program was operating" and an attack on a clearly marked WFP convoy.
"These incidents are part of a dangerous pattern of sabotage and deliberate disruption," said Fletcher. "Israeli forces are unable or unwilling to ensure the safety of our convoys. Statements by Israeli authorities vilify our aid workers even as the military attacks them. Community volunteers who accompany our convoys are being targeted."
"I call on U.N. member states to insist that all civilians, and all humanitarian operations, are protected," Fletcher added. "This should not need to be said."
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President Chaos Presiding Over Hell on Earth
Donald Trump is guaranteed to make this not only the hottest planet around but a planet of billionaires living in a new golden age (both of their wealth and of a world in flames).
Jan 06, 2025
Honestly, as 2025 begins, isn’t it finally time to reimagine American history? So, what do you think of this: George Trump, Abraham Trump, Ulysses S. Trump, Franklin D. Trump, Dwight D. Trump, John F. Trump, Lyndon B. Trump, and even Richard M. and George W. Trump. And yes, of course, on January 20th, Donald J. Trump (of all people) will once again be president of these distinctly (dis-)United States of America.
As Joe Biden hobbles into… well, if not the future, then some unknown past, HE looms over us, the political equivalent of a giant armed drone about to be back in the skies of our lives. Of all the Americans whom, once upon a time, I couldn’t have dreamed of being in the White House, Donald J. Trump would have been at the top of my list. No longer, of course. Sometimes I even imagine calling my parents back from the dead and trying to explain President Trump (twice!) to them. They would be… well, flabbergasted is far too modest a word for it, even if, to put him in a context they would have understood, I had compared him to a nightmarish figure of their own time: Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.
My mother was a political and theatrical caricaturist in the 1950s. Of all the drawings of hers I still have, the one that, grimly enough, I keep propped up near my desk in the room where I work — call me a masochist, if you will — is a caricature she did for the New York Post (in the pre-Murdoch days when it was still a liberal publication) of that grimmest of senators of her era, Joe McCarthy. He was the fellow who claimed that the State Department contained hundreds — yes, hundreds! — of communists. She drew that eerily smiling portrait in the spring of 1954 at the time of the Army-McCarthy hearings when he insisted that the U.S. military, too, was filled with commies and, in the process, essentially took himself down.
I was then nine years old and Senator McCarthy’s face was quite literally the first one I ever saw on a black-and-white TV in my house after the Post hired my mom to draw those televised congressional hearings. On opening our front door and walking in from school on whatever spring day that was, the face on that new TV screen was… well, the political precursor to D.J.T., although McCarthy looked far more like the evil monster he was than The Donald does. (No yellow hair and burnished red face for him.)
And yes, he was indeed a monster (and not just an anti-communist maniac, but an antisemitic one, too). Here’s the difference, though: he could indeed wound officials in Washington, as well as figures in the entertainment industry and elsewhere, destroying careers, but he was a senator and no more than that. In other words, he never truly entered the ultimate realms of American, not to speak of global, power.
Unlike Donald Trump, he was never chosen to be president, no less reelected to that powerful position in an era when, thanks in part to this country’s Global War on Terror, whoever holds that office has become a far more powerful figure in the American political landscape. Senator McCarthy never had a significant hand in creating the national budget. He undoubtedly couldn’t have imagined taking stances like insisting that this country should possess Greenland or repossess the Panama Canal, no less referring to Canada as “the 51st state” and its leader as “Governor Justin Trudeau,” as You Know Who did only recently. He could never have ordered the U.S. military to do anything, no less potentially round up and deport masses of immigrants (though, had he been alive in 2017, he might at least have agreed with Donald Trump that a group of neo-Nazi and white nationalist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, included some “very fine people”).
Strangely enough, however, they had more in common than just a certain grim similarity in style, belligerence, and subject matter. The two of them were also linked by a single adviser, one Roy Cohn, who helped them both find their all-too-aggressive footing in this ever stranger world of ours.
A New “Golden” Age
Now, of course, we’re about to face the modern Joe McCarthy the third time around (counting, of course, his loss in 2020 that he’s never stopped disputing). He will return to the White House on a planet that, in more than one sense, is all too literally going to hell in a handbasket. I mean, just imagine this: in the last election, 49.7% of American voters and a striking number of energy industry funders decided to send back to the Oval Office a man whose tagline was, above all else, “drill, baby, drill” — a phrase that, in reality, should have been “heat, baby, heat,” or “destroy, baby, destroy,” in a world that’s already been warming to the boiling point, with year after year of unprecedented high temperatures even when he wasn’t in office. We’re talking about a candidate who has openly sworn that, on Day One back in the White House, he will direct his government to do everything in its power to turn this planet into an all-too-literal hothouse.
So, expect a presidency focused — to the extent that Donald Trump can truly focus on anything (except, of course, himself) — on drilling, drilling, drilling for oil and natural gas, and so adding significantly more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere (and waters) of Planet Earth. Which means more wildfires, droughts, unprecedented storms, you name it. And that, of course, is just to begin to lay out the nightmare to come. And don’t forget that, at least until (as predictably will happen) Trump turns on him, it looks like we’ll have as co-president the richest person on earth, that potential future first trillionaire Elon Musk. We’re talking, of course, about the fellow who only recently and all too symbolically gave his support to Germany’s rising anti-immigrant neo-Nazi party, the Alternative für Deutschland. (“Only the AfD can save Germany.”)
Yes, Donald Trump is guaranteed to make this not only the hottest planet around but a planet of billionaires living in a new golden age (both of their wealth and of a world in flames).
When you think about it (as so many American voters obviously didn’t) on this ever hotter, more arid, more wildly stormy planet of ours, we (and I think under the circumstances I should put that in quotes) — “we” voted back into office someone who will leave Senator Joe McCarthy in the dust of history when it comes to utter malevolence and destructiveness. Consider it guaranteed that he will go a long way toward tearing both this country and this world apart. Indeed, he truly does give the all-American decline of the United States and this planet wild new meaning.
Unlike Senator McCarthy, he won’t just malignantly take out a few imagined bad guys, but potentially all of us. In such a context, four years of (or do I mean in?) hell will have a new, anything but metaphorical meaning in the wake (not an inappropriate word under the circumstances) of the year that will undoubtedly prove to have been the hottest ever and which, in the years to come, will undoubtedly be left in — once again! — the dustbin of history. Oh, and with the help of Elon Musk (or as Bernie Sanders calls him “President Elon Musk”), he only recently tried (and failed) to ensure that Americans who were recently clobbered by two horrific hurricanes that had been fed mightily by the ever more severely overheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico would not get any further government help in the recovery process.
Consider it no small thing that, 70 years after Senator Joe McCarthy went down in flames (and then essentially drank himself to death), an all-too-fierce update of him (and what an update he is!) will once again be in the White House, backed — imagine this, Joe! — by the richest man on Planet Earth, a possible future speaker of the House of Representatives, Trump’s ultimate attack dog — or do I mean (thanks to Space X) the commander in chief of outer space? — Elon R. Musk, who controls a world of commentary, communication, and entertainment that would have been inconceivable on the planet where black-and-white TVs were a wonder to behold.
Make America Gross Again
Imagining the future has never been among humanity’s greatest skills. With that in mind let me nonetheless suggest that Donald Trump’s return to the all-too-grimly Grayer House is a sign of how this country and this planet are preparing to go down big time. The second time around, consider him the functional definition of decline — even if the U.S. does get Greenland and the Panama Canal in the bargain. (Okay, I’m just joking or do I mean Donalding?) In fact, think of MAGA the second time around as Make America Gross Again.
There have, of course, been distinctly bad times in this country before. Consider, for instance, 1968, the year of the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, of rioting and destruction in American cities, and of the horror of the ongoing war in Vietnam and the election of — god save us! — Richard M. Nixon as president. Still, it remains hard to face the second round (or is it the 102nd round?) of Donald J. Trump.
Yes, starting on January 20th, you can plan on watching the country that, in the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, American officials came to think of as “the sole superpower” on planet Earth, begin to come apart at the seams on a planet that, unfortunately, is now doing the same. After all, a Europe increasingly threatened by rightist regimes seems itself at the edge of a similar reality (while, of course, Donald Trump functionally dismisses the NATO alliance), even as the nightmarish war in Ukraine spins on (and on and on), while the Middle East seems to be in a stunning process of disintegration.
It’s important, in fact, to put Donald Trump in a global context since he was anything but solely responsible for either the climate or war chaos that’s been increasing for all too long with or without him. What he represents, however, is the coming apart at the seams of that once-upon-a-time sole superpower and that’s no small thing in what still passes for human (or perhaps I mean inhuman) history.
And don’t expect any better when he takes on what passes (even if not very well these days) for the rising superpower on Planet Earth, China, tariff by tariff. Believe me, it won’t be pretty, economically, politically, or even potentially militarily to see who trumps whom in that global showdown between the two powers now putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other countries on this planet.
In short, we’re living in a world of increasingly human-made chaos (with a distinct helping hand from nature) that’s about to experience an occupant of the White House who should be considered President Chaos. You know, the man who won the 2024 election by “a landslide” (or so he claims) and is, as Senator Bernie Sanders has suggested, moving us ever closer to oligarchy and authoritarianism. Under the circumstances, don’t be surprised if, in our future, lurks an even more devastating set of landslides due to… yes, among other things, climate change.
So, thank you, President Chaos (and, for the time being, Elon) for offering such a helping hand in putting us on the path to an all too literal hell on Earth.
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