Sunday, Sep 28, 2014 11:00 AM UTC

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/28/we_need_a_political_revolution_bernie_sanders_on_americas_broken_political_system/

Bernie Sanders: Longterm Democratic strategy is “pathetic”

Senator Bernie Sanders sits down with Salon to talk inequality, the GOP, and whether or not he’ll run for president

Thomas Frank

Bernie Sanders is a legendary political independent from Vermont. Over the years, he has served as mayor of Burlington, the largest city in that state; as a member of the House of Representatives; and (currently) as a United States Senator. We met last week in his office in one of the Senate office buildings in Washington, D.C., and discussed the Clinton years, the way to beat the Right, and whether or not he should run for president in 2016. Needless to say, his take on the current political situation is not exactly the kind of thing you usually hear when you walk the marble halls of the nation’s capital.

This conversation has been lightly edited.

I’ve followed what you have been saying for a long time. You and I are both concerned about the big change of our time, which is the concentration of wealth in this country, deindustrialization, the slow decline of the middle class. 

The not-so-slow decline of the middle class.

Why is it so hard for Americans to talk about this? When the president talks about this, he uses this term “inequality,” and it sounds scientific, but it doesn’t speak to people. For many years, you were the only person on Capitol Hill talking about this at all. Why aren’t people furious about it?

People are furious about it.

We have a very conservative Senate and House. Congress is dominated by large campaign contributors who exercise enormous influence. I think, the people here [in Washington] have almost developed an instinct not to attack the people who put money into their coffers. Obviously the Republicans are beholden to these guys. But too many Democrats are nervous about talking about issues including income and wealth inequality.

But in fact, the American people absolutely want to hear about it. I talk about it all the time. I give a lot of speeches and large crowds come out. People are very, very concerned about the overall impact of income and wealth inequality in terms of morality, in terms of economics, in terms of—with Citizens United—what it means to our political system.

The Koch brothers are not tucking their money under the mattress. They’re spending it very significantly trying to buy elections so that candidates representing the wealthy are going to get elected. So it is a huge issue, which people are keenly concerned about. But you have a Congress significantly dependent on the one percent for their campaign contributions and you have the media that is owned by multinational corporations who are not excited about dealing with this issue.

For Salon, I’ve been doing a series of articles about the history of inequality – where it comes from, when it got worse. You said the middle class is declining precipitously now…

What can I tell you? You know all the facts.

Come on, now. You know this better than me.

Well, I don’t know that I do. But you’re looking at, today, an American male worker, the average guy in the middle, the median guy, is making $280 less than he did 44 years ago. Given inflation—

Per week?

Per year. So 44 years have come and gone. There’s a huge amount of increase in productivity. And that guy is making less in inflation-counted dollars than he did 44 years ago. That’s extraordinary. Women are making less than they did — I don’t have the numbers here — a number of years ago. Median family income has gone down by $5,000 since 1999.

So what you’re seeing is a middle class which in fact is disappearing. You’re seeing, up until very recently, more people living in poverty than any time in American history, because most of the new jobs that are being created are low-wage or part-time jobs. And people, believe me, they know it. They understand it. They are worried not only for themselves but for their kids. And meanwhile, while that’s going on, they see another reality which is — the people on top are doing phenomenally well. Corporate profits are at an all-time high and people do not believe that that is what America is supposed to be about.

And yet at the same time we just came through this financial crisis. I mean, there is no better expression of what’s wrong with us. And what’s the reaction? The Tea Party movement, another wave of conservatives sweeping over Capitol Hill.

The reaction is that you have some very smart people, like the Koch brothers, who do a very effective job of taking the discontent — that’s what your book was about — and channeling it in exactly the wrong direction. So you have the rather remarkable reality that the people who founded the Tea Party are the Koch brothers. And if the people, the working class members of the Tea Party, knew what their founders believed in, they would be in for a very big shock. And it’s one of our jobs to get the word out.

Getting back to the history of it. Everybody knows about the ’80s, the Reagan tax cuts. Everybody talks about deregulation. But we often have trouble talking about the ’90s. I was reading your book, “Outsider in the House,” about when you first came to Congress back in the ’90s. And you had NAFTA, welfare reform, bank deregulation — what’s the significance of these in the long term?

You had, in terms of NAFTA, the beginning of a disastrous set of trade policies absolutely pushed by corporate America with the goal of making it easier for plants to shut down in this country and move to Mexico.

That was the goal?

Of course it was the goal. And to cultivate a race to the bottom.

So what NAFTA, which primarily dealt with Mexico, does — as well as CAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations to China — is it says to the average American worker… First of all it says, “We can make 5 cents more by moving to China, so we’re going, have a nice day.” Second of all, what it says is, “We’re thinking about going to China. If you as a worker don’t want us to go to China, if you as a union don’t want us to go to China, you’re going to have to take a cut in your salary. You’re going to have to take a reduction in healthcare benefits we provide you. Or else, by the way, we’re going.” So what was engaged in was a race to the bottom.

A year or two years ago, there was a piece in the paper that pointed out that GE was expanding a manufacturing plant in Louisville. I asked the guy, I said, “This is good. You’re creating hundreds of new jobs. That’s very nice. Why are you doing that?” The guy said, “Well, the truth is that when you look at transportation costs, the wage costs, and everything else, the United States is now becoming competitive with the international community.” In other words, as wages go down, and you factor in quality of work, and infrastructure, lack of bribery and transportation costs, America is an increasingly better place [for employers] to work, which has always been the goal. So we are moving down — we’re not at a Chinese level — but the goal is a race to the bottom, where workers earn less, have fewer benefits, and that was the goal and we’ve succeeded in doing it.

Welfare reform did a similar kind of thing, I think.

You know, there are a lot of angry people out there and for a whole bunch of reasons — political consciousness in this country is very, very low. And people think that huge amounts of their money are going to foreign policy, going to foreign aid, and huge amounts of money are going to welfare. That’s not true, but that’s what people think. So that became an issue where Democrats would say, we’re going to cut. The Republican thesis is that the real cause of the economic decline is that you’re paying too much in taxes and all of that money is going to unwed mothers and that really what the problem is. And it became quote-unquote “good politics” for some Democrats to pick up on. And it caused a lot of pain.

These things, along with bank deregulation—one of the sticking points for people like me is that these were all accomplished by a Democratic president.

Yes. Why should that be a sticking point? Why are you shocked?

That’s supposedly the party of working people.

No. I don’t think anyone thinks that. There’s no question that the Republican Party has become a far-right party, significantly controlled by the Koch brothers and a few others. But the Democratic party has moved, you know. It used to be a center-left party — Truman, Roosevelt — it was the party of the American working class. I don’t think there are many people who think that is the case now. It is far better [than the Republican Party], and there are some great people in the Democratic Party who spend an enormous amount of time and energy fighting for working people, and I work with those guys. But I don’t think anybody would say, as a whole, that the Democratic Party is the party of the American working class.

Now, in terms of this deregulation, I mean, one of the great magazine covers in history is the picture — who was it?

Is it the three musketeers: Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers?

Saving the world.

Yes! Classic!

Right. That was one of the great covers of all time, because it tells you pretty much all you need to know about politics. You had Alan Greenspan, who to his credit is an Ayn Rand acolyte. On YouTube someplace there is some dialogue I had with Greenspan which has gotten a zillion viewers, about deregulation. I took him on and questioned him about the impact of deregulation. And he said “No, it’s not gonna. . . ” You know, all these things he was wrong about. I asked him, I said, “I listened to what you say and it sounds to me like you might not even believe in the concept of the minimum wage.” And he said, “Yeah.”

Really.

I got one article about it in the L.A. Times. So you had, then, the head of the Federal Reserve basically acknowledging what today is— By the way, he was ahead of his time. Today, many Republicans acknowledge that they don’t believe in the concept of the minimum wage. So you can work for three bucks. Salon can hire you for three bucks an hour.

It gets worse and worse, and more and more of our leaders think that’s okay.

Well, you have a situation where, for much of the media, the differentiation between the Democrats and the Republicans are: One party strongly supports gay marriage and gay rights, one party strongly supports the need to address climate change, one party strongly supports immigrant rights, one party has concerns about guns — and the other party is different. In fact, some things, like economics, is for some people not even relevant. The issue is abortion rights. You’re a liberal? You’re for abortion rights. He’s not. You’re a liberal. He’s a conservative. The fact that you voted, as a liberal, to deregulate Wall Street or to give tax breaks for billionaires, we don’t even consider that part of the political discussion.

So I think, and where I’m cautiously optimistic about the future of this country, I never believed in red states and blue states. I don’t believe that. Recently I was in North Carolina, South Carolina, and in Mississippi, and had nice turnouts. And if you talk about economic issues you find that in this country there is a lot more commonality than the inside-the-Beltway pundits understand.

For example, a couple of years ago I helped lead the effort to prevent cuts in Social Security. I worked very, very hard for that. You go out to conservative states, you go out to the Tea Party guys, and you say, “Do you think we should cut Social Security and Medicare?” And they’ll say, “Are you crazy?” And yet here, you have not only a Republican Party moving very aggressively [in that direction]. You have some Democrats.

You ask people about Citizens United: “Do you think billionaires should be able to buy elections?” Across the political spectrum, people say no.

“Do you think we should give more tax breaks to billionaires?” Across the political spectrum, “No.”

I’ve noticed the same thing. I’m an author, I’m not a politician, but I lecture around the country and these issues make people really mad. People from all walks of life. Here in Washington, D.C., you’ve got all of these political scientists and all these consultants whose job it is to win elections, and if what you’re saying is true, why aren’t they out there hitting this with everything they’ve got?

Because they’re caught in a bind. The bind is… Look, if you spend four hours a day — which is certainly not uncommon around here, Democrat [or] Republican — being on the phone dialing for dollars, the people you’re going to dial for have a lot of money. And you know what? Some of them do not mind paying more taxes. They understand that that’s the right thing to do. But if you’re hustling up to corporate leaders, if you’re hustling up to wealthy people, they do not want to pay more in taxes. They do not necessarily want to see the minimum wage raised. They certainly do not want to see changes in trade policy.

So all of this speaks to the extraordinary influence of money in Congress. You know, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t think that there is anything that Wall Street does not want that will get passed here. It’s just not going to happen. Or corporate America, anything it doesn’t want, it’s not going to happen. In other words, there is not the political strength to take on corporate America or Wall Street. That’s just the simple fact.

I’ve heard you, in other conversations with reporters, use the term “oligarchy” to describe what’s—

Yeah. And I believe that. I remember, distinctly — I can’t remember what happened yesterday, but I sometimes can remember what happened 50 years ago — and I remember during elementary school, the teachers, looking at these textbooks, and they said, “Look, there are countries in Latin America who have a few very wealthy families who control the whole country. And sometimes they fund both political parties.”

In Latin America?

Yeah. This is 50 years ago. So you had this party and that party, two years these guys serve, and the next two years, doesn’t matter. It’s one ideology. So if you look at the grotesque distribution of wealth in America, in which the top 1 percent today own 37 percent of the wealth, and the bottom 60 percent own 1.7 percent of the wealth; where one family—the Walton family, of Wal-Mart—own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent; where the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, that smacks to me like oligarchy.

And what it is, is the worst level of wealth inequality that exists among major countries, and worse than any time since 1929, before the Great Depression. That’s wealth. And then if you look at income since the Wall Street crash [of 2008], 95 percent of all new income generated in America goes to the top 1 percent. That smacks to me like oligarchy.

And then, equally important, because of the Supreme Court decisions of Citizens United, et cetera, you now have a situation where the billionaire class can spend as much money as they want on elections. So it’s not only economic, it is now political. These guys can buy elections.

And if the Koch brothers get their way, we will do away with all campaign finance reform. That is now the official position of the leadership of the Republican Party. Which will mean that the Koch brothers won’t have to waste their time doing independent expenditures; they can bring their team of candidates into a room and say, “Okay, you want to run for U.S. Senate in Kansas? Here’s your check for $100 million.” Here’s your check for $100 million, because it doesn’t mean anything to the Koch brothers, their wealth increased by $12 billion last year. So Kansas is a nice state. “Here’s a hundred million. And here is your platform. And here is your media consultant and there is your think tank to write your speeches. We’ll watch you closely, but here’s your check for $100 million and have a nice day.” That’s called buying elections.

So right now they can do it in a significant way through independent expenditures. But they want to go further. Clarence Thomas in the McCutcheon decision voiced his support for that. And that’s where they’re moving, that’s the leadership of the Republican Party. Add all of that together, when you have a few people owning and controlling and benefitting from the economy, and a few people controlling the political process. You tell me what the word is. I like the word “oligarchy.” Do you have a better word?

Plutocracy?

Plutocracy. There you go.

What drives me crazy is that we voted for it. This has happened gradually over years. And we’ve let it happen. That’s the puzzle that people like me are trying to figure out. How on earth did this come to pass?

But you know how this happened, because you wrote a book about it.

I have my ideas.

I think you’re pretty much on track. But “we voted for it”—let’s talk about “we voted for it.”

Because it goes deeper than that. The election coming up in two months, the pundits here tell us, and they may be right — they may well be wrong, but they may be right — they estimate that 60 percent of the American people aren’t going to vote. So those guys didn’t vote for it. So you have 40 percent whose incomes are substantially higher, by the way, and are better educated than the general population. Of the 60 percent who don’t vote, no one knows exactly, the guess is 75-to-80 percent of low-income workers don’t vote. I recently talked to a union organizer in South Carolina who’s trying to organize fast food people. And she just checked with the people — the five or six hundred people that she’s working with, with the voter registration files, and I think 15 of them are registered to vote. You have 5 percent or lower of people working at minimum wage who participate in the political process. It’s not relevant to them. And young people to very large numbers don’t vote as well. And then the Koch brothers spend $400 million.

So the election system, the electoral system, is clearly rigged. And by that I mean culturally, throw in the media and everything else, what you have is a situation where a majority of the people — I shouldn’t say majority — but many people do not understand the significance of government and politics on their lives. If you’re a minimum wage worker and you want to raise your minimum wage — you’re making $7.25 an hour and you want to raise it to $10.10—and I [hypothetically] don’t want to do it, you wouldn’t vote for me.

It’s very important to your life. But for a variety of reasons, that is not an issue that a lot of low-income workers are invested in. It has a lot to do with the media and it has to do with many, many things.

Another thing I’ve been wrestling with lately is a kind of complacency that you see among Democrats, where they say, “Eventually, Democratic domination is inevitable. The demographic changes in this country…”

Believe me, I’ve heard it 500 times.

So why do we need to worry?

Which is obscene. Forget obscene, it’s the wrong word. It’s pathetic.

I’ve been to those meetings with very high-ranking campaign leaders. And that’s exactly what they say. So what they say is, during the Obama campaign, “This is how we’ll win this election. We’re going to get a huge percentage of the African-American vote. We’re going to get 67 percent of the Hispanic vote. We’re going to get 58 percent of the women’s vote. Et cetera, et cetera. All those trends are on our side. And that’s how we win elections.”

During the course of that discussion, the issue of how the party that created Social Security and Medicare is losing the senior vote—or even the issue of seniors—was not there. They have a list of the 87 different categories, and kind of toward the bottom is seniors. The white working class of America, which now votes overwhelmingly for Republicans, was not mentioned. Now, how can it be that the party that is struggling to raise the minimum wage, to fight for pay equity, do reasonable things for working-class people — not enough by any means — is losing the white working class to the other side? Very little discussion about that.

So I am not a great fan of this. I understand demographics. But it has to do with what your political values are. And if your value is to expand the middle class of this country, provide healthcare to all people, educational opportunity for all people, it’s not just winning elections. It’s not just being better than another party, which is now an extremist party with racist overtones. You can’t go through your life saying, “Hey, you think we’re bad! You should see them! Vote for me! Yeah, we’re pretty bad, but they’re worse!”

That’s always what they [Democrats] do. That’s the rationale. That’s the reason they exist.

So the answer is to say, “We are going to stand up for the working class of this country — black workers, Hispanic workers, and white workers. And we do have the guts to take on the billionaire class, and we do have the guts to take on Wall Street and we do have the guts to take on the people who finance campaigns.” Is the Democratic Party there today? No. No one thinks it is.

Let me reiterate. I’m not one who says there’s no difference between the two parties. There are significant differences. The Republican Party is right-wing extremists. The Democratic Party is centrist. That is a big difference.

Centrist… That’s what I was going to ask you about next. Do people ever say, “Senator Sanders, he’s an independent. That’s awesome: the center! He’s in between. A person in the middle who can reach across the aisle and achieve bipartisanship.” Most people in my line of work, in the media, think that’s what we need in Washington. I’ll go farther than that. They think that’s a no-brainer. That you don’t even have to turn on your mind to understand that.

That’s why they love these so-called centrists. And I certainly don’t agree with that.

I can, and I have throughout my career, worked with conservatives and Republicans. That’s part of being in politics. We just passed what some would call the major piece of legislation passed in this session of Congress, which was a veterans bill. And I’m chairman of the Veterans Committee and we passed that. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that at all. It was $17.5 billion for veterans’ healthcare, and I worked with John McCain on that. And I worked with the Republicans in the House. It was maybe the most significant piece of legislation passed in this Congress. So I can and have always worked with Republicans, there’s nothing wrong with that.

But, at the end of the day, when you talk about where the American people are and what they need, I think what they want and need is a progressive agenda which addresses the needs of a collapsing middle class: Many, many people living in poverty; high unemployment; 40 million people without any health insurance; a campaign finance system rigged for the rich; a climate change situation where if we don’t take aggressive action, the planet is in serious trouble.

I am comfortable in saying that, as a progressive, I think my agenda is — not in all cases, but in most cases — actually what the American people want. And, by the way, not just Democrats.

So you’re in the center.

Well, I don’t think I’m in the center. Politically, obviously I’m very far to the left here. But what I’m saying is: I helped lead the fight to stop the cuts in Social Security, along with some others. I would say, 70-to-80 percent of the American people agree with me. I believe we should raise the minimum wage. I would say 70 percent of the American people agree with that. I’ve been very active in the fight to overturn Citizens United. I would say, again, 70 percent of the people agree with that. I am active in the fight to address the crisis of climate change. I wouldn’t say 70 percent of the people agree with that, but a pretty strong majority do. Okay. So what does that make me?

Now, if you were a candidate of the Republican Party and you wanted more tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, which they do, I would say you have 10-to-15 percent support. So what does this mean? There’s an agenda.

You see what takes place around here: Ee had Bowles-Simpson come here a few years ago, and the media thought this was the coming of the messiahs. Bowles is a Wall Street Democrat and Simpson is a right-wing Republican, and their agenda was consistent with that ideology. And the Democrats and the Republicans — it was like, my God! I was very strongly opposed to them. Now you have Republicans running ads attacking Democrats because they thought kindly of Bowles-Simpson. [Laughs] Because Republicans understand, people do not want cuts in Social Security.

The world is a funny place. Another question that everybody in the media, everybody in the entire country, wants to know: We look at Congress and we say, “What is wrong with these people? They can’t get along, they can’t do anything together.” You’ve been here for quite a while in both houses. What do you think can be done by either the leadership in Congress or the president to break through the incredible obstinacy of the Republicans?

Hmm… Bad question. Wrong question.

What’s the right question?

The right question is: How can the United States Congress respond to the needs of the American people? That’s the right question. Your question is asking: How does a right-wing extremist political party and a centrist party significantly controlled by corporate interests, work on an agenda together?

People ask that all the time.

They certainly do. I know, the media feeds this thing.

The point here is, you’ve got to create a United States Congress that represents the needs of the American people. The Republican party absolutely does not, and many Democrats do not. So what you really need is, a transformation of the political system by going from 40 percent turnouts to 80 percent turnouts. Getting low-income and working class people involved in the political process and start responding to their needs.

Note: We were interrupted at this point. Senator Sanders and I resumed the conversation by telephone a few days later.

What we were talking about when we left off was this problem of—what appears to be the problem of complete gridlock in Congress. And you had an interesting take on it. You said the problem is that Congress doesn’t want to do what the people of this country need to have done.

But the problem is not gridlock. The problem is that the American middle class is collapsing. The gap between the very, very rich and everybody else is growing wider. We’ve got 40 million people who have no health insurance. We have kids who can’t find jobs, and can’t afford college, and Congress is doing nothing. That’s the issue. I don’t think people want us to overcome gridlock and cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and federal aid to education, and give more tax breaks to billionaires.

Is that what would happen if we overcame gridlock?

I mean, if the Republicans were to prevail and push their agenda through, you could conceivably end gridlock and do devastating harm to working families.

President Obama has his drawbacks, and I’ve criticized him as much as anybody. You suggested that maybe you might run for president one of these days. What could a president whose heart was in the right place, what could he do to deal with these guys?

I start off, Thomas, from the position that we need a political revolution in this country and that’s not just rhetoric. What I mean by that is that we need—and a president certainly can play a very, very important role in this—we need a massive change in citizen participation and in political consciousness. There was a poll that just came out I think yesterday. Gallup tells us that… I believe it is 63 percent of the American people cannot name which parties control the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. So you have consciousness so low, a significant majority of the American people who are very concerned about what’s going on for themselves and their kids, they don’t know who controls the House and the Senate. They can’t name which party controls both bodies. You have what the political scientists tell us is a situation where in this coming election, 60 percent of the American people will not bother to vote. That means 70 -to-80 percent of low-income workers and young people will not vote. So before you can talk about changing America, you have to change the political consciousness and the way that people relate to the political process.

Now, there is a group that relates very strongly to the political process, [and] that is the billionaire class that is now prepared to spend many hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates to represent their interests.

So you ask me, what can a president do? The main thing, I think, that the president can do is understand that no kind of progressive agenda can take place unless the American people are involved in that struggle and are prepared to put real pressure on the establishment to make it happen. It’s not going to happen in back rooms. It’s not going to happen in White House negotiations. If students, for example, want to see the cost of college go down and want to see their very high levels of debt be significantly reduced, they’re going to have to take it up with the members of Congress. They’re not doing that now. If low-income workers want to see the minimum wage raised, it cannot be a situation where only 20 percent of low-income workers vote. They’re going to have to be actively involved. That’s what a president can do.

Wow. I mean, that’s a problem that in some ways seems even greater than the problem of dealing with the Republicans. You’re talking about building a mass movement.

What I am telling you, as somebody who likes Obama and respects Obama, is that the key mistake that I believe he made, and it’s perfectly understandable, is he got into office, and he said, two years after he was in, “I’m gonna sit down and negotiate with the Republicans. I know I can’t get everything. We’ll work on some kind of compromise.”

What he didn’t catch on to is that the Republicans had no intention of compromising with him and they have no intention of compromising at all. They have an agenda. It is an extreme right wing agenda backed by the Koch brothers and other billionaires, and the only way you defeat that right-wing agenda is when the American people rise up and demand real change. It can’t be done within the confines of Congress. It has to be part of a strong and active grassroots movement.

Do you understand what I’m saying here?

I absolutely see what you’re saying. I’m thinking of examples like the 1930s, the 1960s, and I also think of 2008 when president Obama had a very robust grassroots movement, or what looked like a grassroots movement, behind him.

And what did he do with that movement?

I’m gonna let you tell me. [laughs]

I believe that Obama’s 2008 campaign will go down in history as one of the most extraordinary campaigns ever run. But what Obama did not do is follow through with that grassroots effort. He did not. Of course, he had a majority in the Senate and in the House, but be that as it may, he lost what I think was the golden opportunity.

For example, just one example of many: Civil rights in this country. The change in attitude toward civil rights did not come about because a couple of senators and the White House negotiated it. It came about because millions of people took to the streets and it filtered on up. Women’s rights did not come about because senators have a tinge of guilt about the way women were treated as second-class citizens. It happened because women were actively involved with the women’s movement. Same for the gay movement and so forth. When people get involved and struggle and put pressure on the Congress and the President, things happen and that’s what we’ve got to do.

And that leads to Citizens United. You talk about Citizens United a lot. Is there any way that can be overturned?

Yes. I am not unconfident that it will be overturned. And I’ll tell you why, because the vast majority of the American people do not agree with the Republican leadership that buying elections constitutes free speech. Very few people agree with that. So it’s not just progressives like me, it’s not just moderates, it is conservatives as well. We just put up something on our Facebook which came from Barry Goldwater talking about the same issue.

So the bottom line is, I think the vast majority of the American people believe that we need real campaign finance reform and that billionaires should not be allowed to buy elections.

For the time being, this is the system that we’re stuck with. And you look at our politics unfolding before us, is there even a route for a progressive candidate to win the presidency, given the situation that we’re in with Citizens United?

Meaning the huge amount of money that’s going to conservative candidates.

Or even to moderate, centrist Democrats.

The answer is yes, and I’ll tell you what makes me optimistic: Neil Abercrombie is a friend of mine, [so] I’m not happy to tell you this. Neil is the governor of Hawaii. He outspent his opponent by 10 to 1, and he lost his primary bid by 2 to 1.

If you look at Eric Cantor: Eric Cantor had so much money he couldn’t even spend it, and as you know, he lost his primary bid. If you look at Andrew Cuomo, he ran against a candidate [Zephyr Teachout] who nobody knew, who had no money. She won half the counties in New York state in the recent primary. [Cuomo] had all the name recognition and all the money and she had very little.

So I think what we are seeing now is a profound anger at the corporate establishment, at the political establishment, at the media establishment. I think people want change. So to answer your question, yes, money is important, I don’t deny it for a moment. But I think people are paying less and less attention to ugly, 30-second ads and are prepared to hear from people who want real change in this country.

I wanted to talk to you about your own plans for 2016. You haven’t said all that much in public, but it would be nice to know…

What I’ll tell you is what I do say in public, which is that, at a time when the middle class is collapsing; when we have more people living in poverty than ever before and we have huge income and wealth inequality; when we are the only major nation on earth that does not have a national healthcare system; when we have millions of young people leaving college deeply in debt; when we have the planetary crisis of climate change; when we, because of Citizens United, have a billionaire class now controlling our political process, we need candidates who are prepared to stand up without apology representing the working families of America and are prepared to take on the billionaire class which controls so much of America. I think that’s absolutely imperative that that takes place.

What I have said is that I am giving thought to running for president. I haven’t made that decision. It’s a very, very difficult decision. I have gone to Iowa on a couple of vacations. I’ll be back there. I’ve gone to New Hampshire. I’ll be there this Saturday. And I’ve gone to other places in the country including the south—North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi—to get a sense of how people are feeling.

But yes, I am giving thought and I will make the decision at the appropriate time.

People always talk about how hard campaigning is. I personally really like Iowa, I think it would be fun to spend a lot of time in Iowa.

I agree with you. We were in Iowa last week and I had three town meetings and we had one a week ago Sunday night. We had 450 people coming out in Des Moines, Iowa, for what I thought was a great meeting.

Would that mean running as a Democrat, because the Iowa caucuses…

That’s a decision, also, that I have to think about.

There are advantages and disadvantages of running as an independent and as a Democrat. That’s something I have to talk to a whole lot of people about and sort out. When I was in Iowa, most people thought I should run as a Democrat. I was in New York City the other day, most people thought I should run as an independent.

The advantage is pretty obvious: Right now, there is a whole lot of anger and frustration at the two-party system, and more and more people are registering as independents. On the other hand, If you run as an independent, then you have to set up a 50-state political infrastructure which is very difficult in some states. In other words, you have to get an enormous amount of signatures just to get on the ballot, and it is quite possible that in some states the regulations are so onerous and unfair that you may not be able to do it.

Those are issues that I just have to talk to a lot of people about.

Speaking of that, one of my own personal favorite movements was a third-party movement in the 1890s called Populism. You brought up the two-party monopoly, which is something that drives me crazy, and it’s one of the many things that ensures that you don’t get a responsive system. Is there any way that the two-party monopoly will ever get challenged?

Well I should tell you that, as you may or may not know, I was mayor of the city of Burlington for 8 years. In this city, while it was not a legal political party, given Vermont state law, in our city we had three political factions: The Republicans, the Democrats, and what we then called the independent coalition. And the independent coalition, I was the mayor as an independent. We had five out of 13 seats on the city council. Not a majority, but—I think it was 6 out of 13 for a while—but enough for veto power, which I used. So we did it in Burlington.

Now, in the state of Vermont, you have the Progressive Party, which was an outgrowth of that effort, which is now the most successful progressive third party in America, which has three state senators and, I can’t remember, six, seven members of the House, and more to come in this election.

So in Vermont you are seeing a significant, progressive third party effort.

One last question: What is going to turn around the drift toward inequality in this country? What measures could actually happen?

What you can do?

What a politician can do.

I’ll tell you what you do. If you did the following things, it wouldn’t solve all the problems, but you’d have a profound impact on income and wealth inequality:

First of all, you raise the minimum wage to a living wage so that the people who are working 40 hours a week are not living in poverty.

Number two, and maybe most importantly, you put Americans back to work. Real unemployment today is not 6.1 percent, it is 12 percent. Youth unemployment is 20 percent. If we invest a trillion dollars in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, you can create 13 million decent paying jobs, and I think we need to do that.

Thirdly, you stop companies from throwing American workers out on the street and moving to China or Vietnam or Mexico by creating a trade system that works for working people and not just corporate America.

You do those things. Then you institute tax reform which asks the wealthy and large corporations to start paying their fair share of taxes. You make college affordable and deal with the issue of student debt. Those things will go a long way, and we have legislation that would make significantly more progressive the estate tax. So if you do those things, I think you’d have gone a good way, I think, to rebuilding the middle class in this country and asking the wealthy to start paying their fair share.

Thomas Frank is a Salon politics and culture columnist. His many books include “What’s The Matter With Kansas,” “Pity the Billionaire” and “One Market Under God.” He is the founding editor of The Baffler magazine.

http://progresoweekly.us/fight-progressive-vision/

Bernie Sanders • December 31, 2014

By Mark Jacobson

 Photo: Nigel Parry

Photographs by Nigel Parry

Source: New York Magazine

There were a few changes in that same speech Bernie ­Sanders freely admits he’s been giving for the past four decades, give or take a j’accuse or two.

Beginning in 1981, when he was first elected as the democratic-socialist mayor of Burlington, a.k.a. “the ­People’s Republic of Burlington,” the only U.S. city then maintaining a pro–Nicaragua-­Sandinista foreign policy, Bernie, as he is universally known there, often railed against “the ruling class.” These days, with the condition-red Republican hegemony hard upon the land, the 73-year-old U.S. senator has upped the ante, going with “the billionaire class.” Likewise, well-worn jeremiads against the Rockefellers, big oil, and the Bush neocon cabal have been replaced by broadsides decrying corporate media and the moneybag Koch brothers, Chuck and Dave, wielders of the Citizens United truncheon.

“The Koch brothers say, ‘Oh, you want to run for the Senate?’ ” Sanders thundered during a recent speech in New Hampshire, the early presidential-primary state where prospective candidate Sanders has been spending a good deal of time of late. “ ‘Okay,’ ” Sanders continued. “ ‘Here’s your hundred million dollars. Here’s your speech. … You’re not an elected official, you’re an employee.’ …Does their greed know any bounds?”

The question is rhetorical. Almost everything Bernie Sanders says, in his incongruous Brooklyn-deli-man accent that dates to his 1940s Flatbush upbringing, is rhetorical. Small talk and false ­ingratiations are not his thing.

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Like a rabbinical Man in Black, a lone truth teller, Bernie fired the rat-a-tat of bone-chilling bullet points: how nearly 46 million Americans are now in poverty, “more than at any time in the history of our country”; how, “despite the modest gains of the Affordable Care Act,” some 40 million citizens still will likely have no health insurance. Did you know that the top 25 hedge-fund managers in the country make enough to pay the salaries of more than 425,000 public-school teachers? No? Well, it’s true, Sanders said. Is anything likely to change? Not really. As Bernie explained, “60 percent of the people don’t vote; 75 percent of low-income people don’t vote; 80 percent of people between 18 and 21 don’t vote.”

Like his fellow senator on the left, Elizabeth Warren, the white-haired Sanders is a reigning campus hero, but his testament brings only gloom to his audience at the University of New Hampshire auditorium. Could things really be that bad? Could the American experiment, the New Jerusalem of Thoreau and Emerson, have been reduced to this snarling, cobalt-hearted thing? What kind of country have we bequeathed to our children, the poor debt-ridden college students/suckers who filled much of the hall?

As for the upcoming 2016 election, what could a matchup of Hillary and Jeb Bush decide except who sat at the temporary head of the Illuminati table? Sanders is on record as saying he respects Hillary, that they became “friends” when she was First Lady and then a senator. But what difference could someone as connected to power as Hillary make in the present dire situation? “If you talk about the need for a political revolution in America, it’s fair to say that Secretary Clinton probably will not be one of the more active people,” Sanders has said.

It is at about this point in the Bernie Sanders speech that someone asks the Question. The query might come from a man with a graying ponytail, or a lady in a hand-knit sweater, the sort of people who regularly contribute $25 to $50 to Sanders, who won’t take money from major corporations. (He still has about $4.5 million left over from the $8 million he raised during the 2012 election cycle.) Or it could be asked by a student, an earnest, fresh-faced scholar looking into the abyss of an uncertain future. The fact is the Question is not quite a question at all. It is more of an entreaty, a plea.

Are you going to run for president? That’s what everyone wants to know.

At the UNH speech, the supplicant was a middle-aged registered nurse. “Will you do this for us?” she beseeches. “We’re begging you, Bernie. Save us. Please.”

Photo: Nigel Perry/New York Magazine

At any given time there are but 100 individuals who can call themselves U.S. senators, and only one of them decorates his office with a large portrait of Eugene V. Debs, the five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America. Then again, there aren’t many states in the Union that would elect someone like Bernie Sanders to the Senate.

To know why we may soon be living in a however unlikely Bernie Sanders moment, it is useful to know Vermont, the state Sanders has represented in Congress for 24 years, the last eight as a senator. It is helpful to understand that long before Sam Houston and the loutish Lone Star State, before the “patriot” secessionists of Arizona, there was the Republic of Vermont, a sovereign nation with its own constitution. Signed in a tavern during a raging thunderstorm in 1777, the Vermont constitution forbade slavery and guaranteed suffrage to male non-landowners. In other words, it offered more freedom than the famous document promulgated by the vaunted U.S. Founding Fathers and ratified in 1789.

By the 20th century, Vermont had settled into a pious, flinty New Englander sort of pre-Goldwater Republicanism (tough on money, liberal on social issues). But these stately agronomic rhythms were well in flux by the time Bernie Sanders arrived for good during the tumultuous year of 1968.

“My hair was long, but not long for the times. I smoked marijuana, but was never part of the drug culture. That wasn’t me,” says Sanders as we sit together in his office on Church Street in Burlington, a pleasant burg of more than 40,000 and the largest settlement in the state.

Good luck prying anything personal beyond the basic bio from Sanders. He does, however, allow that his early life in Flatbush, where he grew up in a three-and-a-half-room apartment on East 26th Street and went to James Madison High School (Chuck Schumer also went there), bore little resemblance to the left-leaning intellectualism often associated with the New York Jew.

“My father was a worker,” Sanders says dispassionately. “He came here in 1917 without a penny, didn’t speak English, yet managed to send me and my brother to college. My mother wanted a house of our own, but he couldn’t provide that. I suspect they voted Democratic, but it wasn’t anything that was ever discussed.”

Sanders says it was only after leaving Brooklyn to attend the University of Chicago—and when the civil-rights movement hit—that he became politically aware. He began marching and protesting. In the mid-’60s, he lived on an Israeli kibbutz for six months.

Sanders after his first win as Burlington mayor in 1981. Photo: Rob Swanson

When Sanders arrived in Vermont at age 27, it was among the whitest and most rural states in the country, as it still is today. He was one of thousands of “flatlanders” (what the “woodchuck” locals call out-of-staters) fleeing the “hassle” of New York and Boston. Sanders fell in love. This wasn’t Brooklyn. “In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never once heard anyone loudly cursing in the grocery store.”

He did odd jobs and began to raise a family. In 1971, a friend invited him to a meeting of the then-fledgling leftist Liberty Union Party. Sanders remembers: “I stood up, said a few words. I can’t remember what. Two hours later, I was a candidate for the United States Senate.” He got in his $200 car and went out to campaign. “Here I was, running on this tiny party, with no money, but I was allowed to participate in the debates, I was on the radio, interviewed in the newspapers, actually taken seriously. Could you imagine that happening today?”

Sanders ran as an “unabashed socialist,” got 2 percent, kept at it, got 4. He did considerably better in the blue-collar areas of Burlington. Switching from the socialist Liberty Union Party to become an Independent, he ran for mayor and, in what became a nasty standoff between liberal flatlanders and old-line woodchucks, managed to beat the five-term incumbent Gordon Paquette by a count of 4,030 to 4,020.

Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, another Brooklyn-born flatlander and Vermont icon, recalled the scene. “Our first store was in an old gas station. We wanted to show movies, but the city said no. We’d be competing with the theater. It was that old-boy cronyism, like playing a Betty Boop cartoon on a wall was going to wreck anyone’s business. When Bernie came in—his followers were called Sanderistas—things loosened up quite a bit.”

As the flatlanders kept coming, making Vermont into perhaps the bluest of blue states, Sanders became the beneficiary of a rare political calculus. Unlike almost every other modern pol, he hasn’t had to change with the times. The times came to him. After four terms as Burlington mayor, 16 years in the House, and eight years in the Senate (he was reelected in 2012 with a steamrolling 71 percent of the vote), Sanders says his views are “basically the same” as during his Liberty Union days.

In a way, he is the living embodiment of the ’60s credo “What goes around comes around,” because it is Sanders’s unchangingness that has landed him a bumper crop of press and appearances on national media like The Colbert Report. His ­message of equality in the face of massive inequality strikes many as an echo of a nearly forgotten yet more hopeful time. As another hippie phrase goes, “It’s so old it’s new.”

“You could say moving to Vermont was the best decision I ever made,” Sanders says. “What would have happened if I’d stayed in Brooklyn? How far could I have gotten? The State Assembly?”

Although he was admittedly no more than “a foot soldier” in the great movement battles of the ’60s, Sanders is the last pure man standing of his most political generation. The highly compromised examples of Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Jerry Brown, and even Jesse Jackson notwithstanding, he alone has been able to keep the outsider faith. Even though he votes with the Democratic Party more often than many actual Democrats, he is the longest-serving Independent member of Congress in the history of the country.

Sanders estimates he’s personally conversed with “a very high percentage” of the state’s 620,000-plus inhabitants. Everyone you meet can tell you of the time Sanders came into their store, addressed their town-hall meeting, or stepped out of character to play a garbageman in a Bread and Puppet Theater extravaganza up in Glover.

This doesn’t mean he is universally beloved. Stories abound about Sanders’s highhandedness, his sheer I-am-right-and-everyone-else-is-wrongness. You look for the Brooklyn in the man, a hint of the ­haimish, a few laughs to make the medicine go down, but find little. Even though many younger progressive pols in the state have worked for him, they approach him with wariness. “He’s the king, they owe him, they don’t want to cross him,” says one close observer. A commonly heard phrase is “Bernie Sanders is a man of the people who doesn’t particularly like people.”

Bernie might be a grump, but, as they say in the northern kingdom, “he’s our grump,” a durable brand. No one can say he’s not his own man. That’s what he’s got going for him as he trundles around the country with his decades-old speech, testing the waters for a long-shot presidential run. It could be that Warren is a better sell to those who feel disenfranchised by the soul-crush of money politics, but as of now she isn’t making the rounds for herself in Iowa and New Hampshire. So until someone else comes along, if you’re not crazy about the way things are going in this benighted land of ours, Bernie Sanders, grumpy grandpa, is your guy.

You know you’re in Vermont when you get off the plane and the first thing you see is a sign offering college students a chance to spend a semester abroad in Cuba. You know you’re in New Hampshire when your rental car bottoms out in a pothole 400 yards past the state line. Compared with the designer Eden west of the Connecticut River, things are a little scrabbly here in the “Live Free or Die” state. Maybe it’s that no-state-income-tax that keeps the roads so crappy, but everywhere was the hand of man: stilled factories, giant malls, and all.

Much of the anti-Sanders rhetoric in Vermont comes from the left, often from old comrades dating to the pre-mayoral days who consider “Bernardo” a sellout. He’s been lambasted over his rapprochement with upstate gun owners and his relatively moderate commentary on Israeli-Palestinian relations (he’s for a two-state solution, but the topic only makes him groan). There was widespread criticism, even from people like Ben Cohen, over Sanders’s support for basing Lockheed’s F-35 jets at the Burlington airport. But that’s Vermont. New Hampshire is a place more in tune with the prevailing American norm.

“Bernie Sanders for president? You frickin’ kidding me? He’s a commie. Is that even legal, a communist president?” says a man named Tom, sloshing back a margarita, watching Thursday-night football at Cactus Jack’s in Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city and the home of the Union-Leader, the right-leaning newspaper (Hunter S. Thompson called it “America’s worst newspaper”) that plays a large role in the New Hampshire primary process.

“The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, everyone else gets fucked,” says one of Tom’s buddies who identified himself as “a dues-paying member” of the pipe-­fitters union. “Things suck, I get it. I just don’t want to be yelled at by some socialist.”

I bring this up with Sanders. Is there something in the national DNA that words like socialism cause such seemingly instinctive abhorrence?

It has nothing to do with socialism, Sanders counters. It is all the fault of the Koch brothers and the media. The entire popular culture is a vast mind-control program.

“People care more about Tom Brady’s arm than they do about our disastrous trade policy, NAFTA, CAFTA, the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. ISIS and Ebola are serious issues, but what they really don’t want you to think about is what’s happened to the American middle class.”

The excessive cost of higher education and the burden of “Mafialike,” shortsighted student loans are other staples of Bernie’s never-ending speech. He never fails to hit the note in his voluminous web presence, which is the pride and joy of his bare-bones staff, making sure that ­prospective younger voters know that, even if Sanders reminds them of their lovable-curmudgeon grandpa, he’s got a big and beefy Twitter feed. “Once America ranked No. 1 in turning out college graduates. Now we are 12th,” Sanders regularly tells his overflowing campus crowds.

When speaking to students, Bernie often stops mid-speech to ask “How much does it cost a year to go here?” At Plymouth State, a properly disgruntled computer major derisively shouted out, “$22,000.”

“Twenty-two thousand!” Sanders replied. “That’s a lot of money. A working family can have a hard time coming up with that.”

It’s at that point that Bernie, who paid nothing like that for his one year at Brooklyn College, unveils his belief that all colleges should be free. Predictably, the proposal gets a big cheer.

Another college appearance, this one within the Ivy League halls of Dartmouth, offered an opportunity for some old-time class analysis. With the room awash with fist-bumping Bernie energy, Sanders asked his “how much” question. Someone answered, almost apologetically, “$65,000, maybe 70.”

The number—it’s actually $62,000—seemed to stop even Bernie in his tracks. That was really a lot of money.

Then again, this is the alma mater of Nelson Rockefeller. Over in the stately Baker-Berry Library, with its 200-foot bell tower, was the renowned “Black Dan” portrait of the young Dartmouth man Daniel Webster, Sanders’s fellow senator and leading Federalist enemy of the American populism that would come to be known as “Jacksonian democracy.” Dartmouth’s endowment currently stood at $4.5 billion, returning 19.2 percent in the fiscal year that ended on June 30. Even at $248,000 for a four-year degree, it is unlikely that many of the students here will leave school in the condition Sanders sometimes calls “indentured servitude.” Here was the Establishment Sanders rails against.

But what could you do? There’s only so much power anyone, Bernie Sanders very much included, could challenge in America. Besides, the speech is the speech. Sanders pronounced himself happy with the turnout and the enthusiasm of the students’ response.

In 1987, while still mayor of Bur­lington, Sanders made a record of ’60s folk anthems, his booming Flatbush-ese plowing through such movement favorites as “We Shall Overcome” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Asked why he did such a thing, Sanders says, “It appealed to my ego.” Nonetheless, Bernie is not known for letting his hair down. “The guy works 100 hours a week. Maybe he hit a golf ball at the driving range once or twice. That’s his fun for the year,” says a former political associate. Likewise, when Congress is in session, Sanders prefers to eat in the cafeteria of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, carrying a tray like back at James Madison High School. So it was a bit of an occasion, the famously frugal Bernie stopping for lunch at the well-appointed Hanover Inn.

“What’s this fennel?” Sanders inquires as he points to the Crossroads Farm roasted-tomato-and-fennel soup on the menu. It was kind of amusing: The senator from an artisanal hot spot like Vermont not knowing what fennel was. “Is it a seed? Is it an herb?”

“It has a tangy yet understated licorice flavor,” says the somewhat nonplussed server.

“Licorice? Like an old penny candy?” Sanders asks, deciding to order it.

Soon we are discussing a major question in the would-be Bernie campaign: Would he run on a third-party ticket or as a Democrat? The choice seems obvious. Not even Ross Perot could afford to launch a meaningful third-party national campaign these days. Beyond that, you risk what Sanders calls “the Ralph Nader dilemma.”

If there’s one thing that really bugs Bernie, it is the specter of Nader, who earlier this year sent a bizarre “open letter” to the Burlington Free Press whining about how Sanders won’t return his calls. Discounting the argument that the two-party system might be a big part of the status quo he so deplores, Sanders slaps down his soup spoon.

“Do you remember Florida?” Sanders half-shouts. “I won’t play the spoiler.”

Besides, being a Democrat gets you onto the primary stage with Hillary Clinton, a prospect that figures to keep political analysts palavering long into the night. The issue is how much Bernie can tap into what he calls “the profound anger” that has pervaded the nation from the tea party to Occupy, and how much that anger will play into the campaign narrative. Bernie could push Clinton to move left. Who knows, he could get hot. If Herman Cain could get hot, even for a moment, why not Sanders? He is already beginning to connect the mass protests following the Eric Garner and Michael Brown killings with his core economic-fairness issues.

If one thing is for certain, Bernie Sanders, for all his seeming marginality, is as savvy and hard-nosed a politician as you’ll find. He couldn’t have come through those early face-offs with the 100 would-be Bernies back in Burlington without a high percentage of cold-bloodedness. He’s a lone wolf, but won’t be caught howling at the moon like the last Vermonter to mount the big stage, Howard Dean.

Indeed, you felt you were beginning to root for him. It was the speech that won you over, that same old speech. It was the part about his father, “the worker,” who couldn’t earn enough to buy his wife the house she wanted yet still managed to raise a son who became a U.S. senator. “My father had a deep love for this country; he believed in it,” Sanders says.

Running was a matter of patriotism, Sanders says. He’ll be 75 in 2016. He has seven grandchildren. True, he’d been lucky, but America has worked for him, big time. Even now, the Republican takeover of the Senate was working in his favor. He lost his treasured chairmanship at Veteran Affairs, but seniority has landed him as the ranking minority member of the Budget Committee. Sanders called it “a bully pulpit” from which to push his anti-megacapital agenda. In Iowa in December, he was using his new position to buttress a call for the breakup of the big Wall Street banks.

Sanders is fond of saying that “anyone who wakes up in the morning with a burning desire to be the president of the United States is a little bit crazy.” (He says it to every reporter asking about a presidential run.) Still, it is worth asking what a Bernie administration might be like.

The question gives the senator pause. It isn’t part of the speech, not yet at least. But then it comes to him in a great, stirring flash.

“This is how it is going to be,” Bernie says, as if he were still in his $200 car, back in the Liberty Union days. “Suppose you want to raise the minimum wage to a fair level and know that change is not going to come from inside Washington. Not in this climate. So, as president, I’d invite millions of low-income workers to come to the capitol. Like a bonus march. I’d do the same thing about making college affordable. Put out the call, invite a million students. Make sure they’re all registered to vote. Then when these congressmen come by the White House and they’re beholden to the Koch brothers, the super-PACs, or the oil companies, I will say, ‘Do what you want, but first do one thing for me: Look out the window.’ ”

“Look out the window,” Bernie repeats, liking the sound of it, the call to arms, just the sort of phrase that might get the attention of a downtrodden, detached electorate and prompt them to raise a fist in the air.

“Look out the window. Because all those people are out there. They’re demanding their fair share and they’re not leaving until they get it.”

*This article appears in the December 29, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/12/26/bernie-sanders-announces-deadline-presidential-decision

http://www.dsausa.org/sanders_petition

Web Only / Features » December 19, 2014

Why Bernie Sanders Needs to Run for President—As an Independent

The corporate capture of both parties, explosion of energy in grassroots movements, and popular disgust with politics as usual make this the perfect moment for Sanders to run outside the Democratic Party.

BY David Goodner

Source: In These Times

It’s time for a new course of action—and Bernie Sanders has the name recognition, the resume and the gravitas to be the face of a new national democratic socialist political party that has the potential to change the direction of U.S. politics.

Bernie Sanders, the fiery, independent, populist U.S. Senator from Vermont, has been mulling a presidential campaign in 2016. There is no question about it: He should absolutely run.

Mr. Sanders has the credentials, the charisma and the community support he needs to seize the populist moment we are in and help spark a grassroots insurgency against the billionaire class.

Somebody has to take on Hillary Clinton from the Left—otherwise the 2016 elections will be nothing more than two corporate politicians making hollow promises to the American people while selling their souls behind the scenes to war profiteers and Wall Street banksters. And while Elizabeth Warren is also a compelling candidate, chances are at least moderately high that she may not run, opting to play it safe in favor of maintaining good standing with the party’s leadership.

And even if Warren does run, her candidacy will not contribute to the building of a genuine third party movement—which is what the Left really needs to do to build long-term independent political power.

That’s why Bernie Sanders must run—and it’s why he should run on a third party ticket, not as a Democrat.

Merely impacting the 2016 presidential elections through the Democratic primaries is too small of a goal given the times we are in, and will not go far or fast enough to move the people and the planet away from the brink of corporate and climate catastrophe. The last thing we need is a firebrand like Mr. Sanders to spearhead a populist electoral charge and raise expectations, only to concede after a few weeks, endorse Hillary and urge his followers back into the folds of the establishment Democratic tent.

It would be disappointing, to say the least, to see a lifelong independent and self-described democratic socialist using the specter of a Republican boogey-man to scare millions of everyday people back into the two-party closet. The truth is, our country’s neoliberal turn advanced tremendously under the Carter, Clinton and Obama Administrations, and it was the Supreme Court that stole the 2000 election from Al Gore, not Ralph Nader.

Neither should Mr. Sanders run only as an independent without attempting to build the kind of organizational and party infrastructure that can live on after his campaign is over, as Nader failed to do in 2004. Mr. Sanders should instead aim higher and strive to change the course of U.S. history by making 2016 the year that an independent third party broke through the white noise and became a permanent fixture in American politics. This should not be done through the Green Party, but through the construction of a new, broad-based democratic socialist party.

Building a nationally viable third party in less than two years will be challenging, but Mr. Sanders has long enough coattails to pull it off. For one thing, the conditions in this country are ripe for this kind of move. Grassroots social movements, from Madison to Occupy Wall Street to #BlackLivesMatter, have been growing steadily since the economic crash in 2008, and have articulated a reform agenda that neither political party appears willing to embrace.

The 2014 midterm elections saw the lowest voter turnout of the modern era, after which the much ballyhooed left turn by President Obama and Senate Democrats turned out to be little more than liberal hype. (See, for example, the party’s capitulation to the corporate right without much of a fight during the recent “Crominbus” budget debate.) The incident serves as yet another example of a political culture that has become thoroughly corrupted by big corporate money.

Voters aren’t stupid. Their apathy in these elections comes from a lack of appealing choices. In a system where neither party is willing to address the bread-and-butter issues that impact us most like jobs, education, housing, health-care and debt, our only options are to stay home or to “vote the bums out,” replacing them with another set of bums we’ll want to vote out, ad infinitum.

That’s why the history of U.S. electoral politics is such a schizophrenic seesawing of power back and forth between two wings of the same corporate power structure. One party swoops into office using the voter backlash against the other’s broken promises as a wedge, and then once in power does very little (at best) to make everyday people’s lives better in material, tangible ways.

Such a system will never be able to solve the staggering number of social problems confronting us. A third party candidacy led by Bernie Sanders, perhaps with a strong running mate like Seattle council woman and fellow socialist Kshama Sawant as his running mate, can give voice to the aspirations of millions of working-class Americans who have been effectively shut out of the governing process by the corrosive influence of corporate power. Their goals should include winning at least a third of the popular vote, concrete victories in dozens of local, county, statewide, and federal down-ballot races, construction of permanent party infrastructure and close collaboration with social movement actors independent of the Democratic Party.

There is already an emerging electoral precedent that suggests such a strategy is not outside of our ambitious reach. Ms. Sawant’s successful campaign in Seattle in 2013 not only elevated a card-carrying socialist to office, it helped catapult (alongside tenacious street demonstrations) the national Fight for $15 movement that has seen several major American cities pass significant minimum wage increases.

The success of Howie Hawkins and Brian Jones on the Green Party ticket in November’s New York gubernatorial race is also strong evidence that the appetite for third-party movement-building is there—if organizers and activists are willing to seize the initiative and take some risks.

The liberal establishment will cry “spoiler,” but their strategy has long proven to be bankrupt. It’s time for a new course of action—and Bernie Sanders has the name recognition, the resume and the gravitas to be the face of a new national democratic socialist political party that has the potential to change the direction of U.S. politics.

David Goodner

David Goodner is union organizer in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Originally from Iowa, he worked in Des Moines as a community organizer and Catholic Worker between 2009-2014. He may be reached at david.a.goodner [at] gmail.com or @davidgoodner.