Bernie Sanders: America's #1 Socialist
Makes His Move into the Mainstream
Vermont senator, for years a political exile, insists his left-wing beliefs chime with Americans far more than people think
By Paul Harris
SolidarityEconomy.net via Guardian.co.uk
Oct 15, 2011 - Bernie Sanders sits in his Senate office and reflects on another unexpected twist in his already unusual political life. As the only self-proclaimed socialist to sit in the US Congress, Sanders is long used to surviving in the political wilderness. But Sanders is now having to get used to a different environment altogether: the mainstream.
His constant slamming of Wall Street, his critiques of big business and the excesses of money in politics, as well as his call for a defence of American jobs, have become hot issues in US politics. The senator from Vermont is now a regular on American TV screens and rapidly becoming a fixture of US politics and a hero to many on the left.
The white-haired and irascible Sanders, 70, who is famed for his blunt outspokenness, almost became bashful at the thought that his exile from the mainstream appears to be ending.
"It's, you know, nice to know that positions you have been advocating for years are now getting out to Main Street, and that millions of people are beginning to say: enough is enough," he told the Guardian.
Is this, at last, his political moment? "Yeah, it is," he said, and then he details why, in a typically long, passionate, Sanders-style explosion of stream-of-consciousness explanation.
"If you were to speak to any audience in America and you say: there's something wrong with our system when the crooks on Wall Street, through their recklessness and criminal behaviour, are able to cause a recession, which has resulted in so much suffering to people, and then they get bailed out by the American people and then three years later end up making more money than they ever have before: people go nuts!"
He pauses for breath to think about the situation. "The short answer to your question is: 'Yes'," he says.
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by Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report
Former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel is right to be scared of most of the Democratic field of presidential candidates. Except for Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the contenders jockey for the title of most-likely-to-attack-Iran. Impeachment "is the only way to discredit Republicans enough to insure a Democratic victory in 2008," but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will hear none of that. Even if the Democrats somehow triumph, nothing much will change, because the frontrunners are all beholden to Big Money and enthralled with war.
During the first Democratic presidential debate a little known candidate, former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, ended up with one of the most memorable lines of the evening:
"And I got to tell you, after standing up with them, some of these people frighten me - they frighten me. When you have mainline candidates that turn around and say that there's nothing off the table with respect to Iran, that's code for using nukes, nuclear devices. 
BY OVERWHELMING MAJORITIES
IN CHICAGO, COOK COUNTY SUBURBS
AND SEVERAL ILLINOIS CITIES
By Chicagoans Against War & Injustice
CHICAGO (Nov 8, 2006) - Huge numbers of voters across the state of Illinois, wherever antiwar referendums appeared on the ballot, voted to stop the war and 'immediately begin an orderly and rapid withdrawal.'
At 3am, in the City of Chicago, with 95 percent of precincts reporting, the margin was 80 percent to 20 percent--389,000 'Yes' and 93,000 'No'. The tallies were similar throughout suburban Cook County, where towns like Evanston and Oak Park had the measure on the ballot as well 
