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I essentially question the epistemological flaws surrounding the uses of the notion: when is it safe to call a politician, a political party or movement ‘populist’?

The stakes are high because to label someone as ‘populist’ is to imply that s/he is somehow a potential or real enemy of representative democracy. My critic refers to the ‘pernicious effects’ of populism which underlines the notion’s very negative connotation. Let me here reply to Catherine Fieschi’s major criticisms.

Cas Mudde, one of the major specialists on the subject, concedes that populism is a ‘thin-centred ideology’.

The fact that the party even has superdelegates is a sign of its anti-democratic, pro-oligarchy stance. As Branko Marcetic of In These Times reports the superdelegate system was created specifically to challenge the will of voters. According to Marcetic, “When a Sanders supporter criticized superdelegate Howard Dean for sticking with Clinton despite Sanders’ landslide victory in Vermont, Dean tweeted back: “Superdelegates don’t represent the people.”

The DNC created a debate schedule designed to make it hard for candidates to challenge Clinton’s status as the “presumptive” nominee.  Debates were held on weekends, at times that conflicted with other events, and were generally slotted to attract fewer viewers.

Fox News offered to host one.  Fox News wrote that, “the race is still contested, and given that you sanctioned a final trio of debates, the last of which has not yet been held, we believe a final debate would be an excellent opportunity for the candidates to, as you said when you announced these debates, ‘share Democrats’ vision for the country.’”  There never was a California debate set up. Not on Fox News or any other venue.

Two books have been recently published which attempt to present an alternative perspective on the Reagan presidency. One, William Kleinecht's The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America, is revisionist polemic and does more to enrage than enlighten. Will Bunch's Tear Down this Myth, however, is a fair and balanced (to borrow a phrase popular with right-wingers) look at the Reagan presidency. Far from polemic, and often complimentary to President Reagan, Bunch attempts to reveal the presidency of Ronald Reagan as it was experienced by those during the era. Many of the negative reviews appearing on Amazon are obviously written by those who didn't read the book. As I've said before, Amazon needs to look more carefully at reviews before publishing them. This is not a chat board.

But Reagan made mistakes which have been glossed over: including the stationing of Marines in Lebanon and providing aid to Saddam Hussein. The Iran-Contra scandal, which nearly sank his presidency, has been almost forgotten. And the spiraling deficits of the 1980s (repeated 20 years later) proved that the Laffer Curve, which was the cornerstone of Reaganomics, had no basis in actual fact.

Bunch reminds us that Reagan was not particularly popular during most of his presidency, and that many Americans had good reason to wonder whether the country was in competent hands. Bunch runs over the Iran-Contra scandal, which came close to ending up in Reagan's impeachment. Far from being a thrifty government downsizer, he added $2 trillion to the national debt and grew the government. Bunch also reminds us that Reagan was the original "cut and run" artist, pulling US troops out of a failed mission in Lebanon within weeks after 241 Marines were killed there in a terrorist attack. We are reminded that Reagan's overtures to Iran to free hostages only resulted in more Americans being taken, and that his economic plans sowed the seeds of deregulation and greed that we are still reaping.

Pick a dictator, almost any dictator - Cuba's Fulgencio Batista, the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos, Haiti's Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, the Shah of Iran, Central African Republic Emperor Jean-BÉdel Bokassa - and they all have this in common: they allegedly stashed their loot in secret, numbered accounts in Swiss banks, safely guarded by the so-called Gnomes of Zurich. This association - of bank secrecy and crime - has been fed into the public's imagination by dozens of books and movies. It's a reputation that rankles the Swiss, who have a more benevolent view of their commitment to privacy - one that happens to extend to tax privacy. Don't ask, because we won't tell. But the dramatic federal investigation of Switzerland's UBS has blown the lid off bank secrecy - and revealed how Swiss banks abet tax evasion on a far more widespread, if more banal, level. Over the past two decades, these secret banking services have been peddled progressively downmarket - first to the lesser-known fabulously wealthy, then to just the wealthy; more recently, private bankers have been tripping over themselves soliciting business from doctors, lawyers and other folks who are what the biz generally calls "high net worth" individuals. "The IRS has been concerned for decades that a combination of a global economy, the Internet, offshore banking, was really going to take offshore tax evasion from the old so-called 'gentlemen's sport' to tax evasion for the masses," says Mark Matthews, a former deputy IRS commissioner and now a tax attorney with Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP.