Your Saturday Radical 3: Bernie Sanders and progressive municipal policies.

Pragmatism, grassroots, collaboration and livability.

Who's the radical, again?

There's this ...

What Kind of Mayor Was Bernie Sanders?, by Peter Dreier and Pierre Clavel (The Nation)

... Thanks to the enduring influence of the progressive climate that Sanders and his allies helped to create in Burlington, the city’s largest housing development is now resident-owned, its largest supermarket is a consumer-owned cooperative, one of its largest private employers is worker-owned, and most of its people-oriented waterfront is publicly owned. Its publicly owned utility, the Burlington Electric Department, recently announced that Burlington is the first American city of any decent size to run entirely on renewable electricity.

And this ...

Most of Burlington’s business leaders initially distrusted Sanders. They didn’t know what a socialist would do once he held the reins of power. But even many of Sanders’s early opponents came to respect and even admire his willingness to listen to their views and his efforts to adopt progressive municipal policies.

Also this ...

Under Sanders, Burlington became a magnet for attracting and incubating locally owned businesses, many of which expanded into large enterprises. Burton, the nation’s largest snowboard company, has its headquarters (as well as a snowboard museum) in Burlington. The city assisted Seventh Generation, a green cleaning-products firm, when it started in 1988. Today, with its downtown waterfront headquarters in a LEED-certified building and over $300 million in annual sales, it is one of Burlington’s largest employers. With the city’s help, Gardeners Supply Company, which sells environmentally friendly gardening products, moved to Burlington in 1983. Four years later, its founder, Will Raap, began the process of selling the firm to its workers. It now has over 250 employee-owners.