SocraticGadfly: Bernie Sanders: the “socialist” who really isn’t

February 13, 2007

Bernie Sanders: the “socialist” who really isn’t

And isn’t even close

Leave it to Ted Rall to get to the heart of the matter.
Even Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist, went along with the Republocratic mob. Sanders serves as yet another hollow symbol of the system's supposed openness to unorthodox politics. Sanders plays a socialist on TV, but he also voted for a Bush-backed resolution supporting the troops as they invaded Iraq.
He has neither joined the Socialist Party nor promoted socialist views.

A real socialist would do things, beyond Iraq, or even possibly winding down the Afghanistan war, would do things like:
1. Get a COLA on the minimum wage bill. (I can’t believe even the Green Party, in its call to support this legislation, missed out, before the new Congress started, on issuing the call for a COLA.
2. Go beyond current calls to ease check-off unionization drives, to giving unions more say over corporate pension fund investments, union reps more opportunities to sit on corporate boards of directors, etc.
3. Actually say more than he has about NAFTA, WTO, etc.

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