Hillary and Bernie in perspective

 We enjoyed these two lengthy, excellent articles in the New York Review of Books on the top Democratic Party contenders for president because they made some points about both of them in relaxed, accurate language. All we know about the author, Simon Head, is that he holds academic positions at Oxford and NYU, and is a journalist whose latest book is The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age (1996). Unlike so many writers on the contemporary political situation, Head seems to be contemporary. In our view many commentators are practically useless, regardless of their sincerity or the strength of their bile, because they don't have sufficient historical distance on the scene to describe the forces at work.
Simon Head is very good at perspective.  -- blj  
 

Further research done by Sirota and Perez ofInternational Business Times and based on US government and Clinton Foundation data shows that during her term the State Department authorized $165 billion in commercial arms sales to twenty nations that had given money to the Clinton Foundation. These include the governments of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Algeria, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, all of whose records on human rights had been criticized by the State Department itself. During Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary of state, arms sales to the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation ran at nearly double the value of sales to the same nations during George W. Bush’s second term. There was also an additional $151 billion worth of armaments sold to sixteen nations that had donated funds to the Clinton Foundation; these were deals organized by the Pentagon but which could only be completed with Hillary Clinton’s authorization as secretary of state. They were worth nearly one and a half times the value of equivalent sales during Bush’s second term. -- Simon Head, NYRB, Jan. 30, 2016.
 
It is here that the third and perhaps least understood strand of Sanders’s radicalism comes into play: his ability to organize a previously unrecognized constituency—one that embraces the shrinking middle class, both white- and blue-collar, the working and non-working poor, as well as young, first-time voters with large student-loan debts. One thing that comes over strongly in interviews of those attending Sanders rallies is their sense that they are no longer alone, that they’re joining with thousands who are in much the same predicament as they are, and that together they can change things for the better. -- Simon Head, NYRB, Dec. 23,2015
 

1-30-16
New York Review of Books
The Clinton System
Simon Head
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/01/30/clinton-system-donor-machine-201...Clintons%20Bizet%20Soviet%20artists&utm_content=NYR%20Clintons%20Bizet%20Soviet%20artists+CID_299cb6b9c73a72af9d751324b48c30cc&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=The%20Clinton%20System
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bill Clinton during the seventh annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), New York City, September 22, 2011
On January 17, in the final Democratic debate before the primary season begins, Bernie Sanders attacked Hillary Clinton for her close financial ties to Wall Street, something he had avoided in his campaigning up to that moment: “I don’t take money from big banks….You’ve received over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in one year,” he said. Sanders’s criticisms coincided with recent reports that the FBI might be expanding its inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails to include her ties to big donors while serving as secretary of state. But a larger question concerns how Hillary and Bill Clinton have built their powerful donor machine, and what its existence might mean for Hillary Clinton’s future conduct as American president. The following investigation, drawing on many different sources, is intended to give a full sense of the facts about Clinton and not to endorse a particular candidate in the coming election.
It’s an axiom of Washington politics in the age ofCitizens United and Super PACs that corporations and the very rich can channel almost unlimited amounts of money to candidates for high office to pave the way for later favors. According to the public service websiteOpen Secrets, in the 2016 campaign, as of October, in addition to direct campaign contributions, Jeb Bush had at his disposal $103 million in “outside money”—groups such as PACs and Super PACs and so called “dark money” organizations that work on behalf of a particular candidate. Ted Cruz had $38 million in such funds, Marco Rubio $17 million, and Chris Christie $14 million.
Yet few have been as adept at exploiting this big-money politics as Bill and Hillary Clinton. In the 2016 campaign, as of October, Hillary Clinton had raised $20 million in “outside” money, on top of $77 million in direct campaign contributions—the highest in direct contributions of any candidate at the time. But she and her husband have other links to big donors, and they go back much further than the current election cycle. What stands out about what I will call the Clinton System is the scale and complexity of the connections involved, the length of time they have been in operation, the presence of former president Bill Clinton alongside Hillary as an equal partner in the enterprise, and the sheer magnitude of the funds involved.
Scale and complexity arise from the multiple channels that link Clinton donors to the Clintons: there is the stream of six-figure lecture fees paid to Bill and Hillary Clinton, mostly from large corporations and banks, which have earned them more than $125 million in the fifteen years since Bill Clinton left office in 2001. There are the direct payments to Hillary Clinton’s political campaigns, including for the Senate in 2000 and for the presidency in 2008 and now in 2016, which had reached a total of $712.4 million as of September 30, 2015, the most recent figures compiled by Open Secrets. Four of the top five sources of these funds are major banks: Citigroup Inc, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and Morgan Stanley. The Clinton campaign meanwhile has set a goal of raising $1 billion for her Super PAC for the 2016 election.
Finally there is the nearly $2 billion that donors have contributed to the Clinton Foundation and its satellite organizations since Bill Clinton left office. It may seem odd to include donations to the foundation among the chief ways that corporations and the super-rich can gain access to the Clintons, earn their goodwill, and hope for future favors in return. The foundation’s funds are mostly spent on unequivocally good causes—everything from promoting forestation in Africa and helping small farmers in the Caribbean to working with local governments and businesses in the US to promote wellness and physical fitness.
Moreover, not all donors to the Clinton Foundation and its affiliated institutions are corporate. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, ranks among the largest contributors to the Clinton Foundation, having made grants totaling more than $25 million since its inception, and with a special focus, to quote a 2014 Clinton Foundation press release, on a partnership “to gather and analyze data about the status of women and girls’ participation around the world.”
But among the largest contributors to the foundation are many of the same donors that have supported Hillary Clinton’s political campaigns and that have paid the Clintons six-figure lecture fees. For these mainly corporate donors, access to the Clintons may be as important as the purposes for which their donations are used. According to a February 2015 analysis of Clinton Foundation funding by The Washington Post, the financial services industry has accounted for the largest single share of the foundation’s corporate donors. Other major donors to the foundation have included US defense and energy corporations and their overseas government clients.
Former US presidents have long used charitable foundations as a way to perpetuate their influence and to attract speaking fees as a lucrative source of income. But the Clintons are unique in being able to rely on the worldwide drawing power of former president Bill Clinton to help finance the political career of Hillary Clinton—with the expectation among donors that as a senator, secretary of state, and possible future president Hillary Clinton might be well placed to return their favors. The annual meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative have provided a prime setting for transactions between the Clintons and their benefactors. Among the corporate sponsors of the 2014 and 2015 CGI conferences in New York City, for example, were HSBC, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Proctor and Gamble, Cisco, PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Blackstone Group, Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobile, Microsoft, and Hewlett Packard. For sponsorship of $250,000 or more, corporate executives attending the CGI meetings can enjoy special privileges up to and including direct access to the Clintons.
Frank Giustra speaks as former President Bill Clinton looks on during a press conference announcing the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, New York, June 21, 2007
In a 2013 investigative article for The New Republic, Alec MacGillis described the annual CGI meeting as a complicated give and take in which CEOs provide cash for CGI projects in exchange for access to Bill Clinton. MacGillis focused on the activities of Douglas Band, a former low-level aide in the Clinton White House, who at the CGI meetings arranged favors for selected CEOs such as “getting them on the stage with Clinton, relaxing the background checks for credentials, or providing slots in the photo line.” At the CGI’s 2012 meeting it was Muhtar Kent, then CEO of Coca Cola, who, The New York Times reported, “won a coveted spot on the dais with Mr. Clinton.”
Along with the Clinton Foundation, lecture fees have offered another way for interested parties such as Citicorp and Goldman Sachs to support the Clintons beyond direct campaign donations. Data drawn from the Clintons’ annual financial statements, the Clinton Foundation, and the banks themselves show that between 2001 and 2014 Bill Clinton earned $1.52 million in fees from UBS, $1.35 million from Goldman Sachs, $900,000 from the Bank of America, $770,000 from Deutsche Bank, and $650,000 from Barclays Capital. Since she stepped down as secretary of state in February 2013, Hillary Clinton has been earning comparable fees from the same sources. Of the nearly $10 million she earned in lecture fees in 2013 alone, nearly $1.6 million from major Wall Street banks, including $675,000 from Goldman Sachs (the payments referred to by Bernie Sanders in the January 17 2016 debate), and $225,000 each from UBS, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Deutsche Bank.
Among the most striking and troubling aspects of the Clinton System are the large contributions corporations and foreign governments have made to the Clinton Foundation, along with Bill Clinton’s readiness to accept six-figure speaking fees from some of them, at times when the donors themselves had a potential financial interest in decisions being made at Hillary Clinton’s State Department. An investigation published in April 2015 by Andrew Perez, David Sirota and Matthew Cunningham-Cook at International Business Times shows that during the three-year period from October 2009 through December 2012, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, there were at least thirteen occasions—collectively worth $2.5 million—when Bill Clinton received a six-figure speaking fee from corporations or trade groups that, according to Federal Government records, were at the time engaged in lobbying at the State Department.
These payments to Bill Clinton in 2010 included: $175,000 from VeriSign Corporation, which was engaged in lobbying at the State Department on cybersecurity and Internet taxation; $175,000 from Microsoft, which was lobbying the government on the issuance of immigrant work visas; $200,000 from SalesForce, a firm that lobbied the government on digital security issues, among other things. In 2011, these payments included: $200,000 from Goldman Sachs, which was lobbying on the Budget Control Act; and $200,000 from PhRMA, the trade association representing drug companies, which was seeking special trade protections for US-innovated drugs in the Trans-Pacific Partnership then being negotiated.
And in 2012, payments included: $200,000 from the National Retail Federation, which was lobbying at the State Department on legislation to fight Chinese currency manipulation; $175,000 from BHP Billiton, which wanted the government to protect its mining interests in Gabon; $200,000 from Oracle, which, like Microsoft, was seeking the government to issue work visas and measures dealing with cyber-espionage; and $300,000 from Dell Corporation, which was lobbying the State Department to protest tariffs imposed by European countries on its computers.
During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, US defense corporations and their overseas clients also contributed between $54 and $141 million to the Clinton Foundation. (Because the foundation discloses a range of values within which the contributions of particular donors might fall, only minimum and maximum estimates can be given.) In the same period, these US defense corporations and their overseas government clients also paid a total of $625,000 to Bill Clinton in speaking fees.
In March 2011, for example, Bill Clinton was paid $175,000 by the Kuwait America Foundation to be the guest of honor and keynote speaker at its annual Washington gala. Among the sponsors were Boeing and the government of Kuwait, through its Washington embassy. Shortly before, the State Department, under Hillary Clinton, had authorized a $693 million deal to provide Kuwait with Boeing’s Globemaster military transport aircraft. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton had the statutory duty to rule on whether proposed arms deals with foreign governments were in the US’s national interest.
Further research done by Sirota and Perez ofInternational Business Times and based on US government and Clinton Foundation data shows that during her term the State Department authorized $165 billion in commercial arms sales to twenty nations that had given money to the Clinton Foundation. These include the governments of Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Algeria, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, all of whose records on human rights had been criticized by the State Department itself. During Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary of state, arms sales to the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation ran at nearly double the value of sales to the same nations during George W. Bush’s second term. There was also an additional $151 billion worth of armaments sold to sixteen nations that had donated funds to the Clinton Foundation; these were deals organized by the Pentagon but which could only be completed with Hillary Clinton’s authorization as secretary of state. They were worth nearly one and a half times the value of equivalent sales during Bush’s second term.
Among the most important, and lucrative, business friendships the Clintons have formed through the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiatives has been that with Canadian energy billionaire Frank Giustra. A major donor to the foundation for many years, Giustra became a member of its board and since 2007 has been co-sponsor of the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative, or CGGI. In turn, Bill Clinton’s political influence and personal contacts with foreign heads of state have been crucial to Giustra’s international business interests.
In September 2005, Bill Clinton and Giustra travelled to Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, to meet with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. At their meeting Clinton told Nazarbayev that he would support Kazakhstan’s bid to become chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The OSCE is a body with the responsibility for verifying, among other things, the fairness of elections among member states. According to multiple sources, including the BBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, Nazarbayev coveted this position for Kazakhstan, primarily as a mark of European diplomatic respectability for his country and himself.
Clinton’s endorsement of the Kazakh bid was truly bizarre in view of Kazakhstan’s ranking by Transparency International as among the most corrupt countries in the world—126th, on a par with Pakistan, Belarus, and Honduras. Freedom House in New York judges Kazakhstan to be “not free,” with Nazarbayev clocking up Soviet-era margins of victory of 90 percent or more in Kazakh presidential elections. Yet in a December 2005 letter to Nazarbayev following one of his landslide victories, Bill Clinton wrote: “Recognizing that your work has received an excellent grade is one of the most important rewards in life.” It is unclear what influence, if any, Bill Clinton’s support for Nazarbayev may have had in Kazakhstan’s efforts to lead the OSCE, but in 2007, after the United States gave its backing to the bid, Kazakhstan was chosen as the next chair of the OSCE, a position it assumed in 2010.
Possible reasons for Clinton’s support become clearer when we scrutinize the activities of Frank Giustra. In a January 31, 2008 article in The New York Times, Jo Becker and Don Van Natta, Jr., provided detailed evidence that Nazarbayev brought his influence to bear to enable Giustra to beat out better-qualified competitors for a stake in Kazakhstan’s uranium mines worth $350 million. In an interview with the Times,Moukhtar Dzakishev, then chair of the state-owned nuclear holding company Kazatomprom, confirmed that Giustra had met with Nazarbayev in Almaty, that Giustra had told the dictator he was trying to do business with Kazatomprom, and that he was told in return, “Very good, go to it.”
The deal was closed within forty-eight hours of Clinton’s departure from Almaty. Following this successful visit to Central Asia, Giustra donated $31 million to the Clinton Foundation. He then made a further donation of $100 million to the foundation in June 2008.
In an interview with David Remnick for a September 2006 New Yorker profile on Clinton’s post-presidency, Giustra described how his ties to Clinton could work for him and his interests. With Bill Clinton at that moment riding aboard his private executive jet for a journey across Africa (“complete with leather furniture and a stateroom,” according to The New Yorker),Giustra told Remnick that “all of my chips, almost, are on Bill Clinton. He’s a brand, a worldwide brand, and he can do things and ask for things that no one else can.”
The Clinton-Giustra connection became even more important in Colombia, where from 2005 onward Bill Clinton arranged a series of meetings between Giustra and then-president Álvaro Uribe, during which Clinton was frequently present. Giustra was already known in Colombia as the founder and backer of Pacific Rubiales, a Colombian oil company formed in 2003. In 2007, according to The Wall Street Journal, Bill Clinton had invited Uribe and Giustra to meet with him at the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York.
The meetings provided a way for Giustra to lobby Uribe and his administration on behalf of Pacific Rubiales at a time when the Uribe administration was seeking to end the dominance of the national oil company, Ecopetrol, and open up the sector to foreign investors. These contacts appear to have born fruit for Giustra. In 2007 Pacific Rubiales signed a $300 million deal with Ecopetrol to build a 250 kilometer pipeline between Meta and Casanare provinces in Central Colombia. In the same year, Pacific Rubiales gained control of the Rubiales oilfield, Colombia’s largest.
Uribe was a singular interlocutor for Clinton and Giustra. The Colombian leader had been viewed by the George W. Bush administration as a crucial ally in the War on Drugs, in which Colombia was often held up as a success story. Yet Uribe and his political allies had longstanding connections to the Colombian drug cartels. In a 1991 intelligence report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), declassified in August 2004, described Uribe as “a Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin Cartel at high government levels…. Uribe was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the United States. [He] has worked for the Medellín cartel” and is “a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar Gaviria,” the longtime drug kingpin.
A 2011 report on events of 2010 by Human Rights Watch provides detailed evidence that Uribe was not free of this poisonous legacy when he was dealing with Clinton and Giustra. The report described President Uribe’s administration as “racked by scandals over extrajudicial killings by the army, a highly questioned paramilitary demobilization process, and abuses by the national intelligence service,” which participated in illegal surveillance of human rights defenders, journalists, opposition politicians, and Supreme Court justices. Hillary Clinton was warned about these human rights violations when, as secretary of state, she met with Bill Clinton, Giustra, and Uribe during a trip to Bogota, the Colombian capital, in June 2010. In an email message relayed to Secretary Clinton by the US Embassy in Bogota, Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts warned that “while in Colombia, the most important thing the Secretary can do is to avoid effusive praise for President Álvaro Uribe.”
Hillary Clinton chose to ignore the warning. Addressing Uribe in the visit’s keynote speech, Clinton described him as an “essential partner to the United States” whose “commitment to building strong democratic institutions here in Colombia” would “leave a legacy of great progress that will be viewed in historic terms.” During her visit Clinton also affirmed her support for a US-Columbia free trade agreement, from which Giustra and other wealthy investors stood to benefit. This reversed her previous opposition to the agreement during her campaign for president in 2008, on grounds of Colombia’s poor human rights record, especially concerning the rights of labor unions.
Since the Giustra deal, there have also been complaints about the treatment of workers at Pacific Rubiales’s Colombian oil fields, which has been the target of numerous strikes and lawsuits by pro-labor groups. In an August 2011 speech to the Colombian Senate, Jorge Robledo, leader of the Polo Democrático Alternativo(Social Democratic) Party in the Colombian Senate, described the living quarters for Pacific Rubiales employees as “concentration camp-like,” with work shifts that sometimes exceeded sixteen hours a day for weeks on end, inadequate sanitary facilities and shared beds, and with the company relying on third-party hiring halls to avoid unionization and the payment of pension and healthcare benefits. (In April 2015, Peter Volk, general counsel for Pacific Rubiales, denied these allegations, saying that the corporation “fully respects the rights of its workers and demands from companies that provide services to it to also do so.”)
The record of the Clinton System raises deep questions about whether a Hillary Clinton presidency would take on the growing political influence of large corporate interests and Wall Street banks. The next president will need to address critical economic and social issues, including the stagnating incomes of the middle class, the tax loopholes that allow hedge-funders and other members of the super-rich to be taxed at lower rates than many average Americans, and the runaway costs of higher education. Above all is the question of further reform of Wall Street and the banking system to prevent a recurrence of the behavior that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
So far, Hillary Clinton has refused to commit herself to a reintroduction of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which Bill Clinton allowed to be repealed in 1999 on the advice of Democrats with close ties to Wall Street, including Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. The reintroduction of Glass-Steagall, favored by Bernie Sanders, would prevent banks from speculating in financial derivatives, a leading cause of the 2007-2008 crash. With leading Wall Street banks so prominent in the Clintons’ fundraising streams, can Hillary Clinton be relied upon to reform the banks beyond the modest achievements of the Dodd-Frank bill of 2010?
 
12-23-15
Bernie Sanders: The Quiet Revolt
Simon Head
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/12/23/bernie-sanders-quiet-revolt/
In 2003 I wrote in my The New Ruthless Economy that one of the great imponderables of the twenty-first century was how long it would take for the deteriorating economic circumstances of most Americans to become a dominant political issue. It has taken over ten years but it is now happening, and its most dramatic manifestation to date is the rise of Bernie Sanders. While many political commentators seem to have concluded that Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee, polls taken as recently as the third week of December show Sanders to be ahead by more than ten points in New Hampshire and within single-figure striking distance of her in Iowa, the other early primary state.
Though he continues to receive far less attention in the national media than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Sanders is posing a powerful challenge not only to the Democratic establishment aligned with Hillary Clinton, but also the school of thought that assumes that the Democrats need an establishment candidate like Clinton to run a viable campaign for president. Why this should be happening right now is a mystery for historians to unravel. It could be the delayed effect of the Great Recession of 2007-2008, or of economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s unmasking of the vast concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent and the 0.1 percent of Americans, or just the cumulative effect of years of disappointment for many American workers.
Such mass progressive awakenings have happened before. I remember taking part in antiwar demonstrations on the East and West coasts in the Fall and Winter of 1967–1968. I noticed that significant numbers of solid middle-class citizens were joining in, sometimes with strollers, children, and dogs in tow. I felt at the time that this was the writing on the wall for Lyndon Johnson, as indeed it turned out to be. We may yet see such a shift away from Hillary Clinton, despite her strong performance in the recent debates and her recent recovery in the polls.
If it happens, it will owe in large part to Sanders’s unusual, if not unique, political identity. Consider the mix of political labels being attached to him, some by Sanders himself: liberal, left-liberal, progressive,pragmatist, radical, independent, socialist, and democratic socialist. Sanders’s straight talk about the growing inequalities of income and wealth in America has been much written about, notably in a long profileof him in The New Yorker in October. But most of this writing has been of the campaign trail genre, and has not gotten very far in sorting out the strands of radicalism that have come together in Sanders’s run for the presidency and that have attracted large numbers of Americans dissatisfied with their deteriorating economic circumstances and with the politics that has helped create them.
Sanders is unusual because he brings together three kinds of radicalism, each with very different roots. First is Sanders’s commitment to bringing the progressive ideas of Scandinavian social democracy to the United States, including free and universal health care, free higher education at state colleges and universities, mandatory maternity and sick leave benefits, and higher taxes on higher incomes. In American political history you have to go back to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society or even to the early New Deal to find anything comparable.
The second strand of Sanders’s radicalism is his excoriating account of contemporary American capitalism, and with this he neither looks nor sounds like a consensus-minded Scandinavian social democrat. Here Sanders is willing to name and denounce the new economic royalists—what he calls collectively the “billionaire class”—in a way that Hillary Clinton, who has relied heavily on their financial backing, has not. These include the leading Wall Street banks and their lobbyists; the energy, health care, pharmaceutical, and defense industries; and the actual billionaires deploying their wealth on behalf of the far right, foremost among them the Koch brothers, the Walton family of Walmart, and the real estate tycoon Sheldon Adelson.
From these great concentrations of wealth and power, Sanders argues, derive multiple injustices: the corrupting of electoral and legislative politics with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling; the steady erosion of the American middle class, which has suffered stagnating income and declining benefits, even as corporations return to profitability and enjoy historically low interest rates; and the emergence of an American workplace where most employees are putting in longer hours, earning less, and suffering from less job security than ever before.
Sanders can support these claims with substantial bodies of empirical data and research. There are the monthly figures put out by the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which show a steady decline in real hourly and weekly earnings of most working Americans since the 1970s. There is the work of the French economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez documenting a growing and overwhelming concentration of income and wealth in the US in the hands of the top 1 percent—and especially the top 0.1 percent—of taxpayers. There is also the research of Jacob Hacker of Yale, showing how the disposable income of middle-income Americans has been further eroded by health care and pension costs dumped on them by their corporate employers, what Hacker calls the Great Risk Shift.
But the challenge for Sanders is not the arguments themselves, which are widely acknowledged (Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century was a runaway bestseller last year). The challenge is how to organize those who have suffered in the harsh new economy into a viable political force. In the 1930s and the succeeding decades many of those facing hardship could benefit from the support and solidarity of big labor unions and the Democrats’ big-city political machines. In our own times these networks are largely gone. Those being laid off, downsized, reengineered, or outsourced today are, in comparison with their grandparents and great-grandparents, far more likely to find themselves isolated and alone, especially those from middle-income families, who may be facing a drastic and very visible loss of class identity.
It is here that the third and perhaps least understood strand of Sanders’s radicalism comes into play: his ability to organize a previously unrecognized constituency—one that embraces the shrinking middle class, both white- and blue-collar, the working and non-working poor, as well as young, first-time voters with large student-loan debts. One thing that comes over strongly in interviews of those attending Sanders rallies is their sense that they are no longer alone, that they’re joining with thousands who are in much the same predicament as they are, and that together they can change things for the better.
Sanders’s success in bringing these people together comes from his grounding, as a student at the University of Chicago in the early 1960s, in the grass-roots politics of Saul Alinsky (1909–1972), the founder of modern American community organizing. Alinsky’s crucial insight was that people at the bottom of the system could fight for local political and economic power by forming alliances with sympathetic community groups sharing many of their interests. From the late 1930s through the 1960s, Alinsky focused on the black ghettoes and white working-class districts of Chicago, Rochester, Buffalo, Oakland, and many other cities. His greatest success—and one of the best examples of his methods at work—was his 1939 campaign to unionize the Armour Company’s Back of the Yards meat packing plant in Chicago.
In the late 1930s, working conditions at the Armour plant still evoked the world of Upton Sinclair: an immigrant workforce toiled long hours for poverty wages, in unsanitary and unsafe conditions. With Chicago run by a corrupt political machine, Alinsky took the lead in mobilizing every constituency he could in the local community against Armour—including the churches and especially the Catholic Church, labor unions, neighborhood groups, athletic clubs, and small businesses.
He brought in John L. Lewis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to advise him, and after a huge mass demonstration in July 1939, Armour agreed to recognize the union. In a 1999 PBS documentary, Ed Chambers, who was Alinsky’s successor as Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, described the tactics that had proven so successful—and that would be repeated in many of Alinsky’s postwar campaigns:  “All change comes about as a result of pressure or threats. But you can’t get social change or social justice without confronting it. Because if you are a ‘have not,’ ‘the haves’ never give you anything that’s real.”
Alinksy is no longer a reference point in contemporary American politics, although his work and influence features in the CVs of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. In a 2007 New Republic profile, Ryan Lizzadescribes the young Obama’s training as an Alinskian community organizer in 1980s Chicago, though Lizza noted that Obama as a presidential candidate-in-the-making was already distancing himself from this past, omitting all mention of Alinsky in his campaign biography, The Audacity of Hope. For her part, Clinton titled her 1969 BA thesis at Wellesley College “There is Only the Fight…”: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model, something she has not cared to mention in recent campaigning.
But it is Sanders who has gone on to put Alinskian methods into practice as both a politician in Vermont and a candidate for president. In a November interview with NPR, Sanders described how his work as a community organizer as a student at the University of Chicago “did a lot to influence the politics I now have.” In fact, Sanders was chair of CORE’s (Congress on Racial Equality) social action committee at the university at a time when the organization, advised by Alinsky, was leading the campaign against segregation in Chicago schools and housing. CORE and its student supporters were fighting the university itself, which upheld segregation through a policy of purchasing vacant homes in its neighborhood to prevent them from being purchased by African Americans. In 1962, Sanders organized a sit-in at the president’s office to protest the university housing policies; the following year, he was arrested while demonstrating against segregation in the Chicago schools.
Two decades later, Sanders’s remarkable campaign for Mayor of Burlington, Vermont as an independent was another illuminating case history of successful Alinskian campaigning at the grassroots, adapted from its Chicago origins to the more tranquil setting of Vermont. Sanders followed Alinsky’s cardinal rule of taking on the city’s dominant business interests and their allies in City Hall with a program that was, for Burlington, radical and progressive: curbing real estate development at the city center and  providing ample public space there, especially on the waterfront of Lake Champlain; building affordable housing; keeping out the mega-retailers and creating  neighborhood associations as participants in city planning decisions. To achieve this Sanders put together an all-embracing, Alinskian coalition of women’s groups, unions, neighborhood activists, environmentalists, even the police patrolman’s association, all of whom saw him as someone who could deliver on his pledge to make Burlington a more affordable and civilized place to live.
There are big differences between Burlington, with a population of 42,000, and the United States, with a population of nearly 320 million. Alinsky himself never tried to reproduce his approach on a national scale. But in Alinsky’s time there were no social media, whose potential Sanders, like the Obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012, has deftly exploited. And unlike the president, Sanders has also used social media to rally people behind a truly radical message. Not only has he formed alliances with sympathetic community groups like labor unions, environmental organizations, immigrant advocacy groups, and public sector workers; he has also been able to rely on these groups’ own considerable presence on social media to reach voters.
These efforts may be less attention-getting than Trump’s, but they have proven highly effective in building a strong base of supporters. The Sanders campaign has now drawn more than 2.2 million individual donations in 2015, surpassing even Obama’s record for the number of donations to a presidential candidate in a single year. In the third quarter, he raised four times as much money as Clinton from donors contributing $200 or less.
The columnist Mark Shields has pointed out on PBS’sNewshour that it was no mean feat for Sanders to attract an audience of 27,500 in Los Angeles in August, a city where, in Shields’s words, the typical campaign event is a party at Steven Spielberg’s house hosted by George Clooney. This was an event at which Sanders said, to thunderous applause,
There is something profoundly wrong when one family, the owners of Walmart, own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the American people. This is an economy which is rigged, which is designed to benefit the people on top, and we are going to create an economy which works for all people.
Sanders has significant weaknesses. His poll numbers have been much lower in the south, where he is far less known. They show Hillary Clinton enjoying strong support among African Americans, who favor her over Sanders by 5–1 or more. But it is surely patronizing to African-Americans to portray them as locked in an unending embrace with the Clintons, impervious to Hillary Clinton’s reliance on big corporate donors, her weaknesses as a candidate, which are still considerable, and the shifting winds of the campaign as it unfolds. Until now, Sanders has largely avoided direct criticism of Clinton.  The big question is whether he will extend his critique of the billionaire class and their corrupting political power to what I’ll call the Clinton system. That system will be the subject of a second article.