Fernando Alcoforado*
Senator Bernie Sanders is back. He has just launched his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, and he does so as a representative of the left among the Democratic Party’s pre-candidacies. He is not afraid to declare himself a socialist. Its radicality and transparency are understandable. Bernie Sanders says he cannot be centrist or confused to face extreme inequalities in the United States, challenge the control of large American companies over political life and curb global warming.
Neoliberalism has widened inequalities in the United States. The income of the richest 1% has tripled in the past four decades, controlling 22% of the country’s total wealth (according to the Economic Policy Institute). At the same time, there is the paradox that 40 million poor people live in the richest country in the world. The concentration of income and wealth among the 1% of the population is largely explained by the huge profits of large corporations in recent decades. This is facilitated by the close link of these corporations with the parties of the establishment. For this reason, Sanders refuses corporate funding for his campaign, and his program proposes to end their influence in political life.
This is the context that underlies Bernie Sanders’ political program. He reiterates the same ideas with those faced Senator Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries: raising the minimum wage, universal medical care and reducing the price of medicines, public university no cost of registration, women’s reproductive rights, environmental protection and protection for immigrants. To finance these proposals, he plans a policy of heavy taxes for the wealthiest, especially the increase in inheritance taxes. Vermont Senator Sanders qualifies Donald Trump as the most dangerous president in modern US history, but goes further by saying to his supporters that “our campaign is about transforming our country and creating a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice ”. It is a difficult proposal to accept for many traditional politicians, the media and the big business. But Bernie Sanders is determined.
Bernie Sanders opted for political radicalism because the changes it intends to drive in the United States require depth. A center proposal would be futile and defeatist in the face of Trump’s right-wing populism. This explains why Sanders has no complexes in calling himself a socialist, even though his ideas are clearly social democratic. This is Bernie Sanders’ political moment. Only he can tackle the country’s inequalities to challenge corrupt corporate power, as well as global climate change that threatens all of humanity. For American society and the whole world, Sanders’ “socialism” can be the lifeline against Trump’s populist demagogy and the immense dangers that his fascist policies can still bring.
Bernie Sanders won the preview in Nevada. A projection made during the dawn of this Sunday by CNN shows Sanders with the support of 46.6% of the delegates. What does Senator Bernie Sanders think, who is gaining prominence in the race for the Democratic Party in the United States presidential election? He calls himself a social democrat, which means creating an economy that works for everyone, not just the very wealthy. Sanders’ fight for equal treatment for the poor and middle class, and against the “billionaire class”, is a central theme in his campaign.
Sanders believes that climate change is real and caused by human activity. He wants to tax carbon emissions, cut subsidies on fossil fuels and invest in clean energy technologies. Sanders argues that class equality will be impossible if most Americans do not have access to college education. He devised a plan to make tuition fees free by taxing financial markets on Wall Street. Sanders has a dubious past on gun control, which is explained by the fact that he comes from Vermont, a pro-gun state and where “99% of people who hunt obey the law,” according to the senator. He does, however, support universal background checks for arms buyers, but prefers compromise over broad gun control.
Sanders agrees that the high rate of unemployment and incarceration among African Americans is evidence of systemic racism in the United States. He advocates criminal justice reform as a way out of the problem. Sanders says that no one who works 40 hours a week should live in poverty. For decades, Sanders has criticized both the Republican and Democratic parties, saying the two are tied to corporate money. He prefers to travel in economy class to show that he is an ordinary man who would not waste the money of taxpayers. Sanders believes that the United States should adopt the universal health care system, paid for by the federal government. Sanders regularly exposes his admiration for the health systems of Canada and Scandinavian countries.
Sanders wants to create jobs with heavy investments in roads, bridges, water treatment systems, railways and airports, which, according to him, would generate 13 million new jobs in five years. Sanders wants to tax the rich by creating a series of taxes and fees, most of which are on rich Americans: hedge fund managers, speculators on Wall Street and big businessmen. Sanders voted against the Iraq war started in 2002 and says he has not changed his mind. He calls the invasion “the worst foreign policy stupidity in the country’s history”. Sanders believes that diplomacy should always come first in foreign policy and says that the countries in the Middle East should have led the fight in the region against Islamic State and not the United States.
Sanders’ socialism is not that of Cuba, nor Maduro’s “21st century socialism”. His socialism is a kind of recovery of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s social democratic tradition and New Deal. Its objective is to confront neoliberal capitalism, which was installed in the United States under the government of Ronald Reagan, in the early 1980s, and which remains in power until now, supported transversely by Democrats and Republicans.
When Bernie Sanders launched the race for the Democratic Party to run for president in 2016, few took it seriously. However, already in the first of the contests of that year, in Iowa, the Vermont senator was competitive, falling slightly behind Hillary Clinton. There, the yellow light came on for the leaders of the Democratic Party. If in the past he was seen only with disdain or relative dislike by senior leaders, the picture is now different.
When it comes to “renovation”, in this case, it is not just a discursive resource, but the adoption of initiatives that range from financing mechanisms that exclude large donations, through constant dialogue with associations and collectives and in fact horizontality in construction of proposals. Sanders is part of this movement and a good part of his supporters is genuinely based on his campaign slogan: “Not me, us”. They are people organized in movements that go beyond militancy in electoral periods, rescuing the original sense of politics, of participation. And perhaps therein lies the problem for the top of the Democratic Party.
When working explicitly for Sanders’ candidacy, his supporters suggest that, in addition to defeating Trump, he fosters a movement that has the capacity to modify the country’s own party structures and political and economic system. The problem is not just the Vermont senator’s campaign proposals, but what he can represent in terms of truly democratic airing that goes beyond mere voting rights. In the United States themselves, Donald Trump beat Hilary Clinton because he was an outsider in opposition to the political establishment from a rhetorical point of view. Bernie Sanders can play the same role in relation to Donald Trump in opposition to the political establishment of American bipartisanship, but proposing effective changes in the country’s structures.
If Bernie Sanders wins this year’s presidential election, he will have to face, however, fascism embedded in the country’s power structures. Fascism was leveraged in the United States under the Bush administration and maintained by the Barack Obama and Donald Trump governments. The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon led by Osama bin Laden on 11/09/2001, was the necessary event (equivalent to the fire of the German Reichstag in Hitler’s Germany to leverage Nazism) for the pro-fascist devices to take action. in the United States during the George W. Bush administration. For internal use, a law with hundreds of articles had already been drafted, the Patriot Act, with almost unanimous approval from Congress, which abolished the country’s main democratic achievements. Among other measures, an internal security structure, the Department of Homeland Security, was created in addition to the already abundant repression apparatus, for the repression of terrorists and internal threats to order.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 80, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is author of the books Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017), Esquerda x Direita e a sua convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018, em co-autoria) and Como inventar o futuro para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019).
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