I had thought I was right wing but Bernie Sanders has won me over!
Enlightened US senator isn’t afraid to support bin charges and water charges
Thank you Bernie Sanders. I was beginning to think I was turning into a curmudgeonly conservative, annoyed more than inspired by the antics of the Irish radical left.
Then last Sunday, I heard Bernie speak in Dublin and found myself agreeing with almost everything this icon of the left says.
Ireland could take a leaf out of the book he was here to promote – Our Revolution:
A Future to Believe In – which spells out how we could tackle our housing, water and environmental crises.
As Labour did with the Tories this week in Britain, Bernie ran his rival Hillary Clinton unexpectedly close for the Democratic Party nomination, winning 46% of the vote.
Also like Corbyn, this greyhaired, old-school socialist won over a majority of young people, fuelling hope of a more enlightened future after Brexit and Donald Trump’s election.
His liberal credentials are impeccable. Page 19 of his new book shows a young Bernie being shoved to the ground by police in a protest over segregated housing in Chicago. He marched on Washington alongside Martin Luther King, whom he describes in his book as ‘one of the great leaders in… history.’
Unlike certain radical socialists in Ireland who’d run a mile from the responsibilities of Government, Bernie walked that walk. For eight years, he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, which he helped to transform into one of the most popular places to live in America, with a scenic public waterfront that’s the envy of nearby cities. In 2014, Burlington became the first US city completely fuelled by renewable energy.
Energy-efficiency was the easy bit – the book describes it as ‘lowhanging fruit’ – achieved thanks to solar power, wind energy and hydro-power. Low-hanging or
not, it’s fruit we in Ireland have abjectly failed to pick.
The Irish Socialist Party and its offshoot, People Before Profit, might be surprised to learn that their US counterpart ran a city funded by three things they are most fervently opposed to: property tax and bin and water charges.
To pay for what he calls in his book ‘the most innovative affordable housing initiative’, Sanders even added 1% to property tax, although it has since been cut. There is even a small bin tax on every home to fund recycling.
His home city, mostly run by ‘Sanderistas’ for two decades, still charges for water at a rate that’s twice as high as what was proposed here.
That doesn’t mean they are high. Burlington charges three times less than nearby Flint, Michigan, whose toxic water recently caused a national scandal. Mayor Sanders undertook the largest environmental improvement programme in Vermont history, ‘a $52m project to rebuild sewers, upgrade waste-water plants and stop pollution’.
His plan was not far off from the original one for Irish Water, which was to levy charges and use them to back loans that would pay to fix our broken water system.
Instead, protests kiboshed the utility and funding slowed to a trickle.
In fairness, this shows up failures of the right and centre parties as well as the left.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been running the country for decades. And they are also responsible for our housing crisis.
Our local authorities built swathes of council estates and flat complexes. Many, through neglect, became ghettoes. Those that didn’t are let to tenants for life, even if they later become wealthy.
The priority of councils seems to be to sell their social housing stock as quickly as possible to tenants at discounts of up to 60% – and depleting our stock further.
What did Bernie do? The same as the rest of Europe – used housing trusts, or associations, to build and manage social homes. Unlike monolithic councils, they’re small and want to succeed because locals help to run the areas and ensure they don’t deteriorate.
Bernie set up one housing trust with a $200,000 grant. It now has a portfolio of 2,800 price-controlled homes.
Proportionate to the Irish population, that would equate to around 280,000 houses – more than enough to solve our housing crisis.
Owners who sell their homes must do so at low prices to ensure housing stays affordable.
We had a similar scheme in Ireland, which cash-hungry councils ruined by allowing builders to pay them off instead of building social homes. In 2011, it was abandoned.
Socialism is usually defined as workers controlling the means of production.
Bernie realises that we don’t have to own the factories if we can control them through the democratic process.
We could, for instance, make billionaires pay more taxes and increase the wages they pay us.
Bernie has been watching the Waltons. No not John-boy and the impoverished hillbillies in the TV series of that name. These Waltons own the US retail chain Wal-Mart and are the wealthiest family in America, with a net worth of $130bn.
They’re also the biggest welfare recipients in the US, Bernie says. Because they pay workers so little, the state has to give them food stamps, social housing and healthcare.
If the US minimum wage was increased to $15 an hour, WalMart’s profits would fall $5bn to $10bn a year. ‘The Walton family could probably survive on that,’ Bernie reasons in his book.
Here in Ireland, we too are subsidising wealthy corporations’ low pay with supports such as Family Income Supplement for minimum wage workers on €9.25 an hour. People on this income would be better off on social welfare with free housing, medical care and other supports – thus creating poverty-traps where it’s not worth going to work.
The obvious solution is to up the minimum wage, one of Sanders’ key proposals.
Over to you, Leo!