Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Socialist senator makes US history

Socialist senator makes US history
By Richard Allen Greene
BBC News, Washington
The US Senate may not be ready for Bernard Sanders.
It's a collegial, even fusty place, where senators' hair turns white
with decades of speeches and service.
Mr Sanders blasts the US health care system as driven by profit
Mr Sanders has the requisite white hair surrounding his bald patch, but
his attitude remains unmistakeably New York despite his many years in
Vermont.
"Anybody read your website?" he asks the BBC brusquely at the beginning
of an interview ahead of taking his seat in the Senate.
Assured that millions do, he says: "OK, let's talk to them."
The blunt manner is not all that sets apart Mr Sanders, the
newly-elected senator from Vermont known to all and sundry simply as
"Bernie".
The Senate has had plain speakers before, but it has never before had a
politician who calls himself a socialist - not even a "democratic
socialist," as Mr Sanders specifies.
But he clearly thinks Washington needs at least one, as he praises the
achievements of Europe's social-democratic parties in health care,
housing, education and reduction of child poverty.
"The government should make sure people who work 40 hours a week do not
live in poverty," he says, adding for good measure: "I disagree with
Bush and other right-wing extremists about this."
Mr Sanders, himself labelled an extremist by his Republican foes,
served in the House of Representatives for 16 years before being
elected to the Senate in a landslide in November.
Ground-breaking state
His two-to-one victory over an independently wealthy businessman called
Richard Tarrant would have been remarkable in most places, but perhaps
not in iconoclastic Vermont.
Vermont's Gov Howard Dean turned into a firebrand campaigner
The tiny New England state's population makes it barely larger than
Glasgow, and slightly smaller than Frankfurt, Germany or Memphis,
Tennessee.
But its irascible (if not numerous) voters produced the firebrand 2004
presidential candidate Howard Dean, a former state governor.
And Mr Sanders' own predecessor, Jim Jeffords, pulled the rug out from
under George W Bush six years ago by defecting from the Republican
party and thus robbing the president's party of control of the Senate.
Mr Jeffords became an independent who aligned himself with the
Democrats, and the voters have replaced him with a man who is doing the
same.
Not seeking socialists
They have clearly not been put off by his socialism, although the US
has never had anything resembling a successful socialist party.
  Our system is designed to make money, not to provide quality health
care
Bernie Sanders
Send us your views
Mr Sanders waves away the question of why it has not.
"Books this thick have been written about that," he says, holding his
thumb and index finger far apart, before launching another swipe at
"the right-wing and corporate media" which "did a good job of equating
democratic socialism with Stalinism, Maoism, Albania and North Korea".
But he does not claim the voters of Vermont sought out a socialist
either.
"People looked at the record, and they said: 'We'd like more of what
Bernie is doing.'"
As a congressman, "what he did" included leading groups of pensioners
across the border into Canada to buy prescription drugs that are
cheaper there than in the United States.
Few topics aggravate Mr Sanders more than the US health care system,
which is largely private and relies on insurance companies to pay most
bills.
"We spend three times as much per capita on health care as the UK, and
48 million Americans have no health insurance," he says.
"Our system is faulty and inefficient," he says, and the reason is
clear to him: "It is designed to make money, not to provide quality
health care."
Efforts to implement a national health care system have failed over the
last 60 years because of "powerful special interests - insurance and
pharmaceutical companies - determined to charge high prices".
Party of one
Mr Sanders is vague about what one senator out of 100 can do to change
that when presidents as powerful as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman
and Bill Clinton have all failed.
He hopes to entice some senators to join the Progressive Caucus that he
founded when he came to Congress as a representative in 1991. (Paul
Wellstone of Minnesota, the only senator to have joined Mr Sanders'
left-leaning group, was killed in a plane crash in 2002.)
But he is not planning to found his own progressive party, he adds.
"Working 70 hours a week is enough," he says. "I was elected to be a
congressman. I worked hard at that. I was elected to be a senator, and
I am going to work hard at that.
Starting a new party, he says, is "not my job. If others can do better,
God bless them."


Wow un senatore socialista in america, circa cento anni dopo tutti gli
altri.
Back in the USA. Vuoi vedere che e' finito il Macartismo e gli yankee si
avviano lentamente verso la democrazia?
Non piu' partiti fuori legge, l'ultima dittatura si spegne.
Saluti
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