The commissars get a dacha, you get a communal apartment. They get fresh meat, you get bread stuffed with straw. They get everything, you get nothing.
Here’s how Bernie Sanders, who champions the Green New Deal, does business.
The Sanders campaign’s $50 million spending spree in the last quarter of 2019 included more than $8 million in spending on more than 900 staffers and $1 million on rent and utilities for an operation with a big physical footprint, as well as $1.3 million dropped on private flights to travel to and from events.
And in the process, Sanders has vastly outspent other candidates, on his personal convenience and comfort.
An analysis of private jet spending in filings from other top candidates found that Elizabeth Warren’s campaign spent $720,518 and Pete Buttigieg’s campaign spent $323,518. Michael Bloomberg, who pumped a whopping $200 million of his personal fortune into his campaign’s opening weeks, spent about $646,000 on private jet travel, about half of what Sanders spent.
Sanders has long leaned on private air travel on the campaign trail, despite his belief that limiting carbon emissions from the transportation sector is crucial to combating climate change. Traveling by private jet is estimated to produce roughly eight times the amount of carbon per passenger as traveling by commercial airliner.
“Global climate change is real, it is caused mainly by emissions released from burning fossil fuels and it poses a catastrophic threat to the long-term longevity of our planet,” he writes on his campaign website. “The transportation sector accounts for about 26 percent of carbon pollution emissions.”
This is a familiar story with Greedy Bernie.
Last month, Sanders supporters were passing around a photo of Bernie Sanders asleep in coach. Such depictions of their candidate struggling with the same inconveniences as ordinary passengers had boosted his image as a fighter for the average guy. But there was one problem. The photo wasn’t of him. It was instead some ordinary man trying to catch a few winks in the middle of a crowded plane.
Bernie Sanders wasn’t in coach. He wasn’t even in business class or stretching out both legs in first class. With tens of millions of dollars in donations coming in every month, he wasn’t flying commercial.
Not anymore.
Long before that meme, Sanders had already blown through six figures on private jets during the previous year.
In April, Bernie Sanders took 50 staffers and reporters on a chartered Delta 767 for a trip to the Vatican where he briefly met Pope Francis Not only wasn’t Bernie flying coach, but he was chartering mostly empty passenger planes on left-wing political jaunts. The menu on board Air Sanders included lobster sliders, crab salad, red lentil soup, herb crusted lamb loin, chocolate ganache, fine cheeses and white wine. It was a long way from coach.
Air Bernie kept on flying in 2018.
Sen. Bernie Sanders 2018 re-election campaign spent almost $300,000 on private jet service for a recent cross country tour to stump for Democrats and test the presidential waters.
According to federal campaign finance reports, Friends of Bernie Sanders, the senator’s official 2018 Senate campaign committee, spent $297,685.50 with Apollo Jets, a private charter jet service headquartered in New York.
And the jets thing kept on being an issue when Hillary was the nominee.
In 2016, after Sanders endorsed Clinton and agreed to campaign on her behalf, the Sanders campaign’s preferred mode of travel quickly emerged as a point of tension, according to six former Clinton campaign staffers and another source familiar with the travel.
“We would try to fight it as much as possible because of cost and availability of planes, but they would request [a jet] every time,” one of those sources said. “We would always try to push for commercial. … At the campaign, you’re constantly trying to save like 25 cents.”
Prior to working out the logistics of Sanders’ travel, “our working assumption was that 90 percent of the time it would be commercial,” said another person familiar with the matter. “If he was trying to hop from city to city in a particular state and [commercial] didn’t work, we were open to” chartering a plane.
But that idea did not go over well with the Sanders camp, according to this person.
“At that time, getting him on board — no pun intended —and his followers engaged for her, was a big priority,” said one former Clinton staffer, who explained that campaign leadership, including campaign manager Robby Mook, decided it was something Sanders wouldn’t budge on, so the campaign approved the requests to keep peace with the senator.
How’s that “climate change” thing going again? But under Comissar Bernie that just means you won’t be allowed to have a car. But Air Bernie will go on flying.
Leave a Reply