It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism

by Bernie Sanders, John Nichols (Editor)

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A progressive takedown of the uber-capitalist status quo that has enriched millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the working class, and a blueprint for what transformational change would actually look like

“A clarion call against the American oligarchs . . . powerful.”—The Guardian

It’s OK to be angry about capitalism. Reflecting on our turbulent times, Senator Bernie Sanders takes on the billionaire class and speaks blunt truths about our country’s failure to address the destructive nature of a system that is fueled by uncontrolled greed and rigidly committed to prioritizing corporate profits over the needs of ordinary Americans.

Sanders argues that unfettered capitalism is to blame for an unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality, is undermining our democracy, and is destroying our planet. How can we accept an economic order that allows three billionaires to control more wealth than the bottom half of our society? How can we accept a political system that allows the super rich to buy politicians and swing elections? How can we accept an energy system that rewards the fossil fuel corporations causing the climate crisis? Sanders believes that, in the face of these overwhelming challenges, the American people must ask tough questions about the systems that have failed us and demand fundamental economic and political change. This is where the path forward begins.

It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism presents a vision that extends beyond the promises of past campaigns to reveal what would be possible if the political revolution took place, if we would finally recognize that economic rights are human rights, and if we would work to create a society that provides a decent standard of living for all. This isn’t some utopian fantasy; this is democracy as we should know it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593238714
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/21/2023
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	85,670
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Bernie Sanders is serving his third term in the U.S. Senate and is the longest-serving Independent member of Congress in American history. He is the chairman of the Budget Committee, where he helped write the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, one of the most significant pieces of legislation in our modern history. In the Senate, Sanders is leading the fight for Medicare for All, for combating climate change, and for making public colleges and universities tuition free.

John Nichols is an award-winning progressive author and journalist who serves as the national affairs correspondent for The Nation.

Read an Excerpt

1

Not Me, Us

The 2020 campaign and the fight to transform our country

On April 8, 2020, after almost fourteen months of competing for the Democratic presidential nomination, I announced that we were suspending our campaign. The important message in the statement I made that day was “While this campaign is coming to an end, our movement is not.”

Given the growing pandemic, and social distancing requirements that effectively ended in-person campaigning, I made the announcement through a livestream from my home. I was deeply moved that some seven million people ended up viewing it. During my remarks, I chose to focus less on the practicalities of a campaign that had fallen short in the delegate count and more on the historic nature of what we had accomplished.

“I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour,” I explained. “But let me say this very emphatically: As you all know, we have never been just a campaign. We are a grassroots, multiracial, multigenerational movement which has always believed that real change never comes from the top on down but always from the bottom on up.”

Our campaign was like none other in modern American history. Built upon the foundation of a 2016 bid that had proposed a political revolution, we forged a grassroots working-class movement that was national in character, and which sought to overcome the overwhelming barriers to progress in the Democratic Party and the broader politics of the United States.

I ran, as had been the case since my first campaign almost fifty years earlier, as a democratic socialist who was ready and willing to take on the oligarchs, the plutocrats, and the billionaire class that had turned our economic system into their plaything. But this time was different. While my ideas were still dismissed as “radical” by political elites and many in the media, I began the 2020 campaign with a base of supporters that numbered in the millions and was prepared to fight for fundamental change. By the time the campaign was done, we had taken on Wall Street and the enormously powerful economic interests that control not just the economy but the politics of our nation. We had challenged the billionaire class and the corporate elite, their media and their super-PACs. We had taken on the political establishment in both major parties.

From the start, we achieved victories that shocked the pundits. We won the popular vote in the first three primary states on the way to securing almost ten million votes nationwide for a campaign that was suspended before more than two dozen primaries were held. We won California, the most populous state in the country, by more than 450,000 votes. For a time, we led the national polls, not only in the race for the Democratic nomination but in head-to-head matchups against Donald Trump. And we built a movement powered by young people who were prepared to trudge through snow to knock on doors in northern New Hampshire and to sweat through ninety-degree days in South Texas.

We had organized the most ambitious and most successful progressive presidential campaign in a century. Our ideas, which just a few years earlier had been dismissed as too extreme to be politically viable, had become part of the mainstream Democratic Party agenda. Our supporters and allies had begun to be elected to seats in Congress, and to chair state parties. We had expanded political consciousness and gotten millions of Americans to embrace a new understanding of what they had a right to expect from their government.

Most important for the long term, as a result of our campaign, young people were participating in the political process at an unprecedented rate. It turned out that our ideas and our movement were, in fact, the future of the Democratic Party. While poll after poll showed us doing more poorly than we’d hoped with older voters, those same polls showed that we were swamping the other candidates among younger voters—winning overwhelming support from Black, Latino, Asian American, Native American, and white voters under age forty. What was striking was that these young people were not only voting for us; they were the foundation of our grassroots campaign. They were the ones handing out literature, making phone calls, texting, raising small contributions, and volunteering in a hundred different ways.

A Campaign Finance Revolution

Our campaign attracted a new generation of voters because we revolutionized modern presidential politics.

At a time when virtually all campaigns were funded by super-PACs and the very rich, we broke that long-established mold and created an entirely new approach to raising sufficiently large sums of money to run a truly national presidential campaign. We did not hold one fundraiser in a billionaire’s mansion. We did not seek the support of super-PACs. Our campaign was fueled by the working class—teachers, postal clerks, Amazon warehouse workers, nurses, small-business owners, farmers, and veterans—with more than two million individual donors making ten million contributions that averaged $18.50. No campaign in American history had ever received that kind of support. We had revolutionized campaign financing, developing an entirely new model that rejected Big Money and put the people in control.

The way we ran our campaign was intentional. We knew that, to reach people who had grown justifiably cynical about politics, we had to abandon the practices that had caused tens of millions of American to lose faith in both major parties. We didn’t just talk about “rejecting the influence of big corporate money”—although I did that a lot—we actually did it. And we explained why it was absolutely necessary to reject “greed-fueled, corrupt corporate influence over elections.” The simple truth, as I said in every stump speech, is that no elected official is going to represent ordinary Americans and take on the special interests if they are beholden to Big Money. You can’t receive campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry and lower the outrageous cost of prescription drugs. You can’t rely on funding from the fossil fuel industry and combat climate change. You can’t take big checks from CEOs who have made their fortunes running non-union plants and then implement pro-worker labor law reforms. You can’t do fundraising events with billionaires and help develop a fair and progressive tax system.

Ultimately, of course, this country needs to enact fundamental campaign finance reforms to overturn the disastrous Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United and establish public funding of elections. But to get to the point where we can enact those reforms, candidates have to break free from the stranglehold of Big Money. And the only way to do that, as I learned a long time ago, is by relying on contributions from working-class people. Our campaign showed it was possible to do this even at the level of presidential politics.

Initially, we were told our approach was impractical. That it could never work. I knew that was wrong. So I went on social media and wrote: “I have a wild idea: I want to challenge you to help our campaign hit a goal that will absolutely astonish the political and financial establishment.” People from all across the country responded and political veterans were, indeed, astonished when our campaign raised $45 million in a single month—February 2020—with more than 2.2 million donations. The Guardian newspaper said we’d “established a gold standard for small-dollar fundraising.”

I was enormously proud of what we accomplished. I was prouder still of the legacy of our grassroots online fundraising efforts, which can be seen in the campaigns of a new generation of candidates, especially those running for Congress, who have rejected all corporate PAC money, basing their fundraising on small donations—ensuring they will never have to bend to pressure from Big Money interests.

Editorial Reviews

03/13/2023

U.S. senator Sanders (Where We Go from Here) delivers a feisty if familiar takedown of “the uber-capitalist system in which we live.” Rehashing the talking points of his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns in blunt terms, Sanders castigates “oligarchs” who tip the scales of democracy in their favor through campaign contributions and media ownership; attributes Donald Trump’s political rise to “the pain, desperation, and political alienation that millions of working-class Americans now experience”; and accuses the Democratic establishment of being beholden to Hollywood celebrities and Wall Street financiers. He also blames senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (“both of them heavily financed by corporate interests”) for killing the momentum behind President Biden’s Build Back Better bill and proposes various strategies for “taxing the billionaire class down to size.” Elsewhere, Sanders highlights deficiencies in the healthcare systems and outlines his Medicare for All proposal, recounts how Reagan-era deregulation led to the decline of America’s working class, and calls for federal funding to desegregate public schools and a ban on for-profit charter schools. Throughout, Sanders’s arguments are forceful, specific, and urgent, though he seems more interested in preaching to the choir than changing minds. Still, Sanders voters will appreciate his commitment to keeping up the fight. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

2023-02-21
Everyone’s favorite avuncular socialist sends up a rousing call to remake the American way of doing business.

“In the twenty-first century we can end the vicious dog-eat-dog economy in which the vast majority struggle to survive,” writes Sanders, “while a handful of billionaires have more wealth than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes.” With that statement, the author updates an argument as old as Marx and Proudhon. In a nice play on words, he condemns “the uber-capitalist system under which we live,” showing how it benefits only the slimmest slice of the few while imposing undue burdens on everyone else. Along the way, Sanders notes that resentment over this inequality was powerful fuel for the disastrous Trump administration, since the Democratic Party thoughtlessly largely abandoned underprivileged voters in favor of “wealthy campaign contributors and the ‘beautiful people.’ ” The author looks squarely at Jeff Bezos, whose company “paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2017 and 2018.” Indeed, writes Sanders, “Bezos is the embodiment of the extreme corporate greed that shapes our times.” Aside from a few passages putting a face to avarice, Sanders lays forth a well-reasoned platform of programs to retool the American economy for greater equity, including investment in education and taking seriously a progressive (in all senses) corporate and personal taxation system to make the rich pay their fair share. In the end, he urges, “We must stop being afraid to call out capitalism and demand fundamental change to a corrupt and rigged system.” One wonders if this firebrand of a manifesto is the opening gambit in still another Sanders run for the presidency. If it is, well, the plutocrats might want to take cover for the duration.

Even if they're pie-in-the-sky exercises, Sanders’ pitched arguments bear consideration by nonbillionaires.

Kirkus Reviews

A clarion call against the American oligarchs . . . powerful.”—The Guardian

From the Publisher

The senator’s fervor can still be heard, but intelligent writing and his calm performance allow his ideas to have more prominence than his passion.”

AudioFile

A clarion call against the American oligarchs . . . powerful.

The Guardian

Bernie Sanders combines a summary of his political ideals with a history of how the world's oldest democracy elected a wannabe oligarch, unleashed a class war, and enabled a new wave of corporate greed. He sounds surprisingly calm and measured narrating this informative audiobook, not at all like the ranting ideologue portrayed on cable TV and SNL skits. His gentle delivery of these progressive ideas allows listeners to think about a society in which the needs of ordinary citizens can be prioritized over corporate profits. Tightly organized and articulate throughout, this audiobook is also a plea for more citizen activism. The Senator's fervor can still be heard, but intelligent writing and his calm performance allow his ideas to have more prominence than his passion. T.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

MAY 2023 - AudioFile

Bernie Sanders combines a summary of his political ideals with a history of how the world's oldest democracy elected a wannabe oligarch, unleashed a class war, and enabled a new wave of corporate greed. He sounds surprisingly calm and measured narrating this informative audiobook, not at all like the ranting ideologue portrayed on cable TV and SNL skits. His gentle delivery of these progressive ideas allows listeners to think about a society in which the needs of ordinary citizens can be prioritized over corporate profits. Tightly organized and articulate throughout, this audiobook is also a plea for more citizen activism. The Senator's fervor can still be heard, but intelligent writing and his calm performance allow his ideas to have more prominence than his passion. T.W. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

MAY 2023 - AudioFile