​

​

The oldest and most well-known socialist in the Democratic Party is Bernie Sanders. As a millionaire, he gets a lot of criticism for his support of socialism. Is he going to give up his money to share with the poor and growing entitled population?

 

Some on the left challenge Sanders’s socialist credentials. His policies read like a liberal democratic wish list not a complete overhaul of society’s economic relations. Sanders has thus been referred to as a “Democratic Socialist Capitalist”, with one British observer pointedly asking: “Is Bernie Sanders really a socialist? Or just redefining socialism for America?”

 

Democratic socialism, Sanders said, is not tied to any Marxist belief or the abolition of capitalism. “I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal,” he said.

 

Bernard (Bernie) Sanders was born September 8, 1941, in Brooklyn, New York, to Eli and Dorothy Sanders. His father, Eli, was born in Slopnice, Poland, and immigrated to the United States in 1921 at age 17. Dorothy Glassberg Sanders was born in New York City to Jewish immigrant parents from Radzyn, Poland, and Bialystock, Russia.

 

Eli worked hard as a paint salesman traveling through the city’s five boroughs to support Dorothy, Bernie, and his older brother, Larry. The family lived in a three-and-a-half-room rent-controlled apartment on East 26th and Kings Highway, where Dorothy was a stay-at-home mom. Dorothy hoped that one day, they would be able to buy a private home but never realized that dream. Bernie remembers that they always had enough money for rent and food, but not for extras. “It’s not that we were poor, but [there was always] the constant pressure of never having enough money. …The money question to me has always been very deep and emotional.”

 

Dorothy had had rheumatic fever as a child and became ill from the long-term effects when Bernie was in high school. She passed away at the young age of 46 following a second failed heart surgery shortly after he graduated from high school. His father, Eli, died two years later.

 

Bernie Sanders attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York, graduating in 1959. He was an elite long-distance runner and co-captain of the school's track and cross-country team. Peers noted he was one of the top ninth-grade runners in New York City. Others that attended school with Sanders included Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Senator Chuck Schumer, and singer-songwriter Carole King.

 

Sanders briefly attended Brooklyn College before transferring to the University of Chicago.He became deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement, serving as a leader in the campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). He helped lead a historic two-week sit-in outside the office of University President George Beadle to protest racially segregated university-owned housing. In 1963, he was arrested for resisting arrest during a protest against segregation in Chicago's public schools, later paying a $25 fine. Sanders later described himself as a mediocre classroom student, feeling that practical community organizing and civil rights work mattered more to his education than traditional lectures.

 

Also in 1963, Sanders traveled to Israel to stay at a leftist collective community located northeast of Haifa. The experience, he has noted, helped shape his early understanding of cooperative and socialist community values.

 

After scraping through to his graduation in 1964, he briefly returned to New York where, according to the National Journal, he started teaching children from low-income families for the new Head Start Program. That summer he bought, for $2,500, his first house, a dirt-floor sugar shack in the woods outside Middlesex, Vermont. It had no electricity and no running water. He and his first wife were divorced. (Can’t say that I blame her.)

 

In the 60’s and 70’s he lived “just one step above hand to mouth,” according to a longtime friend, barely paying his bills as an intermittent carpenter and freelance writer. He once ran an extension cord from his “sparse,” “stark” apartment to get electricity from a downstairs neighbor.

 

         ● He visited Nicaragua in 1985 and met its president, Daniel Ortega. He heaped praise on its socialist Sandinista government, which at the                         time  was fighting rebel Contras supported by the U.S.

 

        ● He “honeymooned” with his second wife in the USSR in 1988. He praised the lower cost of health care and housing in the Soviet Union and                    rebuked the U.S. for its intervention in foreign countries.

​

        ● He flew to Cuba with his wife in 1989 hoping to meet Fidel Castro. He had to settle for the mayor of Havana.

​

        ● He tepidly endorsed Walter Mondale for president in 1984 and more enthusiastically endorsed Jesse Jackson in 1988. He made it clear these               endorsements did not mean he was more closely aligning himself with Democrats. “Jesse believes that serious social change is possible                        within the Democratic Party,” he said at the time. “I don’t.”

 

Over the course of his 16 years (1991-2007) in the House, he was the lead sponsor of only one bill that became a law: renaming a post office in Fair Haven, Vermont. Sanders co-sponsored a bill that paved the way for Vermont to ship low-level nuclear waste to Sierra Blanca, Texas, a largely impoverished town where two-thirds of the residents were Latino. Hmm?

 

He owns three houses and is worth at least $2 million. Based on a deeper examination of his financial disclosures, tax returns, property records in Washington and Vermont, Sanders’current financial portrait is the product (with the help of his wife) of decades of planning. The upward trajectory from poverty to his relative riches now is the product of years of middle-class striving, replete with credit card debt, real estate upgrades and an array of investment funds and retirement accounts.

 

“The goal must be to take political power away from the handful of millionaires who currently control it and place that power in the hands of the working people of the city who are the vast majority of the Burlington population.” This was the Sanders of 1980 when running for mayor of Burlington, Vermont. The Sanders of today is still saying “word for word” the same thing. The only difference is he’s changed the word millionaire to billionaire.

 

There is no doubt that Sanders has spent his life wanting to help the poor, the discriminated, the “outsiders”, (Forget about the Latinos in Texas.) but he has profited in the capitalistic system he denounces. Once again, who paid for his college, his numerous trips, even his $2500 “sugar shack” in Vermont? Hard to do working odd jobs, freelance writing and making film strips. He did a good job playing the part by saying “I don’t want to be rich”, while driving his old jalopy and wearing worn out clothes, but he, like most Socialists will fight to stay on top and hide their million-dollar homes from the entitled masses.

 

STOP SOCIALIST FANTASIES!

​

Kathleen Nunn