"Bernie Sanders isn’t a radical — he’s a pragmatist who fights to un-rig the system."

It's so very tiresome having to explain these matters again and again -- to Democrats, whose prefer keeping the system rigged, and whose idea of "resistance" is to become as much like their opposition as humanly possible while expressing dismay that nothing ever changes. Then it's back to the imaginary Star Wars and Marvel canons, and another half-decade of decline.

Opinion: Bernie Sanders isn’t a radical — he’s a pragmatist who fights to un-rig the system, by Mark Weisbrot (Market Watch)

 ... He is a “socialist,” his opponents cry, leaving out the first part of the term “democratic socialist” that Sanders always uses when this issue is discussed. There is much room to induce confusion here because the term “socialist,” in English, has a number of different definitions that have all become common usage over the years.

It can be used to mean anything from “communist,” as in the former Soviet Union, to the European social democratic or socialist parties that have governed for much of the past 70 years in countries such as France, Germany, Spain, and the U.K., not to mention the Scandinavian countries.

It should be clear to anyone who is not trying to frighten voters that Sanders is a social democrat of the latter, European variety. There will be no U.S. government takeover of the means of production under a Sanders administration.

The biggest expansion in government will be in public funding of health insurance. Like traditional Medicare, where less than 2% of expenses are administrative costs, public health insurance will be much more efficient than the current six times as much spent by the private insurance industry. And we won’t have 8 million people falling into poverty every year due to medical expenses, or worse, tens of thousands actually dying because of lack of access to affordable health care.

Sanders’ program is targeted at correcting a very harmful transformation of the U.S. economy that has taken place over the past 40 years ...

"From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare."
-- Gore Vidal (1987)

Local DemoDisneyDixiecrats appalled as "Bernie Sanders and AOC Unveil a Green New Deal for Public Housing."

Half of Jeff Gahan's enthusiasts in the Floyd County DemoDisneyDixiecratic Party are horrified by this idea because they agree with Dear Leader that the best solution to the public housing problem is to run the residents out of town.

The other half are scandalized because this is radicalism run amok, and can't we just be clean safe centrists -- you know, avoid insulting the 1%?

Let's see a show of hands: who's a left-winger, or are you all just a slightly less vivid shade of Republican?

Bernie Sanders and AOC Unveil a Green New Deal for Public Housing, by Kriston Capps (CityLab)

The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act would commit up to $180 billion over a decade to upgrading 1.2 million federally owned homes.

Socialist Democrats are pushing the progressive envelope with a new iteration of Green New Deal legislation this week, this time with a focus on public housing ...

 ... The bill is an effort to bag two birds with one stone. America’s public housing portfolio is in a shambles, with deferred maintenance costs nationwide running into the billions. The bill introduced by AOC and Sanders would bring that backlog up to date while also reducing the energy consumption from this aging housing stock.

Liberals and progressives, which one Pete Buttigieg is, and whether local DemoDisneyDixiecrats are either.

Valletta, 2016.

I'll give a respectful nod to Pete Buttigieg for being that rarest of breeds, a Maltese-American. The Knights Templar aside, I'm not very impressed with Mayor Pete's positions so far.

This article interests me for two reasons. Secondly, it briefly surveys Buttigieg's policies to date, and these come up lacking. But before doing so, the author contrasts the political identifiers known as liberal and progressive.

There are an increasing number of Democrats locally referring to themselves as progressive. I've even done it at times, so no stones are being cast by me. I'm not sure being a progressive interests me much any longer, probably because so many local progressives are liberals -- and the governing elite is neither.

Anyway, I consider myself less of a "progressive" and more a Social Democrat of the mixed-economy, European model; since there's no place for such a beast in L'America, I scrape by as a pants-down independent.

And while independence may never be enough to win an election, it's an honest designation and describes me pretty well. I'm comfortable with that. Groucho Marx was supposed to have said, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member."

Yeah, that's me.

Here's the link, with the opening passage about the difference between liberals and progressives. Broadly speaking, I agree with the author's assessment.

Pete Buttigieg Is Not a Progressive, by Jacob Weindling (Paste)

The word “progressive,” means something. It’s not just the basic definition of moving progress forward, but it is a political ideology that stands opposed to the tenets of the ideology of liberalism. Liberalism approaches politics from the standpoint that the capitalism-based status quo is worth preserving, and policy focus should be on fixing its deficiencies around the edges. Progressivism takes the attitude that the status quo is the problem, and the only solution is to get rid of the system perpetuating the unsustainable status quo.

This is important because whether or not it gets covered, the dramatic ideological split on the left will have a massive impact on the 2020 election. In 2016, 43% of the Democratic Party did not vote for the party’s hand-picked nominee. Progressives are not some small faction of the party, and in fact, given that millennials prefer socialism to capitalism, you could define our generation—the largest in human history—as largely “progressive.”

I bring this up because Pete Buttigieg is having a moment in the early 2020 Democratic Primary, and the former McKinsey consultant has (falsely) branded himself as a progressive ...

"The Nordic countries aren't socialist. But they're still a living, breathing falsification of the US right's anti-socialist talking points."

Apparently written by real Danes.

The Real Denmark, by Andreas Møller Mulvad and Rune Møller Stahl (Jacobin)

The Nordic countries aren't socialist. But they're still a living, breathing falsification of the US right's anti-socialist talking points.

 ... What Denmark Is and Isn’t

Denmark is not a socialist country. While it has a strong welfare state and strong unions that make life better for the average citizen (and in the 1970s there was an abortive push to partially socialize industry through wage-earner funds), ownership of the economy remains predominately in private hands. Denmark even suffers from its share of corporate governance scandals. Currently, the country’s leading bank, Danske Bank, is embroiled in what might be the largest case of financial whitewashing in world history.

What Denmark does show is that there are no economic barriers to high taxation, high social spending, and high unionization. Social democracy, contrary to Regan and other right-wing ideologues, does not yield mass unemployment or economic ruin. It’s yielded some of the highest standards of living and freest countries the world has ever seen. Poverty and inequality are relatively low, gender equality (not least because of the welfare state) is comparatively high, and workers have more rights and say on the job than in the US.

Denmark is not unique. Each of the Scandinavian countries have attained similar levels of social equality despite having quite different economies. While Sweden has always been dominated by mining and heavy industry (with industrial giants like Volvo and Bofors figuring prominently), Denmark has relied on agriculture and smaller industrial firms, Norway has been fishing- and timber-heavy, and so on.

Despite these different economic profiles, over the course of the twentieth century all of the Nordics managed to drastically reduce wage inequality and decommodify substantial parts of the economy. The key was unions, popular movements, and left parties. It was these mass forces — not benevolent elites, carefully weighing the alternatives before deciding on an enlightened mix of capitalism and socialism — who were the architects and impetus behind the Nordic model. They are the ones responsible for making the Nordic countries among the happiest and most democratic in the world ...