Bernie Sanders

Bernard ( Bernie ) Sanders ( born September 8, 1941 in New York City ) is an American politician who represents the state of Vermont since 2007 in the U.S. Senate.

Sanders, who represents socialist views, won on November 7, 2006 election for U.S. Senator against the Republican candidate, Richard Tarrant, and entered succeeding the former Senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords in January 2007, to which not seek reelection was started. Sanders is the first openly socialist in the history of the United States who was elected to the Senate. He has no party affiliation, but the faction of the Democratic Party has endorsed. Previously (1991 to 2007), Sanders was the longest serving non-party member of the House of Representatives.

Career

Sanders was born in 1941 as the son of Polish- Jewish immigrants in New York, studied at Brooklyn College and the University of Chicago in 1964 and moved to Vermont. He was a member of the Liberty Union Party, which opposed the Vietnam War. Sanders was set up in 1981 mayor of Burlington, Vermont 's largest city. In this office he was re-elected three times. 1986 Sanders stepped on in the election for Governor of Vermont and finished with 14.5 percent of the vote for third place. In 1988 he applied, unsuccessfully, for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Not until the 1990 election Sanders was able to achieve a majority, defeating Peter Plympton Smith, against whom he had lost two years earlier.

Sanders from 1991 to 2007 Member of the House and therefore the only and longest serving non-party candidate. He was a deputy of the State of Vermont, which has only one seat in the House of Representatives. Sanders was re-elected six times, some with over two-thirds of the votes cast (1992: 57.8 %, 1994: 49.9 %, 1996: 55.2 %, 1998: 63.4 %, 2000: 69.2 %, 2002: 64.3 %, 2004: 68.8 %). In 2006 he ran for the Senate and won as an independent candidate with 65.4 % of the vote choice. In 2012, he succeeded with 71 percent of the vote against Republican John MacGovern reelection. Since January 2013 he is chairman of the war veterans committee of the Senate.

Sanders supported in the past has always been the presidential candidate of the Democrats. He was against the invasion of Iraq by U.S. troops in 2003 and is a critic of the USA PATRIOT Act, state and commercial influence in the media and telecommunications industry. During the presidency of Obama, he supported his (but then only a small portion of unreacted ) Health Reform plans to introduce a universal health insurance and advocated going on for a citizens' insurance from.

Larger national sensation was caused by a non-stop eight half-hour filibuster speech Sanders before the U.S. Senate on 10 December 2010, in which he took a critical look at U.S. policy in recent decades. The occasion was the compromise by the Obama administration with the Republicans retain the changes made under George W. Bush tax cuts for high income. Sanders criticized this and established an alternative tax policy. He later thematized in his speech also, among other things, the U.S. income distribution, influences of lobbying and regulation / deregulation. The actually transmitted only on the parliamentary channel C-SPAN speech spread to numerous on the internet and was then picked up by the media.