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    Sanders hopes nation smitten by his mittens will back food charity push

    Bernie Sanders is turning a meme based on the mittens he wore to Joe Biden’s inauguration into a money-making opportunity – to benefit programmes like Meals on Wheels in a time of spiralling food insecurity.At the US Capitol on Wednesday, the independent senator from Vermont was pictured wearing chunky knitted mittens, sitting cross-legged on a folding chair, socially distanced from other guests, hunched against the cold.The image was soon spliced into a billion social media pictures and videos, the be-mittened democratic socialist appearing from Yalta to the ranks of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the famous potters’ wheel scene in Ghost. In Wisconsin, one man even adapted a snow sculpture of the Lincoln Memorial, a pillar of American democracy, to depict Sanders and his mittens instead.The Vermont second-grade teacher who made the mittens out of an old sweater and recycled plastic bottles and offered them on Etsy soon announced she had sold out.“There’s no possible way I could make 6,000 pairs of mittens,” Jen Ellis told Jewish Insider, “and every time I go into my email, another several hundred people have emailed me. I hate to disappoint people, but the mittens, they’re one of a kind and they’re unique and, sometimes in this world, you just can’t get everything you want.”On Sunday, a chuckling Sanders welcomed his mittens’ notoriety and described how he wanted to put it to work.“Not only are we having fun,” the 79-year-old told CNN’s State of the Union, “what we’re doing here in Vermont, is we’re going to be selling around the country sweatshirts and T-shirts and all of the money that’s going to be raised, which I expect will be a couple of million dollars, will be going to programs like Meals on Wheels that feed low-income senior citizens.”Food insecurity under the coronavirus pandemic has become a serious problem, among Biden’s targets in his first days as president.“So,” Sanders added, “it turns out actually it’s a good thing, not only fun.”On the senator’s website on Sunday morning, a $45 “Chairman Sanders” crewneck sweatshirt featuring the inauguration image was itself sold out. More

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    'You just can’t get everything you want': Bernie Sanders' mittens not for sale

    Bernie Sanders’ mittens may have become the unexpected must-have fashion accessory of Joe Biden’s inauguration, but those hoping to steal the Vermont senator’s look are in for a disappointment. The teacher who made them and gave them to Sanders says she has none for sale.The mittens that sparked hundreds of internet memes were made from repurposed sweaters and recycled plastic by Jen Ellis, 42, a second grade teacher who lives in Essex Junction, Vermont, just outside of Burlington, where Sanders was mayor in the 1980s.“I don’t have any mittens to sell. I don’t really do it a lot any more. I’m flattered that they want them, but there are lots of people on Etsy who sell them and hopefully people will get some business from them. But I’m not going to quit my day job,” Ellis told the Jewish Insider in an interview on Wednesday night.She explained that the demand had been overwhelming. “I am a second grade teacher, and I’m a mom, and all that keeps me really busy. There’s no possible way I could make 6,000 pairs of mittens, and every time I go into my email, another several hundred people have emailed me.”She went on to say: “I hate to disappoint people, but the mittens, they’re one-of-a-kind and they’re unique and sometimes in this world, you just can’t get everything you want.”“It’s been unexpected,” she said of their sudden social media fame. “He must really like them if he chose to wear them.”Ellis said she was not a regular social media user, and had struggled to remember the login for her Twitter account.Asked about his outfit, Sanders told CBS News in an interview after the ceremony: “In Vermont, we dress warm – we know something about the cold. We’re not so concerned about good fashion. We want to keep warm. And that’s what I did today.”Sanders’ outfit rapidly became an internet meme. He was Photoshopped into historic photographs, comic panels and the subway, while sitting, arms folded, wrapped up warm against the DC winter weather, wearing that spectacular pair of mittens. Indeed, #BerniesMittens became one of the trending hashtags of the inauguration.There was also political speculation about what might be fuelling the senator’s mood.And this appears to be true.Meme veterans also noted that Sanders was wearing the same practical and sturdy coat that had become internet-famous in a video where he had appealed for financial support at the end of 2019.The truth is, we have an excellent chance to win the primary and beat Trump.But the only way we can do that is if we have the sufficient financial resources.So I am asking you today to contribute to our campaign before the FEC deadline: https://t.co/9y9BZMs0GM pic.twitter.com/wnYbUDBynW— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 30, 2019
    Since that post, the picture has appeared repeatedly on social media, with the caption replaced to say: “I am once again asking …” followed by a joking topical reference.An earlier photo from the day, picturing Sanders carrying a folder of documents, also caused a stir on social media when the director Rian Johnson responded to a fan who had superimposed the label “Knives Out 2 script” on to the folder. Johnson jokingly suggested he had given a draft script of the keenly anticipated potential sequel to 2019’s surprise hit movie Knives Out – but had heard nothing back yet. More

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    Vermont dadcore: does Bernie Sanders caring so little about fashion make him chic?

    It’s not every day that you get to inaugurate the 46th president of the United States, the first female vice-president of color, or attend the inauguration, period. But for Bernie Sanders, it’s also not often he gets enough time in the middle of the day to run errands and take care of his mail either.The former presidential hopeful has drawn side eyes for turning up to the inauguration day sans formal attire – instead looking like he was stopping by between doing his laundry and going to the post office. Wearing a winter jacket, oversized mittens and holding a manila envelope, the Vermont senator at least gets top marks for one thing: “absolutely crushing Vermont dadcore”.But for those wanting to get the Sanders’ look, it could be difficult to get hold of his mittens – those were a gift from a teacher in Vermont, Jen Ellis, according to local press. The mittens are very on-brand for Sanders, who popularized the Green New Deal in the US, as they are made with wool repurposed from sweaters and fleece made from recycled plastic bottles.(Much to Ellis’ surprise, after she gifted Sanders the mittens, he wore them on the campaign trail for two years straight. At least his fingers won’t be feeling the Bern in today’s sub-zero weather.)Sanders is no stranger to becoming a meme – indeed, a video of him asking supporters for money in 2020 led to numerous jokes made at his expense.Luckily for those who know the meme well, Sanders turned up at the inauguration wearing that same Burton jacket – he’s thrifty like that! – leading to a slew of new memes written in the style in which the Vermont senator usually asks for money.“I am once again asking for a space heater,” said one. (My own take involves imagining Sanders at the post office shortly after speeches today: “I am respectfully asking you to have this sent by Thursday,” he will ask, handing over the manila envelope.)Sanders has often been ribbed for putting the practical over the ceremonial – abstaining from mingling at events, dallying in niceties and, it would appear, even bothering to upgrade from the $1 mask he bought at the bodega last March.But others find his Grandma energy quite endearing. It takes some resolve – or obliviousness – to care so little about sartorial conventions that not even such a historic day would drive you to make an effort. Perhaps not caring is the new chic. More

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    To keep the Democratic coalition together, Biden will have to be the Great Balancer | Geoffrey Kabaservice

    It may just be a function of the circles I travel in, but very few people I know are happy with the election results. Republicans are unhappy that Donald Trump has lost his reelection battle with Joe Biden and will become a one-term president. Democrats are unhappy that the predicted blue wave did not materialize, which means that Republicans will likely maintain control of the Senate and Mitch McConnell can thwart any ambitious Democratic legislation. And my Never-Trump friends are unhappy that the outcome did not deliver the complete repudiation of Trumpism, and the subsequent reformation of a chastened Republican party, that they had hoped for.Like many people, I am guilty of having placed too much trust in the pollsters. But I really didn’t think a progressive tsunami was about to crash over the national landscape. The last time there was a genuine Democratic wave election, in 2008, its enabling condition was deep Republican demoralization over the George W Bush administration’s economic and foreign policy failures. Trump’s supporters, by contrast, are more fired-up than ever, despite his administration’s inability to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic and its accompanying economic dislocations.One lesson to be drawn from this election is that US politics nowadays is more about tribal, identity-based divisions than policy disagreements. But it’s hard to know what other definitive lessons to draw, because in a narrowly decided election all explanations are plausible.My own belief, for what it’s worth, is that Trump would have won re-election handily if not for the pandemic and his botched response to it. He had the advantages of incumbency that helped his three presidential predecessors win second terms. His base considers him infallible and enough voters outside his base were sufficiently satisfied with the pre-coronavirus economy that they tolerated all the ways in which he was unfit for the presidency. But character is destiny, and the same qualities that allowed Trump to win the presidency – his rejection of advice and experts, his unerring preference for personal advantage over the national good – ensured that he would lose it through his mishandling of the pandemic.And while the Democrats clearly are the majoritarian party, now that they have won the popular vote for an unprecedented seven of the past eight presidential elections, the country on some basic level continues to reject progressivism.I don’t for a second buy the leftwing argument that if Senator Bernie Sanders had been the Democratic nominee, he would have won a smashing victory against Trump and swept in a Senate majority. Given the Senate results and the fact that nearly half of the electorate voted for Trump, I find it hard to credit the argument that the country as a whole yearned for the kind of radical change that didn’t even command a majority in the Democratic party.It’s true that the Republicans’ entire election strategy was based on the expectation that Trump would run against Sanders. When that didn’t happen, they had to fall back on the charge that Biden, despite his decades-long reputation as a centrist, was somehow the puppet of those who would impose terrifying socialist tyranny upon the land.The implausibility of this claim allowed Biden to flip the Midwestern states that had decided the election in 2016, mobilizing more Black voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016 while peeling away just enough working-class whites and conservative suburbanites to win narrow majorities. Sanders, who didn’t win a single primary victory in the Midwest, could not have built such a coalition.One lesson to be drawn from this election is that US politics nowadays is more about tribal, identity-based divisions than policy disagreementsThe more economically populist and libertarian-ish aspects of progressivism have considerable electoral appeal, as was evident in the states (including some red states) that passed ballot measures liberalizing drug laws and, in Florida, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. But in California, perhaps the leading progressive state, voters rejected initiatives to reinstate affirmative action, impose rent controls, and classify rideshare and delivery workers as employees.But while Republicans’ dire warnings of an impending socialist dystopia didn’t work against Biden, this line of attack succeeded in allowing them to retake many of the House seats the Democrats flipped in 2018. Republicans tied these most moderate and vulnerable Democrats to far-left ideas such as the Green New Deal, free college, Medicare for All, and defunding the police. Angry centrist Democrats blamed their progressive colleagues, during a private post-election conference call, for costing the party critical seats and reducing the Democrats’ House majority to a thread. The Washington Post reported that moderate representative Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat from Virginia, heatedly insisted that “we need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again”, or else “we will get fucking torn apart in 2022”.The claim that the Democratic party has become a Trojan Horse for socialism also seems to have resounded with large numbers of Hispanics, particularly in states such as Florida and Texas where the Biden campaign performed much worse with these voters than Clinton did in 2016. Republican ads warning that Democrats would turn America into a socialist country may have succeeded in scaring Hispanics whose families fled dictators such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.More generally, it’s becoming clear that while most minorities vote Democratic, many don’t share white progressives’ views on issues like the need to cut police spending, the desirability of open immigration, and the nature of systemic racism. The writer Matthew Yglesias notes that progressives’ preferred term to refer to people of Latino origin – Latinx – is used by only 3% of US Hispanics, and that this divergence is symptomatic of white progressives’ “tendency to privilege academic concepts and linguistic innovations in addressing social justice concerns.” White progressive researchers also are shocked to find that minorities often support Trump’s racist rhetoric or policies – particularly when directed against other minority groups whom they also dislike.Then again, there are a host of other reasons why at least some fraction of Hispanics and other minorities may be breaking away from the Democratic coalition. These could include the appeal of Trump’s brand of swaggering masculinity, immigrants’ attraction to conservative ideas of individualism and upward mobility, and the growing tendency of non-college-educated minorities to see the world in similar terms as Trump’s base of non-college-educated whites. Or it could mainly be that, under the unique circumstances of this pandemic-year election, Republicans did a better job of engaging with minority voters, while the Democrats’ choice to suspend door-to-door canvassing, rallies, and other in-person means of voter mobilization was a critical error.A Biden presidency is likely to operate under both the external constraint of the Republican Senate majority and the internal constraint of the need to balance between its moderate and progressive wings. While this all but rules out big, ambitious reforms, it is possible that a Biden administration might succeed in passing more pragmatic measures like an economic stimulus, increased state aid for Covid-19 relief, and incremental criminal justice reforms. It’s even possible that there may be bipartisan action to combat climate change; two-thirds of Americans think the federal government should do more on climate, with particularly high levels of concern among coastal residents. But will progressives revolt against what they will see as too little, too late?If the Democratic party succeeds in realigning the college-educated, suburban middle class away from the Republican party while still holding onto its minority supporters and at least some fraction of the white working class, we might finally enter the long-predicted era of Democratic dominance. But the 2020 election showed that these constituencies, as well as the party’s moderate and progressive factions, have interests and priorities that are in high tension with each other. If a President Biden can keep the party together, history may remember him as the Great Balancer.Geoffrey Kabaservice is the director of political studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, as well as the author of Rule and Ruin: the Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party More

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    How do we avoid future authoritarians? Winning back the working class is key | Bernie Sanders

    As the count currently stands, nearly 80 million Americans voted for Joe Biden. With this vote against the authoritarian bigotry of Donald Trump, the world can breathe a collective sigh of relief.But the election results did also reveal something that should be a cause for concern. Trump received 11 million more votes than he did in 2016, increasing his support in many distressed communities – where unemployment and poverty are high, healthcare and childcare are inadequate, and people are hurting the most.For a president who lies all the time, perhaps Donald Trump’s most outlandish lie is that he and his administration are friends of the working class in our country.The truth is that Trump put more billionaires into his administration than any president in history; he appointed vehemently anti-labor members to the National Relations Labor Board (NLRB) and he gave huge tax breaks to the very rich and large corporations while proposing massive cuts to education, housing and nutrition programs. Trump has tried to throw up to 32 million people off the healthcare they have and has produced budgets that called for tens of billions in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and social security.Yet, a certain segment of the working class in our country still believe Donald Trump is on their side.Why is that?At a time when millions of Americans are living in fear and anxiety, have lost their jobs because of unfair trade agreements and are earning no more in real dollars than 47 years ago, he was perceived by his supporters to be a tough guy and a “fighter”. He seems to be fighting almost everyone, every day.He declared himself an enemy of “the swamp” not only attacking Democrats, but Republicans who were not 100% in lockstep with him and even members of his own administration, whom he declared part of the “deep state.” He attacks the leaders of countries who have been our long-standing allies, as well as governors and mayors and our independent judiciary. He blasts the media as an “enemy of the people” and is ruthless in his non-stop attacks against the immigrant community, outspoken women, the African American community, the gay community, Muslims and protesters.He uses racism, xenophobia and paranoia to convince a vast swath of the American people that he was concerned about their needs, when nothing could be further from the truth. His only interest, from day one, has been Donald Trump.Joe Biden will be sworn in as president on 20 January and Nancy Pelosi will be speaker of the House. Depending upon what happens in Georgia’s special elections, it is unclear which party will control the US Senate.Democrats’ job during the first 100 days of the Biden administration is to make it clear whose side they are onBut one thing is clear. If the Democratic party wants to avoid losing millions of votes in the future it must stand tall and deliver for the working families of our country who, today, are facing more economic desperation than at any time since the Great Depression. Democrats must show, in word and deed, how fraudulent the Republican party is when it claims to be the party of working families.And, in order to do that, Democrats must have the courage to take on the powerful special interests who have been at war with the working class of this country for decades. I’m talking about Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the private prison industrial complex and many profitable corporations who continue to exploit their employees.If the Democratic party cannot demonstrate that it will stand up to these powerful institutions and aggressively fight for the working families of this country – Black, White, Latino, Asian American and Native American – we will pave the way for another rightwing authoritarian to be elected in 2024. And that president could be even worse than Trump.Joe Biden ran for president on a strong pro working-class agenda. Now we must fight to put that agenda into action and vigorously oppose those who stands in its way.Which Side Are You On? was a folk song written by Florence Reece, the wife of an organizer with the United Mine Workers when the union went on strike in Kentucky in 1931. Democrats need to make it absolutely clear whose side they are on.One side is for ending starvation wages and raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. One side is not.One side is for expanding unions. One side is not.One side is for creating millions of good paying jobs by combating climate change and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. One side is not.One side is for expanding healthcare. One side is not.One side is for lowering the cost of prescription drugs. One side is not.One side is for paid family and medical leave. One side is not.One side is for universal pre-K for every three- and four-year-old in America. One side is not.One side is for expanding social security. One side is not.One side is for making public colleges and universities tuition-free for working families, and eliminating student debt. One side is not.One side is for ending a broken and racist criminal justice system, and investing in our young people in jobs and education. One side is not.One side is for reforming and making our immigration system fair and humane. One side is not.Democrats’ job during the first 100 days of the Biden administration is to make it absolutely clear whose side they are on, and who is on the other side. That’s not only good public policy to strengthen our country. It’s how to win elections in the future. More

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    Bernie Sanders says Republicans are afraid to stand up to Trump following election loss – video

    Democratic senator Bernie Sanders says members of the Republican party are afraid to stand up to Donald Trump as he continues his refusal to concede the result of last week’s presidential election. Speaking on CNN, Sanders said his Senate colleagues on the Republican side are not ‘idiots’, but there’s an intimidation factor from Trump that is preventing members from speaking up. ‘They understand Trump has lost,’ Sanders said. ‘But one of the other things we should all be nervous about and fearful about is the degree to which Trump intimidates and scares the hell out of Republican members of Congress. They are afraid to stand up to him’
    Trump under growing pressure to accept election defeat – US politics live More

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    Bernie Sanders offers congratulations to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris – video

    Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator of Vermont who put up a strong challenge to Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries before helping him campaign, has offered congratulations to the president-elect and his running mate, Kamala Harris. Sanders called this election the most important in modern American history
    The path to Joe Biden’s victory: five days in five minutes – video highlights
    US election live: Joe Biden wins and says ‘It’s time for America to unite’ More

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    America is a failing state. And establishment politics can’t solve the crisis | Bhaskar Sunkara

    Our country is breaking down, we have no effective leadership, and we’re lagging behind other rich countries. The left needs to provide an answerIn 2020, America has shown itself to be exceptional in the worst possible ways. No other rich country has such a poor public health infrastructure or such a tattered social safety net. America’s levels of both police violence and violent crime find their closest peers in countries like Venezuela and South Africa, not Canada and Germany. And even Cuba and Bosnia and Herzegovina beat the world’s only superpower in infant mortality and other key social indicators. Continue reading… More