Just for everyone's future reference on a zombie trope that pops up daily -- a few quick excerpts and links, among many to choose from...
Mayor:
When Bernie Sanders won by 10 votes in a four-way mayoral race, Ronald Reagan had just entered the White House, the Cold War was in full swing, and people were seriously freaked out. “You would’ve thought that Trotsky had come to Burlington,” said Sanders’ confidant and one-time roommate, Richard Sugarman.
But now, 34 years later, as Sanders launches a campaign for the presidency, many of the radical solutions he imposed — free arts and culture for the masses, local-first economic development, wresting money from rich nonprofits, and, most shockingly, communal land for affordable housing — have become mainstays of the American municipal governance playbook.
[...]
Early in Sanders’ tenure, his treasurer discovered $200,000 in the city’s coffers and the mayor determined to plow it into a bold initiative. Inspired by the garden cities of England, Isreali kibbutzim and Indian communes set up by the followers of Gandhi, he proposed to buy land and hold it in a communal trust for affordable housing, while the housing itself would be owned by occupants.
An opposition group, Homeowners Against the Land Trust, or HALT, labeled it a “communist scheme.” But the plan went through. In 1984, the Burlington Community Land Trust became one of the first affordable housing trusts in the world, and the very first to receive municipal funding. Today, there are over 250 such trusts in the United States — in places like Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Boston and Chapel Hill, North Carolina — most of which receive some form of government funding.
[This whole article could be quoted here, really... -Addison]
http://www.politico.com/...
Congressman:
Sanders is the amendment king of the current House of Representative. Since the Republicans took over Congress in 1995, no other lawmaker – not Tom DeLay, not Nancy Pelosi – has passed more roll-call amendments (amendments that actually went to a vote on the floor) than Bernie Sanders. He accomplishes this on the one hand by being relentlessly active, and on the other by using his status as an Independent to form left-right coalitions.
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
Senator:
The conventional wisdom on Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is that he’s a charming if impractical dreamer, a pie-in-the-sky socialist who’s good at inspiring young people and aging hippies, but hopeless at the knife fighting that real-life politics requires.
Despite the inherent limitations of a self-described democratic socialist who eschews the norms of Beltway fundraising, the Democratic presidential candidate from Vermont has won legislative victory after victory on an issue that has been dear to him since his days as Burlington’s mayor.
That issue is the simultaneously benign and revolutionary expansion of federally qualified community health clinics.
Over the years, Sanders has tucked away funding for health centers in appropriation bills signed by George W. Bush, into Barack Obama’s stimulus program, and through the earmarking process. But his biggest achievement came in 2010 through the Affordable Care Act. In a series of high-stakes legislative maneuvers, Sanders struck a deal to include $11 billion for health clinics in the law.
The result has made an indelible mark on American health care, extending the number of people served by clinics from 18 million before the ACA to an expected 28 million next year.
https://firstlook.org/...
WASHINGTON -- With days to go before Congress adjourned for August recess last year, the prospects of passing a Veterans Affairs reform bill looked dim.
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The VA reform effort seemed likely to end up in the same trash heap as all the other attempts to respond to the crises of summer 2014, from illegal border crossings, to lost IRS emails, to the dwindling highway trust fund.
And then, it was saved.
A phone conversation took place between Sanders and Miller. Their staffs held marathon negotiating sessions. And three days before the calendar turned to August, they finalized a deal. It permitted veterans to get care at private hospitals under certain conditions, spent $5 billion to shore up the VA's own system, allocated additional funds to leasing new facilities and implemented new policies to encourage doctors to work for the VA
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...