(born Sept 8, 1941) A bum who didn’t earn a steady paycheck until he was 40 years old. He later wrote about crudities for left-wing rags for $50 a story, and then tried politics where he has served as U.S. Senator (D-VT) since 1991. Peter Schweizer’s book, Profile’s in Corruption, details how Bernie over the course of his 30-plus years in public office funneled huge sums of money ($83M via clandestine media-buying company) to his family. Sanders ran unsuccessfully for the 2016 Democratic nomination (stolen by Hillary) for president and is running again in 2020. He has denied ever being a member of the communist SWP, but The Washington Examiner found his ties to the party are “deep and enduring.” He took several “goodwill” trips not only to the USSR (where he took his 2nd wife on their honeymoon), but also to communist Cuba and Nicaragua where he spoke at the 7th anniversary of the violent Sandinista Revolution in 1985. He has amassed a $2.5+ million fortune (disclosed), but wants you to redistribute your wealth, if any, to bums like him until a capitalist free market (along with shady dealings) made him millions.
Investor’s Business Daily reported:
Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything. And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances — “We will raise taxes;” he confirmed Monday, “yes, we will.”
One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.
Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”
Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.
The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off.“The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”
So he tried politics, starting his own socialist party. Four times he ran for Vermont public office, and four times he lost — badly. He never attracted more than single-digit support — even in the People’s Republic of Vermont. In his 1971 bid for U.S. Senate, the local press said the 30-year-old “Sanders describes himself as a carpenter who has worked with ‘disturbed children.’ ” In other words, a real winner.
He finally wormed his way into the Senate in 2006, where he still ranks as one of the poorest members of Congress. Save for a municipal pension, Sanders lists no assets in his name. All the assets provided in his financial disclosure form are his second wife’s. He does, however, have as much as $65,000 in credit-card debt.
Sure, Sanders may not be a hypocrite, but this is nothing to brag about. His worthless background contrasts sharply with the successful careers of other “outsiders” in the race for the White House, including a billionaire developer, a world-renowned neurosurgeon and a Fortune 500 CEO.
The choice in this election is shaping up to be a very clear one. It will likely boil down to a battle between those who create and produce wealth, and those who take it and redistribute it.
As mayor of Burlington, VT, Bernie Sanders appointed his wife to an initially unpaid position in his municipal administration. Against the city council’s objections, he later put her on the payroll at local taxpayers’ expense. Author, Peter Schweizer recalled Jane Sanders’ previous role as head of Burlington College, a private school with fewer than 200 students. One of the college’s board members admitted that hiring Jane Sanders was a function of her marriage to Bernie Sanders — then a member of House of Representatives from Vermont — believing it would help the school’s fundraising endeavors.
Despite its financial difficulties at the time, in 2009, Burlington College contracted with an unaccredited woodworking school run by Jane Sanders’ daughter, Carina Driscoll. Over $500,000 was funneled to from Burlington College to the woodworking school.
“Carina Driscoll’s school also received at least one federal grant from the US Department of Agriculture,” added Schweizer, noting that Bernie Sanders had oversight over the USDA’s funding at the time as a member of the Senate Budget Committee.
“I don’t believe in Charity,” said Bernie Sanders while mayor of Burlington.
Schweizer concluded, “While Sanders may not be a fan of charity, he seems to have no problem awarding jobs and contracts to those closest to him.”
“The biggest charity in Bernie’s life is Bernie,” said Schweizer in January.
Read the full video report’s transcript here.
Sanders’ personal files from his time as mayor of Burlington, from 1981 to 1989, show he supported and campaigned for the SWP and maintained a close relationship with its senior members. Archived at the University of Vermont, the files show Sanders “proudly endorsed and supported” the SWP candidate in 1980, Andrew Pulley. As an elector for Pulley on the Vermont ballot, Sanders said in a press release, “I fully support the SWP’s continued defense of the Cuban revolution.”
The SWP, founded in 1938 by devotees of Russian communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, promote an ideology of international revolution with the aim of “the abolition of capitalism through the establishment of a Workers and Farmers Republic” and the elimination of most private property.
Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, campaigned for SWP presidential nominee Mel Mason, a former Black Panther, four years later. Mason, during his campaign, praised the Russian and Chinese revolutions. “The greatest example of a socialist government is Cuba, and Nicaragua is right behind, but it’s still developing,” Mason said.
The Examiner found a flier in Sanders’ archives showing he was a featured speaker at the 1982 SWP “Campaign Kick-Off Rally” in Boston for the party’s candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and Congress.
In March, a CNN investigation found that when Sanders first ran for the Senate in the 1970s, he advocated full-blown socialist policies such as nationalizing major industries, including energy companies, factories and banks. And he campaigned for a 100 percent income tax for the wealthiest Americans.
In February, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Sanders whether he wanted America to become a socialist nation. The senator did not answer the question directly but rattled off a list of socialist policies he wants to implement such as “universal health care.”
Sanders began his political career under the tutelage of his older brother, Larry. President of Brooklyn College’s Young Democrats Club, Larry used to take Bernie to Manhattan’s Lower East Side to campaign against an urban renewal project that threatened to displace low-income residents.It seems fitting that the country’s first serious socialist presidential candidate since the 1930s should have political roots in the Lower East Side — the cradle of New York socialism. Known as Kleindeutschland in the nineteenth century, the area’s German immigrants transplanted Karl Marx’s teachings to American soil and built a sturdy workers movement aligned with the Socialist Labor Party.
Little Germany eventually gave way to “The Great Jewish Ghetto,” as more than five hundred thousand Yiddish-speaking immigrants streamed into the area.The Jewish workers movement, modeled to a great extent on its German predecessor, grew into the largest, most powerful force in Jewish life. On any given day, Yiddish soapboxers dotted street corners and public squares. Political debates filled cafes and lecture halls. Escalating cycles of strikes and consumer boycotts fostered a culture of resistance.Amid the ferment, socialism took shape, not so much as a doctrine, but a “whole climate of opinion that cemented, both economically and intellectually, a Jewish world in turmoil,” in the words of Moses Rischin, the Lower East Side’s pioneering historian.
New York socialism reached its political apex in the second decade of the twentieth century. In 1914, East Side voters sent labor lawyer and Socialist Party activist, Meyer London, to Congress. He was not America’s first Socialist congressman. That honor went to Milwaukee’s Victor Berger, an Austro-Hungarian Jew by birth. But London’s victory initiated a string of Socialist Party victories in New York. In 1917, the city’s predominantly Jewish precincts elected seven Socialist aldermen, ten state assemblymen, and a municipal judge to office.
“Du host gevunen /du host zikh aleyn gefunen,” the beloved Yiddish poet, Morris Rosenfeld, sang. “You have finally won / You have finally come into your own.”
Beyond New York, Americans of many backgrounds rallied around the Socialist Party. At its peak, the party counted almost 118,000 members across the country: native-born citizens, immigrants, blacks, whites, factory workers, farmers, and middle-class professionals. Debs garnered 6 percent of the popular vote in his 1912 presidential bid.
Socialists scored twelve hundred election victories and controlled a number of city governments, including those of Berkeley, Butte, Flint, and Milwaukee. The Kansas-based Socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason was for a time the most popular political weekly in the United States, with a peak circulation of 750,000.
And in the workplace, socialists controlled a number of important unions, including the Brewery Workers, the United Mine Workers, the International Association of Machinists, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and other garment workers unions. That a cooperative commonwealth or a workers republic or some other vision of socialist society could be achieved in the near future seemed eminently possible in the early twentieth century.
Yet by the end of World War I the Socialist Party was in tatters. Its antiwar position invited formidable repression; at the New York State Assembly’s opening session in January 1920, the Speaker excoriated the Socialists as an organization of “aliens, enemy aliens, and minors.” The quintet had, he charged, been “elected on a platform that is absolutely inimical to the best interests of the state of New York and the United States.” The Assembly proceeded to suspend its five Socialist legislators by a vote of 140 to 6. Voters sent the five Socialists back to office nine months later, but three of them were again expelled. The other two resigned in solidarity.
Debates over the Soviet Union dealt another, arguably more damaging blow to the Socialist Party. In January 1919, the Communist International called on socialists everywhere to wage a “merciless” war against their own parties to purge moderate elements or, failing that, split from them. The Comintern wanted anticapitalists to form new revolutionary parties fearless enough to seize political power immediately and establish dictatorships of the proletariat.
In the wake of the October Revolution, the party’s left wing was energized. The SP’s national leadership expelled the leftists en masse in the summer of 1919. Some of them assembled in Chicago to establish a new, revolutionary party, but, unable to agree on a platform, they created two parties, both claiming the mantle of Russian communism. And, so, the American left was reconfigured. It would remain permanently divided between socialists and communists, and among communists themselves.
The Socialist Party showed a brief sign of revival with the onset of the Great Depression. Its presidential candidate, Norman Thomas, won almost 900,000 votes in 1932. But factionalism consumed the SP again. “Militants” agitated for revolution; Trotskyists attempted to bore from within; the social-democratic “Old Guard” pulled toward the Democrats. All the while, Thomas’s “centrists” tried in vain to hold the organization together.
Still, socialism as a political force persisted in certain cities. Milwaukee’s Socialist mayor, Frank Zeidler, served three terms between 1948 and 1960. And in New York, erstwhile Socialists formed the American Labor Party (ALP) in 1936, which wielded considerable clout thanks to New York’s fusion law, which enabled voters to cast their votes for one of the major parties though a third party.
Backed by the traditionally pro-Socialist garment unions and supported mainly by Jewish voters, the ALP and its successor, the Liberal Party, achieved major legislative gains for affordable housing, decent health care, civil rights, amenable labor laws, and access to the arts and education for working people. Social democracy triumphed in postwar New York like nowhere else in the United States.
Sanders came of age in the heyday of New York exceptionalism. To him, it seemed obvious that workers ought to use unions and the political system to transform society. He joined the Young People’s Socialist League as a student at the University of Chicago, the youth wing of the Socialist Party USA. He also organized for a communist front, the United Packinghouse Workers Union, which at the time was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Founded in 1907, YPSL had little to show for itself by mid-century, but in the early sixties the country was changing. McCarthyism had lost credibility, Michael Harrington’s best-selling book, The Other America, brought poverty into popular conversation, and the Civil Rights Movement was on the march.
YPSL began to grow and its members played an outsized role in civil rights organizations, particularly in the North. Sanders became active in the Congress on Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and participated in what is said to be Chicago’s first civil rights sit-in.
But if the 1960s began on a promising note, the 1970s witnessed the Socialist Party demise. Pulled apart by the Vietnam War, it collapsed in 1972, after 101 years of existence. By then, New York City was spiraling toward fiscal insolvency and social disorder, a national symbol of all that ailed America.
“Don’t you see,” pleaded Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall, “the rest of the country looks upon New York like we’re left-wing, Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.”
What was a thirty-something New York Jewish socialist, who was not a pornographer, to do? Sanders moved to Vermont.
There he headed the American People’s History Society, an organ for Marxist propaganda and produced a glowing documentary on the life of socialist revolutionary Eugene Debs, who was jailed for espionage during the Red Scare and hailed by the Bolsheviks as “America’s greatest Marxist.” This subversive hero of Sanders, denounced even by liberal Democrats as a “traitor,” who hailed the “triumphant” Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Sanders still hangs a portrait of Debs on the wall in his Senate office.
In the early ’70s, Sanders helped found the Liberty Union Party, which called for the nationalization of all US banks and the public takeover of all private utility companies.
He hardly seemed poised to scale the heights of American politics. When he wasn’t selling “radical film strips” to schools, Sanders ran for office five times unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Liberty Union Party. After failed runs for Congress, Sanders in 1981 managed to get elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., where he restricted property rights for landlords, set price controls and raised property taxes to pay for communal land trusts. Local small businesses distributed fliers complaining their new mayor “does not believe in free enterprise.”
In 1983, at the height of the Reagan Revolution, when even liberalism became a dirty word, Sanders decided to run for office yet again. But this time he won. Stranger still, Sanders was reelected twice and received national recognition as one of the country’s most effective mayors. And, as if to enter the realm of science fiction, Sanders was elected to the House of Representatives in 1990 and then the Senate in 2006.
Sanders took several “goodwill” trips not only to the USSR, but also to Cuba and Nicaragua, where the Soviets were trying to expand their influence in our hemisphere. In 1985, he traveled to Managua to celebrate the rise to power of the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government. He called it a “heroic revolution.” Undermining anti-communist US policy, Sanders denounced the Reagan administration’s backing of the Contra rebels in a letter to the Sandinistas. His betrayal did not end there. Sanders lobbied the White House to stop the proxy war and even tried to broker a peace deal. He adopted Managua as a sister city and invited Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega to visit the US. He exalted Ortega as “an impressive guy,” while attacking President Reagan.
“The Sandinista government has more support among the Nicaraguan people — substantially more support — than Ronald Reagan has among the American people,” Sanders told Vermont government-access TV in 1985.
Video: At the invitation of the communist regime in Nicaragua, @BernieSanders speaks at the 7th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution in 1985, where he bashes “150 years” of American imperialism, & defends the Communist regimes in Latin America who are just trying to do good. pic.twitter.com/tJ84oMytSB
— The Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) February 21, 2019
Sanders also adopted a Soviet sister city outside Moscow and honeymooned with his second wife in the USSR. He put up a Soviet flag in his office, shocking even the Birkenstock-wearing local liberals. At the time, the Evil Empire was on the march around the world, and threatening the US with nuclear annihilation.
Then, in 1989, as the West was on the verge of winning the Cold War, Sanders addressed the national conference of the US Peace Council — a known front for the Communist Party USA, whose members swore an oath not only to the Soviet Union but to “the triumph of Soviet power in the US.” Sanders wants to bring what he admired in the USSR, Cuba, Nicaragua and other communist states to America.
For starters, he proposes completely nationalizing our health care system and putting private health insurance and drug companies “out of business.” He also wants to break up “big banks” and control the energy industry, while providing “free” college tuition, a “living wage” and guaranteed homeownership and jobs through massive public works projects. Price tag: $18 trillion.
Who will pay for it all? You will. Sanders plans to not only soak the rich with a 90 percent-plus tax rate, while charging Wall Street a “speculation tax,” but hit every American with a “global-warming tax.”
Of course, even that wouldn’t cover the cost of his communist schemes; a President Sanders would eventually soak the middle class he claims to champion. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, right?
How Bernie Sanders of Brooklyn became a credible candidate for the US presidency is something historians can puzzle over later. For the moment we can say that Sanders has accomplished no small achievement. He has restored the word “socialism” to American political discourse. The renewed vitality of the ideal may prove more significant, in the long term, than the election’s outcome.
Former mayoral advisers from Burlington defend their old boss. They note that Sanders was never a member of the Communist Party and deny he was even a small-c communist, even while acknowledging he named their city softball squad the “People’s Republic of Burlington” and the town’s minor league baseball team the “Vermont Reds.”
What about those communist sister cities he adopted? “Bernie established them to support people-to-people exchanges which might support peace in the long run,” said Bruce Seifer, who was one of Sanders’ central economic planners directing Burlington businesses to “reinvest their profits in the community.” In an interview, Seifer claimed that it was “no different than President Nixon opening relations with China.”
Please. Sanders and his Sanderistas are all still pining for what Debs called “the Greater Revolution yet to come.” Bernie is more careful about what he says today, although his agenda is communist, but he has never recanted his anti-Americanism and pro-Communism speeches. He is one of the most consistent of candidates. He is still enthusiastically in support of the Sandanistas who ruined Nicaragua and he backs the Chavistas who ruined Venezuela.
What’s revolting is how this hardcore commie’s campaign has gotten this far. While it may be hard to hate the old codger, it’s easy — and virtuous — to hate his un-American ideas. They should be swept into the dustbin with the rest of communist history.
Sanders is on record endorsing plenty of dumb ideas. He wrote in the 1970s that the country was close to experiencing a nuclear apocalypse or “death by poison gas.” He claimed cervical cancer was caused by women not experiencing enough orgasms.
To people like Bernie, the economy is a plaything, a living entity that can be made subservient to government. Operating on the same assumption, communist countries created bureaucratically-administered “command economies” and millions of their subjects starved. The Soviet Union, which was supposed to live forever, disintegrated after just 74 years and all but a few communist countries followed it into the dustbin of history. Nazi Germany’s command economy didn’t save it either; the “Thousand Year Reich” perished after just 12 years.
Bernie is still a Communist dictator-loving thug. And, just so you know, the Democrat Socialist agenda is worse that that of the Communist Party USA. Dem Socialists left the National Socialists because they didn’t see them as extreme enough.
Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate, admitted in 2019 that he is a part of the millionaire class. Sanders often rails against millionaires on the campaign stump and opened his 2016 presidential campaign by bragging that he didn’t “have millionaire or billionaire friends.” But Sanders himself is now a millionaire, he acknowledged to The New York Times. “I wrote a best-selling book,” he told the paper. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
Shady Dealings
Throughout his congressional career in the House and Senate, Bernie Sanders has used campaign funds to procure media-buying services from a consulting company founded and operated by his wife and her children.
Peter Schweizer stated in his book, ‘Profiles in Corruption‘:
[In] 2000, Bernie was in Washington D.C, serving in Congress. Jane and her children a new LLC called Sanders and Driscoll. The new firm was a for-profit consulting company, and was run by Jane, daughter Carina, and son David. The family ran this new business out of the Sanders family home. Because of the way it was structured, it’s impossible to know just how much money Bernie’s wife and children made from his congressional campaign. But critics would claim that Sanders doled out more than $150,000 to his family through the new company.Jane would even set up a media buying company, meaning that she would get paid every time candidate Bernie Sanders bought television advertising for his Congressional campaigns.
Then, during his 2016 presidential run, the Sanders campaign would funnel $82 million dollars through a mysterious media buying company run by Jane’s former colleagues. That company, known as Olde Towne Media, was located in private home in a cul de sac in Virginia.
Nestled near the end of a suburban cul-de-sac in Alexandria, Virginia, is one of the most profitable media buying agencies in the 2016 primary race for the White House. The unassuming two-story, single family home at 4507 Penwood Drive, is the registered address for Old Towne Media LLC — the media buying company that purchased more than $82 million in TV ad time for Bernie Sanders’ Democratic presidential campaign, Federal Election Commission reports through May show.
Old Towne’s income from the Sanders campaign has not been disclosed, but the industry standard for ad buy commissions is 15 percent. Based on that formula, the firm could have made $12 million. The ad agency, established in 2014, has almost exclusively served the Sanders campaign, and the company keeps a low profile. It has no website and no listed phone number. A full list of principals isn’t publicly available.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Old Towne’s only other work besides the $82 million in Sanders ad buys was two months of work for liberal super PAC New Leadership for Ohio. The PAC placed $879,222 in ads.
Old Towne Media has another connection to Sanders: The two principal buyers for the company worked in the past with his wife, Jane. Jane Sanders, Shelli Hutton-Hartig and Barbara Abar Bougie were media buyers during Bernie Sanders’ 2006 Senate race. In the 2006 Senate campaign, his Republican opponent suggested Sanders’ wife improperly profited from campaign ad buys. Richard Tarrant leveled the accusation a few months after news media reported that Jane Sanders had received $30,000 from 2002 to 2004 for work on her husband’s congressional campaigns, which is allowed under federal rules.
In response to Tarrant’s criticism at the time, Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager, said Jane made the 2006 buys as a volunteer and gave her commission to the firm, Abar Hutton Media, which was run by Hutton-Hartig and Bougie. During the 2016 primary campaign, Hutton-Hartig and Bougie signed media contracts for Bernie Sanders through their new company, Old Towne Media.
Public records show Hartig owns 4507 Penwood Drive in Alexandria with his wife, Shelli Hutton-Hartig, one of the chief Sanders ad buyers throughout the 2016 primary calendar and a buyer on his 2006 campaign. In April 2016, The Washington Post reported that the Sanders campaign was outspending Clinton on media strategy, creating “a financial windfall for his team of Washington consultants.”
A Slate piece described the company as “a black box” and a “front company.” WaPo also questioned how a small company with so little experience landed such lucrative work. Read more…
See also:
- https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259477/bernie-sanders-communist-and-ignoramus-matthew-vadum
- https://nypost.com/2016/01/16/dont-be-fooled-by-bernie-sanders-hes-a-diehard-communist/
- https://www.wnd.com/2019/05/sanders-has-deep-ties-to-communist-socialist-workers-party/
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