Donald Trump, alone among the three presidential candidates enjoying a chance last summer to secure the nomination of a major party, did not find himself under FBI investigation in the year that followed.
One gleans the opposite impression from news reports.
Senator Bernie Sanders, like Hillary Clinton before him, faces, along with his wife, an FBI investigation. The inquiry explores allegations that Jane Sanders, as president of the now defunct Burlington College, defrauded a lender and Bernie Sanders used his influence to secure a dubious loan for the school to a buy waterfront land. She allegedly justified loans to creditors and school officials on, to borrow a phrase invented by socialist-songster Joe Hill, pie-in-the-sky projections regarding donations and enrollment. Mistaking hopes for reality makes for bad banking as it does bad politics.
“The fraudulent loan led to the demise of the college,” Brady Toensing, the Vermont lawyer who on behalf of a Catholic parishioner requested the investigation 18 months ago, tells The American Spectator. “This fraud harmed students and resulted in financial losses to the bank, almost $150,000 in losses to the taxpayers of Vermont, and almost $2 million in losses to the Catholic Diocese. Numerous vendors to the school also did not get paid.”
Toensing, who managed President Trump’s campaign in Vermont, adds, “Ms. Sanders, however, was fully paid the $200,000 severance package she extracted from the school when she was fired. Ms. Sanders has made no offer to give back this golden parachute.”
The investigation may or may not find that Senator Sanders used his office to help secure the dubious loans for his wife’s school. Whether his wife used her husband’s position to parlay her status as a college dropout in the 1970s into becoming a college president in the 1990s does not appear to require a federal investigation.
What super senior obtaining a degree in her thirties not married to a septuagenarian socialist senator with an unshakable Brooklyn accent ever won appointment as the head of a university?
In victimizing the church, the taxpayers, and a corporation (a bank, at that), the defaulted loan harmed the very trio eliciting the ire of socialists for centuries. Less coincidentally, people regarding other people’s cash as community property here cavalierly treated the fruits of hard-earned labor as monopoly money.
Capitalism works for men who do. Socialism works for men who don’t.
Bernie Sanders, champion of the working man, perfected the art of not working. A Politico profile noted that the future senator “didn’t collect his first steady paycheck until he was an elected official pushing 40 years old.” A refusal to pay electricity bills in these lost years resulted in discontinued service, which Sanders got around by redistributing a neighbor’s power through the revolutionary implement of an extension cord. At least he preaches what he practiced.
The it’s-not-our-fault default meshes with Senator Sanders’s biography and philosophy, which, when put into action, invariably expropriated the wealth of the church, corporations, and taxpayers. Like the loan, the philosophy of Sanders and Sanders overpromises and underdelivers. In essence, the alleged scam came about through two people imagining a scam as a political philosophy.
In his days in the political wilderness, Bernie Sanders produced a glorified slide show he dubbed a documentary on Socialist Party icon Eugene Debs (it’s cable-access horrible). The union-activist-turned-quadrennial-presidential-candidate promised his followers a human perfectibility, a brotherhood of man, and heaven on earth in the socialist powerhouse publication of the day, Appeal to Reason. The ads surrounding the Debs articles made similar boasts: “Cancer Cured,” “Make Money Easy,” “Gold Watch.” Bernie Sanders never quite caught the similarity between the snake-oil articles and the snake-oil ads paying for them.
Reckless finances wrecked a school. One wonders of the shuttered result if a Sanders became President of the country instead of a college.
