Brendan Bordelon reports for National Review Online on details of Bernie Sanders’ past that might disappoint fans of the self-described socialist.
It’s a sentiment at the heart of Sanders’s pitch to Democratic-primary voters: He’s the self-described “socialist” who will fight for working men and women against their greedy corporate overlords.
Campaign contributions from Sanders’s recent past, however, paint a slightly different picture. During his 2012 reelection race, Sanders accepted $10,000 from a Midwestern sugar conglomerate that was at the time locked in a long, bitter battle with its labor force — a fight that ultimately left more than 1,000 union workers out of a job.
Unlike his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, Sanders derives much of his appeal from the notion that he is above politics, beholden to no one, and unwavering in his support of liberal values. That he took money from a union-busting company might give his fans pause, expose him to charges of hypocrisy, and harm his uphill battle to secure critical union endorsements.
Contribution data from the Sunlight Foundation shows Sanders received two $5,000 donations from American Crystal Sugar on July 12, 2012. The sugar company finished in a three-way tie as the single largest donor to Sanders’s campaign that cycle, and was his only corporate donor in the race, which he ultimately won with 71 percent of the vote.
At the time Sanders took their money, American Crystal was already deep into one of the most contentious labor disputes of the decade. In September 2011, the company locked out 1,300 Iowan, Minnesotan, and North Dakotan workers from the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers Union for their refusal to ratify a labor contract. In the 20-month standoff that followed, American Crystal did everything it could to cow the union into submission, hiring replacement workers and suing to revoke the locked-out workers’ unemployment benefits.