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      Senate votes against Sanders resolution to force human rights scrutiny over Israel aid

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      US senators have defeated a measure, introduced by Bernie Sanders, that would have made military aid to Israel conditional on whether the Israeli government is violating human rights and international accords in its devastating war in Gaza.A majority of senators struck down the proposal on Tuesday evening, with 72 voting to kill the measure, and 11 supporting it. Although Sanders’ effort was easily defeated, it was a notable test that reflected growing unease among Democrats over US support for Israel.The measure was a first-of-its-kind tapping into a decades-old law that would require the US state department to, within 30 days, produce a report on whether the Israeli war effort in Gaza is violating human rights and international accords. If the administration failed to do so, US military aid to Israel, long assured without question, could be quickly halted.It is one of several that progressives have proposed to raise concerns over Israel’s attacks on Gaza, where the Palestinian death toll has surpassed 24,000 and Israel’s bombardment since Hamas launched attacks on it on 7 October has displaced most of Gaza’s 2.4 million residents.“We must ensure that US aid is being used in accordance with human rights and our own laws,” Sanders said in a speech before the vote urging support for the resolution, lamenting what he described as the Senate’s failure to consider any measure looking at the war’s effect on civilians.The White House had said it opposed the resolution. The US gives Israel $3.8bn in security assistance each year, ranging from fighter jets to powerful bombs that could destroy Hamas tunnels. Biden has asked Congress to approve an additional $14bn.The measure that Sanders proposed uses a mechanism in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which Congress to provide oversight of US military assistance, that must be used in accordance with international human rights agreements.The measure faced an uphill battle. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress oppose any conditions on aid to Israel, and Joe Biden has staunchly stood by Israel throughout its campaign in Gaza, leaving Sanders with an uphill battle. But by forcing senators to vote on the record about whether they were willing to condition aid to Israel, Sanders and others lawmakers sparked debate on the matter.The 11 senators who supported Sanders in the procedural vote were mostly Democrats from across the party’s spectrum.Some lawmakers have increasingly pushed to place conditions on aid to Israel, which has drawn international criticism for its offensive in Gaza.“To my mind, Israel has the absolute right to defend itself from Hamas’s barbaric terrorist attack on October 7, no question about that,” Sanders told the Associated Press in an interview ahead of the vote.“But what Israel does not have a right to do – using military assistance from the United States – does not have the right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people,” said Sanders. “And in my view, that’s what has been happening.”Amid anti-war protests across the US, progressive representatives including Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Barbara Lee and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for a ceasefire. In a letter to the US president, many of these lawmakers stressed that thousands of children had been killed in the Israeli bombings.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking from the Republican side before the measure was introduced on Tuesday evening, South Carolina senator Lindsay Graham said that Hamas, the Islamist group, has “militarized” schools and hospitals in the territory by operating amongst them.Israel has blamed Hamas for using hospitals as cover for military purposes, but has not provided definitive proof backing its claims that Hamas kept a “command center” under Gaza’s main al-Shifa hospital, which the Israeli Defense Forces raided in November.Two thirds of Gaza’s hospitals have been closed amidst what Biden has characterized as “indiscriminate bombings”, during a time of acute need, where United Nations agencies are warning of famine and disease as Gaza is besieged by Israel.Despite the defeat, organizations that had supported Sanders’ effort saw it as something of a victory.“The status quo in the Senate for decades has been 100% support for Israel’s military, 100% of the time from 100% of the Senate,” said Andrew O’Neill, the legislative director of Indivisible, one of the groups that backed the measure. “The fact that Sanders introduced this bill was already historic. That ten colleagues joined him is frankly remarkable.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      The Rebels review: AOC, Bernie, Warren and the fight against Trump

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      In 2017, mere months after Donald Trump settled into the White House, Joshua Green of Bloomberg News delivered Devil’s Bargain, a mordantly amusing but deadly serious take on the 45th president and his relationship with Steve Bannon, the far-right ideologue who became Trump’s chief strategist. With wit, insight and access, Green informed, entertained and horrified. More than six years later, both Trump and Bannon face criminal trials. Then again, the band may soon be back together – in the West Wing.Green is acutely aware of the economic and social cleavages that roil the US and divide Democrats ranged against the Republicans’ rightward turn. With his new book, The Rebels, he shifts his gaze to three notables of the Democratic left: two senators, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman from New York. Once again, Green’s work is smart, sharp and smoothly written.Warren and Sanders failed in bids to become president. In 2020, his second such primary campaign, Sanders won early contests but saw his ambitions crash in South Carolina. That heavily African American primary electorate wasn’t all that keen on Brooklyn-bred progressivism, as Sanders offered.As for Warren, she failed to win a single contest and finished third in her home state, behind Sanders and Joe Biden. What worked for her in debates, congressional hearings and the faculty lounge did not resonate with voters. A highly contentious claim to be Native American raised damning questions too.Still, Warren’s critiques of the mortgage meltdown and resulting displacements provided intellectual heft for the populist left. Furthermore, unlike Biden she was intellectually brilliant and not beholden to Delaware and its credit card giants. Warren was a harsh critic of Wall Street too. The two billionaires in the 2020 race, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, regularly felt her sting. Ditto Tim Geithner, first treasury secretary to Barack Obama and another key character in Green’s book.Warren made an impact. Green writes: “Knowing [Trump’s] commitment to economic populism was merely rhetorical, Bannon fretted that Warren would lure away blue-collar voters with a program he described as ‘populist Democratic nationalism’.”In the House, Ocasio-Cortez, who at 34 is decades younger than Warren, Biden and Sanders, is the one member of the “Squad” of progressives who possesses the tools and dexterity to play politics nationally. She is emotionally grounded.At one 2019 hearing, the congresswoman widely known as AOC filleted Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook’s ties to Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct data-harvesting and research firm owned by Bannon and the rightwing Mercer family. She also put the wood to Exxon over its early but non-disclosed knowledge about global heating and its effects.All three of Green’s subjects convey seriousness. Humor, less so. Nonetheless, the book offers a valuable recapitulation of the crack-up of the New Deal coalition, the impact of Ronald Reagan’s victories and the continued reverberations of the Great Recession of 2008.The Democrats hold the White House and the Senate but their future is unclear. Non-college graduates, regardless of race, find less to love in the historic home of working America. Green seizes on the havoc wrought by economic liberalization, financialism and expanded trade with China – factors that have driven a wedge between the Democrats and what was once their base.Convincingly, Green argues that neo-liberalism is in retrograde and that Biden is more a transitional figure than a harbinger of what comes next. Even so, Biden tacked left – instead of pivoting toward the center – as he faced Trump in 2020.In 2021, on inauguration day, Biden issued the Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. His White House intoned: “Advancing equity is not a one-year project – it is a generational commitment that will require sustained leadership and partnership with all communities.”Good luck with that. The controversial fall of Claudine Gay, the first Black president of Harvard, who came under sustained conservative fire over the Israel-Hamas war, student protest and allegations of plagiarism in her work, is just one recent illustration of how tough such terrain will remain.Green traces many Democratic dilemmas to 1980, when Reagan handily defeated an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. Afterwards, Democratic mandarins concluded that the old-time religion of lunch-bucket liberalism needed to make room for market-based economics. Reagan’s embrace of tax cuts and reduced government resonated with the public. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama came to stand as heirs of that strategic decision. But it was about more than “it’s the economy, stupid”, as Clinton would learn on the job.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” Clinton told Robert Rubin, his treasury secretary, a former head of Goldman Sachs.James Carville, the guru of Clinton’s first victory, later said that were he to be born again, he wanted to be reincarnated as the most powerful thing in the world: the bond market.Green homes in on the close relationships that existed between the Obama administration and Wall Street. In 2008, for all the then Illinois senator’s talk of hope and change, he was the financial sector’s choice for president over John McCain. Green quotes Geithner’s pitch to Obama for the treasury slot, and describes how Geithner beat out Larry Summers, Rubin’s successor, to secure the job.Green also examines how in saving the financial system despite its players’ unadulterated greed and stupidity, Geithner helped incubate resentments that haunt the US today.“In a crisis, you have to choose,” Geithner said. “Are you going to solve the problem, or are you going to teach people a lesson?”In 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton, voters did the latter. Ten months from now, they may do so again.
      The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      Sanders warns Biden: address working-class fears or risk losing to demagogue

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      Bernie Sanders, America’s leading progressive politician, has issued a stark warning to Joe Biden at the start of presidential election year: be more aggressive in addressing the anxieties of millions of struggling voters or risk handing back the White House to the anti-democratic demagogue Donald Trump.In an interview with the Guardian from his home base in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders urged the Democratic president to inject more urgency into his bid for re-election. He said that unless the president was more direct in recognising the many crises faced by working-class families his Republican rival would win.“We’ve got to see the White House move more aggressively on healthcare, on housing, on tax reform, on the high cost of prescription drugs,” Sanders said. “If we can get the president to move in that direction, he will win; if not, he’s going to lose.”The US senator from Vermont added that he was in contact with the White House pressing that point. “We hope to make clear to the president and his team that they are not going to win this election unless they come up with a progressive agenda that speaks to the needs of the working class of this country.”Sanders’ warning comes at a critical time in American politics. On Monday, Republicans in Iowa will gather for caucuses that mark the official start of the 2024 presidential election.Biden faces no serious challenger in the Democratic primaries. But concern is mounting over how he would fare against Trump given a likely rematch between them in November.Recent polls have shown Trump not only doing well in key battleground states but gaining traction with demographic groups who proved vital to Biden’s 2020 victory, including Hispanic and young voters.In his Guardian interview, Sanders cast the threat of a second Trump presidency in existential terms. “It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy,” he said.He predicted that over a further four years, Trump would shift the electoral goalposts so that “many people who would vote against Trump are unable to do so. He will make it harder for young people, people of colour, to participate in the political process.”It is in that dystopian context that Sanders criticises the president’s re-election team for failing to bang the drum hard enough. “They’re not their own best advertisers, they don’t do a particularly good job in explaining what Biden has accomplished,” he said.Sanders praised Biden for the $1.9tn Covid rescue plan which he said helped avoid economic collapse during the pandemic, and for the Inflation Reduction Act which pumped money into transforming US energy away from fossil fuels. He was also effusive about Biden’s historic decision to join a United Auto Workers (UAW) picket line during the union’s strike with the three biggest carmakers, which he said made him “the strongest pro-union president that we have had, certainly, since FDR [Franklin D Roosevelt]”.But Sanders urged the White House to resist sitting back on its laurels. “The president has got to do something that’s very, very hard,” Sanders said.“He should be proud of his accomplishments, but he’s also got to say that he understands that there is a housing crisis, that people can’t afford healthcare or prescription drugs or childcare – that he’s trying, but he hasn’t yet succeeded.”Biden could find a historical template for such messaging, Sanders suggested, in Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election campaign. By then, the Democratic president had been in office for almost four years and had implemented the first two of his groundbreaking New Deal programmes.“Roosevelt didn’t go around saying, ‘Look at all I’ve done’,” Sanders explained. “He said: ‘I see a nation that is ill-clad, ill-housed. We made some progress, but I know there are enormous problems.”Critics will accuse Sanders of attempting to press his own brand of politics on to the establishment of the Democratic party. But he has credibility when it comes to presidential campaigns, having come close to securing the Democratic nomination twice and having given Biden a leg up into the White House in 2020.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Vermont senator not only rallied his millions of young supporters to vote for Biden, he also used his influence as runner-up in the 2020 Democratic primaries to push the candidate in a more progressive direction. He formed a set of “taskforces” in which top Biden and Sanders advisers worked together to forge policy agreements in several key areas including the economy, immigration and the climate crisis.In his new book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, Sanders sets out a similar progressive agenda for 2024. He calls for the Democratic party to wean itself from “corporate elites” and redirect its sights on to working-class struggles.He told the Guardian that if that does not happen, he fears that many young Americans will simply stay at home in November. “The polling is clear. Given the choice between Biden and Trump, a lot of people are saying, ‘Thank you, but no thank you’.”The danger of support for Biden fading among young voters has been enhanced by the Israel-Hamas war. The senator said that Biden’s staunch support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza could affect his standing among young progressive voters in November.He implored Biden to detach himself from Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who has taken a hard line on the military assault. “I hope that he [Biden] understands that you can be pro-Israel without supporting Netanyahu and the horrific war he is waging against the Palestinian people.”Opinion polls have shown a generational divide, with younger Americans tending to be more critical of US backing for the bombardment of Gaza. Almost three-quarters of voters aged 18 to 29 disapproved of Biden’s handling of the conflict, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll found.Sanders also faces challenges over his position on the war. Though he has become steadily more damning of the Israeli onslaught, calling it a “mass atrocity”, he continues to resist calling for a permanent ceasefire which he says would open the door to further Hamas outrages following the 7 October attack.That has strained relations with some of his army of young supporters. Asked whether he feared that the coalition he has so diligently nurtured since the 2016 presidential election was in danger of splintering, he said: “I think, at the end of the day, we’ll be all right”.The senator said he was actively working with allies to develop what he called a “progressive strategy to defeat Trump”. Central to that is “rallying the working class of this country to stand up to Trump”.He said he draws confidence from recent labor union victories, including wage increases won by the UAW and new agreements secured by the Teamsters at UPS and by Hollywood writers and actors. “We are seeing the revitalisation of the trade union movement in this country in a way that we have not seen for many, many decades.” More

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      ‘It will be the end of democracy’: Bernie Sanders on what happens if Trump wins – and how to stop him

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      Bernie Sanders sweeps into his state office in Burlington, Vermont, itching to get on with our interview. When I try to break the ice by asking the US senator how he is, he replies gruffly, “Good,” and motions with his outstretched hand for our conversation to begin.It’s a Saturday, and Sanders is dressed in his casual weekend uniform of cream chinos, blue shirt and sweater, no tie. I’d been hoping the day would be so cold and crisp in Burlington, the idyllic college town which has been his home since 1968, that he’d be wearing the mittens captured in a cult photo of Sanders huddled against biting winds at Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration. The ones that launched a quadrillion memes and sent the US senator hurtling into the cyber stratosphere. “I couldn’t believe it, all I was doing was trying to keep warm!” he says, before breaking the bad news. Not only is he not wearing the mittens, “I don’t even know where they are.”Sanders always seems to be in a hurry. Like Alice’s white rabbit, he’s forever racing against the clock in his battle with the billionaires and corporate interests. He is the most unlikely harbinger of change: a politician who drove young voters wild with “Berniemania” in 2016, when he was already 74; a man with none of the usual TV good looks and smooth talking attached to presidential candidates, but one who, by being absolutely himself, still turned out to be hugely charismatic.In the past decade, he’s done more than almost anyone to change the political lens in the US, bringing income inequality, poverty and what he calls “uber-capitalism” into focus. And yet before that he was a virtual unknown.In his 20s and 30s, Sanders worked lean years as a carpenter and freelance writer, alongside campaigning for the local socialist party, Liberty Union. It took him 10 years to learn how to win an election, which he did in 1981, aged 39, by all of 10 votes, to become Burlington’s mayor, before taking Vermont’s only congressional seat a decade later.He remained for the next quarter of a century largely in the shadows, a rare overtly leftwing voice in Congress, diligently ploughing his self-styled democratic socialist furrow. And then in 2016, he suddenly burst on to the national stage in his challenge against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, attracting an army of young voters chanting: “Feel the Bern”.Eight years on, he’s still in a rush, but he comes across as more sombre now, more edgily reflective. He imbues that mood in an afterword to the new paperback edition of his book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, in which he writes that though he would like to be optimistic about the future, he cannot. He invokes his seven grandchildren, and laments that they will inherit a world that faces “more urgent and undeniable crises than at any time in modern history”.I ask him to spell that out. “We’re looking at a series of extraordinary crises. Climate: it’s up in the air whether the world community will make the cuts in carbon emissions to provide a habitable planet for our grandchildren. The growth of oligarchy: a small number of extremely wealthy people control the economic and political life of billions. Democracy: under severe threat from those capitalising on people’s fears.”Not long ago, Sanders used to be ridiculed for such disquieting rhetoric; he was denounced as a firebrand, a rabble-rouser. No one’s laughing at him now. Two wars, a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, vast swathes of North America literally burning, inequality between rich and poor at mind-sizzling levels. As the New Yorker memorably noted, “reality has endorsed Bernie Sanders”.Is that how it seems to him, that all his fears are coming home to roost? “It’s not a great feeling,” he says. “I’m extremely nervous about what is coming.”Ah yes. Donald Trump.Sanders has long had the measure of Trump. In 2016, when Trump said, “I alone can fix it,” as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination, Sanders commented: “Is this guy running for president or dictator?” Two months before the 2020 election, he predicted that a defeated Trump might not go peaceably – another portent that was dramatically fulfilled.Now, as the Iowa caucus kicks off the 2024 primary season on Monday, Sanders is at it again. Except this time, he says, the stakes are much higher.Even for a politician who doesn’t mince his words, his assessment of a Trump victory in November is sobering. “It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy.”It may not happen on day one, he says. Trump wouldn’t be as obvious as to abolish elections. But he would steadily weaken democracy, making it harder for young people and people of colour to vote, enervating political opposition, whipping up anger against minorities and immigrants.A second Trump presidency would be much more extreme than the first. “He’s made that clear,” says Sanders. “There’s a lot of personal bitterness, he’s a bitter man, having gone through four indictments, humiliated, he’s going to take it out on his enemies. We’ve got to explain to the American people what that means to them – what the collapse of American democracy will mean to all of us.”He doesn’t ascribe the rise of Trump solely to a lumpen mass of redneck working-class Americans, deplorables to borrow a phrase. “I do not believe that all of Trump’s supporters are racist or sexist or homophobes. I think what’s going on in this country is a belief that the government is failing ordinary Americans.”Sanders’ office sits in the main street of Burlington and is, like the man, minimalist and spare. There are posters from different stages in his political life, including an inevitable “Feel the Bern” placard and a photograph from Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, which mayor Sanders twinned Burlington with during Ronald Reagan’s Contra war against the leftwing Sandinistas. A third wall-hanging says: “In recognition of your support for fish hatcheries in the Lake Champlain Basin”.He lives in a modest house a little way from the centre of town, with Jane O’Meara Sanders, whom he married in 1988 and to whom he dedicates It’s OK to Be Angry, calling her his “wife, co-worker and best buddy”. He also dedicates the book to his brother, Larry Sanders, who lives in Oxford, England, and is a former Green party councillor, and to his four children – one by his first wife, Deborah Shiling Messing, and three stepchildren, who are Jane’s but whom he considers his own – as well as to those seven grandchildren.He has built his political persona around reciting startling and infuriating statistics, and my encounter with him is no exception. With his index finger jabbing as though pointing to an invisible crowd, he tells me that before the pandemic three multibillionaires (Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) owned more between them than the combined wealth of the 160 million Americans who make up the bottom half of society. “Three people! That’s unbelievable! Incredible! Wages, accounting for inflation, are lower today for working people than they were 50 years ago. Think about that! My grandchildren will have a lower standard of living than my generation.”In this scheme of things, Trump is merely doing what demagogues are doing the world over – capitalising on the anxieties and struggles of the people. “Trump comes along and says, ‘I’ll be your strong guy, I’ll deal with all your anxieties – immigration, transgender issues, race – I’ll be there for you.’”Uncomfortably for his colleagues in Congress, Sanders reserves much of his sharpest criticism for the Democratic party. Officially, he has sat as an independent since entering the House of Representatives in 1991, but he votes as a Democrat in Congress and ran both his presidential campaigns as one. Yet he denounces the party establishment as a “consultant-driven, ad-producing election machine”.It is “beyond pathetic”, he writes in the book, that a phoney corporate hack like Trump should be able to present himself as the “champion of the working classes”, while the Democratic party stands back and cedes territory to him. He caricatures the Democratic promise to voters as, “We’re pretty bad, but Republicans are worse”, and warns that is simply not good enough.Which brings us to Biden.Sanders describes Biden, whom he has known since he was elected to the Senate in 2007, as a likable and decent man. But he has a clear message for the sitting president: step up to the plate or the future of the United States, of the world, is in peril. “The challenge we face is to be able to show people that government in a democratic society can address their very serious needs. If we do that, we defeat Trump. If we do not, then we are the Weimar republic of the early 1930s.”Sanders says he’s in touch with the White House, exhorting them to be more vocal in their appeals to working Americans. “He has got to say, in my view, that if he is re-elected, within two months he will bring about the sweeping changes the working class of this country desperately need.”So are they listening? “As is always the case, not as strongly as I would like.”You can see why Sanders was enticed to move to Burlington as a 27-year-old, having been brought up in a Brooklyn tenement. The town, which is famous as the birthplace of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream, is flanked by Lake Champlain on one side and the Green mountains on the other, its steeples and cobbled streets dusted with snow. It feels like an oasis of peace in a very disturbed world.Until it doesn’t.On 25 November, three 20-year-old Palestinian-American students, best friends from Ramallah in the West Bank who had come to the US to pursue a safe university education, were shot in a Burlington street by a hate-filled stranger. One of the men, Hisham Awartani, is paralysed from the chest down.The incident has left Sanders shaken. In a speech to the Senate five days after the shooting, he stepped out of the limited emotional range he usually displays in public – anger, outrage, disgust – and sounded palpably upset.He sounds upset now. “Less than a mile away from where we are right now, three really bright young people were walking down the street, talking some Arabic. Words fail to describe the ugliness and the horror of this, in this city.”The Israel-Hamas war that erupted on 7 October with the Hamas massacre has troubled Sanders like few other events in his 40 years in politics. “It’s on my mind all of the time,” he says. “This is something I literally dream about.”That’s not surprising, given that he is both one of the most prominent Jews in the United States and a politician who puts human rights front and centre. And this is profoundly personal for him.During his 2020 presidential campaign he told a CNN town hall that there were two main factors behind his worldview. One was growing up in a cash-strapped Brooklyn family supported by his father’s job as a paint salesman. The other was being Jewish.Sanders recalls the visceral way he learned as a young child about the Holocaust. He lifts up the sleeve of his left arm and rubs his skin as he tells me: “I remember going down a few blocks to the shopping area, and there were people working in the markets, and they had their concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms.”His father, Elias Ben Yehuda Sanders, emigrated from Poland to the US in 1921. He was 17 and penniless, and fleeing antisemitic pogroms. Most of that side of Sanders’ family remained in Poland and were almost entirely wiped out by the Nazis.A few years ago, Sanders went with his brother, Larry, to Słopnice, the Polish village where their father had been raised. “There was a mound, and it was a mass grave of people slaughtered in the town,” he says. “So racism, wiping out people because of a different religion, that’s stayed with me my whole life.”His deep personal understanding of the horrors human beings can inflict on each other helps explain the tightrope Sanders has been walking over the war. He has always stood firmly beside Israel as a safe haven for Jews, and has also spoken up over many years for the right of the Palestinians to live in peace. It’s a classic two-state position.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat has translated in the current crisis as Sanders steadfastly defending the right of Israel to go after Hamas, which he calls a “disgusting terrorist organisation”. At the same time, he has become steadily more damning of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli military’s “mass atrocity” in Gaza.He has also grown increasingly disapproving of Biden’s staunch support for the Israeli war effort, condemning what he calls US complicity in “destroying the lives of innocent men, women and children in Gaza”. He is trying to block billions of dollars of extra US military aid to Israel, and is demanding a Senate investigation into how US arms are used in Gaza.I ask him whether he feels a special distress watching a country he has always supported as a post-Holocaust shelter for Jews inflict such indiscriminate bombing on others. “The answer is yes. If there are any people that have suffered, it’s Jewish people. And they should not be imposing that type of suffering on Palestinian children – killing children is not the solution.”To say the dual position Sanders is attempting to hold is uncomfortable would be a gross understatement. He has come under fire from pro-Israeli Democrats and Republicans who accuse him of betraying America’s great ally by failing to offer Netanyahu unconditional support.On his own progressive side, his refusal to countenance a permanent ceasefire, which he fears would merely embolden Hamas to renew its attacks with the aim of destroying Israel, has also landed him in hot water. More than 400 of his former staffers signed an open letter imploring him to shift his position; one of them, his 2020 campaign spokesperson, Briahna Joy Gray, tweeted “biggest political disappointment of our generation” in response to an interview in which Sanders explained his view.There has also been fallout among young Americans, whom Sanders has long cultivated as the sweet spot of his base. Young voters, drawn towards his no-nonsense takedown of the ultra-rich, are at the core of his 15.2 million following on X, formerly known as Twitter. Yet amid the Gaza crisis, polls show a stark generational divide, with young, progressive Americans coalescing around demands for a permanent ceasefire. I ask him, does he fear that his movement of youthful supporters could be starting to splinter?He clearly doesn’t want to go there. “I think, at the end of the day, we’ll be all right,” is all he’ll say.Is Sanders swimming against the tide of an increasingly polarised and social-media-driven world?“I’m trying to do my best,” he concedes, a little mournfully, “within the complexities.”When Sanders went up against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary, those who were paying attention could feel the tectonic plates of US politics shifting. An insurgent campaign focused around inequality and corporate greed was giving a figurehead of the Democratic establishment a run for her money.Not that there were many paying attention. Sanders clearly still feels riled by how marginalised he was in the 2016 race. While his gargantuan crowds chanted, “Feel the Bern”, pundits derided the “free stuff” he promoted, such as decent housing and healthcare for all, with the New York Times chiding that it would add $3tn a year to government spending.Many media outlets largely ignored him. Even those dismissive of him had to recognise that he had become a phenomenon. By the end of the primaries he had won 22 states and more than 13m votes. Though he lost, he gained a universe: an army of young, progressive, impassioned Americans fluent in Bernie-ese.Oh, and he also acquired a picture-perfect impersonation of himself on Saturday Night Live, courtesy of Larry David. The Curb Your Enthusiasm star was not only the spitting image of his subject, but he got Bernie’s arms-flailing stump speech and legendary crotchetiness to a T, and as a fellow Brooklyn Jew spoke his language (“yuuuge”). The two men appeared together on SNL just before the 2016 New Hampshire primary, and a few months later were revealed by genealogists to be distant cousins.The shorthand often used for the uprising Sanders catalysed is the Squad, the team of progressive Congress members around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that emerged in the wake of 2016. Sanders writes in his book that the Squad were a “breath of fresh air”, but to me he insists the sea change went even deeper. “When I was elected to the House in 1990, there were five members of the progressive caucus. Today, there are well over 100. It is far more powerful and progressive than back then.”Could there one day soon be a President AOC, not just a female president, but a progressive one?Sanders squirms a little, saying he doesn’t want to play the name game. But then he says: “Absolutely. Absolutely. The possibility exists, of course.”For all his talk of revolution, for all his tax-the-rich bills and declarations of radical populism, a large part of the Sanders creed is nothing more nor less than an appeal for the basic fundamentals of life – health, housing, a living wage, education – that are taken for granted by all other developed nations. He devotes an entire section of It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism to Finland, which is hardly a hotbed of revolution.Look at it that way, and it’s not Bernie who is the extreme radical, it’s the far-right march of the Republican party. Which brings us back to Biden, the threat of Trump, and the ominous 10 months ahead.Sanders has plenty of nice things to say about Biden. In the book he praises the president’s 2020 campaign platform, saying that if it had all been put into effect, he would have been the most progressive president since Franklin D Roosevelt. (The compliment is in part self-serving – Sanders credits himself with having pushed Biden further to the left in the run-up to the election.) He also applauds Biden’s decision to join a picket line during the recent auto workers strike, the first sitting president in history to do so.But as we enter election year, he warns that there is much more to be done. “Look, the president has put a historic amount of money into transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels, but the fossil fuel industry keeps on its merry way, and we’re not stopping them. The president is making efforts to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, but it’s nowhere near enough. He tried to lower student debt; it was reversed by the supreme court.”Sanders suddenly leans towards me and gives me a blast of rhetoric that is almost overpowering.“The president has got to acknowledge the enormous crises facing people’s lives. You can’t fool them. If I say to you all the great things I’ve done for you, you will come back and say, ‘Well, I can’t afford healthcare, I can’t send my kid to college.’ Americans are feeling anxious right now, and we’ve got to address that.”Is there a danger many young Americans and voters of colour who formed a critical part of the coalition that elected Biden – and defeated Trump – in 2020 will look at the rematch of the same two candidates in November, decide they aren’t inspired by either, and stay at home?“There’s no question. The polling is clear. Given the choice between Biden and Trump, there are a lot of people saying, ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’”It’s a strikingly different analysis from that offered by much of the commentariat, which has lasered in on Biden’s age. Which is interesting, because Sanders, at 82, is a year older than the president yet rarely gets labelled as old. If anything, he comes across as ageless – as crotchety and energetic as he’s ever been.I ask what he thinks of the focus on Biden’s age, remarking that it’s not just Biden. Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the Senate, is the same age as Biden at 81, and has caused some alarm by freezing mid-speech. Is it time to drop to a younger cadre of political leaders?“It’s a nice phrase, a new generation of leadership, and yes most of the strongest progressives are young people. But you’ve got young Republicans who are among the most rightwing people in the country. So it’s not age, it’s what the individual stands for.”And what about him? On one level, with the world going up in smoke, his brand of urgent analysis is needed more than ever today. But he’s been at it a long time, he had a heart attack during the 2020 campaign, and must be feeling the weight of it all.He’s surprisingly candid. “I am tired. I’ve been doing this since I was elected mayor of this city in 1981. What I see in Washington is so dishonest. There’s no debate on the crumbling healthcare system, no debate on climate, no debate on wealth inequality. None! That’s distressing, and what we’re seeing in the world is distressing, and being 82 … this is painful stuff.”Just when I think Sanders might be about to announce his retirement, he sits back, rallies himself, and says: “Let’s get back to my grandchildren and the future generation. It’s in my DNA, it’s the way I look at the world. You’ve got to stand up and do the best you can. We don’t have the moral right to simply walk away.”“You keep going,” I suggest.“You gotta keep going.” More

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      In 2024, what’s the way forward? | Bernie Sanders

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      It’s no great secret. These are the most difficult and challenging times in modern history.We’re dealing with the horrific situation in Gaza, Putin’s war in Ukraine, the existential threat of climate change, obscene and growing levels of income and wealth inequality, attacks on our democracy and women’s rights, increasing levels of bigotry and intolerance, unprecedented threats from artificial intelligence, a dysfunctional healthcare system, huge increases in military spending – and much, much more.And, oh yes, Donald Trump – who is becoming more rightwing and extremist every day and who is ahead in many of the polls to become the next president of the United States. The Donald Trump who recently said migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”. The Donald Trump who uses language echoing Adolf Hitler when he refers to his political opponents as “vermin” and pledges to “root them out”. The Donald Trump who has referred to the January 6 insurrection as “a beautiful day”.The same Donald Trump who wants to give massive tax breaks to the very rich, throw millions off the healthcare they have and refuses to even acknowledge the reality of climate change.So what do we do about all of that? How do we rally the American people to make sure Trump is not elected once again? How do we build for a brighter future?Well, for a start, let’s do something radical: let’s tell the truth. The American people are tired of tweets, empty political rhetoric and 30-second negative ads. More importantly, they are tired of an establishment-supported status quo which, in many cases, leaves them economically worse off than their parents 50 years ago. They are desperate to understand why we are where we are today and how we can move to a better place.We’ve got some very serious problems.So let’s begin there. Where are we today? What is the reality that many Americans are experiencing?Today, more than 60% of our people are living under enormous financial stress as they try to survive paycheck to paycheck on inadequate incomes. These Americans, the majority of our people, are working hard but going nowhere, and they worry that their kids will end up even further behind than they are.In the richest country on Earth, we now have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major nation, and many of the schools serving lower-income kids are poorly staffed or equipped. Not a great way to create a strong and prosperous future.With housing costs soaring, almost 600,000 Americans are unhoused and millions of working-class families are spending more than they can afford on outrageously high rents. Owning one’s own home is becoming a faraway dream for many, while young people camp out in their parents’ basements.Half of older workers have no savings or pensions as they worry about what happens to them when they retire into their “golden” years. Will they be able to afford prescription drugs or keep their homes warm in the winter? Will they be able to leave their offspring any inheritance?Our healthcare is broken. Despite spending far more per capita than any other country, we don’t have enough doctors, nurses or mental health counselors. Our life expectancy is in decline and 60,000 people die each year because they can’t get to a doctor when they should.Our childcare system, caring for kids in their most formative years, is dysfunctional. Working-class parents can’t find quality slots, tuition is unaffordable and the employees in the industry are grossly underpaid.Our younger generation is struggling financially. Many work for inadequate incomes, and more than 40 million Americans have left college and graduate school deeply in debt, sometimes spending decades paying their loans off.In many working-class communities. crime, homelessness, addiction and drug overdoses are growing problems.But it is not all bad news.In the last year, we have seen a major revitalization of the trade union movement as working-class Americans fight back against unprecedented levels of corporate greed. As corporate profits soar and CEOs get outlandish compensation packages, workers are demanding their fair share.Whether it is Teamster and United Auto Worker blue-collar workers, young people at Starbucks, nurses and doctors or graduate students on campuses, Americans are organizing unions at the grassroots level, going out on strikes – and winning major victories.Further, in the past few years, President Biden and those of us who have worked with him have passed some significant pieces of legislation.The $1.9tn-dollar American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) helped revive our economy far faster than anyone could have imagined as we dealt with the worst public health crisis and economic downturn in 100 years. We have made record-breaking investments in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, in broadband and in renewable energy. We passed a historic expansion of benefits and services for toxic-exposed veterans. We have finally begun to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry. We are rebuilding American manufacturing and have seen the two strongest years of job growth in history.And let’s not forget, Joe Biden was the first president ever to walk a picket line in support of striking workers and to encourage non-union workers to organize.Good stuff. But is it enough?Absolutely not.Far more needs to be done. As progressives, it’s important we lay out an agenda the American people would be eager to vote for – not just someone to vote against.What is that agenda? It is an agenda that acknowledges the pain, stress and despair that the majority of our people are experiencing, and provides a path forward to improve their lives. It is an agenda prepared to take on the greed of the oligarchs and corporate America.It is an agenda that boldly confronts the wealth and power of the 1%, and demands that the rich start paying their fair share of taxes.It is an agenda that uses artificial intelligence to benefit all people, not just the owners of large corporations.It is an agenda that ends starvation wages in America, makes it easier for workers to join unions and provides equal pay for equal work.It is an agenda that makes healthcare a human right and substantially lowers the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs in this country.It is an agenda that will make it possible for all working-class young people to gain a college education without going into debt, and will radically improve our dysfunctional childcare system.It is an agenda that will create millions of good-paying jobs as we lead the world in combating climate change and transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels.It is an agenda that will take on the systemic racism that prevails throughout our country and fundamentally reform our broken and racist criminal justice system.It is an agenda that cuts military spending, prevents war and supports diplomacy and international cooperation.It is an agenda that will lead to comprehensive immigration reform and a path towards citizenship for the undocumented.Now, it goes without saying that this is not the agenda of the Democratic establishment and their wealthy campaign funders. You know that. I know that. So, what do we do? As progressives, what should our political strategy be in 2024?First, we work in coalition with all those who understand that we must do everything possible to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme rightwing Republican party, not just because he is “worse”, but because nothing less than the future of our democracy is at stake in this election. Not only do we need to re-elect President Biden, we need to give him decent majorities in the House and Senate.Second, we aggressively educate and organize at the grassroots level around our progressive agenda. The American people are deeply unhappy with the economic and political status quo. They want change, real change. That means we must roll up our sleeves and do the hard work of reaching new people. That means we must have uncomfortable conversations and invite people to join us, even if they don’t agree with us on everything. We must inspire people to get involved. This will not be easy but it is what our progressive agenda must be about.Third, we must make it clear to the president and his administration that we expect his second term to be far more progressive than his first. He must, in no uncertain terms, take on the greed of the billionaire class whose actions are causing irreparable damage to our country, and stand up for the needs of the working class. Further, his campaign must reflect those progressive principles.In these difficult times it is easy to become victim to despair and cynicism. It is easy to become paralyzed into inaction when one realizes that there are no magic solutions to the complex political crises we face, and that every step forward has its drawbacks and critics.But we truly have no alternative but to stand up and fight for the country we know we can become. This is a struggle not just for our generation, not just for our kids and grandchildren – but for the future of our democracy and our planet. This is not a time to surrender.
      Bernie Sanders is a US senator, and chair of the health, education, labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont, and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress More

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      Liars, expulsions and near-fistfights: Congress plumbs the depths in 2023

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      Before House Republicans left for their holiday recess this month, they addressed one last matter of business. They did not take up an aid package for Ukraine or pass an appropriations bill to fully fund the government through the fiscal year.The House chose instead to vote along party lines to formally authorize an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, even though Republicans have failed to uncover any proof that the president financially benefited from his family’s business dealings.“Instead of doing anything to help make Americans’ lives better, they are focused on attacking me with lies,” Biden said of the vote. “The American people deserve better.”The vote was a fitting end to a year defined by new lows on Capitol Hill. From removing a House speaker to expelling an indicted member and issuing threats of violence, 2023 saw Congress explore new depths of dysfunction. And it all started with a days-long speakership race.The battle for the gavel (part one)After a disappointing performance in the 2022 midterms, Republicans took control of the House in January with a much narrower majority than they had anticipated. That created a math problem for Kevin McCarthy, a Republican of California and the conference’s presumed speaker nominee.Instead of the uneventful process seen in past speakership elections, McCarthy failed to win the gavel on the first ballot, as roughly 20 hard-right members of the Republican conference opposed his ascension. The gridlock forced the House to hold a second round of voting, marking the first time in a century that the chamber failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot.The standoff lasted for four long days and necessitated 15 ballots in total. Just after midnight on 7 January, McCarthy won the speakership with a wafer-thin majority, in a vote of 216 to 212. He would hold the job for just nine months.On the brink of economic collapseAs soon as Republicans (finally) elected a speaker, attention turned to the most pressing matter on Congress’s agenda for 2023: the debt ceiling.The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, warned that the debt ceiling, which represents the amount of money the US government is allowed to borrow to pay its bills, had to be raised or suspended by early June to avoid a federal default and prevent economic catastrophe.Despite those urgent warnings, hard-right members of the House Republican conference appeared prepared to let the US default on its debt in an attempt to force steep government spending cuts. With just days left before the expected default deadline, both the House and the Senate passed a bill to suspend the debt ceiling until January 2025.The bill passed the House with a vote of 314 to 117, as 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats supported the measure. But 71 House Republicans opposed the bill, accusing McCarthy of cutting a horrendous deal with Biden. One Freedom Caucus member, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, mocked the deal as “insanity”.In retrospect, the Freedom Caucus’s attacks on McCarthy marked the beginning of the end of his speakership.The indicted senator from New JerseyAs House Republicans clashed with each other, the Senate grappled with its response to a member accused of corruption so rampant that it bordered on comical. In late September, Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat of New Jersey, was charged in connection to what prosecutors described as a “years-long bribery scheme”.The indictment accused Menendez of exploiting his role as chair of the Senate foreign relations committee to promote the interests of the Egyptian government in exchange for kickbacks. A raid of Menendez’s home, conducted in 2022, revealed that those kickbacks allegedly included a Mercedes-Benz convertible, $500,000 in cash and 13 gold bars.Even as more of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate called on him to step down, Menendez insisted he would not resign, claiming he had been “falsely accused” because of his Latino heritage.Pete Aguilar, a Democrat of California and the highest-ranking Latino member of the House, said of those claims, “Latinos face barriers and discrimination across the board in so many categories, including in our justice system. This is not that.”The chair is declared vacantThe next near-disaster for Congress came in September, when the government appeared to be on the brink of a shutdown that would have forced hundreds of thousands of federal employees to go without a paycheck.But that fate was avoided because, with just hours left before the government’s funding was set to run out, McCarthy introduced a mostly clean bill to fund the government for 45 days. In the House, the bill won the support of 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans, but 90 Republicans opposed the legislation.Democrats and hard-right Republicans alike said McCarthy had “folded” in the funding negotiations, failing to secure the steep spending cuts demanded by hard-right Republicans. Outraged by the bill’s passage, Matt Gaetz, a Republican of Florida, introduced a motion to vacate the chair, forcing a chamber-wide vote on removing McCarthy as speaker.The motion passed, with eight Republicans joining House Democrats in voting for McCarthy’s ouster. Seated in the House chamber, McCarthy let out a bitter laugh as he became the first speaker in US history to ever be ejected from the job.The battle for the gavel (part two)McCarthy’s removal prompted another speakership election, and this one somehow proved even more chaotic than the days-long spectacle that unfolded in January.Republicans initially nominated the House majority leader, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for the speakership. But Scalise was forced to withdraw from the race days later because of entrenched opposition to his nomination among hard-right lawmakers. The caucus then nominated Jim Jordan of Ohio, who attempted to pressure his critics into electing him as speaker by holding multiple unsuccessful chamber-wide votes. Jordan dropped out of the race when it became clear that opposition to his speakership bid was only growing.The election reached its peak level of absurdity on 24 October, when Tom Emmer of Minnesota withdrew from the race just hours after becoming the conference’s third speaker nominee in as many weeks. By then, it appeared even Republicans had grown tired of their manufactured crisis. Republicans’ fourth and final speaker nominee, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, won the gavel in a party-line vote, bringing an end to weeks of turmoil that had become the subject of nationwide mockery.‘You are a United States senator!’The fourteenth of November was a special day on Capitol Hill because it offered an opportunity for members of both the House and the Senate to embarrass themselves.In the House, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, one of the eight Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy as speaker, accused McCarthy of elbowing him in the kidneys. Burchett then chased after McCarthy to confront him, but the former speaker denied the allegation.“If I’d kidney-punched him, he’d be on the ground,” McCarthy told reporters.Meanwhile, on the other side of the Capitol, Senator Markwayne Mullin, a Republican of Oklahoma, challenged one of the witnesses at a committee hearing to a fistfight. Mullin had previously clashed with the witness, the Teamsters union president, Sean O’Brien, over social media and suggested they settle their score with a physical fight.“You want to do it now?” Mullin asked.“I’d love to do it right now,” O’Brien replied.“Then stand your butt up then,” Mullin said.“You stand your butt up,” O’Brien shot back.The chair of the committee, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, then intervened to prevent any violence and offered this pointed reminder to Mullin: “You know, you’re a United States senator.”From Congress to CameoThe House kicked off the final month of the year with a vote to expel George Santos, a freshman Republican from New York who had been indicted on 23 federal counts related to fraud and campaign finance violations.Santos had been plagued by controversy since before taking office, as reporters discovered he had fabricated most of the life story he shared with voters. A congressional investigation uncovered that Santos had spent thousands of dollars from his campaign account on Botox treatments, luxury items at Hermès and payments to OnlyFans, an online platform known for its sexual content.Faced with that mountain of evidence, more than 100 House Republicans joined Democrats in voting to expel Santos. The 311-114 vote made Santos only the sixth member of the House ever to be expelled from Congress.Without his day job, Santos has turned his attention to Cameo, which allows D-list celebrities to make money by filming short personalized videos for fans. Reports indicate Santos is already raking in six figures on the platform.Goodbye, KevinSantos is not the only House members leaving Congress this year. McCarthy announced in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he would resign from the House at the end of December. McCarthy’s decision brought an end to a 17-year career in the House that encapsulated the Republican party’s shift away from small-government conservatism and toward Donald Trump’s “Make America great again” philosophy.Despite his humiliating fall from power, McCarthy expressed unbroken faith in Americans’ goodness and in “the enduring values of our great nation”.“I’m an optimist,” McCarthy declared.That makes one of us, Kevin. More

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      Bernie Sanders demands answers on Israel’s ‘indiscriminate’ Gaza bombing

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      The US’s support for Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza is facing new scrutiny in Washington following a proposed resolution by the independent senator Bernie Sanders that could ultimately be used to curtail military assistance.It is far from clear whether Sanders has the support to pass the resolution, but its introduction in the Senate this week – by an important progressive ally of the US president, Joe Biden – highlights mounting human rights and political concerns by Democrats on Capitol Hill.Citing the killing of nearly 19,000 people and wounding of more than 50,000 in Gaza since Hamas’s brutal 7 October attack, Sanders said it was time to force a debate on the bombing that has been carried out by the rightwing government of the Israel prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the US government’s “complicity” in the war.“This is a humanitarian cataclysm, and it is being done with American bombs and money. We need to face up to that fact – and then we need to end our complicity in those actions,” Sanders said in a statement.If passed, the resolution would force the US state department to report back to Congress any violations of internationally recognized human rights caused by “indiscriminate or disproportionate” military operations in Gaza, as well as “the blanket denial of basic humanitarian needs”.The state department would also have to report back on any actions the US has taken to limit civilian risk caused by Israeli actions, a summary of arms provided to Israel since 7 October, an assessment of Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law in Gaza, and a certification that Israeli security forces have not committed any human rights violations.“We all know Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack began this war,” Sanders said. “But the Netanyahu government’s indiscriminate bombing is immoral, it is in violation of international law, and the Congress must demand answers about the conduct of this campaign. A just cause for war does not excuse atrocities in the conduct of that war.”Any such resolution would have to clear the Senate but only require a simple majority. It would also have to pass the House and be signed by the White House.The resolution includes details about the extensive use of US arms, including massive explosive ordinance, such as Mark 84 2,000lb bombs and 155mm artillery, and includes “credible findings” by human rights monitors and press organizations about the use of US arms in specific strikes that killed a large number of civilians.If the resolution were to pass, the administration would have 30 days to produce the requested report. After it is received, Congress would under US law be able to condition, restrict, terminate or continue security assistance to Israel.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCongress has not requested such a resolution since 1976.Sanders has come under pressure from progressive Democrats to support calls for a ceasefire. Instead, the senator has previously called for a “humanitarian pause” to allow more aid into Gaza.In a letter to Biden this week, Sanders called on the US president to withdraw his support for a $10.1bn weapons package for Israel, which is contained in a proposed supplemental foreign aid package, and for the US to support a UN resolution it has previous vetoed demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. More

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      Change is coming. The question is: what kind of change will it be? | Bernie Sanders

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      We are living in the most difficult moment in modern history. If you feel anxious and overwhelmed about what’s going on, you’re not alone. The extraordinarily challenges we face are very real, but we can never let them become excuses for checking out of the political struggles that address these crises and will define our future.Our nation and, indeed our planet, are at a critical juncture. It is imperative that we recognize what we are up against, and what we must do to move our politics toward justice and human decency. And we can start by acknowledging that the American people have been through a lot, and that their confidence in politics and in government has been shaken.The Covid pandemic, the worst public health crisis in 100 years, took over a million lives in our country, and millions more became ill. The pandemic created the most painful economic downturn since the Great Depression, disrupted the education of our young people, increased isolation, anxiety and mental illness.The climate crisis is ravaging the planet. The last eight years have been the hottest on record and floods, droughts, forest fires and extreme weather disturbances have brought death and destruction to almost every part of the globe. Scientists tell us that unless there is a major reduction in carbon emissions over the next several decades, the planet will become increasingly uninhabitable.Amid unprecedented income and wealth inequality, with three people owning more wealth than the bottom half of American society, a handful of oligarchs control the economic and political life of our nation for their own greedy ends.With a dysfunctional government, and growing economic anxiety for millions of Americans, 60% of whom live paycheck to paycheck, faith that our flawed democracy can respond to the needs of working families is ebbing, and more and more Americans believe that authoritarianism might be the best way forward.Artificial intelligence is exploding. There are deep concerns not only that this new technology will displace millions of workers but about the real possibility that human beings could actually lose control over the future of society.The US healthcare system is broken beyond repair. Despite spending twice as much per capita as any other country, 85 million are uninsured or underinsured, our life expectancy is declining and we have nowhere enough doctors, nurses, dentists or mental health practitioners.Our educational system is in crisis. Childcare is too often unaffordable and unavailable, many of our public schools are unable to attract the quality teachers they need, and 45 million Americans struggle with student debt. In 1990, the US led the world in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds who had college degrees. Today, in a competitive global economy, we are in 15th place.And, oh yes, Donald Trump, who is becoming more rightwing and extremist every day, is leading many of the presidential polls. In a recent speech, using language that echoes Adolf Hitler, Trump stated: “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” He also had strong praise for Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. In an interview, Trump said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country”, promising in another speech that he would round up undocumented people on a vast scale, detain them in sprawling camps, and deport millions of people per year.Frighteningly, the growth of rightwing extremism is not just growing in the United States.As the Washington Post reports, “far-right parties have taken power in Italy, extended their rule in Hungary, earned a coalition role in Finland, become de facto government partners in Sweden, entered parliament in Greece and made striking gains in regional elections in Austria and Germany”. Within the past few weeks, a far-right candidate was elected president of Argentina and a rightwing extremist party won the most seats in the election in Holland.That’s the bad news. The very bad news. But there’s also good news.The good news is that all across the country workers and their unions are fighting back against corporate greed. We are seeing more union organizing and successful strikes than we have seen in decades. Whether it’s the Teamsters at UPS, the UAW at the big three automakers, the Screen Actors Guild (Sag) at the large media production companies, Starbucks workers, graduate students on college campuses, or nurses and doctors at hospitals, working people are making it clear that they are sick and tired of being ripped off and exploited. They are no longer sitting back and allowing large corporations to make record breaking profits while they fall further and further behind. They will no longer accept CEOs making nearly 350 times more than the average worker.The good news is that more and more Americans are making the connections between the reality of their lives and the corrupt and destructive nature of our uber-capitalist system which prizes greed and profiteering above any other human value.Whether they are Democrats, Republicans or independents, Americans want change – real change.They are disgusted by a political system which allows the wealthiest people in this country, through their Super Pacs, to buy elections. They want structural campaign finance reform based on the principle of one person, one vote.They are outraged by billionaires paying a lower effective tax rate than they do because of massive tax loopholes. They want real tax reform which demands that the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes.They are frightened for the future of this planet when they see oil companies make record-breaking profits as the carbon emissions they produce destroy the planet.They are offended to see ten giant pharmaceutical companies making over $110bn in profits last year, while they cannot afford the outrageous price of prescription drugs they need to stay alive.They are shocked as they see Wall Street investment firms buy up affordable housing, gentrify neighborhoods, while they are unable afford to afford the outrageous rents being charged by their unaccountable Wall Street landlords.They are humiliated by having to stay on the phone for an hour, arguing with an airline company machine about a plane reservation, while the industry makes huge profits.The American people today are angry. They are anxious about their present reality and worried about the future that awaits their kids. They know that the status quo is not working and that, in many respects, the system in breaking down.Change is coming. The question is: what kind of change will it be? Will it be a Trumpian, authoritarian type change that exploits that anger and turns it against minorities and immigrants, blaming them for the crises we are experiencing? Or will it be a change that revitalizes American democracy, unites and empowers working people of all backgrounds and has the courage to take on a corrupt ruling class whose greed is causing irreparable destruction in our country and around the world?There is no question but that the challenges we face today are enormous – economic, political and environmental. There is no easy path forward when we take on the oligarchs and the most powerful entities in the world.But, in the midst of all that, here is the simple truth. If we stand together in our common humanity – Black, white, Latino, Asian American, Native American, gay and straight, people of all religions, there are enormous opportunities in front of us to create a better life for all. We can guarantee healthcare to every man, woman and child as a human right. We can create millions of good paying jobs transforming our energy system. We can create the best educational system in the world. We can use artificial intelligence to shorten our work-week and improve our lives. We can create a society free of bigotry.But here is the other simple truth. None of that happens if we are not prepared to stand up and fight together against the forces that work so hard to divide and conquer us. This is a moment in history that cannot be ignored. This is a struggle that cannot be sat out. The future of the planet is at stake, democracy is at stake, human decency is at stake.Let’s go forward together and win.
      Bernie Sanders is a US senator, and chairman of the Senate health, education, labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont, and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress More