Sanders also created a powerful Community and Economic Development Office (CEDO) within the city government. In keeping with his practice, he put his friend Peter Clavelle in charge.25 Sanders was not opposed to development; he just wanted to control it. CEDO would essentially pick business winners and losers in Burlington. As Greg Guma, a progressive journalist in the city, noted, “The administration’s approach was essentially to stimulate certain types of business development while letting others fend for themselves.”26
Despite his socialist rhetoric, to those with Bernie connections, he proved to be a man with whom you could do business. As the former director of the Burlington Square Mall, Nick Wylie, said at the time: “He has figured out that it’s a cow to be milked. He wants to build his tax base. What he does as opposed to what he says are two entirely different things.”27
Fellow progressives who had helped elect Sanders mayor were surprised at how he was consolidating power. He even put local charities on notice that he was in charge. Jon Svitavsky, who ran a local homeless shelter, said the new mayor rejected the charity’s well-established shelter rules. The homeless shelter, for example, had a policy of refusing entry to anyone who was drunk or high on drugs. Sanders did not like that rule, so he had the city set up its own competing shelter.28
Sanders went further still. In search of tax dollars, he sent Burlington’s nonprofit hospital, the Medical Center Hospital of Vermont (MCHV), a $2.8 million property tax bill. Never mind that as a nonprofit charity, it was exempt from paying property taxes. Sanders was challenging the hospital’s tax-exempt status. Mayor Sanders wanted some of the charity’s money for tax revenue. The charity had to take the mayor to court. The court sided with the charity.29
Sanders made clear that in general, he was not a big fan of charities. As mayor, he went to the local United Way and delivered the infamous “I Don’t Believe in Charity” speech, which left the audience “in stunned silence.” Perhaps that explains why Sanders has given sparingly to charities over the years, even when he has enjoyed a high income.30
But perhaps the most surprising move Sanders made as mayor was on real estate development. Bernie had run an explicit campaign as a socialist fighting against the rich. He had campaigned on real reform in Burlington. “Burlington is not for sale,” he said.31 He had directed much of his ire at Pomerleau, who owned shopping centers across Vermont. The white-haired French Canadian had planned to develop Burlington’s industrial waterfront into a condominium and shopping area. During his 1981 campaign, Sanders attacked Pomerleau for wanting to create a waterfront for the wealthy with his development plans, and denounced the waterfront project as an “enclave for the rich.”32
While he had demonized the Pomerleau family during his 1981 election as heartless greedy developers, Sanders soon struck an alliance with the wealthy family formerly in his gun sights—an alliance that would last decades. Sanders tamped down his rhetoric and started collaborating on various projects; at the same time, the wealthy family funded Sanders family projects, including those involving his wife. The Pomerleaus supported Jane’s projects at the Youth Office by helping “generate business support and money.”33 Later, Pomerleau would make Jane’s $10 million Burlington College venture possible.
As local progressive journalist Greg Guma recalls, fighting real estate development was largely why Sanders had been elected. A coalition of progressives in the city believed that Burlington was changing through “gentrification.” As he writes, “Low-income people were being driven out of town, they protested, by condominium and office conversions and by high rents. They were being replaced by upwardly mobile, young professionals with disposable income.”34
As mayor, Sanders suddenly embraced a new development plan for the waterfront that was just as exclusive as the one he had earlier opposed. Indeed, the new project, called Alden, “would dwarf the $30 million Pomerleau project.” Outside investors who were pushing for Alden included an heir to the Dow Jones fortune. When supporters discovered that Mayor Sanders was holding “secret meetings” with these developers, they erupted. He had railed against the political establishment for doing just this sort of thing.35
To make the project appear different to the public, some of the language was changed. “The condominiums were called ‘neighborhood housing’ in their campaign literature, the hotel became a ‘Lakeside Inn.’ ” Former Sanders allies were outraged over the new plan. When Citizens Waterfront Group pushed for transparency and an end to the secret meetings between Sanders and the developers, Sanders “blasted the group.” Other progressives from the green movement accused him of “collusion with business interests.”36
The Sanders-backed Alden plan was not so different from the one he had campaigned against in the 1981 mayoral election. As author Steven Soifer puts it, “Sanders’s original campaign theme, that the waterfront should not become ‘a rich man’s paradise and an enclave for the wealthy,’ was violated as much by the Alden project as it was by the Pomerleau one.”37
In the end, Sanders pushed for a city referendum to approve municipal bonds to make the project happen, but voters rejected it.38
Despite the defeat over the municipal bond referendum, Sanders remained generally popular as mayor. A major component of his political success was the booming Burlington economy—fueled by the “profligate military spending that occurred during the Reagan Administration.”39 (Never mind that Sanders supporters applauded that he would “challenge Reaganism and imperialism in its every manifestation.”)40 General Electric, one of the nation’s largest defense contractors at the time, had a plant in Burlington employing three thousand workers.41 By 1986, the armaments plant had nearly doubled its defense contracts. The Burlington Free Press blared a headline: “Pentagon Spent Big in Green Mountains.”42
The Burlington plant produced Vulcan Gatling guns, a rotating rapid-fire gun that was mounted on attack helicopters and fighter jets. The guns were also exported overseas.43
Many of Bernie’s progressive allies were, of course, opposed to what the plant produced and represented, and showed up at the plant gates with banners and signs. Sanders has been outspoken throughout his political career about the military-industrial complex. So much so that protesters were shocked when Sanders appeared to side with General Electric executives and denounced the protest.44 More shocking still, he had protesters arrested.45 His actions would represent the beginning of an emerging pattern for Sanders. A harsh critic of the wealthy and powerful corporations, he would happily join forces with them if it served his own political interests. It was that way with the developers and it would be that way with military contractors, especially when he joined the U.S. Senate.
Being mayor of Vermont’s largest city was perhaps the first steady job Sanders had ever held. “It’s so strange, just having money, things like that,” he said. Being mayor and creating a city post for his girlfriend, and then later his wife, meant a good income. They would supplement these salaries through tens of thousands of dollars in teaching and speaking fees. In 1989, the Sanderses actually sold two houses and claimed capital gains. Their primary Vermont residence included upscale amenities, which as one observer noted, “incongruously [made] Bernie perhaps one of the few socialists in the country with a built-in swimming pool.”46
But for Sanders, being mayor of Burlington was a stepping-stone. He spent his tenure at city hall perpetually running for office. He ran for governor in 1986, Congress in 1988, and Congress again in 1990. He had come a long way from his insurgent campaigns in the 1970s, when he had run for the U.S. Senate as a member of the Liberty Union Party. For his successful 1990 bid, he raised more than half a million dollars, including large checks from developers, investment managers in Manhattan, and trust fund families.47
Reporters who covered Sanders on the campaign trail saw how he threw out varied ideas depending on his audience. Daniel Bellow, who worked as a reporter for several Vermont papers and covered Sanders, noticed that “Bernie would say one thing in Brattleb
oro and another in White River Junction.”48
His broader campaign themes remained remarkably consistent: attacks on the rich and a call for greater socialism to deal with income inequality. When it came to that campaign, he found ways to save money even at the expense of his own staff—despite his extensive campaign resources. Sanders’s campaign staffers were classified as consultants rather than employees to avoid paying Social Security taxes and workers’ compensation taxes. A Vermont state audit in August 1990 found that seven of his campaign workers were inaccurately classified as “consultants” so the Sanders campaign could avoid having to pay the employee portion of their taxes. Sanders’s campaign opponent charged hypocrisy, declaring, “That kind of selfish behavior has no place in Vermont, especially when Sanders touts himself as the champion of the working class.” Sanders paid the back taxes and won in November.49 The controversy did not seem to matter to many voters.
Once elected, Sanders moved to Washington and his wife, Jane, became a top aide, serving at various times as his chief of staff, press secretary, and political analyst.50 After a decade in Congress, Jane and family went about setting up a company that operated under three different names to provide income tied to Bernie’s political career. On September 27, 2000, the family formed Sanders & Driscoll LLC, a for-profit consulting company run by Jane, her daughter Carina, and son David. The business also operated under two trade names: Leadership Strategies and Progressive Media Strategies.51
The fact that this entity and its aliases were formed just weeks before the 2000 election is significant. The Sanderses ran these out of their home on Killarney Drive in Burlington. These entities served as financial conduits to run cash to the Sanders family. It is impossible to know precisely how much because on Sanders’s financial disclosure forms, which he is required to release as a member of Congress, they only listed “more than $1,000” as the amount of income they earned from these consulting firms. We do know that some of Bernie’s campaign dollars flowed through the LLCs. While running for House reelection in the early 2000s, critics claimed that “Sanders doled out more than $150,000 to his wife and stepdaughter for campaign-related work between 2000 and 2004.”52
The LLCs are just part of a web of murky financial threads in the Sanders family that are difficult to track. For example, on one of Bernie’s financial disclosures Jane lists herself as a “self-employed Antique dealer” making simply more than $1,000, but a search of Vermont business licenses turns up no antiques business registered to Sanders in the state.53
Some of the campaign money flowing to the family from Bernie’s campaign came as Jane served as a “media buyer” for his reelection. Media buying is a murky but potentially highly lucrative stream of income for those involved in political campaigns. Modern American political campaigns spend large sums of money on television and other forms of media. A media buyer handles the purchase of airtime and secures the contracts with media outlets. Typically, a media buyer receives a commission of about 15 percent of the cost for a media campaign.54 So if a campaign were to spend, say, $1,000,000 on television ads, the media buyer would pocket a $150,000 commission. But here’s the kicker: the media buyer commission is not actually disclosed anywhere. Filings with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) only require disclosure of the bulk amount of the media buy.55 In this example, the FEC report will only disclose the $1,000,000 media buy. And as for the fact that Jane Sanders is the spouse of a politician, she is only required to disclose that she earns “more than $1,000” from her businesses.
What is interesting about the Sanders family foray into media buying, in particular, is that Jane Sanders has no apparent background in media buying. But she worked with two media buyers named Barbara Abar Bougie and Shelli Hutton-Hartig.56 Those names are significant. Remember them.
We do not know exactly how much Bernie’s wife and daughter made working on his campaigns. We ultimately have to rely on what his campaign says. Jeff Weaver, his chief of staff at the time and a longtime friend, says that Jane was paid “about $30,000” from 2002 to 2004 and Carina Driscoll got “about $65,000” between 2000 and 2004.57 There is no way to verify this on Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. FEC rules when it comes to the moneymaking of campaigns are minimal. Throughout his more than twenty-five years in Congress and later the U.S. Senate, Sanders has been secretive about his personal finances and tax returns. It was not until he announced his candidacy for the White House a second time in 2019 that he released his tax returns.58
The Sanders family consulting business was at the headwaters of what would become a common Sanders move: use Bernie Sanders’s political position and power to provide income stream opportunities for the Sanders family. Later, as he set up his nonprofit organizations funded by his political supporters, he would again pay members of his family.
* * *
In 2004, tiny Burlington College announced that it had a new college president. Jane Sanders would be taking the helm of the private college with less than two hundred students. Professor Steward LaCasce founded the school in 1972. It was an unconventional place, to say the least: no classrooms or grades, the faculty was heavily adjunct, and students designed their own curriculum.
“You’ve got to remember: It was the 1970s,” LaCasce later said.59
Burlington College positioned itself as a unique school where students who might not succeed elsewhere could prosper academically. The school, however, had problems. Shortly before Jane took over as president, the college was implicated in a scandal involving phony diplomas. For suspicion of fraud, forgery, and other crimes, police arrested five executives of a consulting company that ran schools in Israel that included an extension of Burlington College in the diploma fraud. The head of a teachers’ union actually resigned over accusations that he was “soliciting teachers to purchase degrees from local branches of Burlington College” and another school.60
The fact that Jane was the wife of a U.S. congressman was an important factor in the school’s decision to hire her. Robin Lloyd, a member of the college’s board, says she and others supported Jane’s appointment partly because “[w]e felt that her connection with Bernie would be helpful, certainly in terms of fundraising.”61
Jane went about trying to develop international ties. In 2007, Jane traveled to Cuba and the college started a program to bring students to the communist country to attend classes at the University of Havana.62 Burlington College officials visiting Cuba enjoyed access to the highest levels of the Cuban government. During one visit to the island, college officials met with Cuban Senate president Ricardo Alarcón, the third most powerful official in the country. “That’s kind of exciting,” recalled Jane, “because we’ve been able to make the kind of connections that are unusual.”63 Of course any faculty members of the University of Havana would be required to be in good standing with the Cuban government in order to teach there.
Because Cuba was under U.S. sanctions, the college had trouble getting the Treasury Department in Washington to sign off on the exchange program. Then someone made a phone call. They achieved a breakthrough when “Sanders—wife of U.S. Senator Bernard Sanders—simply called the Treasury Department herself.”64
The Sanderses had long-standing ties in Cuba. In 1989, Bernie and Jane visited Havana and met with a leader of the city’s “social brigades” and the mayor. (They attempted a meeting with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, but the bearded one did not make himself available.65) Burlington College’s relationship with Cuba included workshops for teachers, including one attended by Armando Vilaseca, the Cuban-born Vermont secretary of education.66
With no sense of irony, Burlington College touted the study abroad program as a “singular opportunity to question, debate, and discuss” numerous issues. This, including “politics,” even though the university was located smack in the middle of a country that allows no free press.67 There was no mention of the suppression of free speech, the arresting of political dissidents, or the imprisonment of human rights activis
ts. Instead, Jane touted the program as something that would be beneficial to humanity. “We encourage students to become actively engaged in fostering a just, humane society and sustainable communities.”68 This was not, of course, an exchange program. Burlington College students went to Havana. No Cuban students spent time in Burlington.
Unfortunately, Jane steered Burlington College resources in the same direction as Bernie did his campaign money: it went to the family. Burlington College was not cheap; tuition was over $23,000 a year in 2014–15.69 In addition, the college received millions in federal money over the years and students could apply for federal government–supported student loans.70 That flow of money provided funds that could be directed into family enterprises. Beginning in 2009, the nonprofit Burlington College agreed to a deal with the for-profit Vermont Woodworking School to set up a carpentry program. The school was not accredited and happened to be owned by Jane’s daughter, Carina.71 Burlington College had never had a woodworking program before, and apparently never sent out a public notice asking for proposals from people who might want to set one up through the college.72
Like Bernie hiring Jane to a city job while he was mayor, those outside the family were never invited to apply.
Carina had launched her Vermont Woodworking School less than two years earlier. That first year, the college gave her daughter’s school $56,474 for “materials charges and lease of bench space.” By 2010, the cash flowing from the college to the family business was more than $133,000. Payments ballooned to $182,741 in rental costs alone by 2012. In total, Burlington College would funnel more than $500,000 to Carina’s woodworking school.73
Profiles in Corruption Page 18