How Bernie Sanders' 'radical' ideas entered the municipal mainstream “He ran against everything."

[kentuck]

<snip>
On March 4, 1981, red dawn broke over the Green Mountains.

“‘Everyone’s scared.’ Socialist elected mayor of Vermont’s largest city,” blared the UPI headline over an article that began, “Self-described socialist Bernard Sanders… has invited the city’s business and political leaders to join him in creating ‘a rebirth of the human spirit.’ ” Readers could have been forgiven for concluding that some Pol Pot in Birkenstocks had just established a beachhead in Burlington, Vermont.

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.

Such policies “would be unexceptional today,” said UCLA urban planning professor Randall Crane, noting that urban policy in general has become broader and more creative in the decades that followed, as more people returned to city neighborhoods.

Link below:



http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/how-bernie-sanderss-radical-ideas-entered-the-municipal-mainstream-118447.html

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Migod, we gotta sink him NOW

before these crazy ideas get any more traction!

[BrotherIvan]

2. SCANDINAVIA YOU GUYS!!!!!!!

[Fumesucker]

3. Everyone will have to eat Lutefisk!!1!!

And sauna naked!!1

Nooooooooooo.....

[BrotherIvan]

4. Don't forget fermented shark

Hákarl

"Those new to it will usually gag involuntarily on the first attempt to eat it due to the high ammonia content".

http://www.meemalee.com/2010/12/hakarl-rotten-shark-worst-thing-i-have.html

[kentuck]

5. It seemed like a new economics theory?

<snip>
Later in his tenure, Sanders went after the University of Vermont and a local hospital, non-profit institutions that owned large swathes of valuable land in the city but were exempt from paying taxes and cut deals for them for them to contribute “Payments in Lieu of Taxes.”

Sanders didn’t invent PILOTs in Burlington. That other people’s republic, Cambridge, Mass, had been receiving them from Harvard since the 1920s, as had other cities since. But he did anticipate an approach that’s become increasingly popular in the Northeast in recent decades as tax-exempt hospitals and universities have swallowed up more and more land and local governments have put the screws on them to pony up more money for city services.

Sanders also carried through on that original campaign plank, scuttling Pomerleau’s plans for a ritzy waterfront development. But Pomerleau learned to work with Sanders nonetheless. So did the rest of the business community. Ben & Jerry’s grew into a household brand and Burton Snowboards moved to town without any special inducements.

Pomerlau ended up becoming one of Sanders’ closest friends. At one point, a Burlington Free Press front page pictured the two men together under the headline “the odd couple.” On Tuesday, Sanders launched his presidential bid from the public park he created on the waterfront land.

more at link in OP

[hootinholler]

6. Kick to read later

Thanks for posting this.