The foreign minister of Burlington, Vt.
In addition to filling potholes, Bernie Sanders focused on the Soviet Union, Cuba and the Sandinistas.
By Michael Crowley and Michael Kruse
In June 1986, the House of Representatives voted to send $100 million in U.S. military aid to Nicaragua’s contra rebels. It was a major victory for Ronald Reagan’s hardline anti-communist foreign policy.
In Burlington, Vermont, Mayor Bernie Sanders sprang into action. Sanders quickly called an emergency board of aldermen meeting to discuss how the lakeside college town should respond.
This was not a surprising or unprecedented move for the young socialist mayor, who considered it his small city’s responsibility to craft a foreign policy in opposition to the Reagan administration’s. The previous summer, for instance, Sanders had presided over a local meeting to protest Reagan’s invasion of Grenada.
But even in lefty Vermont, his foreign policy activism provoked eye rolling. The Grenada episode led the Burlington Free Press to complain that the city’s leaders were debating foreign issues “while legitimate city business was ignored.” Seven of the city’s 13 aldermen skipped the Nicaragua meeting, with many complaining that Sanders was, once again, wasting time on a far-flung cause.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/the-foreign-minister-of-burlington-vt-120839.html
Read the whole thing, it is an interesting bit of history and not bad.
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