Politics & Government
![Bernie Sanders - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B01NAJEW2P.jpg)
It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A progressive takedown of the uber-capitalist status quo that has enriched millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the working class, and a blueprint for what transformational change would actually look like
It's OK to be angry about capitalism. Reflecting on our turbulent times, Senator Bernie Sanders takes on the billionaire class and speaks blunt truths about our country's failure to address the destructive nature of a system that is fueled by uncontrolled greed and rigidly committed to prioritizing corporate profits over the needs of ordinary Americans.
Sanders argues that unfettered capitalism is to blame for an unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality, is undermining our democracy, and is destroying our planet. How can we accept an economic order that allows three billionaires to control more wealth than the bottom half of our society? How can we accept a political system that allows the super rich to buy elections and politicians? How can we accept an energy system that rewards the fossil fuel corporations causing the climate crisis? Sanders believes that, in the face of these overwhelming challenges, the American people must ask tough questions about the systems that have failed us and demand fundamental economic and political change. This is where the path forward begins.
It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism presents a vision that extends beyond the promises of past campaigns to reveal what would be possible if the political revolution took place, if we would finally recognize that economic rights are human rights, and if we would work to create a society that provides a decent standard of living for all. This isn't some utopian fantasy; this is democracy as we should know it.
It's OK to be angry about capitalism. Reflecting on our turbulent times, Senator Bernie Sanders takes on the billionaire class and speaks blunt truths about our country's failure to address the destructive nature of a system that is fueled by uncontrolled greed and rigidly committed to prioritizing corporate profits over the needs of ordinary Americans.
Sanders argues that unfettered capitalism is to blame for an unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality, is undermining our democracy, and is destroying our planet. How can we accept an economic order that allows three billionaires to control more wealth than the bottom half of our society? How can we accept a political system that allows the super rich to buy elections and politicians? How can we accept an energy system that rewards the fossil fuel corporations causing the climate crisis? Sanders believes that, in the face of these overwhelming challenges, the American people must ask tough questions about the systems that have failed us and demand fundamental economic and political change. This is where the path forward begins.
It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism presents a vision that extends beyond the promises of past campaigns to reveal what would be possible if the political revolution took place, if we would finally recognize that economic rights are human rights, and if we would work to create a society that provides a decent standard of living for all. This isn't some utopian fantasy; this is democracy as we should know it.
Readers Top Reviews
BrandanSeattle La
This dude's literally just been trying to help the working class out. You can attack him for socialism even though you do not understand the meaning of it. But unfortunately we live in a capitalist world and have to play by capitalist rules until the revolution that is. Even if you attack Bernie, he'll still be fighting for your basic human rights to survival in a hostile capitalist world. Keep crying about socialism while ignoring the absolute brutality of capitalism. Conservatives, liberals stop undervaluing your labor. It is worth more than what your company tells you. With out labor pushing products out, Bezos just has a warehouse full of junk. Capitalism is wage theft. Record profits is stolen wages. Healthcare and basic needs of survival should not be paywalled. Yet under capitalism it is and it has killed way more than socialism or even communism could ever have. Stop worshipping capitalism. Stop worshipping billionaires. Also you call Bernie a socialist grifter yet he's worth less than all conservative grifters like Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Steven Crowder, Klandace Owens. Etc. Be smarter.
Juan Thomas Kimbl
This book contains the usual indictment of the cast of bad actors adversely impacting our economy & government for those blissfully unaware of the political reality. This book serves as a post-mortem of the key events that have occurred since the 2020 Dem primaries. He provides a reasonable blueprint in terms of tactics with voter & community engagement which should be heeded by aspiring Democratic Party leaders & current Democratic politicians. Highly recommend the book which was a breeze to read in Sanders’ voice. Most of the negative reviews of the actual book are unwarranted bad faith arguments about democratic socialism & ad hominem attacks against Senator Sanders.
Zombie!Juan Thoma
A quick read, the first 100 pages sum up Bernie’s 2020-2022 and the next 200 pages has Bernie laying out what the government can do to fix the country. His ideas are not radical; Everything he pitches has already been done by other countries and/or the USA itself before the Reagan era. Tax corporations and billionaires and use the money on a public safety net. He gives great details and statistics, all in all leading to a somewhat depressing read when one reflects on how so many people misunderstand him and his ideas, when they are very common sense and aren’t even close to ‘pie in the sky’
CyndiRia Gonzalez
It doesn't tell about the democratic party who takes money and only cares about their own pocketbooks and the hell with the people that they should help.
Justin DillonCynd
This is less-so a biography of Sanders or his second presidential campaign and more a detailed explanation for his positions and how they relate to the various problems the US currently has. Having read the works of other politicians, with few exceptions, I'm most transfixed by Sanders because he discusses things far too often ignored by most of them or mainstream media. It's sad watching his positions on healthcare, tuition-free college, living wages, and war be treated as extreme when they're in line with many other developed-countries around the world. All this arguing and fear-mongering about "socialism" is just an excuse by other politicians and commentators of their ilk to not address any issues and red scare voters into supporting them.
Short Excerpt Teaser
1
Not Me, Us
The 2020 campaign and the fight to transform our country
On April 8, 2020, after almost fourteen months of competing for the Democratic presidential nomination, I announced that we were suspending our campaign. The important message in the statement I made that day was "While this campaign is coming to an end, our movement is not."
Given the growing pandemic, and social distancing requirements that effectively ended in-person campaigning, I made the announcement through a livestream from my home. I was deeply moved that some seven million people ended up viewing it. During my remarks, I chose to focus less on the practicalities of a campaign that had fallen short in the delegate count and more on the historic nature of what we had accomplished.
"I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour," I explained. "But let me say this very emphatically: As you all know, we have never been just a campaign. We are a grassroots, multiracial, multigenerational movement which has always believed that real change never comes from the top on down but always from the bottom on up."
Our campaign was like none other in modern American history. Built upon the foundation of a 2016 bid that had proposed a political revolution, we forged a grassroots working-class movement that was national in character, and which sought to overcome the overwhelming barriers to progress in the Democratic Party and the broader politics of the United States.
I ran, as had been the case since my first campaign almost fifty years earlier, as a democratic socialist who was ready and willing to take on the oligarchs, the plutocrats, and the billionaire class that had turned our economic system into their plaything. But this time was different. While my ideas were still dismissed as "radical" by political elites and many in the media, I began the 2020 campaign with a base of supporters that numbered in the millions and was prepared to fight for fundamental change. By the time the campaign was done, we had taken on Wall Street and the enormously powerful economic interests that control not just the economy but the politics of our nation. We had challenged the billionaire class and the corporate elite, their media and their super-PACs. We had taken on the political establishment in both major parties.
From the start, we achieved victories that shocked the pundits. We won the popular vote in the first three primary states on the way to securing almost ten million votes nationwide for a campaign that was suspended before more than two dozen primaries were held. We won California, the most populous state in the country, by more than 450,000 votes. For a time, we led the national polls, not only in the race for the Democratic nomination but in head-to-head matchups against Donald Trump. And we built a movement powered by young people who were prepared to trudge through snow to knock on doors in northern New Hampshire and to sweat through ninety-degree days in South Texas.
We had organized the most ambitious and most successful progressive presidential campaign in a century. Our ideas, which just a few years earlier had been dismissed as too extreme to be politically viable, had become part of the mainstream Democratic Party agenda. Our supporters and allies had begun to be elected to seats in Congress, and to chair state parties. We had expanded political consciousness and gotten millions of Americans to embrace a new understanding of what they had a right to expect from their government.
Most important for the long term, as a result of our campaign, young people were participating in the political process at an unprecedented rate. It turned out that our ideas and our movement were, in fact, the future of the Democratic Party. While poll after poll showed us doing more poorly than we'd hoped with older voters, those same polls showed that we were swamping the other candidates among younger voters-winning overwhelming support from Black, Latino, Asian American, Native American, and white voters under age forty. What was striking was that these young people were not only voting for us; they were the foundation of our grassroots campaign. They were the ones handing out literature, making phone calls, texting, raising small contributions, and volunteering in a hundred different ways.
A Campaign Finance Revolution
Our campaign attracted a new generation of voters because we revolutionized modern presidential politics.
At a time when virtually all campaigns were funded by super-PACs and the very rich, we br...
Not Me, Us
The 2020 campaign and the fight to transform our country
On April 8, 2020, after almost fourteen months of competing for the Democratic presidential nomination, I announced that we were suspending our campaign. The important message in the statement I made that day was "While this campaign is coming to an end, our movement is not."
Given the growing pandemic, and social distancing requirements that effectively ended in-person campaigning, I made the announcement through a livestream from my home. I was deeply moved that some seven million people ended up viewing it. During my remarks, I chose to focus less on the practicalities of a campaign that had fallen short in the delegate count and more on the historic nature of what we had accomplished.
"I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour," I explained. "But let me say this very emphatically: As you all know, we have never been just a campaign. We are a grassroots, multiracial, multigenerational movement which has always believed that real change never comes from the top on down but always from the bottom on up."
Our campaign was like none other in modern American history. Built upon the foundation of a 2016 bid that had proposed a political revolution, we forged a grassroots working-class movement that was national in character, and which sought to overcome the overwhelming barriers to progress in the Democratic Party and the broader politics of the United States.
I ran, as had been the case since my first campaign almost fifty years earlier, as a democratic socialist who was ready and willing to take on the oligarchs, the plutocrats, and the billionaire class that had turned our economic system into their plaything. But this time was different. While my ideas were still dismissed as "radical" by political elites and many in the media, I began the 2020 campaign with a base of supporters that numbered in the millions and was prepared to fight for fundamental change. By the time the campaign was done, we had taken on Wall Street and the enormously powerful economic interests that control not just the economy but the politics of our nation. We had challenged the billionaire class and the corporate elite, their media and their super-PACs. We had taken on the political establishment in both major parties.
From the start, we achieved victories that shocked the pundits. We won the popular vote in the first three primary states on the way to securing almost ten million votes nationwide for a campaign that was suspended before more than two dozen primaries were held. We won California, the most populous state in the country, by more than 450,000 votes. For a time, we led the national polls, not only in the race for the Democratic nomination but in head-to-head matchups against Donald Trump. And we built a movement powered by young people who were prepared to trudge through snow to knock on doors in northern New Hampshire and to sweat through ninety-degree days in South Texas.
We had organized the most ambitious and most successful progressive presidential campaign in a century. Our ideas, which just a few years earlier had been dismissed as too extreme to be politically viable, had become part of the mainstream Democratic Party agenda. Our supporters and allies had begun to be elected to seats in Congress, and to chair state parties. We had expanded political consciousness and gotten millions of Americans to embrace a new understanding of what they had a right to expect from their government.
Most important for the long term, as a result of our campaign, young people were participating in the political process at an unprecedented rate. It turned out that our ideas and our movement were, in fact, the future of the Democratic Party. While poll after poll showed us doing more poorly than we'd hoped with older voters, those same polls showed that we were swamping the other candidates among younger voters-winning overwhelming support from Black, Latino, Asian American, Native American, and white voters under age forty. What was striking was that these young people were not only voting for us; they were the foundation of our grassroots campaign. They were the ones handing out literature, making phone calls, texting, raising small contributions, and volunteering in a hundred different ways.
A Campaign Finance Revolution
Our campaign attracted a new generation of voters because we revolutionized modern presidential politics.
At a time when virtually all campaigns were funded by super-PACs and the very rich, we br...
