[lbo-talk] How come nobody talks about the New socialist senator

tfast tfast at yorku.ca
Wed Nov 8 15:51:37 PST 2006


Sanders says that he is for:

Single payer state administered health care A Wealth Tax A minimum wage increase

These three items are no small potatos and go against the grain of neoliberal hegemony which seems to have infected most social democrats. It seems to me that these three modest proposals would be a good core set of popular policies that all leftists could embrace in the US. If the this was all an unreal socialist could accomplish it would put to shame what "real" socialists have achieved lately.

No doubt Sanders is a bread and butter populist but he is nonetheless a socialist variant of that.

Here is a link to a Sanders article http://www.commondreams.org/views/021200-101.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/04/AR2006110401124_2.html?nav=rss_politics ____________________________________

Travis W Fast


> Michael J. Smith
> I haven't seen anything from Sanders, at least since he went to
Washington,
> that would surprise you coming from Ted Kennedy. He's a mildly liberal
> Democrat, for all practical purposes, and on no topic more so than
> the Middle East. There's a local paper, the Vermont Guardian, which
> particularly enjoys roasting Sanders on this topic:
>
> www.vermontguardian.com/local/072006/CandidatesAndKings.shtml
>
> > 3) Could a leftist by your definition, assuming Sanders isn't one,
> > ever win an election outside Woodstock or Berkeley, or even there?
>
> Dunno, and I don't much care. I'll grant your point, though, at
> least to the extent that there are probably better tasks for a leftist,
> whatever that is, than trying to get elected to the Senate -- at least
> until conditions in this great country change significantly.
>
> --
>
> Michael J. Smith
> mjs at smithbowen.net
>
> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



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