I thought Sanders wasn't a Democrat- hahahaha....

What a waste. This is just enough to keep the Blue Teamers in line. Brilliant I would say. Throw Grandpa Bernie into the show and all the liberals/progressives strut around for a few months doing nothing other than organizing more "get out the vote" campaigns. Meanwhile in the real world the ruling class will roll all over the floor laughing at all the "progressive" rubes who keep nipping on the chum. It takes so little.

Sanders is no socialist by any stretch of the imagination. He doesn't even pretend to hold that mantle any longer. He's an Independent that caucuses with the Democrats and on any number of large issues he votes with the Dem party line.

The problem with Sanders (or his followers) claiming he is a socialist then distorts the perception of what that is and diffuses the reality of what leftist politics should look like.

He's another example of how the system keeps pushing to the right as Sanders populist rhetoric is portrayed as some "radical leftist" critique of the system and therefore the leftmost critique that is allowable. In fact of matter, rhetoric and his actual policy record Sanders is a rather squishy liberal which means he sits in the center of an ever increasing rightward drift.

======================


Bernie became an imperialist to get elected in 1990. In August, 1990–after the Bush administration enticed Iraq into invading Kuwait–Sanders said he wasn’t “going to let some damn war cost him the election,” according to a staff member who was present at the time. So Sanders backed the buildup in the Persian Gulf and dumped on the left anti-imperialist peace movement, singling
out his former allies like Dave Dellinger for public criticism.

...

Sanders continues to support sanctions even though the Iraqi body count has now passed 1.5 million. Just as he has supported every bombing of Iraq since 1992. When Clinton sent military units to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in October, 1994 because Iraq moved troops inside Iraq closer to the Kuwait border (apparently about 100 miles away), Bernie supported this because “we cannot
tolerate aggression.”

...

He sends out mailings to veterans that supports the US having “the strongest military in the world,” while praising our sacrifices as veterans “for the freedom of Americans.”

...

The overwhelming majority of the people present were against Sander’s support for the bombing. Even with all his attempts to control the meeting, the people had at him for more than an hour and a half. He was denounced for his selling out to the Empire and it’s war machine and for his support for the 9 year old war against Iraq and his active support for every US intervention since he has been in Congress–Iraq, Somalia,

Haiti, Bosnia, Liberia, Zaire (Congo), Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. He was further criticized for his refusal to ban or even object to the use of depleted uranium with it’s long term toxicity in both Iraq and Yugoslavia. Sanders even tried to escape responsibility for arresting 15 of his constituents in his office one week ago for the crime of wanting to talk to him without an appointment by blaming those arrested for their arrest, as if they went out and brought the police in to arrest themselves.

...

http://www.libertyunionparty.org/?page_id=363



DESPITE HIS own claims, Sanders has not been an antiwar leader. Ever since he won election to the House, he has taken either equivocal positions on
U.S. wars or outright supported them.

His hawkish positions--especially his decision to support Bill Clinton's 1999 Kosovo War--drove one of his key advisers, Jeremy Brecher, to resign from his staff. Brecher wrote in his resignation letter, "Is there a moral limit to the military violence you are willing to participate in or support?"

So outraged were peace activists over Sanders' support of the Kosovo War
that they occupied his office in 1999. Sanders had them arrested.

Under the Bush regime, Sanders' militarism has only grown worse. While he called for alternative approaches to the war on Afghanistan, he failed to join the sole Democrat, Barbara Lee, to vote against Congress' resolution that gave George Bush a blank check to launch war on any country he deemed connected to the September 11 attacks.

Ever since, he has voted for appropriations bills to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, despite their horrific toll on the occupied peoples as well as U.S. soldiers.

Sanders has been critical of the war on Iraq, but he has supported pro-war measures--such as a March 21, 2003, resolution stating, "Congress expresses the unequivocal support and appreciation of the nation to the President as Commander-in-Chief for his firm leadership and decisive action in the conduct of military operations in Iraq as part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism."

He also opposes immediate withdrawal from Iraq, despite the fact that a majority of residents in his home city of Burlington voted for such a position in a town meeting resolution in February 2005.

The day after his election to the Senate, Sanders declared, "I don't think you can do a quote-unquote immediate withdrawal. I think the policy has got to be we will withdraw our troops as soon as possible, and by that, I mean that I believe we can have our troops out in the next year, and maybe a significant number of them before that. I don't think you can snap your fingers and just bring all the troops home tomorrow. I just don't think that's practical."

Even more shocking, Sanders scuttled any action on a wave of Bush impeachment resolutions that swept Vermont towns in 2006. Like House Majority Leader-to-be Nancy Pelosi, who has promised not to impeach Bush, Sanders argued that impeachment was impractical, and that activists should put energy into electing Democrats.

...

http://socialistworker.org/2006-2/610/610_11_BernieSanders.shtml

=================

Here are some letters from people who were there Rick D:

Dear Friends near and far,

This is a somewhat lengthy update. Below FYI are three accounts of Monday night's "Town Meeting" in Montpelier, Vermont at which our so-called "progressive" Congressman Bernie Sanders tried to justify his support for the bombing of Yugoslavia and at which he got a well-deserved (and, in my opinion, long-overdue) hot reception from Vermonters on the anti- imperialist Left and in the peace communities.

The first account is by Will M_____, Marxist philosophy professor at the University of Vermont and longtime anti-imperialist activist. . .For another account of the meeting by a member of the Vermont Labor Party who spoke out eloquently against Sanders on the war, see the VLP Web site:

This Web site also features some good photographs of the event, including a photograph of several of the student protesters who were arrested in Sanders' office last week and who came to the Town Meeting linked together with handcuffs and who sat near the front and waved their handcuffs dramatically in Bernie's face from time to time. Bernie was asked repeatedly by some of those he had arrested (now known as the "Sanders 15") how he could justify doing this when they just wanted to talk with him, but he kept dodging the questions -- just as he was totally evasive on why he supports the war when he claims all the time to be against the big corporate interests and the military-industrial complex who are clearly being served, as people like Noam Chomsky have amply demonstrated, by this war.

My sense is that people who were there on Monday and others around the state are definitely not going to let this all slide. Bomber Bernie is likely going to face other similar confrontations when he returns to the state from Washington, D.C. next time, unless he listens to what his constituents are saying, goes back to his more radical roots and changes his support for this illegal and immoral war very soon. . .Through his votes in Congress for the bombing and Clinton's warmaking policies, he and other such politicians have now got the blood of over 1000 Yugoslavian civilians of all ethnicities whom the U.S./NATO have killed at least partly on their hands. Bernie once claimed to have Eugene Debs as his top hero and role-model. Debs, the leader of the U.S. Socialist Party, went to prison for his resolute and principled opposition to the First Imperialist War. What would Debs have thought about his erstwhile disciple?

On another related front, one of Bernie's staffers, the well-known labor writer Jeremy Brecher, resigned yesterday I just learned in disgust with Bernie's support for the bombing. See Brecher's resignation letter.

(Are you listening to this Phil Fiermonte? Phil, then with CISPES, got arrested with me and 42 other people 15 years ago in an occupation of Senator Robert Stafford's office to protest the Senator's support for U.S. imperialist intervention in Central America. Now, he's placed himself on the other side of the fence. As Bernie's head of staff in Burlington, he's the one who had us arrested last week. Phil -- It's time now, I would say, to follow Brecher's example and repent.)

Let's keep up the heat on the warmakers! Stop the bombing now. Negotiate. I think that the initiative is now much more on our side. There are very positive signs of protest against and disunity among NATO members everywhere. It seems that our Sen. Leahy needs some attention from those of us in Vermont, too. Although this hasn't gotten as much publicity as Bernie's pro- war votes in the House, Leahy the loyal "liberal" Democrat cast his vote a couple of days ago for a resolution supporting Clinton's insane warmaking policies when it came before the Senate. (Meanwhile, our Republican Senator Jeffords voted "no". Odd bedfellows. But thanks. At least someone among the politicians is being an independent and doing the right thing)

Jay Moore

**********

By Will Miller

Apparently, Bernie Sanders has forgotten what a Town Meeting is. Perhaps he lived in Burlington (too "big" for town meetings) and Washington (scared to death of town meetings) for so many years he cannot recall how a democratic town meeting actually works. No one is allowed to appoint themselves the moderator for the town meeting and persons who are partisans on the issues before the town are excluded from the moderator's election in favor of persons who can moderate fairly and evenhandedly.
Sanders as the self-appointed moderator/boss opened the evening with naked self-justification. "It is a very complex situation..." followed by the ritual of demonization of Milosevic--a technique he has perfected over the last eight years on Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Then he presented the false dilemma that the only alternative to bombing is doing nothing. Sanders said his situation was the same as that of Joschka Fischer's of the Green Party, Germany's Foreign Minister, who has outraged his Green Party membership by supporting the bombing his coalition government is carrying out as part of NATO. The assembled citizenry moaned audibly.

He continued by subjecting the packed room of over 200 people to more than an hour of a panel presentation by people of his own choosing; even then, only one panelist overtly supported his position--Bogdan Denich, a professor from New York City and leader of the pro-imperialist wing of the Democratic Socialists of America. Another panelist, Shirely Gedeon, a UVM Economist whose speciality is the Balkans, undercut Sander's historical analysis and a third, Roddy Cleary, a feminist and religious activist, challenged he support of the bombing directly.

Apparently, with all the college and universities in Vermont, Bernie had to travel far into flatlander territory to find an academic willing to support his "bomb now, talk later" position. In fact, Denich went beyond Bernie's present position and called for sending in ground troops, immediately.

After allotting the panelists and himself 12 minutes each and now more than an hour and a half into the meeting, the people finally had a chance to speak. But only for 2 minutes each, dictated the self-appointed moderator Bernie! And this after having lectured us on how complex the issue of the US/NATO War on Yugoslavia really is. When he was challenged by a few members of the meeting about his undemocratic restriction of peoples' speech, he said anyone who didn't like it could leave. It seems when Sanders was in college in Chicago, he learned more from Mayor Richard J. Daley than from his academic studies.

The overwhelming majority of the people present were against Sander's support for the bombing. Even with all his attempts to control the meeting, the people had at him for more than an hour and a half. He was denounced for his selling out to the Empire and it's war machine and for his support for the 9 year old war against Iraq and his active support for every US intervention since he has been in Congress--Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Liberia, Zaire (Congo), Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. He was further criticized for his refusal to ban or even object to the use of depleted uranium with it's long term toxicity in both Iraq and Yugoslavia. Sanders even tried to escape responsibility for arresting 15 of his constituents in his office one week ago for the crime of wanting to talk to him without an appointment by blaming those arrested for their arrest, as if they went out and brought the police in to arrest themselves.

Sanders was repeatedly unresponsive to questions put to him. He evasiveness and arrogance did not serve him well. In the end, only a few people defended him. Whatever else Sanders gets for his joining the other side in the global struggle for social justice--he has lost the left and the peace movement here is Vermont. Maybe in the next election he will finally have to run officially as the Democrat he has been for the last 9 years! And then the people of Vermont will be free to build the anti-capitalist political movement and party that Sanders has worked so hard to block for more than a decade.

People left the meeting resolving to escalate the antiwar movement before the US escalates the war with an invasion of ground troops. The latest leaks out of NATO sources in Europe suggest that the current plan is to invade with troops by the end of May. Remember Vietnam! Never again!

===============

When Sanders fully and vociferously supported Bill Clinton and the massive bombing campaign (war crimes) by Clinton in Yugoslavia while aggressively attacking anti-war protesters in Vermont that should have been your clue that Bernie was no "leftist" and that moment was not unique in Sanders mediocre political career.

Post 9/11 Sanders also supported George Bush as Bush adopted a joint resolution to use armed forces against the "perpetrators."

He also voted to fund massive war crimes in Iraq on several occasions.

Sanders is a clown and no friend to the left. Just a hood ornament to keep you distracted and keep believing the system can be reformed.

Neither Sanders or Warren are allies to the left by any stretch of the imagination. Where did you get that fanciful notion. Both Bernie and Warren have records loaded with their numerous kisses to the ring of power. Sanders is especially pernicious here. They are both enemies of the left as they are not only in rhetoric but also in action defenders of the system you know to be utterly corrupt and in their best moments barely seek reforms of this corrupt system but most of the time when push comes to shove they support some of the most craven aspects of the American Empire.

Let's Not Be Fooled By Bernie Sanders
Sanders and Warren
Educate! Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Wars and Militarism
By Thomas Scott Tucker
August 17th, 2014

Let’s not be fooled by “progressives” who can’t find their spines when the colonial regime in Israel bombs the crowded ghetto of Gaza.

Bernie Sanders ends his recent column “Let’s Stand Together” with this piece of advice: “Let’s not be fooled.”

Quite right. Let’s not be fooled by any politician appealing to high ideals when they are in the business of war and empire.

Sanders not only defends military contracts that benefit his constituents in Vermont, he also joined the 100 to 0 vote in the Senate to give unalloyed moral and political support to the state of Israel during its most recent bombing campaign against Gaza.


Elizabeth Warren, the other darling of “progressive” Democrats, also joined that vote. Her brand of populism amounts to a campaign against corruption and for regulation of big banks and high finance. In other words, capitalist utopianism.

My job in this miniature column is not to argue about the definition of such words as liberal, progressive, or even socialist. Once in a while the blatant contradictions not only speak for themselves, but make any thinking person cry out for justice.

Did the “progressives” of the Democratic Party learn any lessons from Obama’s campaign for hope and change? Nothing at all. They go right on debating the fine points of the stupid horse race between Hillary Clinton and any “left” contender among career Democrats who might run a symbolic campaign against her for the presidential nomination.

Sanders is the lone avowed socialist in Congress, though in official partisan terms he was elected as an independent. This has two practical consequences, neither good. In Congress, Sanders caucuses with the other career Democrats. And Sanders does nothing to build the base of any independent party of anti-corporate resistance. Thus any challenge he might raise against Hillary for the presidential nomination amounts, first and foremost, to a vanity campaign.

Let’s not be fooled by “progressives” who can’t find their spines when the colonial regime in Israel bombs the crowded ghetto of Gaza.

Independent political action against the corporate state is the single most important issue, not only in every big election but also in day to day resistance against capitalism and militarism. Otherwise every other issue of great importance— yes, including fossil fuels and climate change, the militarization of police departments, the ruling class war of attrition against the working class— will gain no traction. In class struggles, there is a law of nature: No friction, no traction.

Not one cent and not one vote for the parties of war and empire.

https://www.popularresistance.org/lets-not-be-fooled-by-bernie-sanders/

Senator Bait-and-Switch
The Myth of Bernie Sanders
by THOMAS H. NAYLOR

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has recently been elevated to near godlike status by the political Left in the United States. Some of his fans have even suggested that he should challenge Barack Obama in the Democratic Presidential Primary. The more often he is accused of being a socialist by his political enemies on the Right, the more convinced the Left becomes that he surely walks on water.

Although Sanders may have once been a socialist back in the 80s when he was Mayor of Burlington, today, a socialist he is not. Rather he behaves more like a technofascist disguised as a liberal, who backs all of President Obama’s nasty little wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Since he always “supports the troops,” Sanders never opposes any defense spending bill. He stands behind all military contractors who bring much-needed jobs to Vermont.

Senator Sanders rarely misses a photo opportunity with Vermont National Guard troops when they are being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. He’s always at the Burlington International Airport when they return. If Sanders truly supported the Vermont troops, he would vote to end all of the wars posthaste.

Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Congressman Peter Welch could hardly contain their enthusiasm over the news that Burlington International Airport had been named as a possible site to house the Air Force’s new F-35 fighter jet scheduled to replace the Vermont Air National Guard’s aging fleet of F-16s. The new high-tech instruments of death will cost $115 million a pop in sharp contrast to the F-16s which cost a mere $20 million each.

From whom might these F-35s protect Vermont? Possibly, Canada, separatist-minded Quebec, upstate New York, the New Hampshire Free State, or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? Why on earth would anyone want to invade Vermont? Vermont has no military bases, no large cities, no important government installations, and no strategic resources unless you count an aging nuclear power plant. What if Canada, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, or even the U.S. Marines were to invade the Green Mountain state? Just what would they do with it? Would all of the black-and-white Holsteins be confiscated, or perhaps the entire sugar maple crop be burned? Imagine trying to enslave freedom-loving Vermonters. Good luck!

Vermont is too small, too rural, and too independent to be invaded by anyone. It is a threat to no one. Furthermore, Vermonters, not unlike the Swiss, tend to stick to their own knitting rather than intruding into the affairs of their neighbors. Vermont has always been that way and probably always will be.

Major General Michael Dubie, head of the Vermont National Guard, has expressed the hope that the Vermont Guard might be morphed into a center for unmanned drone aircraft. Sanders, not unlike President Obama, thinks drones are cool.

Sanders is the darling of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the right-wing Likud government of Israel. He has done everything within his power to keep the myth of Islamic terrorism alive. He never questions the U.S. government’s unconditional support of Israeli acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. It is as though these are nonevents.

Last, but by no means least, is the U.S. government-owned Sandia National Laboratories. For over two years Sanders and former University of Vermont President Daniel Fogel have been encouraging Sandia to open a satellite laboratory in Vermont. Sandia, whose historical origins can be traced back to the Manhattan Project in World War II, designs, builds, and tests weapons of mass destruction. The Vermont laboratory envisaged by Sanders would not be involved with nuclear weapons but rather would be engaged in projects related to energy efficiency, renewable energy, and electric grids. Sandia, interestingly enough, is operated under contract by Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the world. Lockheed Martin produces F-35s and drones. General Dubie, who has close ties to Lockheed Martin, recently received an honorary doctorate from UVM. No one at UVM seems to care whether or not the University gets in bed with a manufacturer of atomic bombs.

Bernie Sanders loves to rail against Corporate America, Wall Street, and the super-rich, but has nothing to show for it. He’s done little to constrain their power and influence. But everybody on the Left loves Bernie.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/30/the-myth-of-bernie-sanders/

Bernie Sanders Doubles Down on F-35 Support Days After Runway Explosion

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

03 June 14



Me: “You mentioned wasteful military spending. The other day ... I’m sure you’ve heard about the F-35 catching fire on the runway. The estimated lifetime expense of the F-35 is $1.2 trillion. When you talk about cutting wasteful military spending, does that include the F-35 program?”

Bernie Sanders: “No, and I’ll tell you why – it is essentially built. It is the airplane of the United States Air Force, Navy, and of NATO. It was a very controversial issue in Vermont. And my view was that given the fact that the F-35, which, by the way, has been incredibly wasteful, that’s a good question. But for better or worse, that is the plane of record right now, and it is not gonna be discarded. That’s the reality.”

hat was the exchange I had with US senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at a town hall in Warner, New Hampshire, this past weekend (skip to the 45:30 mark of this video to hear my question). Sanders came to New Hampshire to gauge the local response to his economic justice-powered platform for a presumed 2016 presidential campaign. While his rabid defense of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and takedown of big money running politics was well-received, he contradicted his position of eliminating wasteful military spending while defending the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.

The Lockheed Martin F-35 is the epitome of Pentagon waste. The program has already cost taxpayers roughly half a trillion dollars, with $700 billion or more to come during the program’s lifetime. During an interview, Pierre Sprey, a co-designer of the F-16, went into great detail about how the F-35 was a lemon aircraft. Sprey explained that the fighter is an excessively heavy gas guzzler with small wings, a low bomb-carry capacity, low loiter time, is incapable of slow flight, is detectable to World War II-era low-frequency radar, and costs $200 million apiece. And just a little over a week ago, the F-35 caught fire on a runway at Eglin Air Force Base.

To his credit, Sanders acknowledged that the program was “wasteful” in his defense of it. The contention over the F-35 in his home state of Vermont is that the program is now responsible for jobs in his hometown of Burlington, where he served as mayor before running for Congress. Some front doors of homes in the Burlington area are adorned with green ribbons, signifying support for the F-35. Sanders, like his colleagues in 45 states around the country, doesn’t want to risk the wrath of voters angry about job losses related to F-35 manufacturing, assembly, and training if the program were to be cut. And that’s where Lockheed Martin’s political savvy comes into play.

War hawk John McCain (R-Az.) has called the F-35 program a “scandal and a tragedy” in the past. But when an F-35 squadron came to the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, McCain changed his tune to say the program was “moving in the right direction.” Lockheed Martin, which draws 82 percent of all revenue from taxpayers (Lockheed’s information systems department gets 95 percent of its money from taxpayers), knows that by spreading out manufacturing as widely as possible, the program is more likely to be funded by politicians beholden to voters who draw their livelihood from the F-35. Lockheed spent $15.3 million on lobbying politicians in 2012, a year in which the company made $47 billion in revenue. That’s a return on investment in the thousands of percentage points. Lockheed gets paid, and politicians get re-elected. That’s how Washington runs.

So, while Bernie Sanders is saying we should cut military spending to fund free college for everyone, his defense of the F-35 means that despite everything else, Sanders is still just a politician. Sooner or later, the F-35 will eventually be replaced by something even more expensive, while the F-35 joins the thousands of other unused fighter jets in the boneyard. But rather than lying to people and saying the program is already a done deal and that there’s nothing he can do, Sanders could stand by his principles and introduce an amendment in the next National Defense Authorization Act to strip the F-35 program of its funding. That remaining $700 billion could make college tuition-free for everyone for at least a decade.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/24583-bernie-sanders-doubles-down-on-f-35-support-days-after-runway-explosion

Senator Bernie Sanders, STFU

by Myles Hoenig / January 7th, 2013

Everything Sanders says is so right on. However, his actions belie his words. He is clearly playing ‘I’m of the people’ politics, even doubting the president’s sincerity in protecting Social Security but nonetheless supported his ‘fecal’ cliff bill. This was clearly not a good bill; a compromise that both sides hated. Yet any support of it was a support of the narrative written by Wall Street and endorsed by President Obama.

Senator Sanders has strong allies on his side: unions, seniors’ groups, veterans, etc. They represent the majority of the American population. However in real politics we know that nearly all of them will fold in the end, especially the unions. The president is a registered Democrat. That’s enough to stop Trumpka and others from being blowhards on the stump speech, but wusses when action is needed. Sanders should certainly be able to identify with that.

Although Sanders will be proposing a transaction tax that could yield hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues, it will be later, not when it mattered most. On the Ed Show he allowed Ed to repeat the Wall Street narrative that this transaction tax (which Ed agreed would be good) could enhance the Social Security Trust Fund without separating the Fund as a source of the deficit.

No where in the fiscal bill did we see this transaction tax, a tax on real wealth starting at $250,000, slashing the military budget by 50% or more, closing tax shelter loopholes and corporate welfare subsidies. In fact, some of those were strengthened. That’s not compromising. That’s capitulating to Wall Street. Many would say that the 2012 election was a referendum, a mandate, against Wall Street, yet the victor remains the stalwart Republican he’s always been.

If Bernie had any real credibility as a Senator, and one who once called himself a Socialist, he should have urged to the point of filibuster that we ‘went over the cliff’, not side with the Wall Streeter-in-Chief.

Senator Sanders fools a lot of people. He gets to be on the Ed Show. But he’s a Democratic Party hack just the same and votes more with this corporate party than most Democrats. He’s got a good tongue. But as it wags, his finger is on the ‘Aye’ button for Wall Street.

http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/01/senator-bernie-sanders-stfu/

Well, they don't have the Kooch to kick around anymore, somebody gotta do it. And I think they do need him, gonna push Hillary to the left, doncha know? Hahaha... Then there's that Paul boy, need something to keep the indignados in the corral, that wiff of reefer is mighty enticing.

Sen. Sanders Joins the Race: A Campaign of Capitulation?
by worker

April 30, 2015

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/30/the-problem-with-bernie/
The Problem With Bernie
by RON JACOBS
So, Bernie Sanders made his call. He is going to run for President of the United States and he is going to do so as a Democrat. Even if he wins the nomination, one can be quite certain that the reactionary forces of US capitalism will oppose him in every way they can. Additionally, and more insidiously, so will a fair number of liberal champions of US capitalism to his right in the Democratic Party. Yet, he has made his claim and it is one he will have to live with, no matter what price he ends up paying. Given the nature of national electoral politics in the United States, his chances of winning the party nomination are small, much less the presidency itself.
Who is Bernie Sanders and what does he stand for? Now that he is a candidate, it’s fair to assume that his biography will be dissected across the media spectrum. To much of the US population, he is still the most radical politician from the Left they have ever seen. This is especially true for anyone who came of age politically since Ronald Reagan’s first term in the White House. What interests me more is the gradual transition he has made politically from socialist (more or less) to social democrat and from that to liberal Democrat. The anecdotes that follow reveal something of that retreat.
In the spring of 1997, a drive to form a union amongst the housekeeping, bookstore, landscaping and trades workers at the University of Vermont (UVM) was well underway. The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers union (UE) had been enlisted to help those of us in the UVM work force working on the union drive get organized. Their abilities had helped us move quickly and gain numerous signatures on cards. On March 8, 1997 International Women’s Day, we held a union rally. It was very well attended. The speakers built a crescendo of assent. I was on the list and gave a brief talk about the importance of the date for the US union movement and its relevance to our campaign. Then the lead organizer Kimberley Lawson took the stage. An excellent organizer and an inspiring individual, she introduced the last speaker. It was Bernie Sanders, then Vermont’s Congressman. The applause was stupendous. Chants of Bernie! Bernie! filled the room. After about five minutes of applause, Bernie began to speak. It was a good, if standard, stump speech about the rights of workers and the need for the university administration and Board of trustees to do the right thing and recognize the union.
Two years later, it was the spring of 1999. Bill Clinton was under fire in Congress for his misguided and manipulative dalliances with Monica Lewinsky. The Dayton Accords concerning the growing civil war in Yugoslavia had created the intended scenario, leading Belgrade to insist on its historical right to keep Kosovo under its governance. In response, Washington and other NATO governments began an intensive bombing campaign. Bill Clinton and his war cabinet began an around-the-clock assault on the Serbian people. Liberals and progressives drank the kool-aid and offered their whole- hearted support. Bernie Sanders made it clear he was completely on board with the action. Indeed, after antiwar activists in Burlington, Vermont marched through downtown Burlington stopping at the offices of each Senator and ending at Sanders’ office where they staged a sit-in, Bernie instructed his office staff via telephone to call the police and clear the office. A week later at an emergency town meeting on the bombing in Montpelier, Vermont Sanders showed up with a couple staff members and a panel of pro and antiwar speakers. Bernie vehemently defended the bombing and actually told at least two antiwar members of the audience to leave if they didn’t like what he was saying.
September 2001. After thousands of people were killed in the World Trade Center and Pentagon, President George Bush and Congress declared war on Afghanistan. Sanders joined the bandwagon and voted to adopt the joint resolution that authorized the President to use the United States Armed Forces against anyone involved with the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and any nation that harbors these individuals. In October 2002, after two years of war on the people of Afghanistan and a series of lies and misinformation, Congress and the White House (with help from Great Britain and a couple other governments) ignored the United Nations and world opinion and invaded Iraq. While Sanders voted against the original authorization to use military force against Iraq, he followed that vote with several subsequent votes authorizing funding of that war and the debacle in Afghanistan. The other piece of legislation passed that long ago September was the PATRIOT Act. Like the vote that sent troops to Afghanistan, that legislation changed the US forever. To his credit, Sanders voted against the original PATRIOT Act legislation and attempted to curtail its effect in subsequent votes. However, in 2006, he voted Yea on legislation that made the remaining fourteen provisions of the Patriot Act permanent and extended the authority of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to conduct “roving wiretaps” and access certain business records through December 31, 2009. In a similar vein, Sanders voted against the original legislation that created the Department of Homeland Security, but by 2006 he had joined the majority of Congress in passing continued funding of that agency.
In 2008, Sanders was elected to the Senate. This transition gave Bernie a salary increase with potentially even less power than that he had in the House. His voting record changed little: voting for some war authorization funds while opposing others; funding intelligence operations while voting to remove immunity for communications companies involved in government surveillance; supporting contraception funding and funding for children’s health insurance programs; and opposing John Brennan’s appointment to head the CIA while supporting Chuck Hagel’s appointment as Secretary of Defense. He continued authorizing grants and loans to Israel, even after Israel ruthlessly attacked Gaza (two such operations), attacked the Mavi Marmara and supported illegal settlements in the West Bank. Most recently, Sanders joined ninety-seven other Senators and approved a $1 billion aid package to the coup government in Ukraine, a package that (when combined with International Monetary Fund loans) will most certainly further impoverish Ukrainian working people. He is on record opposing US ground support for the war against ISIS and Al Qaida, as well as opposing arming Syrian mercenaries.
Beginning in 2010, Vermonters became aware that the Air National Guard base in Burlington was one of the top choices of the Pentagon to base the multimillion dollar F-35 fighter plane. Immediately, citizens began organizing against that possibility. Some members of the organizing group thought Sanders might be in support of their position. They were quickly disappointed. Indeed, as the campaign against the F-35s being based in Vermont grew, Senator Sanders’ support for the idea grew stronger and more adamant. By October 2012, after a series of victories by opponents of the plane, Sanders stated in part, “I’m very proud of the role that the Vermont National Guard has played in our state and I do not want to see that role diminished or eliminated…. The F-35, whether one may like it or not, is the plane of choice not only for the U.S. Air Force, but for the Navy, Marines and much of NATO. If the F-35 ends up not being located here, it will end up at a National Guard base in Florida or South Carolina. I would rather it be here.” As I wrote in an article after the Pentagon announced it had chosen Burlington to base the planes (VTDigger: The Pentagon gets what it wants (again)1/15/2014), “There is an alternative to the cynical attitude that rationalizes taking blood money since, after all, somebody will and it might as well be Vermont.”
In a recent interview I conducted with Left progressive authors William Grover and Joseph Peschek regarding their book The Unsustainable Presidency, I asked them if Sanders could actually move the US leftward and institute policies for working people and other disenfranchised. The key part of their answer was “(No.) He would be among the first to admit that. Indeed, in an interview last week he did just that: “We can elect the best in the world to be president, but that person will get swallowed up unless there is an unprecedented level of activism at the grassroots level.” The question I have for Mr. Sanders is this: How does he expect to create radical change in the US if this radical grassroots activism he correctly states is needed is hijacked by the Democratic Party–a political entity that is owned lock, stock and barrel by the very same banks and corporations he claims to oppose. After all, it’s been many years since the progressive George McGovern was the Democratic candidate for President. It’s been almost as long since the conservative wing of that party formed the Democratic Leadership Council and changed their rules so that no one with politics like McGovern’s would ever be their nominee again. Ask Bill Clinton about that. After all he was the first candidate chosen by that council to win the White House. His wife may be the next. There are those who say Sanders will “at least move the discussion leftward.” That is not enough. Conversations are meaningless without bold, concrete action. The Democratic Party has proven over the past six and a half years that not only is it incapable of bold action in favor of the vast majority of working people in this country, it is barely capable of concrete action. How else does one explain the disastrous austerity policies taking place in the United States?
The majority of Vermonters still like Bernie Sanders. In fact, he wins election with a substantial majority every time he runs. After all, as the summary above of his voting record suggests, Bernie Sanders is if nothing else a shrewd politician. Like his colleague currently in the White House, Sanders campaigns on progressive and populist themes. Unlike Mr. Obama, however, Sanders usually sticks to his positions on issues relating to labor, veterans, children, corporate cheats, and certain social issues (marriage equality, for example.) However, when it comes to matters of war and peace, his record is at best a mixed bag and, more likely, representative of his ideas on how the United States can maintain its imperial role forever (or at least for a long, long time.) Remember, all US wars involve a defense of the capitalist economy and, consequently, a belief in that economy’s superiority. Bernie Sanders actions make it clear he shares that belief.
After the bombing of Yugoslavia had ended and the US plan to Balkanize the Balkans neared its completion, I received many emails and calls regarding the abovementioned sit-in at Bernie’s office and the protesters’ opposition to his politics of war. Most of these messages came from outside of Vermont and considered what the protesters did to be counterproductive. After all, the messages stated, Sanders went to Chiapas to support the Zapatistas and he’s against the various free trade agreements and the WTO. He’s more of an ally than a foe, isn’t he? My answer to these challenges is that I’m not sure. So called progressive politicians who do not draw the link between corporate America’s wars and its attack on social security, health care, the minimum wage, forty- hour work week, and other issues working people consider important are doing us a disservice. The wars fought by the US military are ultimately fought for one reason only–to maintain and expand the power of corporate America at the expense of workers and the poor around the world. Didn’t neoliberal writer Thomas Friedman write during the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force Navy and Marine Corps.” (New York Times 3/29/1999) Sanders must understand the connection. Hence, his support for those elements of the war machine that allow him to support labor in the manner he does.
The recent mass movement against the epidemic of police murders of (primarily) young Black men has exposed a gaping hole in the myth that comprises the United States. Racism, which Barack Obama’s election was supposed to have placed in the dustbin of history, is arguably greater now than at any time since the 1960s. Because of the aforementioned movement, the nature of the criminal justice system, the laws its enforcers enforce and how those laws are enforced, and the prison system have all been brought under well-deserved scrutiny. No politician has come up with any genuine programs that will check police brutality and remove killer cops from the streets. Nor have many politicians seriously addressed the fundamental role neoliberal capitalism plays in the impoverishment of America’s working class, especially its non-white members. Bernie Sanders’ attacks on the excesses of Wall Street and its cohorts are usually addressed to the “middle class,” that US ideal. Indeed, Sanders was one of many Congressmen who voted for the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill that its author Bill Clinton recently acknowledged placed too much emphasis on mass incarceration and barely any on keeping young people out of prison or rehabilitating them if they ended up there. Failing to conduct a critically honest discussion that includes solutions to this problem that are not predicated on making profits for the private sector would be a mistake for Sanders or any candidate. It will prove interesting to watch his moves in this area.
After all is said and done, the question here is not whether Bernie Sanders is the progressive savior so many people want him to be. Instead, it is whether or not such a politician can even exist in the United States. I am one of the first to admit that Sanders’ record on labor, veterans, and most civil liberties issues is mostly decent, especially for someone who is part of the ruling elite (even if he doesn’t see himself that way.) However, this fact is probably irrelevant. The system in place in the Executive Branch is implacable and essentially without redemption. Barack Obama’s two terms should make it clear to any but his most fervent supporters the truth of this statement. With the exception of a very few social issues, Obama has done very little that is any different from his right wing predecessor or the neoliberal champion Bill Clinton who preceded George Bush. In part, this is certainly because Obama is not a leftist or even a progressive. The primary reason, though, is because politicians who do not agree with the US insistence on military superiority and economic hegemony rarely get to Washington, much less to the White House.
In a John Nichols interview with Sanders that appeared in The Nation April 7, 2014 print issue, the Jesse Jackson campaign of 1984 is also mentioned as a template for Bernie’s potential presidential run. As anyone involved in that campaign might remember, Jackson’s progressive and populist politics were succeeding beyond his (and his supporters) dreams. Then the establishment moved in. Anti-Palestinian and big business donors and media commentators took a private comment made by Jackson out of context and splashed it across the pages and television screens of America. Racial code words began being heard in relation to Jackson’s name. Soon, his chances of winning the Democratic Party nomination were gone. Instead, the party limped out of San Francisco that summer with the Cold War liberal Walter Mondale as its loser candidate.
The reality of US politics in the current age is that any progressive in a position of power must temper their left-leaning politics if they want to keep their power. The more powerful their position, the more compromise is required. The anecdotes related above suggest Bernie Sanders understands this all too well and acts accordingly. So, even if the reader might believe President Bernie Sanders could bring us back from the precipice we find ourselves on the edge of, the very nature of the US economic and political system ensures that he can not. By beginning his campaign as a Democrat one wonders if he even wants to.
(This piece originally appeared in the May 2014 print issue of Counterpunch with the title “Bernie Sanders Cannot Save US.” It has been modified to reflect the current situation.)
Ron Jacobs is the author of a series of crime novels called The Seventies Series. All the Sinners, Saints, is the third novel in the series. He is also the author of The Way the Wind Blew: a History of the Weather Underground. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. His book Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies will be published by Counterpunch. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.April 30, 2015

So, even allowing the that Bernie may 'mean well', which I doubt but don't mean shit anyway, then what's the point? None, unless all you really want is the warm fuzzy of having your 'feelings' justified.

what's the point?

The point, I think, is to pull all of the "progressives" into the election. Even if they "hate Hill", once they are thoroughly involved, then good ol' Bern will concede and make a pitch for everyone to pull together to beat the evil Republicans, 'cause, come on, Hill is better than Jeb! Same old, same old.

This is from and article in In These Times. Jeziz...


A Sanders candidacy offers American progressives the chance to build the infrastructure for future progressive electoral campaigns. Carl Davidson, co-chair of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (a New Left organization), puts it this way: “Bernie’s candidacy separates out the ‘politics-as-a-horse-race’ crowd from the ‘politics-as-an-organizing-opportunity’ gang.”

As Matt Taibbi observed in Rolling Stone, the fact that super-rich donors have no interest in Sanders’ politics requires the senator to tailor his political program to the interests of regular people. The Sanders campaign, as a grassroots project, will be backed by groups such as Progressive Democrats of America, which advocates what is known as the “inside-outside strategy.” This entails working with social movements on the outside and expressing the demands and concerns of those movements on the inside, in the internal battles of both Congress and the Democratic Party.

Couple of things, here. If the "super-rich" are not interested in Bern, it is because he has zero chance of winning, period. Any candidate that had any chance would be of "interest" to the money men. But more interesting is what Taibbi says next: that because the rich are not interested in Bernie, "requires the senator to tailor his political program to the interests of regular people". Also, there will be no "internal battles" in the Democrat Party (I love using "Democrat" :)); Bernie is not a party member, so if he does not get the nomination, there will be nothing for the Dem Party to talk about with anyone. How can these liberal progressive appear to have no idea how their own party works?

And to cap it all off with a big belt of lesser-evilism:


In January, asked if he would mount a third party campaign for president, Sanders replied, “I will not play that role in helping to elect some right-wing Republican as president of the United States.”

There you have it. The main reason for all this Bernie folderol is just to suck the "lefty" wannabes back into the Hillary fold and I will bet the rent that it will work. All they ever needed was some kind of justification and cover; last two times it was the faux progressive black guy, before that it was the evil Bush, now it will be "we have to follow Brenie!"

This is from an article in In These Times. Jeziz...


A Sanders candidacy offers American progressives the chance to build the infrastructure for future progressive electoral campaigns. Carl Davidson, co-chair of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (a New Left organization), puts it this way: “Bernie’s candidacy separates out the ‘politics-as-a-horse-race’ crowd from the ‘politics-as-an-organizing-opportunity’ gang.”

As Matt Taibbi observed in Rolling Stone, the fact that super-rich donors have no interest in Sanders’ politics requires the senator to tailor his political program to the interests of regular people. The Sanders campaign, as a grassroots project, will be backed by groups such as Progressive Democrats of America, which advocates what is known as the “inside-outside strategy.” This entails working with social movements on the outside and expressing the demands and concerns of those movements on the inside, in the internal battles of both Congress and the Democratic Party.

Couple of things, here. If the "super-rich" are not interested in Bern, it is because he has zero chance of winning, period. Any candidate that had any chance would be of "interest" to the money men. But more interesting is what Taibbi says next: that because the rich are not interested in Bernie, "requires the senator to tailor his political program to the interests of regular people". Also, there will be no "internal battles" in the Democrat Party (I love using "Democrat" :)); Bernie is not a party member, so if he does not get the nomination, there will be nothing for the Dem Party to talk about with anyone. How can these liberal progressive appear to have no idea how their own party works?

And to cap it all off with a big belt of lesser-evilism:


In January, asked if he would mount a third party campaign for president, Sanders replied, “I will not play that role in helping to elect some right-wing Republican as president of the United States.”

There you have it. The main reason for all this Bernie folderol is just to suck the "lefty" wannabes back into the Hillary fold and I will bet the rent that it will work. All they ever needed was some kind of justification and cover; last two times it was the faux progressive black guy, before that it was the evil Bush, now it will be "we have to follow Brenie!"

I usually watch ABC's This Week on Sundays, just to keep an eye on the latest political spin from the corporatist media. Bernie Sanders was interviewed by George Stephanopolous, who introduced Sanders as a "socialist." Sanders talked a lot about the "billionaire class" and how something--he didn't say precisely what--needs to be done about the exponentially rising income inequality in the United States. Stephanopolous told him he could see the Republican attack ads already: "Bernie Sanders wants to make America look like Scandanavia." Sanders replied, "That's exactly right," and then went on talking for a couple of minutes about the fact that working and middle class people in Scandinavia really do have a better quality of life than their American counterparts do. He even used the R-word, saying that America needs a "political revolution" to address that income inequality thing.

Foreign policy was never mentioned.

When Georgie asked Bernie if he would endorse Hillary Clinton if he did not win the nomination, he unhesitatingly said he would. He even said that he liked her and respected her. I was in jeopardy of losing my breakfast for a minute there.

The "roundtable," including the usual meathead from the Weekly Standard, Dana Perino of all people, Bill Richardson, and the revolting(IMHO) Katrina van Heusel or whatever from The Nation, nattered on about whether the Sanders candidacy would help or hurt Hillary, and most said it would help her by bringing more voters into the Democratic Party or would make no difference at all because Sanders is so "far left" he is irrelevant. The Nation-thing did say that Bernie's candidacy could start a new political movement, but I took her as implying that such a movement for more income equality can and should remain within the safe umbrella of the D-Fascist party. I know that everyone here knows that's categorically impossible and why already, so I won't bother to go there.

I agree with Chlams: this is a brilliant tactical move by the ruling class. Run a so-called socialist in the Democratic Party primary against The Anointed Corporate Whore, suck in as many gullible, idealistic voters into the party as possible with an appeal to the quixotic "populist" knight in shining armor, have him gracefully bow out after a few drubbings at the polls, and then start the lesser-of-two-evils meme to try to get Hillary over 270 votes in the purposefully designed anti-democratic Electoral College. Rah, rah, Blue Team.

Barf, barf, same old shit.

I usually watch ABC's This Week on Sundays, just to keep an eye on the latest political spin from the corporatist media. Bernie Sanders was interviewed by George Stephanopolous, who introduced Sanders as a "socialist." Sanders talked a lot about the "billionaire class" and how something--he didn't say precisely what--needs to be done about the exponentially rising income inequality in the United States. Stephanopolous told him he could see the Republican attack ads already: "Bernie Sanders wants to make America look like Scandanavia." Sanders replied, "That's exactly right," and then went on talking for a couple of minutes about the fact that working and middle class people in Scandinavia really do have a better quality of life than their American counterparts do. He even used the R-word, saying that America needs a "political revolution" to address that income inequality thing.

Foreign policy was never mentioned.

When Georgie asked Bernie if he would endorse Hillary Clinton if he did not win the nomination, he unhesitatingly said he would. He even said that he liked her and respected her. I was in jeopardy of losing my breakfast for a minute there.

The "roundtable," including the usual meathead from the Weekly Standard, Dana Perino of all people, Bill Richardson, and the revolting(IMHO) Katrina van Heusel or whatever from The Nation, nattered on about whether the Sanders candidacy would help or hurt Hillary, and most said it would help her by bringing more voters into the Democratic Party or would make no difference at all because Sanders is so "far left" he is irrelevant. The Nation-thing did say that Bernie's candidacy could start a new political movement, but I took her as implying that such a movement for more income equality can and should remain within the safe umbrella of the D-Fascist party. I know that everyone here knows that's categorically impossible and why already, so I won't bother to go there.

I agree with Chlams: this is a brilliant tactical move by the ruling class. Run a so-called socialist in the Democratic Party primary against The Anointed Corporate Whore, suck in as many gullible, idealistic voters into the party as possible with an appeal to the quixotic "populist" knight in shining armor, have him gracefully bow out after a few drubbings at the polls, and then start the lesser-of-two-evils meme to try to get Hillary over 270 votes in the purposefully designed anti-democratic Electoral College. Rah, rah, Blue Team.

Barf, barf, same old shit.

It's the Kooch all over again.

Wildcard this time is Paul, if he can thread the needle by appeasing R powers that be and by deftly talking out both sides of his mouth beguile the sappy progressives with sex & drugs & rock&roll things could get interesting. It would be clarifying for these lifestyle liberals to 'come out' as the bourgeois toadies that they are.

Sander's candidacy in fact acts as something of an inoculation against just such an occurrence.

It's the Kooch all over again.

Wildcard this time is Paul, if he can thread the needle by appeasing R powers that be and by deftly talking out both sides of his mouth beguile the sappy progressives with sex & drugs & rock&roll things could get interesting. It would be clarifying for these lifestyle liberals to 'come out' as the bourgeois toadies that they are.

Sander's candidacy in fact acts as something of an inoculation against just such an occurrence.

Kooch. Dennis Kucinich. Best adjacent district congresscritter I ever had. Sad, is it not? I even met him once. Compared to all of the others, he was pretty good. Oh, he betrayed all of us when he voted for the Health Insurance Corporation Enrichment Act, aka Obamacare, in exchange for a promise from Obama that he wouldn't eliminate good jobs at NASA Glenn in Cleveland, a promise Obama broke just a year or so later. But I have to give credit where credit is due: Kucinich stuck to his guns better than just about every other one of the 535 Congresscritters during his tenure there. Good enough? No, but there it is, for whatever little it's worth in terms of affecting my and my family's quality of life. THAT is what is truly important to me, a member of the working class.

As for the Bernie/Kooch comparison, first, Bernie could have stopped that fascist medical plan simply by voting No, all by his own self. He voted Yes, in spite of the identical promise he and Kucinich had made to their constituents and supporters that they would vote against any "affordable care act" that did not include a public option. I will never forget, of forgive, that.

Second, I find your analogy accurate. Just like Kucinich's candidacy, the Sanders candidacy provides a convenient and temporary outlet within one of the fascist political parties for "progressives" to go to in order to vent their grievances, and then to support the winner of their party's primary, no matter how reluctantly. If Sanders was at all serious, he would run a third party campaign. Kucinich could have done the same thing, and refused to do so repeatedly.

As for Rand Paul, he is the ONLY candidate with whom I actually mostly agree with on foreign policy and, as you pointed out, on some domestic social issues that are of secondary importance, at best, as well. No doubt Sanders holds those same positions on sex & drugs & rock$roll(ampersand deliberate) things, though he still supports an interventionist and imperialist foreign policy. Rand Paul, though, lives up to his namesake in supporting Ayn Rand's truly Liberal(British Victorian definition) economics, which is truly repugnant. That may be attractive to our ruling class, but his isolationist foreign policy flies in the teeth of that old bugaboo, the military-industrial complex and its hundreds of billions of tax dollar profits a year; hence he has zero chance in the Republican primary. He's no Fascist; he's a true-blue believer in total capitalism with NO government involvement in economics. In short, he's a sort of religious fanatic.

Like Sanders, he provides a relief valve for members of the Republican Party and some "independents" to flock to; then turn around and vote against Hillary and for the lesser-of-two-evils, ie the eventual Republican nominee. IOW, Sanders and Paul are two sides of the same coin. Both represent brilliantly deployed political tactics by the ruling class.

Kooch. Dennis Kucinich. Best adjacent district congresscritter I ever had. Sad, is it not? I even met him once. Compared to all of the others, he was pretty good. Oh, he betrayed all of us when he voted for the Health Insurance Corporation Enrichment Act, aka Obamacare, in exchange for a promise from Obama that he wouldn't eliminate good jobs at NASA Glenn in Cleveland, a promise Obama broke just a year or so later. But I have to give credit where credit is due: Kucinich stuck to his guns better than just about every other one of the 535 Congresscritters during his tenure there. Good enough? No, but there it is, for whatever little it's worth in terms of affecting my and my family's quality of life. THAT is what is truly important to me, a member of the working class.

As for the Bernie/Kooch comparison, first, Bernie could have stopped that fascist medical plan simply by voting No, all by his own self. He voted Yes, in spite of the identical promise he and Kucinich had made to their constituents and supporters that they would vote against any "affordable care act" that did not include a public option. I will never forget, of forgive, that.

Second, I find your analogy accurate. Just like Kucinich's candidacy, the Sanders candidacy provides a convenient and temporary outlet within one of the fascist political parties for "progressives" to go to in order to vent their grievances, and then to support the winner of their party's primary, no matter how reluctantly. If Sanders was at all serious, he would run a third party campaign. Kucinich could have done the same thing, and refused to do so repeatedly.

As for Rand Paul, he is the ONLY candidate with whom I actually mostly agree with on foreign policy and, as you pointed out, on some domestic social issues that are of secondary importance, at best, as well. No doubt Sanders holds those same positions on sex & drugs & rock$roll(ampersand deliberate) things, though he still supports an interventionist and imperialist foreign policy. Rand Paul, though, lives up to his namesake in supporting Ayn Rand's truly Liberal(British Victorian definition) economics, which is truly repugnant. That may be attractive to our ruling class, but his isolationist foreign policy flies in the teeth of that old bugaboo, the military-industrial complex and its hundreds of billions of tax dollar profits a year; hence he has zero chance in the Republican primary. He's no Fascist; he's a true-blue believer in total capitalism with NO government involvement in economics. In short, he's a sort of religious fanatic.

Like Sanders, he provides a relief valve for members of the Republican Party and some "independents" to flock to; then turn around and vote against Hillary and for the lesser-of-two-evils, ie the eventual Republican nominee. IOW, Sanders and Paul are two sides of the same coin. Both represent brilliantly deployed political tactics by the ruling class.

Yeah, about as good as it gets in bourgeois democracy....

Paul ain't no different than the rest of them, he'll say whatever it takes, watch his non-interventionism intersect with the Sam Power school of humanitarian imperialism. His old man has more lib cred & hung out with Nazis, Rand is an opportunistic pustule on his old man's withered ass. Which does not dissuade them from but indeed recommends him to the progressives.

Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016

http://blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-400x300/public/bernie-sheepdog01.jpg?itok=3E5-kSDy

http://www.thebellforum.com/showthread.php?t=133074

History Lessons
Remember in 2009, when the then White house chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, labeled the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party “f**king retards”? Without Emanuel's notoriously crude bluster, President Obama expressed a similar sentiment on April 23 in public remarks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement.


According to MSNBC, President Obama said: “Some of these folks [opponents of the TPP] are friends of mine. I love them to death. But in the same way that when I was arguing for health care reform I asked people to look at the facts – somebody comes up with a slogan like ‘death panel,’ doesn’t mean it’s true. Look at the facts. The same thing is true on this. Look at the facts. Don’t just throw a bunch of stuff out there and see if it sticks...”


Obama's comparison referencing the “death panels” concocted by the lunatic right did not go unnoticed by his critics from labor and the left. Most objected that comparing their opposition to TPP to the ravings of crazies hardly suggests the sentiments of a friend.


Of course this is an old story. Since the defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984, the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council and numerous associated think-tanks, the Democratic Party has moved smartly and steadily rightward, shedding any semblance of New Deal or Great Society progressivism. During the Obama years, the process has reached a point where the Democratic Party's meager left wing pretends to represent the Party's soul while the leadership pretends to welcome its views. On occasions like the TPP incident, the leadership fumbles the script and reveals its true feelings.


Sadly, few lessons are drawn from this experience or the pattern of contempt and derision demonstrated by the party's corporate coddling leadership.
Flashback


As we enter the Silly Season-- the 18 months of lies, bluster, and empty promises preceding the Presidential election-- I am reminded of the last great moment of self-induced, liberal/left self-deception. In the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, all but a few unrepentant Marxist-Leninists, Green Party hardliners, and assorted outliers joined hands in a mad orgy of Obama-mania. For those who need reminding, Obama was actually the corporate choice preferred by the ruling class to clean up the mess left by a failed, embarrassing Bush administration that destabilized the Middle East, antagonized allies, blemished the image of the US, and stood clueless before an economic crisis unprecedented since the Great Depression. A fresh face was needed, a politician unstained by the Bush era, untainted by the “insider” label.


Barack Obama fit the bill, just as Jimmy Carter, a Georgia peanut farmer and home-spun governor did nearly four decades earlier after the Nixon crimes and indignities. In both cases, an “outsider” promised to restore confidence in a tarnished office. I wrote in 2008:
There are some striking and illuminating parallels between this election season and the Presidential election campaign of 1976. Like the eight years of the Bush administration, the eight years of Nixon/Ford produced an unparalleled collapse of support for the Republican Party. The Watergate scandal coupled with the failure of the US military in Vietnam and an economic crisis left the Republican Party wounded and regrouping. The interim elections of 1974 produced gains for the Democrats, especially in former suburban Republican strongholds.
Most citizens looked to the then forthcoming elections with a profound desire for a new course. The Democrats chose a political outsider, Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia. Carter promised to make the government “as good as the people.” Pundits hailed Carter as a departure from the old politics and a fresh, honest voice for change (e.g. The Miracle of Jimmy Carter, Howard Norton and Bob Slosser, 1976).
Similar to 1976 and the Presidential candidate J. Carter, his presumptive 2008 counterpart, Barack Obama, is viewed as a Washington “outsider.” He has campaigned as a candidate of change. Pundits hail him as a fresh voice untainted by the vices of the establishment. (2008: a Reprise of 1976?)


Was Obama really the corporate choice? Or is this just baseless cynicism of a sectarian old leftist? I observed in 2008:
Wall Street has strongly supported the Democratic candidates over the Republicans. Through the end of 2007, seven of the big 8 financial firms (Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, and Credit Suisse) showed a decided preference towards the Democrats. Only Merrill Lynch gave more to Republicans, though they gave the single most to Clinton. The Wall Street Journal (2-3/4-08), while noting that Obama receives a notable number of contributions from small donors, pointed out that “…even for Sen. Obama, the finance industry was still the richest source of cash overall…”
Through February, Obama leads the other candidates in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry and was in a virtual dead heat with Clinton with respect to the energy sector.
These numbers strongly suggest that candidates, especially Democratic Party candidates, are unlikely to challenge their corporate sponsors in any meaningful way. (The Political Economy of the Elections)


To underscore the meaning of these campaign contributions, I ventured:
This election cycle has revealed something new: Democrats are raising more money from corporate interests for their campaigns than the traditionally dominant Republicans. This process began before the 2006 elections, accelerated sharply in the Presidential elections, strengthened in the early primaries and continued into 2008. In March, 2008, McCain gained somewhat on his Democratic rivals, but still fell well below the total raised by the two Democrats.
Within the Democratic camp, Clinton dominated most corporate contributions until 2008, when Obama enjoyed big gains, pushing ahead through March especially in the key industries of finance, lawyers/lobbyists, communications and health.


Would it be far-fetched to say that the corporate choice was there for all to see? Is it difficult to imagine from these facts that unlimited, unconditional bail-outs were ahead for the financial industry in 2009? Or health care “reform” structured around the wishes of insurance companies, the health care industry, and pharmaceuticals?


Yes, it was there for all to see.


Of course many were willfully blind to the facts, embracing self-delusion instead. I wrote of one left pundit so struck with Obama-mania that he reported the Obama victory with wild hyperbole and messianic verve:
"...hundreds of millions-Black, Latino, Asian, Native-American and white, men and women, young and old, literally danced in the streets and wept with joy, celebrating an achievement of a dramatic milestone in a 400-year struggle, and anticipating a new period of hope and possibility." (Quoted in Getting beyond Euphoria)


That pundit has today found a new messiah in Bernie Sanders.


Two days after the 2008 election, weighing the new administration's chief players, their backgrounds, and political records, along with stressing the limitations deeply embedded in the national political institutions, I cautioned that Obama would not and could not deliver the goods expected by the broad left. I summarized the election as follows:
The 2008 US Presidential election is behind us. A fair estimation of the results might be as follows: A clear, significant statement of the US electorate; a hollow, likely disappointing result for the people. After the euphoria of the Obama victory, it is vital that we separate these two assessments and avoid the cynicism of leftist isolationism and the self-deception of hopeful idealism. What the voters wanted was unquestionably significant change. What they were promised was change. Whether change will come from the Obama administration is - at best - questionable. (The Presidential Election: A Victory for the People?)


I concluded the essay with the following remarks:
It's time for the left to put aside the comforting illusions and rebuild an independent, oppositional front that is not dependent upon the good will of the corrupted Democratic Party. We desperately need that left to forge a true people-saving agenda from the destructive gorilla.


Unfortunately, we (the left) have yet to construct the independent, oppositional front needed. Nor has the opposition to the Democratic Party steamroller advanced much beyond the motley group of “a few unrepentant Marxist-Leninists, Green Party hardliners, and assorted outliers” present in 2008. Accordingly, the new political season very likely will reproduce many of the same inanities and fantasies inflicted seven years ago.
Hillary?
With the ability and expectations of raising well over a billion dollars for the forthcoming presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton will likely be the Democratic nominee and very probably the next President. Unlike the 2008 Obama-moment, the ruling class is opting for “insiders” in the period ahead. Even with polls showing a twenty-five year low in confidence that the country is going in the right direction, even with barely double-digit approval of congress, and even with decidedly negative images of both parties by poll respondents, the masters of our fate are favoring old dynastic names: Clinton and Bush.


Chastened by its encounter with “hopey-changey,” the electorate appears to be looking for “experience” as the most important attribute of a candidate this election cycle (Washington Post/ABC News poll). Of course this is precisely the image Clinton has been carefully cultivating since her Senate tenure. Like her husband, the former President, Ms. Clinton seems untouched by her publicized failings. Neither the abuse of her internal communications while in government service nor her slimy horse trading with foreign and domestic wealthy donors to her billion-dollar family foundation has shaken her campaign. The Clintons know no shame, the media show no indignation, and Democratic Party loyalists own no principles.


While there is much talk that the Democratic Party's liberals need some red meat to keep them in the game, there is little evidence that it is forthcoming or needed. Elizabeth Warren likely pledged loyal opposition in her meeting with Ms. Clinton last year.


Even a recent dust-up between Warren and Obama over the secretive, corporate-friendly TPP never moved the compass leftward. Warren timidly and opportunistically raised fears that “foreign” corporations might use the TPP enforcement function to influence US regulation of financial institutions (instead of exposing it as a license for any corporation to violate the sovereignty of all participating nations). Obama shot back artfully: “...The notion that I had this massive fight with Wall Street to make sure that we don't repeat what happened in 2007, 2008 [the recession], and then I sign a provision that would unravel it? ... I'd have to be pretty stupid." Readers may be unacquainted with events occurring exactly as Obama recalls them. They may search their memories in vain for a “massive fight” with Wall Street. Instead, they may remember the massive bailout of Wall Street on his watch, vivid memories that should make one suspicious of Obama's defense of TPP.


Missing from the spat is any effort to call out Hillary Clinton on the TPP. Presumably, her stand on this controversial subject is of great importance for those wishing to make an informed choice in the 2016 election. But the Clinton campaign does not want informed opinion. Her campaign chief reportedly said of the issue: “Can you make it go away?”


Another anti-Clinton “populist,” former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, has cast aside his hard-line image while serving as Baltimore's mayor. Then, he was a Giuliani clone; his administration terrorized marginalized people to ethnically and class-cleanse the new Baltimore, a Baltimore that has made the murderous rough ride in police custody globally infamous. Today, he has been reborn as an ardent enemy of Wall Street.


But Democratic Party leaders need not fear. Opportunism has become so deeply embedded in liberal politics that 87% of liberal poll respondents “could see themselves supporting Mrs. Clinton” (Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll).


To corral the rest, Democrats have Bernie Sanders. Writing in BlackAgenda Report, Bruce Dixon astutely labels Sanders the “shepherd” for the Democratic Party:
...we have seen the Bernie Sanders show before, and we know exactly how it ends. Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton. Bernie will lose, Hillary will win. When Bernie folds his tent in the summer of 2016, the money, the hopes and prayers, the year of activist zeal that folks put behind Bernie Sanders' either vanishes into thin air, or directly benefits the Hillary Clinton campaign.


As Dixon understands and history shows, Democratic Party insurgencies end by sapping the energy and zeal of its idealistic fighters while herding them back into the fold for the ensuing center-right campaign. Before Sanders, Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich were the standard bearers for the futile Children's Crusades against the Party's bosses. Sanders' motives are irrelevant here. Whether or not he sincerely believes he can change the trajectory of politics within the two-party system, the Democratic Party has morphed into an institution irredeemably in the clutches of the rich and powerful. Only forces outside of the Party are capable of directing matters leftward.


Voters seem resigned to mediocrity and the parties seem anxious to comply. In a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, respondents' net positive feelings (positive minus negative) were graphed. Five Republicans scored in negative territory. Only Hillary Clinton managed a net zero to lead the pack. Despite rating quite poor on honesty and straightforwardness, Ms. Clinton is polling ahead of the early Republican candidates.


The Republicans face added obstacles with conflict between their corporate-coddling economic royalists and their ideologically extremist wing, especially the Tea Party. Republican leaders embrace the ideologues as foot soldiers, but recognize that they are a liability with voters in the general election and shun them as candidates. While most Republicans currently prefer Jeb Bush over the rest of the pack, the ideologues-- especially the Tea Party-- question his bona fides (among Tea Party loyalists, he is only the first choice of about 6%). Republican leaders know they must keep the Tea Party in the game (would any Republican leader dare call the Tea Party a bunch of f**king retards?) At the same time, they desperately want to minimize the Tea Party agenda. In 2012, they succeeded by securing the nomination for a corporate shill, Mitt Romney.


Undoubtedly, many dollars will be spent, speeches made, and articles written to convince the electorate that there are real differences between the parties and their candidates. But the differences that surface will not be with goals: the two parties share a common goal of US dominance in foreign policy; the two parties share a common goal of protecting and promoting capitalism in domestic policy.


The differences will be in contrasting assessments on how to achieve these goals. Some politicians believe that the empire is crumbling because the country has turned away from traditional values; others believe the empire is crumbling because we have acted rashly and highhandedly; and still others believe that the empire is doing just fine! But all but a very few fully support the empire. If you don't believe it, ask yourself how many elected officials show up at your anti-drone demonstration, your protest of Israeli outrages, or your solidarity march with Venezuela.


And on the domestic front, our political options are determined by which policies best promote the smooth operation of capitalism; some politicians see unions and welfare as obstacles to the optimal operation of the market; others see inequality and poverty as obstacles to the optimal operation of the market; and still others think that the economy is going swimmingly. But all pay obeisance to capitalism. And do politicians show up at picket lines; have they joined the fight against police brutality; are they leading the fight for a new minimum wage?


Rarely.


The silly season conjures frustration and anger. But as I wrote elsewhere, “...it is vital that we...avoid the cynicism of leftist isolationism and the self-deception of hopeful idealism.” We must not drink the dubious lesser-of-two-evils kool-aid, nor should we leave the electoral field to the hypocrites and liars. Many former loyalists now speak of Obama as a traitor or back-stabber. He is neither. He never was on our side.


I learned (Labor Notes, May 2015) that Vermont Governor Shumlin has rejected the Vermont health care program and has set out with fellow Democratic legislators to go after other programs through steep budget cuts. Author, Traven Leyshon, notes that “The sense of betrayal runs as deep among state workers and teachers as it does among health care campaigners.” But Governor Shumlin did not betray the workers; he was never on their side. This is the important lesson that we must continue to share if we are to move beyond the two-party trap.


Happily, Leyshon reports that “Unions here are drawing the conclusion that we need to run our own candidates. The existing Vermont Progressive Party, which now has nine legislators, could become the vehicle.” This, too, is the lesson that we must spread. If we are to fight the hopelessness and impotency of two-party politics, we must tackle the difficult task of mounting independent and third-party campaigns. Can we afford to wait on another election cycle?


Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
=========================================================

There was this response from the Houston 'Communist' Party in my mail...




ZZ believes in his prophetic abilities
by worker

By A. Shaw
Zoltan Zigedy (ZZ), in his piece titled "History Lessons," exercises his prophetic abilities.
ZZ writes:
"But Democratic Party leaders need not fear. Opportunism has become so deeply embedded in liberal politics that 87% of liberal poll respondents “could see themselves supporting Mrs. Clinton” (Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll)."
"To corral the rest, Democrats have Bernie Sanders. Writing in BlackAgenda Report, Bruce Dixon astutely labels Sanders the “shepherd” for the Democratic Party:
…we have seen the Bernie Sanders show before, and we know exactly how it ends. Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton. Bernie will lose, Hillary will win. When Bernie folds his tent in the summer of 2016, the money, the hopes and prayers, the year of activist zeal that folks put behind Bernie Sanders’ either vanishes into thin air, or directly benefits the Hillary Clinton campaign. "
Apparently, ZZ has a lot of faith in a poll arranged and financed by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, two outlets of the bourgeois media that are most effective and most notorious for lying and duping workers and the middle class.
Completely separate from the lack of trustworthiness of bourgeois outlets like WSJ and NBC is the inherent unreliability of primary polls even as reported in elements of the bourgeois and proletarian media that strive to be more or less truthful.
Joseph Napolitan -- a political consultant, not just a history teacher who focuses on politics -- in the book Winning Elections writes :
"Be leery of primary polls. Great advances have been made in political polling in the past 20 years, but one area that remains difficult to predict is the party primary. This holds true on all levels, from presidential primaries to local elections. One reason for this is the usually low turnout in the primary." (Rule 24, page 32, Winning Elections, Ronald Faucheaux, ed.)"
Relying on an inherently questionable primary poll produced by confirmed liars, ZZ lays out his main thesis that Clinton corrals 87% of the liberals and Sanders corrals the remaining 13%.
Joseph Napolitan's and others' advice about being leery of primary polls is universally followed by political consultants, campaign managers, candidates, contributors, and incumbents on both political Right and Left.
But ZZ, the teacher of history lessons, ignores this advice and speaks with an air of certainty -- even necessity -- about the results and the effects of primary polling.
"Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton," ZZ declares.
Zero likelihood, that's absolute!
This absolute prophecy rests on a precarious and fragile thesis that ZZ derives from the results of primary polling distributed by two of the biggest liars in the world, the WSJ and NBC.

This pathetic sophistry is well on par with the Sander campaign, Philistine desperation thick in the air.

History Lessons
Remember in 2009, when the then White house chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, labeled the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party “f**king retards”? Without Emanuel's notoriously crude bluster, President Obama expressed a similar sentiment on April 23 in public remarks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement.


According to MSNBC, President Obama said: “Some of these folks [opponents of the TPP] are friends of mine. I love them to death. But in the same way that when I was arguing for health care reform I asked people to look at the facts – somebody comes up with a slogan like ‘death panel,’ doesn’t mean it’s true. Look at the facts. The same thing is true on this. Look at the facts. Don’t just throw a bunch of stuff out there and see if it sticks...”


Obama's comparison referencing the “death panels” concocted by the lunatic right did not go unnoticed by his critics from labor and the left. Most objected that comparing their opposition to TPP to the ravings of crazies hardly suggests the sentiments of a friend.


Of course this is an old story. Since the defeat of Walter Mondale in 1984, the founding of the Democratic Leadership Council and numerous associated think-tanks, the Democratic Party has moved smartly and steadily rightward, shedding any semblance of New Deal or Great Society progressivism. During the Obama years, the process has reached a point where the Democratic Party's meager left wing pretends to represent the Party's soul while the leadership pretends to welcome its views. On occasions like the TPP incident, the leadership fumbles the script and reveals its true feelings.


Sadly, few lessons are drawn from this experience or the pattern of contempt and derision demonstrated by the party's corporate coddling leadership.
Flashback


As we enter the Silly Season-- the 18 months of lies, bluster, and empty promises preceding the Presidential election-- I am reminded of the last great moment of self-induced, liberal/left self-deception. In the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, all but a few unrepentant Marxist-Leninists, Green Party hardliners, and assorted outliers joined hands in a mad orgy of Obama-mania. For those who need reminding, Obama was actually the corporate choice preferred by the ruling class to clean up the mess left by a failed, embarrassing Bush administration that destabilized the Middle East, antagonized allies, blemished the image of the US, and stood clueless before an economic crisis unprecedented since the Great Depression. A fresh face was needed, a politician unstained by the Bush era, untainted by the “insider” label.


Barack Obama fit the bill, just as Jimmy Carter, a Georgia peanut farmer and home-spun governor did nearly four decades earlier after the Nixon crimes and indignities. In both cases, an “outsider” promised to restore confidence in a tarnished office. I wrote in 2008:
There are some striking and illuminating parallels between this election season and the Presidential election campaign of 1976. Like the eight years of the Bush administration, the eight years of Nixon/Ford produced an unparalleled collapse of support for the Republican Party. The Watergate scandal coupled with the failure of the US military in Vietnam and an economic crisis left the Republican Party wounded and regrouping. The interim elections of 1974 produced gains for the Democrats, especially in former suburban Republican strongholds.
Most citizens looked to the then forthcoming elections with a profound desire for a new course. The Democrats chose a political outsider, Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia. Carter promised to make the government “as good as the people.” Pundits hailed Carter as a departure from the old politics and a fresh, honest voice for change (e.g. The Miracle of Jimmy Carter, Howard Norton and Bob Slosser, 1976).
Similar to 1976 and the Presidential candidate J. Carter, his presumptive 2008 counterpart, Barack Obama, is viewed as a Washington “outsider.” He has campaigned as a candidate of change. Pundits hail him as a fresh voice untainted by the vices of the establishment. (2008: a Reprise of 1976?)


Was Obama really the corporate choice? Or is this just baseless cynicism of a sectarian old leftist? I observed in 2008:
Wall Street has strongly supported the Democratic candidates over the Republicans. Through the end of 2007, seven of the big 8 financial firms (Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, UBS, and Credit Suisse) showed a decided preference towards the Democrats. Only Merrill Lynch gave more to Republicans, though they gave the single most to Clinton. The Wall Street Journal (2-3/4-08), while noting that Obama receives a notable number of contributions from small donors, pointed out that “…even for Sen. Obama, the finance industry was still the richest source of cash overall…”
Through February, Obama leads the other candidates in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry and was in a virtual dead heat with Clinton with respect to the energy sector.
These numbers strongly suggest that candidates, especially Democratic Party candidates, are unlikely to challenge their corporate sponsors in any meaningful way. (The Political Economy of the Elections)


To underscore the meaning of these campaign contributions, I ventured:
This election cycle has revealed something new: Democrats are raising more money from corporate interests for their campaigns than the traditionally dominant Republicans. This process began before the 2006 elections, accelerated sharply in the Presidential elections, strengthened in the early primaries and continued into 2008. In March, 2008, McCain gained somewhat on his Democratic rivals, but still fell well below the total raised by the two Democrats.
Within the Democratic camp, Clinton dominated most corporate contributions until 2008, when Obama enjoyed big gains, pushing ahead through March especially in the key industries of finance, lawyers/lobbyists, communications and health.


Would it be far-fetched to say that the corporate choice was there for all to see? Is it difficult to imagine from these facts that unlimited, unconditional bail-outs were ahead for the financial industry in 2009? Or health care “reform” structured around the wishes of insurance companies, the health care industry, and pharmaceuticals?


Yes, it was there for all to see.


Of course many were willfully blind to the facts, embracing self-delusion instead. I wrote of one left pundit so struck with Obama-mania that he reported the Obama victory with wild hyperbole and messianic verve:
"...hundreds of millions-Black, Latino, Asian, Native-American and white, men and women, young and old, literally danced in the streets and wept with joy, celebrating an achievement of a dramatic milestone in a 400-year struggle, and anticipating a new period of hope and possibility." (Quoted in Getting beyond Euphoria)


That pundit has today found a new messiah in Bernie Sanders.


Two days after the 2008 election, weighing the new administration's chief players, their backgrounds, and political records, along with stressing the limitations deeply embedded in the national political institutions, I cautioned that Obama would not and could not deliver the goods expected by the broad left. I summarized the election as follows:
The 2008 US Presidential election is behind us. A fair estimation of the results might be as follows: A clear, significant statement of the US electorate; a hollow, likely disappointing result for the people. After the euphoria of the Obama victory, it is vital that we separate these two assessments and avoid the cynicism of leftist isolationism and the self-deception of hopeful idealism. What the voters wanted was unquestionably significant change. What they were promised was change. Whether change will come from the Obama administration is - at best - questionable. (The Presidential Election: A Victory for the People?)


I concluded the essay with the following remarks:
It's time for the left to put aside the comforting illusions and rebuild an independent, oppositional front that is not dependent upon the good will of the corrupted Democratic Party. We desperately need that left to forge a true people-saving agenda from the destructive gorilla.


Unfortunately, we (the left) have yet to construct the independent, oppositional front needed. Nor has the opposition to the Democratic Party steamroller advanced much beyond the motley group of “a few unrepentant Marxist-Leninists, Green Party hardliners, and assorted outliers” present in 2008. Accordingly, the new political season very likely will reproduce many of the same inanities and fantasies inflicted seven years ago.
Hillary?
With the ability and expectations of raising well over a billion dollars for the forthcoming presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton will likely be the Democratic nominee and very probably the next President. Unlike the 2008 Obama-moment, the ruling class is opting for “insiders” in the period ahead. Even with polls showing a twenty-five year low in confidence that the country is going in the right direction, even with barely double-digit approval of congress, and even with decidedly negative images of both parties by poll respondents, the masters of our fate are favoring old dynastic names: Clinton and Bush.


Chastened by its encounter with “hopey-changey,” the electorate appears to be looking for “experience” as the most important attribute of a candidate this election cycle (Washington Post/ABC News poll). Of course this is precisely the image Clinton has been carefully cultivating since her Senate tenure. Like her husband, the former President, Ms. Clinton seems untouched by her publicized failings. Neither the abuse of her internal communications while in government service nor her slimy horse trading with foreign and domestic wealthy donors to her billion-dollar family foundation has shaken her campaign. The Clintons know no shame, the media show no indignation, and Democratic Party loyalists own no principles.


While there is much talk that the Democratic Party's liberals need some red meat to keep them in the game, there is little evidence that it is forthcoming or needed. Elizabeth Warren likely pledged loyal opposition in her meeting with Ms. Clinton last year.


Even a recent dust-up between Warren and Obama over the secretive, corporate-friendly TPP never moved the compass leftward. Warren timidly and opportunistically raised fears that “foreign” corporations might use the TPP enforcement function to influence US regulation of financial institutions (instead of exposing it as a license for any corporation to violate the sovereignty of all participating nations). Obama shot back artfully: “...The notion that I had this massive fight with Wall Street to make sure that we don't repeat what happened in 2007, 2008 [the recession], and then I sign a provision that would unravel it? ... I'd have to be pretty stupid." Readers may be unacquainted with events occurring exactly as Obama recalls them. They may search their memories in vain for a “massive fight” with Wall Street. Instead, they may remember the massive bailout of Wall Street on his watch, vivid memories that should make one suspicious of Obama's defense of TPP.


Missing from the spat is any effort to call out Hillary Clinton on the TPP. Presumably, her stand on this controversial subject is of great importance for those wishing to make an informed choice in the 2016 election. But the Clinton campaign does not want informed opinion. Her campaign chief reportedly said of the issue: “Can you make it go away?”


Another anti-Clinton “populist,” former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, has cast aside his hard-line image while serving as Baltimore's mayor. Then, he was a Giuliani clone; his administration terrorized marginalized people to ethnically and class-cleanse the new Baltimore, a Baltimore that has made the murderous rough ride in police custody globally infamous. Today, he has been reborn as an ardent enemy of Wall Street.


But Democratic Party leaders need not fear. Opportunism has become so deeply embedded in liberal politics that 87% of liberal poll respondents “could see themselves supporting Mrs. Clinton” (Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll).


To corral the rest, Democrats have Bernie Sanders. Writing in BlackAgenda Report, Bruce Dixon astutely labels Sanders the “shepherd” for the Democratic Party:
...we have seen the Bernie Sanders show before, and we know exactly how it ends. Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton. Bernie will lose, Hillary will win. When Bernie folds his tent in the summer of 2016, the money, the hopes and prayers, the year of activist zeal that folks put behind Bernie Sanders' either vanishes into thin air, or directly benefits the Hillary Clinton campaign.


As Dixon understands and history shows, Democratic Party insurgencies end by sapping the energy and zeal of its idealistic fighters while herding them back into the fold for the ensuing center-right campaign. Before Sanders, Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich were the standard bearers for the futile Children's Crusades against the Party's bosses. Sanders' motives are irrelevant here. Whether or not he sincerely believes he can change the trajectory of politics within the two-party system, the Democratic Party has morphed into an institution irredeemably in the clutches of the rich and powerful. Only forces outside of the Party are capable of directing matters leftward.


Voters seem resigned to mediocrity and the parties seem anxious to comply. In a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, respondents' net positive feelings (positive minus negative) were graphed. Five Republicans scored in negative territory. Only Hillary Clinton managed a net zero to lead the pack. Despite rating quite poor on honesty and straightforwardness, Ms. Clinton is polling ahead of the early Republican candidates.


The Republicans face added obstacles with conflict between their corporate-coddling economic royalists and their ideologically extremist wing, especially the Tea Party. Republican leaders embrace the ideologues as foot soldiers, but recognize that they are a liability with voters in the general election and shun them as candidates. While most Republicans currently prefer Jeb Bush over the rest of the pack, the ideologues-- especially the Tea Party-- question his bona fides (among Tea Party loyalists, he is only the first choice of about 6%). Republican leaders know they must keep the Tea Party in the game (would any Republican leader dare call the Tea Party a bunch of f**king retards?) At the same time, they desperately want to minimize the Tea Party agenda. In 2012, they succeeded by securing the nomination for a corporate shill, Mitt Romney.


Undoubtedly, many dollars will be spent, speeches made, and articles written to convince the electorate that there are real differences between the parties and their candidates. But the differences that surface will not be with goals: the two parties share a common goal of US dominance in foreign policy; the two parties share a common goal of protecting and promoting capitalism in domestic policy.


The differences will be in contrasting assessments on how to achieve these goals. Some politicians believe that the empire is crumbling because the country has turned away from traditional values; others believe the empire is crumbling because we have acted rashly and highhandedly; and still others believe that the empire is doing just fine! But all but a very few fully support the empire. If you don't believe it, ask yourself how many elected officials show up at your anti-drone demonstration, your protest of Israeli outrages, or your solidarity march with Venezuela.


And on the domestic front, our political options are determined by which policies best promote the smooth operation of capitalism; some politicians see unions and welfare as obstacles to the optimal operation of the market; others see inequality and poverty as obstacles to the optimal operation of the market; and still others think that the economy is going swimmingly. But all pay obeisance to capitalism. And do politicians show up at picket lines; have they joined the fight against police brutality; are they leading the fight for a new minimum wage?


Rarely.


The silly season conjures frustration and anger. But as I wrote elsewhere, “...it is vital that we...avoid the cynicism of leftist isolationism and the self-deception of hopeful idealism.” We must not drink the dubious lesser-of-two-evils kool-aid, nor should we leave the electoral field to the hypocrites and liars. Many former loyalists now speak of Obama as a traitor or back-stabber. He is neither. He never was on our side.


I learned (Labor Notes, May 2015) that Vermont Governor Shumlin has rejected the Vermont health care program and has set out with fellow Democratic legislators to go after other programs through steep budget cuts. Author, Traven Leyshon, notes that “The sense of betrayal runs as deep among state workers and teachers as it does among health care campaigners.” But Governor Shumlin did not betray the workers; he was never on their side. This is the important lesson that we must continue to share if we are to move beyond the two-party trap.


Happily, Leyshon reports that “Unions here are drawing the conclusion that we need to run our own candidates. The existing Vermont Progressive Party, which now has nine legislators, could become the vehicle.” This, too, is the lesson that we must spread. If we are to fight the hopelessness and impotency of two-party politics, we must tackle the difficult task of mounting independent and third-party campaigns. Can we afford to wait on another election cycle?


Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/
=========================================================

There was this response from the Houston 'Communist' Party in my mail...



This pathetic sophistry is well on par with the Sander campaign, Philistine desperation thick in the air.

Yes the respondent, "worker" (!), dismisses all ZZ's argument except the one small part that is the least important and was used only as an example of ZZ's premise. No one with even an infantile understanding of US politics would give Sanders better than "zero" chance of beating the Hill. That is ridiculous. But this idiocy coming from what is supposed to be a "communist" is sickening. With commies like this, who needs enemies...

As if the muddled (brained) class liberals were not idealistic/delusional enough


Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders keeps bending the rules of Senate service and presidential campaigning by offering up proposals that imagine America as the fair, functional and prosperous country it could be[/b[. Instead of playing politics within the narrow lines prescribed by the partisans and pundits who police the political process in America, the recently-announced contender for the Democratic presidential nomination is going big—this week with a plan to provide tuition-free higher education for students at four-year colleges and universities in the United States.

[b]“We live in a highly competitive global economy and, if our economy is to be strong, we need the best educated work force in the world,” says Sanders. “That will not happen if, every year, hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college, and if millions more leave school deeply in debt.”

http://www.thenation.com/blog/207593/bernie-sanders-has-plan-tax-wall-street-and-make-college-free#

Sanders and those who follow him are the definition of "Useful Idiots"...They can't run on "politics", so they run on "imagining America' as a "fair, functional, and prosperous country."

Capitalism - or America, for that matter - has never existed without the "sacrifice" and blood, sweat, and broken lives of countless workers-whether they be chattel-slaves or wage-slaves, employed or unemployed or "underemployed", whether their labor was "dignified" or not, whether their labor was recognized as being worthy of basic respect or not. But the liberals like Sanders and his merry band of mushy middle-class morons would have us believe that a "Party of the People" for radical politics is based on writing letters to those pricks in Congress, or signing online petitions, or worse, "imagining" the effects of capitalism to "go away" or be 'regulated" by the (bourgeois) State (because we know how THAT turned out so well!...).

They are opposed to some of the negative effects of capitalism because they feel a sense of guilt about their own class privilege, so they think voting for Bernie Sanders will help them sleep better at night. And these are the same people who criticize the working-class for "voting against their interests", or not voting, period (the horror!!!). Yet they honestly think that some liberal "Democratic socialist" (emphasis on the Democratic part...who has Bernie been voting with all this time? Hmm?) Senator from Vermont can "make a difference". Well, it's fitting... they've got not history, no ideology, other than petit-bourgeois longings for "the middle class" and "fairness" and horror at the prospect of "corporations taking over American democracy!" (It's almost as if they're JUST NOW finding out that American "democracy" belongs to the rich and powerful. To which Marxists and working-class people respond: "No shit, Sherlock." )

Bernie Sanders is a Thoroughbred
by worker

Posted on May 17, 2015 by dcampbell1
https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2015/05/17/bernie-sanders-is-a-thoroughbred/


Bernie Sanders is a thoroughbred—why call him a stalking horse?

by Michael Hirsch

Voltaire wrote that “the best is the enemy of the good,” but he cited it as a foible and not a redeeming practice. Within hours of Bernie Sanders announcing his candidacy for the Democratic Party presidential nod on April 30th, in some warrens of the radical left, the long corrective knives were already out for the only socialist in Congress. Why? Because Bernie is just not good enough, they said. Criticism ranged from his being a faux socialist, a stalking horse for Hillary Clinton whose backing by the left would be a practical waste of a year that could be better spent building a movement. Politicking for a candidate who can’t win the nomination and who would be destroyed by corporate America and an avalanche of corporate funding if somehow he did was seen as a mug’s game.

They would be wrong.

Take this example: in his incisive report on the recent Future of the
Left/Independent Politics Conference in Chicago, Dan La Botz cites remarks made by Bruce Dixon of the Georgia Green Party to the effect that “Sanders is a sheep dog whose job is like that of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Congressman Dennis Kucinich in earlier elections, to round up folks who had strayed to the left in response to the Democratic Party’s retrograde domestic and foreign policies and to bring them back to the Party.” At least Dixon didn’t say Judas goat, leading lambs to the slaughter, but it’s still early in the campaign, and the cat-scratch phase hasn’t kicked in yet.

Another group that would at first blush seem natural allies of the insurgent Sanders is organized labor. Despite favorable coverage of him in AFL-CIO Now , the website of the national labor federation, reporting on his role at a recent anti-TPP rally in Washington, D.C. and his remarks on the U.S. Senate floor against the job-swallowing trade bill and the slight-of-hand that would fast-track a vote on legislation no one has even seen, neither the national federation nor its 56 constituent unions are even hinting that Sanders could be their man. While there is considerable support for Sanders among middle-level union staff, that won’t be–and never is–enough to cinch an endorsement. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has said that the beating Democrats took last fall during the midterm elections was due to the fact that labor issues–specifically economic issues close to workers’ hearts–were not foremost in almost any campaign. Now Trumka and the others have a chance to correct that blunder by backing a presidential candidate who reflects and expands on their economic views. Will they do it? Or will they make a Christmas peace with their class enemy again. We’ll know by December.

Labor itself certainly has to stop talking about “jobs” in the abstract. It needs to develop a narrative about why jobs are becoming precarious and a political program that both reverses the trend and re-creates a stable, better paid and thoroughly desegregated workforce. . It’s not just that U.S. workers are losing jobs because of a free-trade mania inherent in neoliberalism and actively promoted by the last five White House occupants. Worldwide the sociology of work is changing for the worse, with full-time, permanent work, benefits and even a common workplace fading. This isn’t the development of a “new class” so much as the of the chronic problem of a secondary work force whose job life is in sociologist Arne Kallberg’s words, “uncertain, unpredictable, and risky from the point of view of the worker.” Once the exception, this degraded work life is now poised to became the rule. From the standpoint of a Sanders socialist campaign and/or a labor challenge to capital, this shift in the nature of work not only domestically but internationally collides with a basic radical tenet: that the increased socialization of modern day work creates a class not only in itself but one recognizably for itself in that it visibly shares problems and possibilities with others whose cultures and languages may be disparate but whose working conditions and common enemy are readily apparent. It’s less apparent today, when a spatially divided workforce is harder to self-organize and easier for employers to control. Bernie can address this, but he can’t do it alone.

Others, including those who think a socialist run is worth it for educational and propagandistic reasons alone, fault him for not rigorously attacking U.S. imperial interests and the glut of military spending, for sitting shtum on the spate of police massacres of people of color in Missouri, New York, Baltimore and elsewhere, or his refusal to support the highly justified boycott, divest and sanction campaign of Israel, let alone embrace the Palestinian national liberation fight. He might not even attack Hillary—he’s said he won’t run a negative campaign—so much as run a parallel, issues-based campaign.

All true. All regrettable. All beside the point. Because this is the moment socialism unadulterated can get a broad public hearing. Sanders has argued that the country deserves a real debate about policy issues, suggesting that such a conversation won’t happen without a contested nomination process. It might not happen with a contested process, either, but it’s worth the time and effort.

Writing in Jacobin, Ashley Smith thinks it’s not. He ends his laundry-list of Bernie Sanders’ sins where the piece should elaborate. He writes, “We need to win the new left born out of Occupy, public-sector union struggles, and the Black Lives Matter movement to break with the Democratic Party and build an electoral alternative as a complement to struggle from below. Sanders’s campaign inside the Democratic Party is an obstacle to that project.” It’s that last sentence, with its one-dimensional bravura and disconnect from the actual Sanders effort that makes we wonder if Smith is any more grounded in politics than the type of uncritical and star-struck Sanders supporters I’ve encountered at meet-ups and on-line. They’re Bernie’s Amen Corner. Their strengths stop at well-meaning.

Writing in countercurrents.org, David Swanson agrees that Sanders and movement-making are at loggerheads; one cancels the other. Instead of working for Bernie, Swanson counsels, why not

“join the movement that’s in the streets of Baltimore opposing police murder, that’s in the halls of the United Nations pushing to abolish nukes, that’s blocking mountaintop removal, divesting from Israel, advancing renewable energy, and struggling to create fair elections through steps like automatic registration in Oregon, and pushing legislation to provide free media, match small donors, give each voter a tax credit to contribute, or take the power to establish plutocracy away from the Supreme Court.”

A good agenda as far as it goes. Is there nothing in labor-law reform, in ending voter suppression—itself a fraud—in upending election laws that privilege the main parties, in anything (beyond his tax credit initiative) that would actually take political action to achieve? That a Sanders race could help catalyze. And even if Swanson eschews political action, how would the Bernie campaign detract from movements such as Black Lives Matter or the Fight for $15? How would these fights do anything but benefit from an articulate national figure banging away on racism, a militarized state and rampant inequality, adding his strident voice to help build those movements?

Swanson also thinks the money it would take to make the Sanders effort threaten the coronation of Hillary and the GOP juggernaut in the general election—he estimates hundreds of millions of dollars—would be better spent in

“creat(ing) a television network dedicated to peace and justice and democracy from here on out. Or we could open a counter-recruiting office next-door to every military recruitment office in the United States. Or we could organize and bus people in for the largest and longest march on Washington against racism, militarism, extreme materialism, and the corruption of our elections ever seen, complete with food supplies and bail funds for as long as it takes. Instead of a march for nothing, how about an occupation for no more Bushes or Clintons or anyone like them?”

More good things from Swanson to do. But his misses the point. With money like that, the left would also have the corresponding number of bodies to do that work. We don’t have it now. The advantage of a Bernie campaign is to radically alter the political discourse, just as Occupy did, but without Occupy’s reluctance to name names or advocate the overhauls Swanson would want to see.

Swanson also thinks that the Bernie effort would “take a year away from policy-based principled activism” to wage a doomed campaign in which “the media monopolies that Clinton’s husband facilitated have demonstrably grown more powerful than ever, and elections have grown more corrupted by money—just ask Hillary who pretends to oppose it.” He closes with “The real question is not whether the next President will be a walking disaster [he’s generously not talking about Bernie here for once], but what sort of popular movement will have been developed to resist it.”

Whatever we think of Bernie’s pedigree as a socialist or deftness as a political leader, nothing of his use in making “socialism” a viable watchword for the growing disenchantment with capital justifies saying his campaign is an obstacle or counterposed to movement building.

When Bernie says “I believe we should break up the big Wall Street banks. If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big to exist,” that’s something Hillary won’t or can’t say. Bernie does in every whistle-stop. It’s not co-optable. Nor can she match his staunch opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and fast-track authority.And if the trio of themes he says he’ll pursue—campaign finance reform, climate change and income inequality—are done with the vigor and intelligence he brings to most issues, well, to me, it’s win-win.

The Huffington Post sums him up this way: “In the Senate, Sanders has focused on a range of issues, from reforming health care for veterans to addressing the threat posed by climate change. He has also been a strong advocate for a universal, single-payer health care plan nationwide…” though to be fair he missed the boat on advocating Medicare for all, the genuinely socialist alternative. Today, when Bernie speaks on socialism, he speaks for millions, And if he sticks to that script, it will be worth the effort. But when he speaks about supporting the eventual primary winner, he speaks for himself. He may not be Eugene Debs, but neither is he the Pied Piper of Hamlin. Or a stooge for the corporate-funded Democrats.

It may very well be that Hillary Clinton needs a goad from the left to appeal to the Democratic base, but is there any evidence that Bernie is playing her useful idiot let alone part of a conscious effort to fool the public, as Smith implies without quite using the word “pawn”?

Does the Sanders campaign by nature compromise the ages-old radical dream of a militant, rank and file movement creating durable counter-institutions of dual power? Is principle throttled in pursuit of publicity? Nothing so dire, or romantic. People compromise on tactics, as Smith should have learned from his own comrades who wisely didn’t break with the Chicago Teachers Union’s Karen Lewis after she announced what for health reasons soon became aborted plans to challenge the incumbent Clintonista leg-breaker mayor as a Democrat.

Even the exemplary Welsh class warrior Nye Bevan broke with his own left parliamentary caucus in 1957 by stepping away from endorsing the growing disarmament movement. As Owen Heatherly writes in The London Review of Books, he opposed disarmament “in what is usually put down to a compromise incumbent on him as shadow foreign secretary.”

Sounds shabby at first reading, but this is the same militant miners’ leader and founder of Britain’s National Health Service who could say “It is an axiom, enforced by all the experience of the ages, that they who rule industrially will rule politically.” Even Bevan wasn’t above trimming his sails, though on this one I’ll go with the all-sails-unfurled Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s Bertrand Russell.

My point: the principle of democratic socialism from below can’t be an absolute prohibition on an anti-corporate election campaign that could reach tens of millions and attract them to a radical movement, even if it’s in the ostensibly wrong party.

Yes, even tactically it’s not all brainpower perfectly attuned to willpower in the Sanders initiative. Before even announcing, Sanders was quoted as saying “I’m not running to attack Hillary Clinton. I’m running to talk about the issues that impact the working class of this country and the middle class.” Decrying “vicious personal attacks on candidates” that “the American people are sick and tired of,” Sanders boasted “I’ve never run a negative ad in my life. I’ve been in many campaigns, and if you ask the people of Vermont, they would tell you Bernie Sanders has never run a negative ad.”

He added, “I believe that, in a democracy, what elections are about are serious debates on serious issues.”

But no attacks on Hillary is problematic, bordering on the daft. Giving Hillary a free pass is a peculiar thing for a veteran politician to do and bizarre in extremis. Hillary is his likely opponent; his traction lies not just in raising class issues but in faulting her for representing the wrong class. And given that she will drop any pledge she makes in the primary to hug the middle ground in the general election, what does Bernie lose by daring her to radically push the envelope? He said as much on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, that “There’s so much to be discussed, Ed, and we’re not in this country about anointing anybody for a nomination.” That’s a point that could be made by radicals inside the campaign where it has salience and where his liberal supporters would never raise.

Arun Gupta, yet another critic, has it exactly backwards when he writes “When a Democrat is president, it spurs left opposition to the whole system. When a Republican sits in the Oval Office, it results in a partisan movement that splits the left and liberals.” In fact, when a Democrat is in the White House or campaigning to be, the movements—Occupy being the exception in more ways than one and United for Peace and Justice the saddest example

—historically and needlessly avoid confrontations with the state. Compare the timid response of the broad peace movement to every Clinton administration adventure with its strident reactions to Bush 1 and Bush 2’s homicidal assaults on Iraq or UFPJ’s tent folding during the Kerry campaign.

What Gupta could have said is that a failed Democrat in the White House has the potential to expose the contradictions in the system better that a GOP sabre rattler who evokes criticisms of policy. But which one offers better opportunities for a fight-back is a wash, unless class-conscious radicals are committed socialists and already leaders of that movement.

Even here, a democratic socialist like Sanders running for office as a Democrat has the potential to expose the corporate links that make the two parties bipartisan on class issues, so why not encourage Sanders to, as veteran Third Party campaigner Ted Glick writes, “Run Bernie, Run.”

But when Gupta writes that “In the general election, the Democrats need the left to be silent about how bankrupt and corrupt the party is so it can gloss its rush to the right in a veneer of progressive rhetoric,” he’s of course right. That’s why the test for me will be getting Sanders post-primary or post-convention not to shake hands with the “liberal” nominee but shake fists at her and her corporate backers. Again, you gain that influence on Sanders by being visible in his primary race, not by acting Hamlet or Mencken or the sideline spit-ball king.

To restate: what’s common to Bernie’s radical critics is the assumption that Hillary’s feints left in response to Sanders is a shadow play that won’t survive past the August 2016 coronation, all the while that the Bernie effort hoovers up support that would be better used elsewhere. Well, it is a short-lived shadow play. While it makes sense for him to attack the Democratic frontrunner, it makes little sense for her (or him) to attack Bernie as it did for Michael Dukakis in 1988, when his campaign team allowed Jesse Jackson his say, featuring him on prime-time at the Democratic national convention, then let him fade away. But is it likely that the sheer numbers of Sanders volunteers would be used elsewhere, as in movement building? Those backing Bernie would not in the main be doing something else except working in local campaigns. I’d like them to be year-round ubiquitous activists, too. It won’t happen by blasting Sanders or analogizing him to a sheepdog. Why? Because he has no radical sheep to shepherd. As Jason Schulman observed in a letter to me and similarly on line responding to Dixon, “If there was already a quasi-mass movement for a left third party then, yes, Sanders’ campaign in the Democratic primary would be wrong. But there isn’t, so he isn’t.”

It is also troubling how anyone would ipso facto assume that founding a new class-conscious party and orchestrating a socialist push in the Democratic presidential primary are zero sum gains. La Botz notes how Sanders sent a congratulatory note to the conference, but that

“even those who opposed endorsing Sanders suggested that advocates of independent political action should maintain a friendly attitude to Sanders supporters. When the seemingly inevitable nomination of Hillary Clinton occurs, it may be possible to win over many of these people to an independent, left, third party perspective.”

Good trick! How will they do that by alleging that Sanders is a stalking horse for Hillary and the Democratic Party elite?

It’s one thing to say, as did Salon commentator Bill Curry, a former Bill Clinton White House counselor, that “Clinton loyalists welcome Sanders’ entry because they know she needs a contest, or at least a tune-up” and that “Some call him a perfect foil; a lesser threat than Warren, yet enough of one to provide progressives with some catharsis while bestowing Clinton with the legitimacy that comes only from competition. “

I’m sure that is Hillary war-room thinking. It doesn’t merit labeling it a conspiracy and justify we lefties positing Bernie as either a naïf or a witting tool of neoliberalism’s primo candidate.

Bernie may indeed be playing the monkey to Hillary’s organ grinding, but the act is something we Reds benefit from. The social movements need representation in elected office and officials need a movement not only to keep them honest, but to see that demands in the base are reflected in policy. Sure, a huge extra-parliamentary opposition would in itself put pressure on governments to act, or at least to freeze governments from doing harm. It also appeals to my syndicalist DNA—a movement in the streets can’t help but batter the two-party neoliberal consensus—but if that movement isn’t reflected in a party or a coalition of parties in an electoral front, it won’t have the tactical flexibility to deal with changing circumstances. Simply put, ruling out any electoral opposition leaves the ruling class as the sole players in a critical political field.

In the meantime, our clever thinkers cum Bernie critics will have alienated the left from doing what little it can do—propagandize for socialism at the point when the base of Democratic voters is paying attention. These voters are in fact to the left of mainstream politicos—the low-turnout of Democrats in 2012 on its own attests to that—but Sanders at least has the capacity to move discourse and energize voters who won’t abandon the only choice they have on 2016, but gin up support for local electoral insurgencies. We don’t have the luxury to reject the good and insist on the better—and so far criticisms of Bernie strike me as fastidious and bookish if not faith-based to a fault.

#

Michael Hirsch is a New York-based writer covering politics and labor. A member of New York City DSA, he is on the editorial boards of Democratic Left and New Politics. An earlier draft of this article appeared on the New Politics website.

Sorry Mike, Sanders is a stooge, follow the votes, after stamping his little foot in a display for those with short attention span he capitulates again and again.

Response to: “Are anarchism and sectarianism compatible?” and “Response to: ‘History Lessons'”, etc.
by worker

Greetings to the Houston Communist Party! Your struggle against CPUSA opportunism and bullying has been an inspiration to all of us on the Marxist-Leninist left. But a large element of CPUSA opportunism has been a slavish dependency on the Democratic Party in the electoral arena. To my mind, that is a colossal mistake and a betrayal of both the theory and practice of Marxism-Leninism.

Regarding recent comments critical of my History Lessons on the Houston CP website, I believe I was mistaken to write of “unrepentant Marxist-Leninists, Green Party hardliners, and assorted outliers”. That expression was a poor attempt at humor, a facetious comment that clearly failed in its intent. In fact, the opposition to the two-party program is much more substantial. Of course we all know of the depleted ranks of the Communist movement, a frustrating fact that Joseph Hancock and “worker” correctly remind us in their comments and a failing that we must assiduously work to correct. But the Green Party is a party of some weight. In my county alone, there are 1,700 voters registered Green, a politically-conscious decision on the part of voters who likely will enjoy few candidates to vote for in the November election thanks to anti-democratic election laws. Nevertheless, they refuse to take part in the two-party charade. As for “outliers”, less than 20% of registered Democrats in my county voted in the 2012 election. Surely that reflects a disaffection with the Democrats. How often have we heard on the street that voting is pointless? That's not a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, but an experience that all of have of had, and had often. Both the growing Green Party strength (claiming a quarter of a million members and 151 elected officials) and the growing dissatisfaction of Democrats would seem to be an encouraging basis for joining hands in third-party and independent efforts.

It has been said before and it is repeated here that “Lenin argued against sectarianism and advocated that in order to bring about revolutionary change, revolutionaries must use all means of struggle available to us”. Of course Lenin would endorse this point, but how does the reference help us understand the 2016 election dialectically “in its concrete setting and development” (Lenin, The Junius Pamphlet)? Concretely, the decisive material conditions determining the election at this moment are campaign contributions. They are decidedly skewed against progressive gains. And there is NOT a remote chance that they will be trumped by anything short of a massive grass roots rebellion or insurgency against the Democratic leadership. How likely is that after six years of fealty to corporate Democrats? The development of the Democratic Party has been steadily, inexorably rightward for many decades. Since the Jesse Jackson insurgency (I differ with Black Agenda Reports's Bruce Dixon here), every hint of rebellion in the Democratic Party has been snuffed out.

These are harsh, but objective truths. And Lenin insisted on facing harsh, but objective truths as a basis for moving forward.

What would Lenin say about the 2016 elections? Perhaps we can gain an insight from reflecting on his advice to Austrian Communists written in 1920. Letter to the Austrian Communists is often mistakenly taken to be a universal call for participation in bourgeois-democratic parliaments. It is no such a thing. The Austrian Communists had delegates elected, but proposed to oppose their participation in favor of agitation in the Council of Workers' Deputies. Lenin correctly challenged this as sectarian, but he urged the Austrians to participate only to agitate, educate, and disrupt. It's a long quote, but one that deserves careful reading:

As long as we Communists are unable to take over state power and hold elections, with working people alone voting for their Soviets against the bourgeoisie; as long as the bourgeoisie exercise state power and call upon the different classes of the population to take part in the elections, we are in duty bound to take part in the elections with the purpose of conducting agitation among all working people, not only among proletarians. As long as the bourgeois parliament remains a means of duping the workers, and phrases about “democracy” are used to cover up financial swindling and every kind of bribery (the particularly “subtle” brand of bribery the bourgeoisie practise with regard to writers, N. P.s, lawyers, and others is nowhere to be seen on so wide a scale as in the bourgeois parliament), we Communists are in duty bound to be in this very institution (which is supposed to express the people’s will but actually covers up the deception of the people by the wealthy) to untiringly expose this deception, and expose each and every case of the Renners and Co.’s desertion to the capitalists, against the workers. It is in parliament that the relations between bourgeois parties and groups manifest themselves most frequently and reflect the relations between all the classes of bourgeois society. That is why it is in the bourgeois parliament, from within it, that we Communists must tell the people the truth about the relation between classes and parties, and the attitude of the landowners to the farm labourers, of the rich peasants to the poor peasants, of big capital to employees and petty proprietors, etc.

Agitation and exposure are distant from working intently for bourgeois candidates. This is not a formula for aloofness or detachment, but for attacking dysfunctional and anti-working class institutions. This doesn't mean that we should never engage bourgeois politics or bourgeois politicians, only that we should monitor them, analyze them, and lend support when they promise to mark a qualitative change in the electoral struggle. I don't see that in today's Democratic Party. Arguably, we might see that in an independent run in the 2016 general election by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, or Jill Stein.

It is clear from the Houston CP website, that the Party is intent upon supporting Bernie Sanders. I cannot help but ask, if Sanders were serious, why he didn't decide to run independently in the general election, a campaign that much of the left could embrace, especially if Hillary wins the Democratic primary? What is gained by running in the primary? If he's not a stalking horse to keep progressives in line, why doesn't he marshal his limited resources for a summer/fall campaign going into the general election where his views will stand in stark relief to the major party candidates?

Suppose, against all odds, Sanders wins the primary. Does anyone believe that the Democratic Party establishment would not subvert his campaign as they did with McGovern in 1972 when political opposition was far stronger?

We cannot build movements on false hope. It didn't work in 2008. It won't work in 2016.

I hope that if Sanders fails to win the Democratic Party primary, the Houston comrades will give some thought to third party candidates (like Jill Stein) in the 2016 general election and further heed Lenin's admonitions on finding our own candidates willing to expose the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy.

(This also in my mail from the Houston club. bp)

6 awesome things about Bernie dontcha' know:

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/6-awesome-things-about-bernie-sanders-you-might-not-know

More from the Houston party, the mind reels....


Response to ZZ’s response
by worker





Response to: “Response to: ‘Are anarchism and sectarianism compatible?’”, “ZZ believes in his prophetic abilities”, and “Response to: ‘History Lessons’”, etc.



By James Thompson



ZZ’s thoughtful response to several responses to his instructive article “History Lessons” was very much appreciated by the Houston Communist Party website. Discussion and dialogue as well as constructive criticism are generally productive and lead to clarification.



ZZ makes an excellent point when he maintains that the Democratic Party typically subverts progressive Democratic party candidates. An example of this in recent times would be the defeat of Dennis Kucinich.



ZZ chooses a very relevant quote from Lenin about elections in the early 20th century. The last sentence is very instructive “That is why it is in the bourgeois Parliament, from within it, that we communists must tell the people the truth about the relation between classes and parties, and the attitude of the landowners to the farm laborers, of the rich peasants to the poor peasants, of big capital to employees and petty proprietors, etc.” Please note that Lenin explicitly states that the agitation should take place “within the parliament.”



In order for any agitation to occur within a legislative body, there must be elected representatives willing to agitate within that body. This means that the legislators must be elected, i.e. they must run for public office and win. If a potential legislator runs for office and loses, they cannot agitate within the legislative body.



It is agreed that the party platform of the Green party is much more palatable than the Democratic or Republican parties. However, to my knowledge, the Green party has never represented itself as a proletarian, non-bourgeois party. It is primarily a petty bourgeois and/or bourgeois party with a progressive bent. It is a given that the GPUSA is far stronger than the CPUSA which is continuing to split splits in its quest to become a party of two. My previous article was incorrect when I wrote that the Greens and other independent parties had not won a single public office in the United States. According to Wikipedia, the Greens won 131 public offices in the United States recently. However, these were all local races. This, of course, is far superior to the CPUSA.



We must keep in mind that the anti-democratic electoral laws in the United States today make it impossible for third parties to win national elections. Although the Green party has a quarter of a million members, which is great compared to the CPUSA, this represents 0.062% of the US population according to rough calculations. The Green party (or any other third or independent party) is only on the ballot in less than 50% of the states. In Texas, for example, the Green party is on the ballot due to the efforts of the Texas Republican Party who paid about $500,000 for a company to gather sufficient signatures to get the Green party on the ballot.



Since no third-party has ballot status in all 50 states, only Democrats or Republicans can win a national election. The Green party has never elected a single US senator or member of the US House of Representatives.



So, in order to elect legislators who can agitate within the U.S. Congress, we must first elect progressive Democrats or Republicans. The first agenda would be to reform US election campaign laws so that progressive, workers parties are not automatically excluded from ballot status. One important reform that is necessary for progress would be to reverse all the anti-Communist laws nationwide. The Houston Communist Party has fought for this reform with very little support from other communist organizations around the country. http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/repeal-the-anti-communist



We see the mission of the Houston Communist Party website to be a venue for open discussion on the left. Our focus is on the political struggle. We do not see ourselves as Democrats, Republicans, Greens or any other political party. We have posted articles in an effort to educate potential voters about various candidates, to include Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott and others.



The website is not opposed to the GPUSA. In fact, the Houston Communist Party website endorsed Green party candidates in local elections. http://houstoncommunistparty.com/houston-communist-party-endorsement-of-green-party-candidates-a-first/ That may be a first for communist formations in the United States.



The Houston Communist Party website continues to support the excellent websites, “Marxism Leninism today” and “ZZ’s blog”. We find the deterioration of the CPUSA repulsive and disgusting. Their activities are a shining example of what a Communist Party should not do.



We would like to support the development of a Workers Party, but a Workers Party that can win elections. In our view, this will be an important part of the struggle to elevate the working class to the ruling class in the United States.



Although we may support local Green party candidates from time to time, it is unlikely that the Houston Communist Party will support any candidates of any party who have 0% chance of winning a particular election.



Again, we express our sincere gratitude to ZZ for his willingness to engage in constructive dialogue. We welcome constructive dialogue from other people as well.


So, the Houston party is not like the horrible CPUSA but follows the same opportunist path, with maybe a caevat. In achieving ours goals there is a time and place for everything, except opportunism.

Gotta go back and see what the context of that Lenin statement was. Doubt it was applicable to the current situation.

Gotta go back and see what the context of that Lenin statement was. Doubt it was applicable to the current situation.

If I remember correctly, Lenin was speaking in terms of a parliament and was speaking directly about Communist Party participation - not fraudulently having a communist run as representative of some other party. Also, if another party could effective agitate for workers' power, why would you need a communist party, just join that party.

There are several problems with relating, directly, Lenin's quotation to our current situation. It is relative, but with the appropriate application. An honest, above board, workers' party is needed, win or lose elections, as may be. It is like a real labor union: you don't win every battle, but every battle, itself, is a victory. Union members who can't understand what the existence of the union means need better and more education, that's all. The same is true of the US working class - more and better education; and a real Communist Party is where that starts.

6 awesome things about Bernie dontcha' know:

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/6-awesome-things-about-bernie-sanders-you-might-not-know

Sanders is a liar and a joke. He isn't a "socialist", he is a pretend socialist. Why does he have an (I) after his name and not an (S)? Oh he isn't a member of any socialist party? Then he is just a liberal windbag with nothing to sell but out.

As long as we Communists are unable to take over state power and hold elections, with working people alone voting for their Soviets against the bourgeoisie; as long as the bourgeoisie exercise state power and call upon the different classes of the population to take part in the elections, we are in duty bound to take part in the elections with the purpose of conducting agitation among all working people, not only among proletarians. As long as the bourgeois parliament remains a means of duping the workers, and phrases about “democracy” are used to cover up financial swindling and every kind of bribery (the particularly “subtle” brand of bribery the bourgeoisie practise with regard to writers, N. P.s, lawyers, and others is nowhere to be seen on so wide a scale as in the bourgeois parliament), we Communists are in duty bound to be in this very institution (which is supposed to express the people’s will but actually covers up the deception of the people by the wealthy) to untiringly expose this deception, and expose each and every case of the Renners and Co.’s desertion to the capitalists, against the workers. It is in parliament that the relations between bourgeois parties and groups manifest themselves most frequently and reflect the relations between all the classes of bourgeois society. That is why it is in the bourgeois parliament, from within it, that we Communists must tell the people the truth about the relation between classes and parties, and the attitude of the landowners to the farm labourers, of the rich peasants to the poor peasants, of big capital to employees and petty proprietors, etc.

"Advocate, educate, disrupt", yes, I can envision Green Party doing all of that, ho ho. And we have the shining example of Kucinich, whose only accomplishment in DC was corraling the deluded left of the party(sound famaliar?). Operating within the major party structures they will be utterly marginalized if they don't play ball and will be opposed vigorously in the next primary. Now communists can certainly fulfill those functions in the booj parliment, as does KKE in Greece. But they do this with the understanding that elections are a gauge of support not a means to power, which they will not be allowed. And having no dog in the fight means that they cannot be controlled the usual machinations. Knowing all of this they advocate for Bernie, another useless witness of truth to power, who has signed on to a boatload of anti-human legislation and whose 'principled stands' are celebrated in obscure philistine parlors while the Dems laugh up their sleeves.

"Advocate, educate, disrupt", yes, I can envision Green Party doing all of that, ho ho. And we have the shining example of Kucinich, whose only accomplishment in DC was corraling the deluded left of the party(sound famaliar?). Operating within the major party structures they will be utterly marginalized if they don't play ball and will be opposed vigorously in the next primary. Now communists can certainly fulfill those functions in the booj parliment, as does KKE in Greece. But they do this with the understanding that elections are a gauge of support not a means to power, which they will not be allowed. And having no dog in the fight means that they cannot be controlled the usual machinations. Knowing all of this they advocate for Bernie, another useless witness of truth to power, who has signed on to a boatload of anti-human legislation and whose 'principled stands' are celebrated in obscure philistine parlors while the Dems laugh up their sleeves.

Right, on all counts. It is astounding that these "progressive" are so deaf to the condescension and snarky bluff of the "liberal" media punditry and Democrat hacks. They have become totally contemptible, and this includes the CPUSA branch of liberal progressives (evidently the Houston Club, too. A shame.) One thing that struck me later, while working, was the over-emphasis on how small the CPUSA is and how much bigger the Greens were, yet still small, as well. The idea of becoming pertinent again, of building a representative standing in the class has completely escaped their minds. Building back power from the shop floor up and from the fields up is hard, long dangerous work, but it sure beats hell out of kissing Democrat and Green ass.

Bernie Sanders Takes It to Wall Street With Financial Transactions Tax
Monday, 25 May 2015 00:00
By Dean Baker, Truthout

The support of readers like you got this story published - and helps Truthout stay free from corporate advertising. Can you sustain our work with a tax-deductible donation today?

Last week Bernie Sanders, the Senator from Vermont and only announced challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, took a strong stand for everyday people. He proposed a financial transactions tax (FTT), effectively a Wall Street sales tax, and to use the revenue to make public colleges tuition free.

While making college affordable to low and middle income families is important, the proposal for an FTT is a real game changer. There is no single policy that would have anywhere near as much impact in reforming the financial sector. A FTT would effectively impose a sales tax on stocks and other financial assets, so that speculators have to pay a tax on their trades, just like people who buy shoes or clothes.

There are three points people should understand about a FTT. The first is that it can raise an enormous amount of money. A FTT could be imposed at different rates. Sanders proposed following the rate structure in a bill put forward by Minneapolis Congressman Keith Ellison. Eleven countries in the European Union are working to implement a set of FTTs that would tax stock trades at a rate of 0.1 percent and trades of most derivative instruments at the rate of 0.01 percent.

Extrapolating from a recent analysis of the European proposal, a comparable tax in the United States would raise more than $130 billion a year or more than $1.5 trillion over the next decade. This is real money; it dwarfs the sums that have dominated most budget debates in recent years. For example, the Republicans had been trying to push through cuts to the food stamp program of $40 billion over the course of a decade. The sum that can be raised by this FTT proposal is more than thirty times as large. The revenue from a FTT could go far toward rebuilding the infrastructure, improving the health care system, or paying for college tuition, as suggested by Senator Sanders.

The second point is that Wall Street will bear almost the entire cost of the tax. The financial industry is surely already paying for studies showing the tax will wipe out the 401(k)s held by middle income families. This is nonsense. Not only is the size of the tax small for anyone not flipping stock on a daily basis, research indicates that most investors will largely offset the cost of the tax by trading less.

Most research shows that trading volume falls roughly in proportion to the increase in transaction costs. This means that if a FTT doubles the cost of trading then the volume of trading will fall by roughly 50 percent, leaving total trading costs unchanged. Investors will pay twice as much on each trade, but have half as many trades. Since investors don’t on average make money on trades (one side might win, but the other loses), this is a wash for the investor.

While most middle income people don’t directly trade the money in their retirement accounts, they do have people who manage these funds. The research means that the fund managers will reduce their trading, so that the total costs of transactions that are passed on to the investor remain roughly constant. This means that the financial industry will bear almost the entire cost of the tax in the form of reduced trading volume.

This gets to the last point: a smaller financial industry is a more efficient financial industry. The purpose of the financial industry is to allocate money from savers to companies that want to finance new investment. As the industry has exploded in size over the last four decades there is no reason to believe that it has gotten better in serving this basic function. In fact, the stock bubble at the end of the 1990s and the housing bubble in the last decade might suggest that it has gotten worse.

A study from the Bank of International Settlements and more recent research from the International Monetary Fund find that a bloated financial sector slows growth. An oversized financial sector pulls resources away from more productive sectors of the economy. People who could be engaged in biological research or developing clean technologies are instead employed on Wall Street designing computer programs to beat other traders by a microsecond to garner profits at their expense. A FTT will make much of this activity unprofitable, encouraging people to turn to more productive work.

In short, a FTT is a great way to raise large amounts of money to meet important public needs. It will come almost entirely at the expense of the financial industry and should strengthen the economy. We now have one presidential candidate who is prepared to support a strong FTT. Are there others?

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30964-bernie-sanders-takes-it-to-wall-street-with-financial-transactions-tax

We now have one presidential candidate who is prepared to support a strong FTT.

The delusion is so thick and heavy - whether this simp actually believes all this crap or is just pushing it at the simps who read him is, perhaps, an open question. One, Berno the Clown is hardly a "Presidential candidate"; we know what he is. Two, Berno himself cannot be stupid enough to think that the US congress would pass, and any President sign, a bill that taxes such a fundamental capitalist function - why would all the bosses pay so much to buy congress if they would allow this? And this is the bottom-line question for all these liberals and progressives who become breathless over these various, ridiculous proposals: If the idea that the wealthy have bought and control practically all of the US government is true, how could any legislation, policy, or edict ever be instituted that would in any way deter or diminish the power and wealth of theses owners? Either the wealthy really do not control the government or liberal/progressives are stupid, culpable or both.
After reading this piece, I get the distinct impression that somebody is flat-out lying to somebody. He might just as well have said, "We now have one circus clown who is prepared to support breathing water." It would be as pertinent a statement as this rot.

Financial Transaction Tax, of course! Brilliant. Capitalism is saved.

Bernie is good enough for Republicans...


Republicans for Bernie
by worker

By Michael T. Hertz

https://www.laprogressive.com/republicans-for-bernie/?utm_source=LA%20Progressive%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=4d3820d669-LAP_News_17April12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9f184a8aad-4d3820d669-286686353
In the past few days, I’ve run into two Republicans who said that they want Bernie Sanders for President. Republicans for a avowed democratic socialist. How did that happen?

The first one was on Facebook. I later learned his name, Everett Clifford. He commented on a pro-Bernie post that I put up. He told me that he was a Republican, an ex-Marine, and a minister. “Have been living in Vermont for many years, have voted for Bernie every time, very proud of him, he tells us what’s wrong, and how to fix it, never ran a dirty campaign, so as a Republican, Marine vet, and Minister, I’m voting for Bernie Sanders.”

I made a poster with him on it and told him I thought that Bernie’s campaign should find more Republicans like him. (I contacted Bernie.org and told them the same thing). If Republicans could supported a democratic socialist, that would show that his message of battling the billionaires has broad appeal. Everett Clifford told me that he thought that there were others like him. (He said he liked my poster. Someone reposted my Clifford poster on a liberal Facebook page and it drew 86 “likes,” which I thought was good, even though I didn’t find my poster that attractive).

Then, a day later, I found a post by another avowed Republican. This post went to great lengths, explaining why the person was supporting Bernie Sanders and was against the Republican party:

I am a long-time GOP supporter. During my teenage years, I witnessed Reagan, contrary to the narrative today, being a very pragmatic moderate Republican. After providing the economy with some Keynesian stimulus in the form of tax cuts, as the economy got back on its feet we saw him increase taxes to help reduce the deficit. He closed loopholes for the wealthy. He granted amnesty (something I oppose but it shows how he was willing to compromise.) He worked with Tip O’Neill to salvage Social Security.

While I did not support Iran Contra, I proudly registered to become a Repbulican just in time for the upcoming election of 1988. I voted for H W Bush, and after being impressed with his pragmatism (i.e. raising taxes although they were unpopular) I voted for him again. During the Clinton Presidency, however, I began to notice a substantial shift to the right. They pushed legislation like DOMA and NAFTA, which I could absolutely not support. However, they showed willingness to compromise with Clinton on major issues such as welfare reform and balancing the budget, so I was not yet ready to abandon the GOP, although I did vote for Perot in ’96.

In 2000, I voted for W, noting the pragmatism of his father and his seemingly reasonable ‘compassionate conservatism.’ However, I quickly noticed things were a bit off. He began the War on Terror and simultaneously cut taxes, even though wars are generally financed through tax hikes. He then expanded Medicare, and again he did not pay for it. I was upset with this, but I was also sucked into the whole “we need a strong leader to defeat terrorism,” which I was convinced John Kerry was not, so I voted for him. Deficits kept rising, the wars were failing, and the WMD claims turned out not to be true. Then the economy collapsed thanks to deregulation, and I strongly regretted my decision to vote for him. In 2008, I refused to vote for McCain, because he seemed way too far right on foreign policy, abortion, and gay marriage (shouldn’t small government supporters be pro choice,) but I also didn’t vote for Obama as his rhetoric seemed extremely far left.

Everything Sanders did was for the American worker, from protecting them from outsourcing and cheap foreign labor, to fixing the budget deficit by hiking taxes on the rich, to boosting the minimum wage. He’d be considered a centrist back in the 80s, which is why he has my vote.

Of course, when Obama got into office, I quickly realized that he was actually, if anything, a moderate Republican. He passed the ACA (Heritagecare) bill, extended the Bush tax cuts (even for the wealthy at first!), and steered us out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. After the 2010 wave elections for the Tea Party, I was disgusted with how far right the Republican party had gone, and began noticing the blatant racism. I found republicansforobama.org, a group of people closely reflecting my views, and voted Obama in 2012 and Democrat in 2014. I lurked on Reddit for a few months, reading r/politics regularly, and was amazed by Bernie Sander’s policies. Everything he did was for the American worker, from protecting them from outsourcing and cheap foreign labor, to fixing the budget deficit by hiking taxes on the rich, to boosting the minimum wage. He’d be considered a centrist back in the 80s, which is why he has my vote.

I cannot vouch for this person. For all I know, his story is made up, although it sounds genuine. One article has already been written about it.

I also found on Facebook a group that calls itself “Republicans for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary.” It has only two likes, and the purpose of group is to have Bernie win so that Hillary will be defeated that the Republicans will win the election.

Republicans wouldn’t necessarily want Hillary Clinton to be defeated. If the GOP ran Jeb Bush as its candidate, having Hillary as the opponent might be advantageous. One of Jeb’s big problems is that he represents a dynasty—the one that got us into the terrible Iraq War. Hillary is part of the Clinton dynasty. Having her as a candidate would probably nullify the whole “dynasty” argument. On the other hand, if Bernie Sanders ran against Bush, Jeb would have the dynasty problem. Similarly, if Hillary ran against Mario Rubio or Scott Walker, she would likewise have that problem.

Fortunately for the Democrats, their convention in 2016 comes second. They’ll know who the Republicans are running before they have to make a choice. Of course, by that time someone may have already wrapped up the nomination for the Democrats. But who knows?

Back to Bernie Sanders. His name has really exploded all over the Internet since he announced his candidacy. I’m an administrator of a small group of supporters on Facebook (“Bernie Sanders 2016 – Ideas Welcome”). The group had 700 members when I joined in November 2014 and 1400 in mid April 2015. As we get towards the end of May, we now have almost 2500 members, so the number has nearly doubled in a month. I get the impression that similar things are happened elsewhere. Bernie got 200,000 volunteers signed up in a few weeks after announcing and $3.0 million in donations in the first four days after he announced. . He is still raising money at a fast pace.

Some of his supporters still think that he should be running an independent campaign and that going for the Democratic nomination will be futile and a “sell out” to a corporate dominated party. However, it’s a balancing act. He won’t win if he runs independently, but if he keeps to his program of not taking money from the billionaires, he has both a decent chance of winning the nomination and the election.

What’s happening on the Hillary Clinton side? Unlike Bernie Sanders, she continuously has problems—potential scandals—that crop up. These could be generated by Republicans, naturally, since many of them do not want to see her in the general election. But the existence of such scandals and issues will not go away. They will be there during the general election as well as the primaries, and they are a cloud over Hillary’s position as a candidate.

Bernie Sanders has no such issues. The only thing really against him is that he’s a “democratic socialist.” And this is where the support of people like Everett Clifford and other Republicans can become crucial. Bernie Sanders should make it a special point to collect endorsements from Republicans and former Republicans to show that his positions have broad support.

How can the positions of Bernie Sanders be broad? “He’d be considered a centrist back in the 80s, which is why he has my vote,” said the Republican who came out for him. And that’s the real truth. Our country has become so conservative in the past 30 years that today a “democratic socialist” is the equivalent of a centrist back in the 1980’s. The positions that Ronald Reagan – the hero of the Republican Party—took back then would be anathema to many who call themselves Republicans today. So the left wing of the old Republican Party may be joining with the Democrats and electing Bernie Sanders, “democratic socialist,” as President.

Michael Hertz


So what's it gonna be then, eh? Wait, I know, Bernie is just another pandering opportunists.

Dispatch from the land of the Lotus Eaters:


May 26 terrifies bourgeois media
by worker

By A. Shaw

On May 26, 2016, Bernie Sanders will formally announce in Burlington, VT his candidacy for the Democratic Party (DP) nomination for president. His May 26 formal announcement follows his April 30 technical announcement.
The April 30 announcement was sensationally successful. Within four days of April 30, the Sanders' campaign signed up 175,00 volunteers and raised $3,000,000 in small contributions.
The bourgeois media gave extensive coverage to both the run-up before April 30 and the consequences relating to volunteers and fundraising. Most of the left proletarian and left petty bourgeois media completely ignored April 30. The left proletarian and left petty bourgeois media are infested by anarchists and closet reactionaries.
April 30 therefore demonstrates the surprising strength of Bernie in the spheres of volunteers and fundraising.
May 26 however is designed to show Bernie's strength or weakness in the sphere of voter contact during this early stage of the campaign.
Unlike April 30, the bourgeois media outside of Vermont so far ignores the run-up to May 26.
Evidently, the bourgeois media anticipates a huge and shocking turnout of Bernie supporters on May 26 which can become a game changer in the race between Hillary and Bernie. So, it seems, the bourgeois media decided not to cover the May 26 story before, during, or after the event.
But if the turnout is big enough, the snippy bourgeois media will not be able to smother the game-changing May 26 story.
But what is "big enough?"
My guess is only 10,000 people is big enough.


From the Houston Party.

Bernie Sanders is no Eugene Debs
May 26, 2015


Bernie Sanders is no Eugene V. Debs

BERNIE SANDERS' entry into the Democratic presidential primaries should be seen as his final decisive step away from the democratic socialism he professes to support. He will raise some progressive demands in the primaries and then endorse the corporate Democrat, Hillary Clinton. Nothing changes.

Sanders is violating the first principle of socialist politics: class independence. The socialist movement learned that principle long ago when the business classes sold out the workers in the democratic revolutions of 1848 that swept across Europe and parts of Latin America.

Drawing out the lesson from these failed revolutions that the middle-class proprietors and professionals could not be trusted as allies of the workers in the battle for democracy and workers rights, Karl Marx told exiled German revolutionaries in London in 1850 that the workers needed to form their own party to look out for their own interests:

Even where there is no prospect whatsoever of them being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces and to bring before the public their own revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection, they must not allow themselves to be seduced by such arguments as, for example, that by so doing they are splitting the Democratic Party and making it possible for the reactionaries to win. The ultimate intention of all such phrases is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is infinitely more important than the disadvantages that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.

The Democratic Party that Marx was referring to in his 1850 speech was the most pro-democracy of the German parties based in the business and professional classes, which were fighting for universal suffrage against the ruling feudal landed aristocracy, but stopped fighting for workers' rights once propertied men had the vote. But the argument applies just as well to the Democratic Party in the U.S. today--a party that poses as the champion of working people, but serves business interests.

Sanders has now gone into coalition with the billionaire class he professes to oppose and that finances the Democratic party. Sanders won't see the billionaire's money. But he has made it crystal clear that he will support their candidate by promising to support the winner of the Democratic presidential nomination.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

UNFORTUNATELY, TOO many self-professed socialists in the U.S. have abandoned the socialist principle of independent political action. They argue instead that whether or not to support a Democrat or an independent candidate is a question of tactics, not principle.

That was not the case when the United States had a viable Socialist Party. The political independence of the Socialist Party is a major reason why it was viable, why it had power, why it elected many of its candidates, why it was central to the political dialogue of the country. After the demoralizing and self-defeating experience of fusion (cross-endorsing the more progressive Democratic and Republican candidates) that undermined and ultimately destroyed the Greenback Labor and People's Parties of the recently past Populist era, the Socialist Party of America put into its constitution a ban against endorsing the candidates of the capitalist parties.

In his opening campaign speech as the party's 1904 presidential candidate, Eugene Debs said:

The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles. With either of those parties in power, one thing is always certain, and that is that the capitalist class is in the saddle and the working class under the saddle.

As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders does a disservice to Debs' memory and his commitment to working-class political independence by displaying a Debs portrait in his office. By choosing to run for president in the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders has shown he is no Eugene Debs.

Sanders is confusing people about what socialism is. Socialism is not so much a social theory, a platform of policies or social ownership of the means of production. Socialism is, above all, the movement of the working class for their own freedom and power in a full democracy.

Sanders' policies are pretty good on working-class economic justice demands and climate action, and not so good on foreign policy and militarism. But his positions on the issues is secondary to the question of whether his politics are helping the working class act for itself or subsume itself under the big business interests in charge of the Democratic Party. By entering the Democratic primaries with the promise of supporting Clinton as the lesser evil to the Republicans, Sanders is not helping the working class to organize, speak and act for itself.

As Frederick Engels told socialists in the U.S. when the labor movement in New York City nominated the non-socialist but progressive reformer Henry George for mayor in 1886:

The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organization of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers' party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first program of this party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement--no matter in what form, so long as it is only their own movement--in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE INDEPENDENT left was a force to be reckoned with in U.S. politics from the 1840s through the 1930s. The Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party and the Radical Republicans carried the banners of abolition, land reform, labor rights and Reconstruction from the 1840s through 1870s. With the post-Civil War industrialization and rapid expansion of industrial workers, the surviving radicals of the pre-war reform movements formed the populist farmer-labor Greenback Labor and People's Parties of the 1880s and 1890s.

With collapse of Populism into the Democratic Party, its radicals were central to the formation of the Socialist Party of America, as well as regionally based Labor, Farmer-Labor and Progressive Parties between 1900 and 1936, which came close to establishing a major third party on the left with a farmer-labor popular base. Together, they elected hundreds of local officials, scores of state officials and dozens of members of Congress. The Farmer-Labor and Progressive parties of the Upper Midwest in the 1930s had two governors, three U.S. Senators, 12 members of the House, and scores of state and local elected officials.

Those successes fueled widespread agitation for an independent labor party based on unions, which reached a peak as the 1936 election approached. Unfortunately, the unions and the Communist Party's Popular Front policy led most of labor and the left into the Democratic Party's New Deal Coalition in 1936--from which they never emerged afterward in a major way.

By failing to act on its own and speak for itself in U.S. elections, the left committed political suicide. It lost its independent voice and its platform from which to be heard. The public doesn't hear from the left in elections. They only hear from pro-capitalist Democrats, who most of "the left" promotes as the lesser evil to the Republicans.

By trying to get Democratic politicians to say and do what the left wants them to say and do, the left has been engaged in a pathetic and hopeless attempt at political ventriloquism. It is dependent politics, powerless politics. It has been 80 years--20 presidential election cycles--since the left largely disappeared itself into the Democratic Party. It is way past time to draw the lesson of this experience: the left won't regain power and public significance until it breaks with the Democrats and acts independently for itself.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SANDERS HAS attracted significant money and energy from progressives. In the first 24 hours after his announcement, his campaign reported raising $1.5 million from 35,000 donors and signing up over 100,000 volunteers. So the independent left is now debating how to relate to the Sanders campaign.

Some argue that we should just build movements outside the electoral arena for now, and that when they get big enough, an independent left party will emerge from them. Social movements making demands on the system are simply lobbying the Democrats in the absence of an independent left electoral alternative. An independent left party is needed so the Democrats are forced to respond to movement demands or lose votes to the left. Movements ebb and flow. A party is needed to keep activists organized and engaged during the downturns in social movements and provide organized support and perspectives when movements expand.

Some even argue that the Sanders campaign is a movement. We've heard that claim before with the candidacies of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich and Barack Obama. Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report aptly described these candidates as "sheepdogs...charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party."

No self-activating movements or organizations came out of these campaigns, and there is no reason to expect the Sanders campaign will be any different. The Sanders campaign is enlisting people in an election campaign, not an ongoing political organization. The Sanders campaign may be a bridge for some to positions as Democratic operatives, as it was for some in previous sheepdog campaigns. But it is not building a political organization that is independent and opposed to the capitalist parties.

The group Socialist Alternative has welcomed Sanders' Democratic candidacy, while calling on him to continue running as an independent after the Democratic primaries. Socialist Alternative's position is naïve at best--or worse, deliberately misleading. There is no way that Sanders will break with the Democrats on the presidential race. We should take him at his word: he's backing the Democratic candidate. Sanders has a long record of supporting Democrats for president, including Gore, Kerry and Obama, while harshly criticizing independent challengers on the left like Ralph Nader.

It's one thing to tell Sanders supporters they need a Plan B--an independent left candidate--when he loses the primaries. It's another to spread illusions that Sanders can be persuaded to be that candidate.

If Sanders wanted to do it, he would have paid petitioners out now getting him independent ballot lines in the 50 states and D.C. He doesn't, and he won't. If he did, the Democrats would bar him from the debates and primary ballots for being disloyal to the Democrats. Some states, such as Michigan, have sore-loser provisions that would prevent him from running as an independent after running as a Democrat. It's disappointing to see Socialist Alternative spread illusions that Sanders will ever break with Clinton after the primaries, or that he even could do so as a practical matter of getting on the ballot.

From an independent socialist point of view, all the money and time going into Sanders' handoff to Clinton is time and money that could be going into getting Jill Stein's Green Party candidacy on every ballot in the country--the only independent left campaign in 2016 with any prospect for doing so. The Greens have 21 ballot lines already and most of the rest can be secured by petitioning in 2015. Doing so now would leave 2016 for campaigning.

One of the weaknesses of recent independent campaigns by Ralph Nader and the Greens is that the ballot access drive did not really begin until the year of the election, making the campaign mostly a desperate scramble to simply get on the ballot. With most ballot lines secured in 2015, the campaign could focus in 2016 on broadcasting its message and on field organizing to build local organizations, register new voters, identify supporting voters, pull them to the polls on Election Day, and continue after the election with local movement and electoral activity.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE INDEPENDENT left should be talking to progressives who have decided to support Sanders. We should talk about why independent politics is the best way to build progressive power, about the Democratic Party as the historic graveyard of progressive movements, and about the need in 2016 for a progressive alternative when Sanders folds and endorses Clinton. I don't expect many will be persuaded to quit the Sanders campaign before the primaries. But I do expect that many of them will want a Plan B, a progressive alternative to Clinton, after the primaries.

I had a similar scenario develop in during my 2014 Green Party campaign for governor of New York. Zephyr Teachout, a liberal Democrat running a primary challenge against the more conservative Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo, attracted the support of progressives in the Democratic Party and won a respectable 34 percent of the primary vote. Analysis of the general election results shows that about half of Teachout's vote came to the Greens in the general election, and that it constituted about half of the Green vote. Our 5 percent showing was the best ever in New York for an independent left candidate for governor, except for the Socialists, who received 5.7 percent in 1918 and 5.6 percent in 1920.

If Stein's Green campaign can draw a significant segment of Sanders supporters to it after the primaries, it could help the Green Party to make a quantum leap in the vote it receives in 2016 over previous elections. That would provide momentum for local, state and congressional elections in the coming years.

While the Debsian Socialists of a century ago were clear about their independence from the Democratic Party, they were also clear about wanting to draw progressives in the Democratic Party into the Socialist Party. As Debs stated in that same 1904 opening campaign speech quoted above:

Where but to the Socialist Party can these progressive people turn? They are now without a party and the only genuine Democratic Party in the field is the Socialist Party, and every true Democrat should thank Wall Street for driving him out of a party that is democratic in name only, and into one that is democratic in fact.

Progressives in the Democratic Party are going to need a Plan B after Bernie Sanders throws his support to Clinton in about 10 months, after the March primaries seal the nomination for her. We should be building Plan B now.

http://socialistworker.org/2015/05/26/bernie-sanders-is-no-eugene-debs

Can Howie (and the rest) simply desist from using the term "progressive?" What is it in this land- why do they insist on the use of weasel words?

The problem with Bernie Sanders
Ashley Smith writes from Vermont on Bernie Sanders' plan to run for president.

May 5, 2015

THE UPCOMING presidential contest was shaping up to be one of the most underwhelming in electoral history. An heir to the Bush dynasty, real estate magnate Jeb, looked like the safest bet to become the Republican presidential nominee, and challenge the anointed frontrunner from the Democrats' leading dynasty, corporate drone Hilary Clinton.

Few people on the left or even among liberals could manage any excitement or conviction about getting "Ready for Hillary Clinton," the former Walmart board member, regardless of the populist veneer she is trying to put forward as her campaign gets underway.

Thus, for many, the decision of Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to challenge Clinton for the Democratic nomination offers an alternative. For example, Jacobin magazine's founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara argued, "Sanders' candidacy could strengthen the left in the long run. The tensions among Democrats are serious and raise the possibility for the realignment of progressive forces on a totally different basis."

Sunkara joined more than 50 activists, mainly from the Occupy Wall Street movement, in forming People for Sanders. Their founding statement says, "[W]e support Bernie Sanders in his bid to become the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. We stand firmly behind Senator Sanders as the strongest progressive possibility in the race right now. His commitment to our values is one of longstanding commitment. Sanders is the bold alternative."

But in running for the Democratic presidential nomination as the liberal outsider with almost no chance of winning, Sanders isn't very "bold"--no more so than the fizzled campaigns of Dennis Kucinich in past presidential election years. And by steering liberal and left supporters into a Democratic Party whose policies and politics he claims to disagree with, Sanders--no matter how critical he might be of Hillary Clinton--is acting as the opposite of an "alternative."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SANDERS HAS positioned himself as a hero of America's downtrodden workers. He doesn't run from the label "socialist," but instead embraces it in his condemnations of corporate greed. He even has a portrait of the great Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs hanging in his office.

Certainly Sanders will bring all sorts of issues to the Democratic primaries that Clinton would prefer to tiptoe around or avoid altogether. He has promised to call attention to inequality in the U.S., the corporate hijacking of American politics and the imminent crisis of climate change.

With refreshing bluntness, he told George Stephanopoulos on ABC News' This Week, "We need a political revolution in this country involving millions of people who are prepared to stand up and say "Enough is enough," and I want to help lead that effort."

But if Sanders really wanted to participate in mobilizing millions to resist the status quo in U.S. politics, he had other options to launching himself into the circus of a Democratic presidential campaign as the designated marginal renegade. And he rejected them.

For one, he could have set a very different example, with a far greater chance of success, if he ran for governor in Vermont against the Democratic Party's incumbent Peter Shumlin, who has betrayed promises to implement a single-payer health care system, create green, union jobs and much more.

Faced with a budget crisis, Shumlin and the state's Democrats refused to raise taxes on the rich to fulfill their promises. Instead, they imposed cuts in social services, education, and environmental programs, and laid off scores of state workers. Shumlin even went so far as to call for the banning of teachers' right to strike.

Sanders is Vermont's most popular politician. With the backing of the Progressive Party, he could have run for governor as an independent and easily defeated both the Democratic and Republican nominees, and never faced the accusation of being a spoiler that is inevitably thrown at any third-party challenger.

A victory for a truly independent campaign by Sanders would have been even bigger than Kshama Sawant's election to the Seattle City Council as an open socialist. In so doing, Sanders could have built momentum for a national third-party alternative to represent workers and the oppressed.

If Sanders had his heart set on national politics, he could have run for president like Ralph Nader as an independent, opposing both capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans. He would have been appealing for a protest vote, rather than any real chance to win, but Sanders rejected this possibility out of hand for a different reason. "No matter what I do," Sanders said in January, "I will not be a spoiler. I will not play that role in helping to elect some right-wing Republican as president of the United States."

In other words, Sanders refused to consider an independent presidential campaign not because he had little chance of winning, but because he didn't want to compete for vote with the Democrats' eventual nominee. There's no reason to believe he will be a "bold alternative" at the end of his doomed campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In jumping into the Democratic Party primaries, Sanders appointed a quintessential corporate party insider, Ted Devine, to be his campaign manager. Devine has worked for a series of Democratic presidential campaigns, stretching back to Walter Mondale and running through to John Kerry.

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THE DEMOCRATIC establishment can breathe a collective sigh of relief. It doesn't, in fact, fear liberal Democrats like Kucinich or Sanders, but third-party challenges like Nader's that have the prospect of breaking their stranglehold on votes from workers and the oppressed, as several local and statewide campaigns have shown over the last few years.

Hillary Clinton certainly doesn't regard Sanders as a threat. She knows that the election business follows the golden rule: Whoever has more gold, wins. Clinton is expected to amass a war chest of more than $1 billion, mostly from Wall Street and Corporate America, to pay for advertising, an army of paid staff and Astroturf support. This will overwhelm Sanders' fundraising goal of $50 million and his underdeveloped volunteer infrastructure.

In fact, Clinton regards Sanders as an asset to her campaign. He will bring enthusiasm and attention to Democratic primaries that promised to be lackluster at best. He will also help her frame the election on populist terms that have widespread support. That benefits the Democrats and undermines the Republicans, who have little to say about inequality, except that they like it.

As liberal writer Paul Waldman wrote in the Washington Post:

Bernie Sanders isn't going to pull her to the left because she was already moving that way. She's talking about issues like inequality and criminal justice reform in terms that she might not have used 10 or 20 years ago...Talking about them in more liberal terms isn't just good for her in the primaries, it's good for her in the general elections.

No wonder Clinton celebrated Sander's entry into the race. "I agree with Bernie," she wrote on Twitter. "Focus must be on helping America's middle class. GOP would hold them back. I welcome him to the race."

You can expect that Clinton will agree with Sanders during the campaign, rearticulating some of his themes in a "more realistic" fashion and occasionally chiding him for taking things too far. Sanders can be counted on to concentrate most of his fire on the Republicans, the Koch brothers and their reactionary positions, as he has been doing for years.

Sanders admitted the truth in what was perhaps a Freudian slip: "If I decide to run, I'm not running against Hillary Clinton. I'm running for a declining middle class."

At this stage, Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to emerge as the Democratic nominee. If she stumbles in some irreversible way, the corporate establishment that controls the Democratic Party will come up with another more mainstream candidate, like Obama in 2008. Either way, the eventual Democratic presidential nominee will toe the capitalist line.

However much he disagrees with that candidate, Sanders will agitate for trade unionists and social movement activists to vote for the lesser of two evils. The result is that he will help corral people on the left from taking any steps toward building a genuine alternative to the two-party status quo.

Thus, Sanders will follow the well-trodden path of other liberals like Kucinich. In the 2004 Democratic primaries, Kucinich excoriated Kerry and other candidates for voting for George W. Bush's wars, implementing neoliberal trade agreements like NAFTA, and supporting the racist death penalty.

But Kucinich was very conscious of keeping the left and liberals from building a third party. At one point during the campaign, he said: "The Democratic Party created third parties by running to the middle. What I'm trying to do is to go back to the big tent so that everyone who felt alienated could come back through my candidacy."

Kucinich thus became the bait on the hook for the Democrats to catch their liberal base. After he lost the primaries, he called on his supporters to support the very candidate he had roundly criticized.

Sanders' campaign will serve the same function. He is already serving that function by luring people on the left, like the Occupy activists who launched People for Bernie, into a Democratic Party campaign when they might have concentrated their energies on politics outside the Democrats.

This is especially ironic when you remember that the Occupy Wall Street encampments were attacked and cleared on orders from Democratic Party mayors--many of them known for being liberals--from Boston to Chicago to Portland to Oakland.

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SANDERS' DECISION to jump into Democratic Party presidential politics represents a decisive break from the man he calls his hero: Eugene V. Debs. Debs spent his whole life building the Socialist Party as an alternative to the two capitalist parties. Year in and year out, he insisted that "[t]he differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties involve no issue, no principle in which the working class have any interest."

Debs understood that his call for working-class people to break with the two capitalist parties meant supporting a political alternative that might not win--but he believed this was a necessary challenge to a two-party system that offered nothing to workers. "I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it," Debs once wrote, "than vote for something I don't want and get it."

Sanders' retreat is based on a liberal strategy of attempting to transform the Democratic Party from within that has failed for generations. Instead of shifting the Democrats to the left, the leftists who join the Democrats get dragged to the right. Sanders himself is, in many ways, a prime example of this process.

Back in the 1980s, as mayor of Burlington--the largest city in Vermont, known back then as "the People's Republic"--Sanders did genuinely challenge the two-party system. He went so far as to build solidarity with the left-wing Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua at a time when Republicans and Democrats were supporting the Reagan administration's dirty wars in Central America.

In the 1990s, however, Sanders set his sites on higher office--not by building an alternative party, but by running as an independent who maintained a collaborative relationship with the Democrats.

Once ensconced in Washington as a member of the House and Senate, he abandoned his principled opposition to the two-party system. As Vermont Democrat Howard Dean--a former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination himself--stated, "He is basically a liberal Democrat, and he is a Democrat at that--he runs as an Independent because he doesn't like the structure and money that gets involved...The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time."

Since he made his arrangement with the Democrats, Sanders has uncritically supported them in Vermont elections. As a result, when his ally, Gov. Peter Shumlin, declared war on state workers, Sanders didn't even issue a statement in opposition. His silence led many in Vermont to ask: "Where's Bernie?"

Nationally, Sanders supported Barack Obama in both of the last two elections, despite the president's betrayal of his progressive promises and his record of continuity with many Bush policies, from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the bailout of Wall Street.

And the Democrats have rewarded Sanders. They instructed their Vermont candidates not to oppose him and sent corporate lackeys like Sens. Charles Schumer and Barbara Boxer to campaign for him. Even worse, Sanders accepted a $10,000 donation from Hillary Clinton's Hillpac back in 2006, during his first run for Senate.

Sanders, the supposed independent, was a bitter opponent of third-party challenges Ralph Nader's campaigns against Al Gore and John Kerry. In 2004, he announced, "Not only am I going to vote for John Kerry, I am going to run around this country and do everything I can to dissuade people from voting for Ralph Nader...I am going to do everything I can, while I have differences with John Kerry, to make sure that he is elected."

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WITH HIS slide into becoming a Democrat in everything but name, Sanders became less and less radical on a host of issues, including cherished ones like class inequality. For example, Sanders rightly denounces the minimum wage as a "starvation wage," but he doesn't support the low-wage workers' movement demand for $15 now. Instead, he proposes a more "realistic" increase to $15 "over a period of years, not tomorrow."

Sanders has similarly moderate positions on many social issues. While he boasts a good voting record on the rights of oppressed groups, it doesn't stand out among most other liberal Democrats.

In fact, on the decisive issue today of racist police brutality, Hillary Clinton is actually posturing to Sanders' left. She has raised questions about the drug war and ending mass incarceration--though, of course, largely to cover her complicity with Bill Clinton's vast expansion of both. By contrast, in a recent CNN interview, Sanders, after expressing sympathy for cops' supposedly "difficult job," managed to call only for jobs and community policing.

His foreign policy positions are to the right of many liberal Democrats. Sanders voted in favor of George W. Bush's original Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution that gave the administration a green light to launch the war on Afghanistan. While he did vote against Bush's invasion of Iraq, he repeatedly supported funding resolutions for both U.S. occupations. He is also a Zionist who supports Israel consistently, even after its recent escalations of the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

Sanders' backing of U.S. imperialism compromises his support for workers' rights. For example, Sanders supports the basing of the new F-35 warplane at Burlington's airport, despite the fact that the fighter-bomber's ear-shattering noise made scores of working-class housing unsafe for habitation.

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LIKE MANY leftists before him, the Democratic Party has co-opted and changed Bernie Sanders, using him to help hinder the development of a genuine alternative to the capitalist parties.

His campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination will be, at best, a re-run of Jesse Jackson's primary runs in 1984 and 1988. Jackson's campaigns galvanized an entire section of the left, channeled it toward the Democratic Party and directed its remnants to vote for a succession of corporate candidates like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

Based on his experience as Dennis Kucinich's former press secretary, David Swanson has drawn the conclusion that the left should not support Sanders. "The best place to put our resources is into uncorrupted, principle, policy-driven, nonviolent, creative activism--including activism needed to create fair, open, verifiable elections," Swanson wrote.

He's right. As the great socialist historian Howard Zinn argued, "The really critical thing isn't who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in--in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating--those are the things that determine what happens."

The recent uprising in Baltimore proves this. Without that revolt, the Baltimore state's attorney would never have charged the six cops who killed Freddie Gray. Without more struggle, they will certainly not be convicted.

At the same time, the left shouldn't abandon the electoral arena to the two capitalist parties. If we do, we create a vacuum that the Democrats will fill, co-opting movement activists, demobilizing unions and social movements, and redirecting their precious time, money and energy into electing candidates who then betray workers and the oppressed.

We need to win the new left born out of Occupy, public-sector union struggles and the Black Lives Matter movement to breaking with the Democratic Party and building an electoral alternative as a complement to struggle from below. Bernie Sanders' campaign inside the Democratic Party is an obstacle to that project.

http://socialistworker.org/2015/05/05/problem-bernie-sanders

Senator Sanders and the Impossibility of Reviving Democratic Party Liberalism
by Charles Andrews

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont released a 12-step economic agenda on December 1, 2014. Cyber Monday at the start of the holiday commercial frenzy is not the best time to capture public attention, but Sanders probably has a strict timeline as he decides whether to run for president.

The goals of Sanders' agenda are worthy. Here are his topics with our brief summary of his proposed implementation:

1. Rebuilding Our Roads -- enact a $1 trillion set of construction projects for transport, water cleanup, and schools

2. Reversing Climate Change -- no specific measures

3. Creating Jobs -- financial assistance to expand worked-owned cooperatives

4. Protecting Unions -- a law to enforce union recognition when a majority of employees sign a card

5. Raising the Wage -- raise minimum wage to an unspecified living wage

6. Pay Equity (for women) -- unspecified law

7. Making Trade Work for Workers -- unspecified change of incentives and taxes to make U.S. corporations produce here not abroad

8. Cutting College Costs -- unspecified measures

9. Breaking Up Big Banks -- break up the six largest Wall Street firms

10. Bringing Health Care to All -- Medicare for All

11. Ending Poverty -- expand Social Security, Medicare coverage, and Medicaid

12. Stopping Tax Dodging Corporations -- raise rates and close loopholes on corporations and executives

The program echoes classic Democratic Party liberalism from the middle 1930s to the middle 1970s (modernized so it addresses environmental issues and corporate outsourcing to cheap-wage countries). In essence, the agenda says, federal spending on broad programs, taxation of corporations and the rich, and other legislation should guarantee working people a job and a secure life -- within capitalism.

Some flaws in Sanders' agenda could be corrected without changing its essence. There is no need to dwell on them. The basic problem is that the old Democratic Party liberalism is no longer possible.

The party was beholden to corporate capital just as it is today, but it was assigned a different role. Its job was to engage with surging mass movements and channel their demands toward palatable reforms. The New Deal and its watered-down and overtly anti-communist successor, Truman's Fair Deal, conceded just enough to restore acceptance of the existing order. The capitalists' worry was that workers might take action for socialism, or form a labor party based on trade unions such as Britain had, or push for the wider political space of a European-style parliamentary system. Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s put through his Great Society programs to tamp down the fiery protests of Black working people in dozens of cities.

New Deal liberalism was both possible and necessary. Possible because capitalism, still in its phase of industrial growth, could make concessions to the working class without derailing investment. Necessary because factories required a big industrial workforce. The drive to accumulate profits and the central place of industrial workers in accumulation gave them the clout to fight for good wages and win.

Since 1973 the processes of investment have run into basic problems, more fundamental than the worst cyclical depression. Capitalists no longer need tens of millions of workers to expand forefront sectors. Capitalist prosperity with a minimal share of it for most if not all workers has disappeared (see this writer's forthcoming book, The Hollow Colossus). The median real wage has stagnated and declined for 41 years, and there has not been a major economic reform of benefit to working people in all that time.

The economic change flipped the role of the Democratic Party. Now it engages in a kind of dance with the Republican Party as they both dismantle one public obstacle after another standing in the way of increased exploitation of workers. President Carter was a transition figure. Clinton presided over the birth of NAFTA and the WTO as well as enacting welfare "reform." Obama managed the response to the depression of 2008 entirely as a rescue of capital, and his Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) set health care on a privatized course to become an individually purchased commodity.

The U.S. working class faces a new reality. On one hand, the boundaries of reform struggle have shrunk; on the other hand, people become more open to socialism and more aware, uncomfortably for now, of the imperative of revolutionary change.

Most of the twelve steps in Senator Sanders' economic agenda are material for good agitation. Why shouldn't "the United States join the rest of the industrialized world" with "a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system"? The question is, to what end is such agitation devoted? Here, Sanders' timid politics are revealed.

One problem underlies his public musing over the last few months whether to run for president as an independent or a Democrat. Ralph Nader's presidential campaign in 2000 stirred real enthusiasm. Nader filled a 10,000-seat coliseum in Portland, Oregon, and the rally was a paid ticket event. Nader tapped a national wave of enthusiasm -- until the two sanctioned political parties and the mass media launched the electoral equivalent of nuclear war. Nader's program was less cohesive in some ways than Sanders' agenda, but Nader openly challenged corporate capitalist domination of parties and elections. His presidential run was a glorious achievement. Unfortunately, Nader walked away from the momentum instead of launching a permanent mass organization.

Sanders calls himself an Independent in the Senate, but he caucuses with the Democrats. If he runs for president, he will enter some Democratic primary contests and then run as an independent, or perhaps as an independent from the outset. Whatever his decision, he will not build a mass movement and lasting organization. In effect, his candidacy says, here is a fine agenda, but I do not challenge capitalism even though that is the only way one could implement it. Sanders peddles the illusion that the Democratic Party could return to its old liberalism. After all, in the unlikely event that Sanders became president, he would ask Democratic members of Congress to legislate his agenda. Ha!

Another problem is that Sanders glosses over class reality. He begins with an appeal to fight "the long-term deterioration of the middle class." Complementary to this, his poverty plank, number eleven of the dozen steps in his agenda, characterizes the poor as seniors and children. He has a separate item about raising the minimum wage for the working poor. By his terminology and rhetorical structure, Sanders evades the fact that capitalism divides society into two classes, capitalists and workers. The working class includes those who still earn a modestly prosperous wage or salary, the growing portion who work at sh-t jobs for miserable pay and practically no benefits, and the vast ranks of people for whom the capitalist economy has only the most precarious temporary and on-call hours, or no job at all.

Sanders, in a polite rebuke to a Red-baiting congressman, said, "I bet I'm the only socialist he knows." But Sanders quickly reclassifies himself from socialist to "the social-democratic tradition" of countries like Sweden, conceding too that they are "no utopia" ("Sanders Socialist Successes," April 22, 2009). The European social democrats of yesteryear boasted that they would make capitalism deliver prosperity for all. Sanders rarely mentions capitalism, and he never speaks of replacing it by socialism.

Our choice inexorably becomes either a socialist society of no rich and no poor or an ever more vicious capitalism. The Democratic Party adapts itself to the latter. The Merriam-Webster definition of "anachronism" could be the caption under a portrait photo of Sanders: "a person or a thing that seems to belong to the past and not to fit in the present."

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2014/andrews091214.html

Bernie Sanders to seek Democratic presidential nomination
By Patrick Martin
1 May 2015

US Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont confirmed Thursday that he was seeking the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. The announcement, made in an email statement sent out to supporters, followed by a brief press conference on the lawn of the US Capitol, marks a new stage in one of the longest-running political frauds in American history.

Since 1990, when he won the first of eight terms as Vermont’s sole member of the House of Representatives, and continuing with his election in 2006 to the US Senate, and reelection in 2012, Sanders has formally declared himself to be an independent. On occasion he goes further, calling himself a democratic socialist, suggesting that he represents some sort of opposition to Wall Street’s domination of American political and economic life.

Throughout this period, Sanders has caucused with the Democrats in the House and then the Senate, receiving the same treatment as any other Democrat in terms of committee assignments and promotions. This year his seniority allowed him to achieve the position of ranking minority member on the Budget Committee, making him responsible for preparing the budget offered by the Senate Democrats as an alternative to that drafted by the Republican majority.

Although he first won his House seat over Democratic opposition, Sanders has long since buried the hatchet. Leading Democratic senators like Wall Street favorite Charles Schumer of New York backed his election to the Senate in 2006, and President Obama traveled to Vermont in 2012 to campaign for his reelection.

In formally seeking the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, Sanders is only admitting publicly what has always been a reality. His “independence” is as much of a sham as his “socialism.”

According to the rules set down by the Democratic National Committee, any candidate for the presidential nomination must be a “member in good standing.” The DNC issued a statement welcoming the Vermont senator into the race, indicating that the Obama White House, the Clinton campaign organization and the Democratic Party establishment as a whole will make no obstacles to his candidacy. Sanders will be included in the Democratic candidate debates and no special effort will be made to keep him off the ballot.

Press reports described Sanders as the standard-bearer for the liberal wing of the Democrats against the overwhelming favorite for the nomination, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. There was discussion of a “Warren-Sanders” wing of the Democratic Party, a reference to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has denied interest in a presidential race at this point, but could easily change course in the event Clinton proves vulnerable.

The Sanders candidacy follows in the footsteps of similar efforts to give a left cover to the increasingly right-wing policies of the Democratic Party. Al Sharpton and Congressman Dennis Kucinich played that role in the 2004 campaign, with Kucinich coming back for a re-run in 2008.

In media interviews Wednesday and Thursday and at his press conference, Sanders struck a pose as a critic of Wall Street and the domination of American politics by multi-millionaires and billionaires. He identified as his three main issues the growth of economic inequality, the political influence of big money, and the increasing danger from climate change.

Significantly, his only reference to foreign policy was a chauvinist denunciation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement with a dozen countries, including Japan, directed against China. Sanders said nothing about the growing danger of war, whether in the Middle East, Asia or Eastern Europe, and he never mentioned the Obama administration—a remarkable feat, since he was announcing his candidacy to succeed Obama in the White House.

Sanders declared that the American people faced “a more serious crisis than at any time since the Great Depression,” and referred to the fact that the 99 percent of all new income growth goes to the top 1 percent, and that the top 1 percent own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. He called this staggering inequality “not just immoral but unsustainable.”
But he said nothing about what policies could reverse the growth of inequality and create “an economy that works for working people,” or how such policies could be enacted, given the intransigent defense of the financial elite by both Republican and Democratic politicians.

Perhaps unintentionally revealing was his explanation of why he chose to run in the Democratic presidential primaries. He could not run as a third-party candidate because he was not independently wealthy. “I am not a billionaire,” he told MSNBC. “To run outside of the two-party system would require enormous sums of money.” In other words, not being an independent billionaire, he had to join one of the two parties controlled by the billionaires.

Sanders has engaged longtime Democratic Party strategist Tad Devine, a veteran of presidential campaigns by Democrats Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry, as his principal campaign operative. Devine told Politico.com, “The one thing he’s determined not to do is to be another Ralph Nader. And the only way to avoid doing that is to avoid being a third-party candidate from the left in the general election.” This was to reassure the Democratic establishment, which vilified Nader for “stealing votes” from Gore in 2000, when the Democrats refused to fight the theft of the presidential election.

Even if Sanders does eventually choose to make a third-party run, as his supporters in groups like the Green Party and the International Socialist Organization are urging, he would still be a capitalist politician offering a capitalist program. This is demonstrated by his political record since entering Congress in 1990.

In 16 years in the House of Representatives, he voted with the Democrats 98 percent of the time, including support for President Bill Clinton’s war against Serbia in 1999. He voted for the Authorization for the Use of Military Force after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the legal basis for both the US invasion of Afghanistan and all subsequent actions in the so-called “war on terror,” including the campaign of drone missile assassination mounted by the Obama administration.
Sanders regularly votes for military appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he is a fervent supporter of the state of Israel. More recently, he backed Obama’s use of sanctions against Russia in the crisis provoked by the US-backed fascist-led coup in Ukraine.

While conventionally liberal on domestic social policies and the environment, Sanders has embraced a strident chauvinism on trade and immigration, taking his cue from the AFL-CIO unions. In 2009, Sanders sponsored an anti-immigrant amendment to Obama’s economic stimulus bill, which the American Immigration Lawyers Association denounced as a “disturbing step backwards,” which “creates a climate of jingoistic divisiveness.”

In his most important policy role, as chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs during last year’s scandal over conditions at VA hospitals, Sanders worked with Republican John McCain to craft bipartisan legislation that opened the door for greatly increased privatization of VA care.

The press response to Sanders’ entry into the presidential race, while dismissing his chances of winning the nomination or the presidency, was largely respectful, even positive. Bloomberg View—the editorial arm of Bloomberg News, owned by the billionaire former mayor of New York—headlined its commentary, “Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign may be useful for Democrats.”

“Sanders can force Clinton to make and articulate choices on precisely the type of issues that she will be most eager to evade, including a host of knotty questions related to inequality,” Bloomberg argued. In other words, Clinton can better define herself by having a “left” straw man in the race.

Other press commentaries noted that Sanders has been reluctant to criticize either Clinton or Obama, a sign that he is himself conscious of the task he has been assigned, to give the Democrats a “left” face without challenging the Wall Street consensus or damaging the presumptive nominee. Even when directly questioned about the tens of millions of dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation from companies with issues before the Clinton State Department, Sanders declined to engage.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/01/sand-m01.html

The right-wing political record of Bernie Sanders
By Tom Hall
15 May 2015

When Bernie Sanders, the nominally independent “socialist” senator from Vermont, announced last month that he would seek the Democratic Party nomination, the World Socialist Web Site commented that this marked “a new stage in one of the longest-running political frauds in American history.” This characterization is completely born out by a review of Sanders' political biography, which spans over four decades.
Born in Brooklyn to middle-class Jewish parents in 1941, Sanders came of age in a solidly liberal milieu during the heyday of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. His older brother Larry helped campaign for Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson as a member of the Young Democrats in the 1950s, and it was he who Sanders says gave him his earliest political education.

Sanders first became politically active after transferring to the University of Chicago in his second year of college. There, he became involved in the student radicalism then emerging, becoming a leader of the campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and leading a sit-in outside the university president's office in 1962. The next year he worked on the re-election campaign of a Democratic city councilman in Chicago, and graduated with a degree in political science in 1964.

However, his career in bourgeois politics began in earnest in Vermont in the 1970s, when Sanders became one of the leading spokesmen for the Liberty Union Party. The party was founded in 1971 by Bill Meyer, who in 1958 had been the first Democrat elected to the House of Representatives from Vermont since the Civil War, serving one term. After being defeated for reelection by a Republican, he had fallen out of favor, failing three times to win the Democratic nomination for US Senator, most recently in 1970. He formed the Liberty Union Party the following year as an antiwar formation to the left of the state Democratic Party, attempting to capitalize on the protest movement of the middle class that was then at its height.

The party, although tiny and politically amorphous, found a certain response in 1970s Vermont. The state was changing significantly, with an influx of new residents, most from New York City and other east coast metropolitan centers, attracted by the prospect escaping the tensions of the cities for life in a rural area only short distance away. Sanders was himself part of this “hippie invasion,” as some called it: shortly after graduating from the University of Chicago, he bought a summer home in Middlesex, a small town in Central Vermont, before leaving Brooklyn for Vermont entirely in the tumultuous year 1968. “I liked nature, I wanted to live in the country,” he later explained. “I had absolutely no intention of becoming involved in politics.”
The Liberty Union Party, like countless other middle-class organizations, had no coherent political program or perspective outside of a vague commitment to social reform, which it was pleased to call “socialism.” As the Boston Globe put it in 1976, “there were nearly as many opinions as there were [party members].” Its political “accomplishments,” aside from attracting enough votes to quality for major party status, consisted of symbolic fig leafs from local government, such as the holding of hearings on utility rate increases and placing items on the agenda of various town hall meetings asking the state to consider nationalizing the state's electric utilities.

In the end, the party collapsed in the mid-70s, a victim of the demise of the anti-war movement, which had a broad demoralizing effect on the middle class radical milieu. Sanders, speaking to the Globe shortly after leaving the party, expressed both the ennui and political narrowness of this outlook:
“'I have done as much as I can,' said Sanders, who volunteered that he is an admirer of Fidel Castro. 'My feeling is that I had remained we'd have gotten just as many votes. But if I can't see growth …' His voice trails off and he shrugs.'”

Sanders ran for public office again in 1981, this time as an independent, for mayor of Burlington, the largest city in Vermont with around 37,000 residents at the time. This time, he jettisoned his former association with the “socialist” politics of the Liberty Union Party in order to avoid antagonizing the city's business interests.
Although he continued to be routinely described in the press as an “avowed socialist,” he did not portray himself as such during the campaign, preferring instead the more amorphous term “radical,” and his opponent, Democratic incumbent Gordon Pacquette, declined to make an issue of it. “I've stayed away from calling myself a socialist because I did not want to spend half my life explaining that I did not believe in the Soviet Union or in concentration camps,” Sanders explained at the time.

Sanders was so successful in achieving a measure of establishment respectability that he even received the endorsement of the Burlington police union, which supported Reagan in the 1980 elections. “He seemed to have some new ideas for some of this city's old problems, like juvenile delinquency,” union president Joseph Crepeau explained.

After winning the race by a mere 10 votes, Sanders set to work reassuring the city's business community. “I'm not going to war with the city's financial and business community and I know that there is little I can do from City Hall to accomplish my dreams for society,” Sanders proclaimed. As the New York Times observed, “Sanders undertook ambitious downtown revitalization projects and courted evil capitalist entities known as 'businesses.' He balanced budgets. His administration sued the local cable franchise and won reduced rates for customers. He drew a minor-league baseball team to town, the Vermont Reds (named for the Cincinnatis, not the Commies).”

Sanders also won praise for his auditing of the city's pension plan for the first time in three decades, and initiated a $100 million redevelopment project of the city's waterfront, opposed by tenants' organizations in the surrounding neighborhood, funded by a combination of federal grants and private investors.
At the same time as he was wooing Burlington business with his fiscal responsibility, enabling him to win three additional two year terms as mayor, Sanders shored up his credentials among petty bourgeois radicals with largely symbolic measures. He traveled to the Soviet Union and Cuba on good-will trips, invited members of the Irish Republican Army to City Hall, and spoke out in favor of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He pursued sister-city status for Burlington with a coastal town in Nicaragua and the Soviet city of Yaroslavl.
When Burlington business interests and radical posturing came into conflict, Sanders came down unhesitatingly on the side his bread was buttered on. One former supporter, in a recent letter to socialistworker.org, describes how Central American solidarity activists picketed the General Electric factory in Burlington that manufactured machineguns used in military helicopters against peasant guerrillas: “I vividly remember Bernie standing arms-folded alongside the right-wing union officials from the factory and the Burlington Police Department as we were being arrested. He falsely insinuated that we were ‘anti-worker,’ and he refused to have any serious political dialogue with us activists.”

In 1990 Sanders ran for the House of Representatives, defeating an incumbent Republican and a Democrat in a three-way race. During congressional deliberations over authorizing the first Gulf War, Sanders declared his support for sanctions, diplomatic pressure and even the use of US forces to “pressure” Iraq into submission, while stopping, along with most congressional Democrats, just short of voting for the actual war. This caveat was dropped in 1993, when Sanders voted for US intervention in Somalia. Sanders then voted for the NATO air war against Serbia in 1999.

This embrace of “human rights” imperialism was part of a worldwide phenomenon among layers formerly associated with the student and middle class radicalism of the 1960s and early 1970s. Especially following the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991, these layers moved rapidly towards an accommodation with imperialism.

The NATO interventions in the Balkans in particular were a turning point in this respect, beginning with the bombing of Serb positions in Bosnia, the dispatch of UN peacekeeping troops, and then the 1999 war over Kosovo. The German Green Party, which carried out savage austerity measures as part of the “Red Green” coalition at the end of the decade, threw its support for German participation in the NATO war against Serbia, the first foreign deployment of the German army since the end of World War II, under the guise of “human rights.” Sanders followed a similar path. (His older brother Larry, who emigrated to Great Britain, ran as a candidate of the British Greens in the 2015 parliamentary elections).

Sanders voted in 2001 for the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the congressional resolution that was the basis of George Bush’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the launching of the “war on terror,” and which is still cited by Barack Obama as the legal justification for drone-missile assassinations in Pakistan, Yemen and other countries. He regularly voted for military appropriations bills, required to fund the ongoing war in Iraq Sanders claimed to oppose.

In the sphere of world trade, Sanders masks a strident chauvinism with “human rights” rhetoric, particularly with respect to China. In 1992 he co-sponsored a bill, first proposed by Nancy Pelosi, and later vetoed by George H.W. Bush, attempting to restrict the trade status of China due to its human rights record. As always, the supreme “human right” was the right of American corporations to scour the globe in source of profit; one of the benchmarks that China would have been required to meet was to provide “United States exporters fair access to Chinese markets, including lowering tariffs, removing nontariff barriers, and increasing the purchase of United States goods and services.”

Sanders' stance on immigration is entirely in line with right-wing efforts to scapegoat millions of impoverished and exploited Hispanic workers for the falling living standards of American working class. He has repeatedly introduced bills in Congress calling for the suspension of the federal visa program under the guise of protecting American jobs. For his efforts, he has earned the admiration of noted anti-immigrant racist and talk show host Lou Dobbs, who called him “one of the few straight talkers in Congress.”

On the massive NSA spying first revealed by Edward Snowden, Sanders has staked out a position virtually indistinguishable from the public position of Barack Obama, “welcoming” the opportunity to “discuss” government spying while demanding that Snowden be punished for revealing it. “The information disclosed by Edward Snowden has been extremely important,” Sanders said in early 2014. "On the other hand, there is no debate that Mr. Snowden violated an oath and committed a crime,” for which he called only for a “lenient” sentence. Last July, Sanders co-sponsored the Obama-supported USA FREEDOM Act in the Senate, which would regularize NSA spying under the guise of regulating it.

For some 25 years, the only thing distinguishing Sanders from garden-variety liberal Democrats in the House and Senate was the “independent” label he espoused. One survey of his voting record in the House in the 1990s noted that he was more Catholic than the Pope: he voted more consistently with the Democratic caucus than the Democratic leader in the House at the time, Richard Gephardt.

The decision by Sanders to seek the Democratic Party nomination for president is the culmination of a protracted process over four decades, during which Sanders, despite never formally belonging to the Democratic Party, never ventured beyond what passes for the party's “left” flank, using the term “socialist” only to suggest an illusory difference with his (infrequent) Democratic Party challengers.
His role in the campaign will be use his reputation as a politician of the “left” to disguise the ever more right-wing orientation of the Democratic Party: its abandonment of even a nominal commitment to social reform, its embrace of war, assassination, mass surveillance and an increasingly dictatorial role for the American imperialist state, both internationally and at home.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/05/15/sand-m15.html

Vermont senator pushes restrictions against foreign workers

The reactionary politics of independent “socialist” Bernie Sanders
By Jerry White
11 February 2009

Last week the US Senate passed an amendment to the economic stimulus package, which would restrict foreign workers from being hired by banks receiving federal bailout money. The measure was co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont who describes himself as a “democratic socialist.”

Introducing the amendment on the Senate floor, Sanders made pseudo-populist denunciations of Wall Street while claiming that American workers were losing their jobs because of the import of tens of thousands of workers from China, India and other countries. Sanders said Wall Street banks had laid off 100,000 workers in the last three months of 2008 and “added insult to injury” by requesting 21,000 H-1B visas to hire foreign workers.

Sanders and the co-author of the amendment, Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, originally sought a one-year suspension of the Labor Department’s visa program—which allows employers to recruit highly skilled workers from overseas—for banks receiving Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money. The measure that was passed limits hiring for two-years and also makes it more difficult for foreign workers already in the US to extend their work permits.

The entire issue has been largely concocted and is being cynically used by the Senate Democrats and Republicans to divert public anger over mounting unemployment and their preparation to hand over trillions more to bail out the banks.
According to the Associated Press, in 2008 banks receiving TARP money only made 4,163 requests for H-1B visas, and the actual number of foreign workers recruited was “likely a fraction” of this figure because the government only grants 65,000 such visas to all US employers each year. One study showed that Bank of America, for example, hired only 66 such employees in 2007—or 0.03 percent of its 210,000-member workforce.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) denounced the measure as a “disturbing step backwards,” which “creates a climate of jingoistic divisiveness.”

This is not the first time Sanders has played the nationalist card. In 2007 he and Grassley co-sponsored a similar bill calling for the suspension of the visa program for any American company announcing mass layoffs.

While posturing as a “socialist” and supporter of American workers, Sanders has cultivated close ties with fascistic types, including CNN talk show host Lou Dobbs, who calls Sanders “one of the few straight talkers in Congress.”

In June 2007 Sanders appeared on Dobbs’ show to denounce changes in the immigration law, which were opposed by the right wing because it allowed for the eventual legalization of undocumented workers and an expansion of the government’s “guest worker” program. Sanders responded to Dobbs, saying, “You’re right. The money interests are selling out American workers and our entire country.” He added, “If poverty is increasing and wages are going down, I don’t know why we need millions of people coming into this country as guest workers.”

During the debate over normalizing trade relations with China, Sanders joined union bureaucrats, including Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, and former Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan to oppose the trade deal. In a December 2004 op-ed piece written for the Washington Times, Sanders denounced Microsoft and other “corporate turncoats and their enablers in government,” who were turning their backs on “the land of the free and the home of the brave” by outsourcing to China.

“As the greatest democracy on Earth,” he continued, “we must ask why American companies are turning communist China into the new superpower of the 21st century? While Microsoft is ’saving a dollar,’ it is helping undermine our economic and military security by gutting our manufacturing and technological infrastructure, and moving it lock, stock, and barrel to one of our major international rivals.”

Explaining his alliance with such reactionary forces, Sanders told the Nation magazine that traditional politics has become obsolete. “In the sense that we are trying to develop left-right coalitions, we are also trying to redefine American politics.” Alliances over trade, health care and other economic issues, he said, presented an opportunity to “redefine the ‘normal’ paradigm that a lot of the corporate media create when they talk about liberal and conservative.”

Sanders’ former communications director David Sirota elaborated on this reactionary outlook in an article called, “The Upside of Nationalism,” in April 2008. Writing in the liberal magazine In These Times, the Democratic Party strategist argued that growing anger over job losses and trade issues had shifted American politics fundamentally, allowing “progressives to use nationalism for our economic agenda.”

All of this is reactionary hokum. The promotion of nationalism, far from advancing the economic and political interests of the working class, only serves to block its struggles and, in the name of “national unity,” subordinate working people to the demands of corporate America and the government for ever greater sacrifices.

The dangers of such pseudo-populist nationalism can be seen in England where the trade unions organized strikes, under the banner of “British jobs for British workers,” against Italian and Portuguese contract workers at the Lincolnshire oil refinery—an action that won the support of the extreme right British National Front.

The logic of economic nationalism—which pits American workers against their brothers and sisters internationally—is war. Through the medium of the Obama administration, a layer of ex-radicals are making their peace with American imperialism and seeking to conceal its predatory aims with sugar coated phrases about “progressive patriotism,” the headline of a recent lead editorial in the Nation magazine.

In the case of Sanders, the 68-year-old former anti-war protester made his peace with US capitalism long ago. First elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont in 1981, under the slogan, “Burlington not for sale,” Sanders quickly established close ties with prominent Republicans and big business interests in the city. Tenants associations opposed his plans for the development of the waterfront district, arguing that he was acting on behalf of luxury housing and hotel developers who were trying to gentrify working class neighborhoods.

In 1990 he won the first of eight terms in the US House of Representatives. Over the next 16 years the so-called “independent” voted with the Democrats 98 percent of the time, including support for Bill Clinton’s war against Serbia in 1999, the congressional resolution authorizing Bush to launch war against any country after the September 11, 2001 attacks and for every appropriation bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For this reason, his 2005-06 race for US Senator received the backing and financial support of the Democratic Party establishment, including New York Senator Chuck Schumer and Barack Obama who traveled to Vermont to personally campaign for Sanders, who appeared on the Democratic Party’s primary ballot.

With the economic situation worsening each day and the Obama administration quickly dispelling illusions that he will provide any relief, other than to Wall Street, the Democratic Party and its allies are seeking to whip up American-first nationalism to pre-empt the eruption of mass struggles, which will inevitably pit the working class against the profit system and the two parties that defend it.

Both houses of Congress have sought to insert “Buy American” clauses into the stimulus package, which mandates the use of American iron and steel and domestically manufactured goods. This was only toned down last week, after severe warnings from the European Union and Canada, as well as major US exporters, that the protectionist measure could provoke a trade war and a more rapid descent into a global depression.

There is deep and legitimate concern over the ongoing destruction of jobs. The only program that can defend the working class, however, is one that begins from the standpoint of the international unity of the working class and the need for a common struggle against the bankrupt capitalist system. In the US, this means organizing the working class in a political struggle against the Democratic Party, on the basis of a genuine socialist program that places the banks and the major branches of the economy under the public and democratic control of working people.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/02/sand-f11.html

Financial Transaction Tax, of course! Brilliant. Capitalism is saved.

You guys were supposed to respond with a chorus of Hallelujahs. Apostates.

You guys were supposed to respond with a chorus of Hallelujahs. Apostates.

Don't ya know? We are the great unwashed! We aren't worthy! We're (shutter) workers. Okay, and apostates.

Bernie gives ’em hell on CNBC
by worker

Tue May 26, 2015 at 09:38 AM PDT

byquince

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/05/26/1387851/-Bernie-gives-em-hell-on-CNBC

Bernie Sanders continued bringing the truth to the media world on CNBC's John Harwood.

“I think it’s sick, and I think these people are so greedy. They’re so out of touch with reality, and they think they own the world, and the idea that me or anybody else are challenging them and saying maybe, just maybe, there’s something wrong with 99% of all new income going to the top 1%. Oh, this is Hitlerism to suggest that? What a disgusting remark. If you’ve seen a massive transfer of wealth from the middle-class to the top one ten of one percent, in our view, you ought to transfer that back. When radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, I think the highest marginal tax rate was ninety percent or something like that.”

Let me answer it this way, John. I think there is obviously an enormously important role for the free market and for entrepreneurial activity. I worry how free the free market is. In sector after sector, you have a small number of companies controlling a large part of the sector.Certainly, in my view, the major banks should be broken up. We want entrepreneurs and private businesses to create wealth. No problem. But what we're living in now is what I would call—what Pope Francis calls—a casino-type capitalism, which is out of control, where the people on top have lost any sense of responsibility for the rest of the society. Where it's just "It's all me. It's all me. And to heck with anybody else." I want to see the result of that wealth go to the broad middle class of this country and not just to a handful of people.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What a pathetic excuse for a socialists, can't say 'working class', says entrepreneurs create wealth...He is in fact the perfect candidate for the indignados.

What a pathetic excuse for a socialists, can't say 'working class', says entrepreneurs create wealth...He is in fact the perfect candidate for the indignados.

Turns my fucking stomach. I am gonna scream the next time anyone calls this asshole a "socialist".

This is What Happens When We Follow the Democrat Sheepdog. And What Can Happen If We Don't
Submitted by Bruce A. Dixon on Wed, 06/03/2015 - 01:51

http://blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/styles/image-400x300/public/hillarys-pocket.jpg?itok=-DYWaFaN

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
It's time for a realistic plan to lift left electoral choices out of the “lesser of two evils” dilemma. The tools and opportunity to escape this perennial trap are here, but only if activists turn their backs on the lure of sheepdog Bernie Sanders and his corporate shepherds Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee.

This is What Happens When We Follow the Democrat Sheepdog. And What Can Happen If We Don't
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Last month I called Bernie Sanders' Democratic party primary run “sheepdogging” my term for a move the national Democratic party seems to execute every presidential primary season when there's no incumbent White House Democrat. The job of the sheepdog candidate is to herd leftish voters and activists back into the Democratic party one more time by giving perhaps sincere but limited and ineffectual voice to some of their issues.

Of course every sheepdog candidate since Jesse Jackson in '84 and 88 always folds his tent at the end of primary season to support the main corporate stooge Democrat for the November election. The hopeful word is always that the defeated sheepdog remains firmly committed to pushing the Democratic nominee leftward, both on the campaign trail and even more hopefully in the White House. But this never happens either. Losing Democratic nominees Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry adopted none of the positions of their sheepdog primary opponents on peace or climate change or mass transit or housing or racial and economic justice, and Democratic winners Clinton and Obama ignored them in the White House as well.

Even though the sheepdog candidates are never able push their opponents leftward, they appear to do the corporate-run Democratic party a priceless favor. Their doomed campaigns ending in endorsement of the party's nominees serve to firmly attach the leftish brands of the losing sheepdogs to the Democratic party, burnishing its populist, peace and leftish credentials for Democrats.

This isn't just my theory. Josh Marshall of Talking Points memo points out that the Democratic National Committee, the executive body and corporate pocket of the Democratic party, is featuring Bernie Sanders on its party fundraising emails as if, he says, Bernie had been designated the safe opposition candidate in some banana . Her decades of loyalty to the one percent may well put Hillary and her party more in need of protective leftish coloration than previous Democratic presidential nominees. The losing sheepdog campaigns, ending in the inevitable support for Hillary lend the corporate Democrat an air of populist legitimacy. DNC honchos know well that earnest leftists who make phone calls and knock on doors for Bernie Sanders are not building anything they can walk out of the party with and throw behind some other candidate when Bernie loses the nomination. Those people they recruit with Bernie's empty talk about “a political revolution” will be around for November, Ready For Hillary.

There really ought to be more viable choices than herding and being herded by Bernie and his friends back to the lesser of two evils corral, or staying home in futile disgust. And there is.

Later this month, Jill Stein will declare her candidacy for the Green Party's 2016 presidential nomination. Like Democrats and Republicans, the Greens won't nominate till the summer of 2016, but any serious campaign is already raising money and making plans. For the Greens, this year's big plan is likely to have two steps:

Step one is a nationwide ballot access drive to overcome the unjust laws Democrats and Republicans have laid in place to keep competition, especially from left parties, off the ballot. To put the presidential candidate of a party other than Republican or Democrat on the ballot in Georgia for instance, where you find the second largest concentration of African descended people in North America, it takes a minimum of 50,000 petition signatures spread over more than 50 of the state's counties. In North Carolina, with a smaller population it takes about 90,000. In Pennsylvania it's 40,000, in Indiana 22,000, in Illinois about 25,000, in Missouri and Oklahoma 10,000 apiece, and similar numbers in Nevada, Tennessee, Michigan and other states where left parties have been barred from the ballot for decades.

Step two, with local Green Party candidates on the ballot in every or nearly every state is achieving a minimum statewide vote of one or two percent in order to fulfill the legal requirements, which differ slightly from state to state. This creates for the first time the opportunity for local candidates to run for sheriff, for county commissioner, for state rep or other local office as something other than a Democrat or a Republican.

Why is this important? Let's try a thought experiment: Imagine you're opposed to mass incarceration, so you want to run for county sheriff. Sheriffs in every county are generally in charge of the county jail. Let's suppose you run as a Democrat because, you tell yourself, most of the folks affected by mass incarceration identify as Democrats. And let's suppose you win. As sheriff the first three things you'll want to do is make certain that every inmate placed in your care has decent food and medical care, and that genuine programs of educational uplift and self-improvement are available. And that's just a start --- you might want to find ways to delay or halt evictions, to ensure that your jail population goes down instead of up, and refuse to accept or use confiscated property, funds and assets.

This will make you plenty of enemies among existing Democratic elected officials who along with their Republican colleagues built and maintained the system of mass black incarceration. While they will not hesitate to denounce you, you might want to think twice about returning the favor. They accept funds from wealthy donors and powerful interest groups like the Fraternal Order of Police, to name just one. Other elected Democrats are quite likely to use campaign funds from corporate donors to run somebody against you in a Democratic primary election, instead of spending that money to unseat a Republican somewhere.

And if you're an elected Democrat you've got to hold your tongue and not criticize people higher up on the ticket than you if they're Democrats. When Chokwe Lumumba was mayor of Jackson, Mississippi he pointedly did NOT criticize the policies of Barack Hussein Obama, even though the president was shredding public education around the country and murdering innocents with drones around the world, breaking promises about the Patriot Act, and more. Mayor Lumumba didn't have anything bad to say about the myriad abuses and tyrannies of Department of Homeland Security, perhaps because prominent Mississippi Democrat Bernie Thompson was the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee. He didn't dare, that's part of the bargain he apparently struck, the bargain struck by all elected Democrats. One only criticizes Republicans and their works, not Democrats, and never for the stuff like gentrification, militarism and privatization, to name just three areas upon which elected Democrats and Republicans pretty much agree.

Ride with Bernie, and there is no way out of that bargain. But get one-time statewide party ballot access followed by that one or two percent in November 2016 and candidates from local parties run by local residents, not by corporate donors and fixers, can run for these offices. That will be an enormous breakthrough, which will potentially transform the electoral landscape.

This is the likely Green organizing plan for 2015 and 2016. It's not focused on trying to win the 2016 presidential election. It's about fighting and winning meaningful ballot access in every state, including those like Georgia and North Carolina where no left party candidate has made the statewide ballot as such in decades, and opening up a crack in the duopoly that will make the vote meaningful instead of meaningless. It's a vision, a strategy that looks well beyond the current election cycle and aims to build the foundation to use the vote to fight for the interests of the people in ways which are utterly impossible inside the Democratic party.

By contrast, a vote for Bernie Sanders will neither elect an anti-corporate, anti mass incarceration candidate any time soon. (Bernie can't seem to make his lips say “mass incarceration” anyway --- Hillary just learned the phrase a few weeks back and has said it more times in a month than Bernie has in his 23 years in Congress.) A vote or a donation, or a week of labor for Bernie is short sighted because it won't help build anything independent inside the Democratic party, or anything that will be there after Bernie folds his tent this time next year. This is where the sheepdog wants to lead. We have to go somewhere else.

The organizing action and the momentum toward real change, should the Greens adopt this strategy, isn't with Democrats. It'll be with those who ride and who run Green, those who organize Green and those who work with them. Jill Stein is expected to make her official announcement in about two weeks. It should be clear by then whether the Greens are leaning forward into creating breakthroughs in ballot access that will make the vote mean something again.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party. Contact him at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

http://blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-in-hillarys-pocket

Dixon is in too much a hurry to 'do something' in supporting the Greens with the purpose of ballot access. They are thoroughly booj and would support another stumbling block.

Dixon is in too much a hurry to 'do something' in supporting the Greens with the purpose of ballot access. They are thoroughly booj and would support another stumbling block.

That is true. However, the creation of a "viable", "long-term" third party, with offices at all levels from city to national might just break the logjam. If working class folks can see that some other party besides the two-which-are-one party can be successful, then party building along class lines might be facilitated. I know, I know, "A lot of mights and maybes in there." And breaking the stranglehold of the two parties is not the real problem - the bourgeoisie nature of the politics is the problem. I would like to pull the rug out from under the Democrats, though...

That is true. However, the creation of a "viable", "long-term" third party, with offices at all levels from city to national might just break the logjam. If working class folks can see that some other party besides the two-which-are-one party can be successful, then party building along class lines might be facilitated. I know, I know, "A lot of mights and maybes in there." And breaking the stranglehold of the two parties is not the real problem - the bourgeoisie nature of the politics is the problem. I would like to pull the rug out from under the Democrats, though...

Mebbe I'm being too 'purist', but I can't see the Greens being helpful here, nor successful, despite some efforts they remain an upper class party who if anything discourage ecological thinking among the masses with their class arrogance. They will always be seen as left of the Dems but for no good reason. Think of them as the outer ring of 'sheepdogs'. Come election day most of thier votes will be ceded to the Dems citing 'realism'.

According to these posts any leftist who refuses to support Bernie is an anarchists, running dog for the capitalists. Real communists support Bernie.....


New post on Houston Communist Party

6010
by worker

By A. Shaw
"Finally, they [that is, Communists] labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries," Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto.
Hare brained elements of the U.S. left can not understand this principle of class struggle, even if their lives depended on it.
These hare brains transform the principle, cited above, into Communists labor for union and agreement with proletarian democratic parties of all countries or Communists labor for union and agreement with petty bourgeois democratic parties of all countries
This principle, as Marx and Engels formulated it, says Communists labor for union and agreement with democratic parties of all countries.
Marx and Engels did not place class or nationality limitations on the principle. So, the priniciple applies to all democratic parties of all countries.
The hare brained element of the U.S. left argues that Marx and Engels did not intend that Communists labor for agreement between proletarian democratic parties and bourgeois democratic parties.
The FBI dominates the hare brained element of the U.S. left. The FBI imposes its 17th and 18th century bourgeois nonsense and foolishness, holding that democratic parties must not agree on . anything.
In other words, the CP and DP today should never struggle for common goals if any common goals exist.
At any given political situation or moment, there may be 1000 or more issues outstanding among democratic parties.
For a union or agreement to exist, there must be common ground on at least 1 issue between 2 democratic parties.
The 2 parties need not agree on the other 999 issues. Such unions and agreements are often called "tactical alliances" which are essential in proletarian as well as bourgeois politics.
In accordance with FBI instructions, most hare brained leftists in the USA care only about intriguing and splitting their own party. To the hare brains, the political struggle is within the party, not against the bourgeoisie outside of party.
Of course, one split is followed by another split, so on and so forth.
Thus, any idea of agreement between democratic parties, as the Manifesto advocates, seems insane or brutish to hare brains.
Again, to hare brains, the only things that count are intrigue and splits.
worker | June 5, 2015 at 9:14 pm | Categories: Analysis, Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, Party Voices, political struggle | URL: http://wp.me/pKlsL-1yW




New post on Houston Communist Party

6013
by worker

By A. Shaw
Marx, Fidel, Engels, Ho, and Lenin all warned us that anarchism assumes many forms.
Here's one of those forms.
"The sheepdog is a presidential candidate running ostensibly to the left of the establishment Democrat to whom the billionaires will award the nomination. Sheepdogs are herders, and the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party, either staying home or trying to build something outside the two party box," Bruce A. Dixon, a running dog of imperialism, barks.
The content of Anarchism, present in all of its forms, is abstention from political struggle or other activity that equates with abstention.
SHEEPDOG AND RUNNING DOG
Using the same words, wit, erudition, and gestures, Bernie Sanders does today what he has done for 40 years.
Imperial running dog Bruce A. Dixon doesn't clarify whether Bernie was a sheepdog during the last 40 years before he became a presidential candidate or whether Bernie during the last 40 years was left or only "ostensibly left."
<If Bernie was a sheepdog 40 years before he became a presidential candidate, then presumably his presidential candidacy has nothing to do with sheepdogging.>
If Bernie wasn't a sheepdog 40 years before he became a presidential candidate, then presumably his candidacy alone accounts for these false accusations of sheepdogging.
So what running dog Dixon is really saying is Bernie is an alleged sheepdog solely because Bernie is running against Hillary Clinton.
Thus, Dixon is a running dog of Hillary, a notorious U.S. imperialist.
INTO THE DEMOCRATIC FOLD OR INTO THE ANARCHIST FOLD

The running dog says " the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold."
Dixon, the running dog of imperialism, seems to understand that many liberals and leftists will never campaign or vote for Hillary Clinton. So, realizing he can't get their vote or support, running dog urges these liberals and leftists not to vote at all or to vote for a candidate who aims to lose.
An example of a candidate who aims to lose is somebody running for a party that is not qualified to be on the presidential ballot in at least half of the states of the USA, thus, making it impossible to win in either popular vote or the votes of the electoral college.
Of all the third parties qualified to be on the presidential ballot somewhere, the Green Party is the most widely qualified.
The Green Party has qualified to be on the ballot in only 21 states and Washington DC.
Running dogs are everywhere today barking "Vote for the candidate who aims to lose.".
This is anarchist trash.
Bernie however aims to win.
BUILD SOMETHING OUTSIDE THE TWO PARTY BOX
Why wait until a presidential election year to build something outside the two party box.
Get your party that's outside the box qualified in most or all of the states before the presidential election year.
Stop telling lies and perpetrating electoral fraud of the electorate by saying that candidates who aim to lose and who must lose are winners or going to be winners.
worker | June 5, 2015 at 9:20 pm | Categories: Analysis, Bernie Sanders, political struggle | URL: http://wp.me/pKlsL-1yZ

In-fucking-credible.

According to these posts any leftist who refuses to support Brenie is an anarchists, running dog for the capitalists. Real communists support Bernie.....





In-fucking-credible.

So this communist stalwart is saying the "Democrat Party" is democratic? How is it any more or less democratic than the Republic Party? Marx wasn't talking about joining forces with the hardest-core bourgeois party in existence. Lenin said somewhere, I read it just the other day, (paraphrasing) that of course 'we' support democratic reforms in any government, because we are the overwhelming majority and we will work to upend bourgeois dominance in anyway available. I think our communist stalwart, here, lacks any kind of analysis of current conditions. He simply lifts words from Marx that can be forced into some sort of philistine justifications of selling out. "Hey, Marx said, we should join in 'union and agreement of the democratic parties!' The Democrats have "democratic" in their name! So they must be 'democratic'!" Putz...

So this communist stalwart is saying the "Democrat Party" is democratic? How is it any more or less democratic than the Republic Party? Marx wasn't talking about joining forces with the hardest-core bourgeois party in existence. Lenin said somewhere, I read it just the other day, (paraphrasing) that of course 'we' support democratic reforms in any government, because we are the overwhelming majority and we will work to upend bourgeois dominance in anyway available. I think our communist stalwart, here, lacks any kind of analysis of current conditions. He simply lifts words from Marx that can be forced into some sort of philistine justifications of selling out. "Hey, Marx said, we should join in 'union and agreement of the democratic parties!' The Democrats have "democratic" in their name! So they must be 'democratic'!" Putz...

I'm not exactly sure how/when Houston was compromised but they are obviously "under different management". They are under pressure because they gotta convince everybody the hoped-for new boss ain't the same as the old boss (who they followed slavishly). Eventually, if they run out of policy points they probably start giving anatomy lessons.

This is so fucking wrong. From the Houston Party...



The army waits
by worker

By A. Shaw

"It’ll take an army to change Washington," says Bernie Sanders.
After all, Washington has its own army which is huge, vicious, well-trained, armed with state of the art political weapons, savage, and experienced in all forms of poltical struggle.
Long ago, Marx and Engels in the Manifesto adopted a military analogy for political struggle.
They argued that the working class must be armed with "weapons" of a political nature.
"The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians," the Manifesto says.
So, in other words, the workers wield political weapons that the bourgeoisie forges. So, the workers get these weapons from the bourgeoisie. In our situation today, the DP, one of two old bourgeois parties, politically represents the bourgeoisie which still today forges political weapons, used in the art of political campaigning.
Let's look at another reference in the Manifesto to political weapons.
"The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie," the Manifesto says.
Waging many political struggles, the bourgeoisie appeals to the proletariat for help. Thus, the bourgeoisie drags the proletariat into the political arena. The bourgeoisie therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.
Clearly, the weapons are of a type suitable for the political arena.
Clearly, the weapons are "elements of political and general education."
Anarchist and other leftist crackpots argue that the "weapons" are cannon balls, atomic bombs, sharp knifes, lethal biological agents, clubs, jet fighters, tanks, etc., etc., and etc.
These droppings left by anarchists and crackpots is not worthy of comment.
When we look at political revolution happening under democratic conditions from point of view of cause and effect, we see cause as a unity and struggle between necessary and sufficient conditions
We see the proletariat as the necessary condition for a proletarian revolution. By necessary condition we mean a condition which by its absence stops the effect [revolution] from happening. In other words, the effect -- i.e., the revolution -- never happens when the necessary condition [the proletariat] isn't, in some significant way, present.
But the mere presence of the necessary condition [the proletariat] does not guarantee that the effect [the revolution] happens. All we can expect when the necessary condition alone is present is that effect will either happen or it won't happen.
The effect always happens upon the union or unity of necessary [the proletariat] and sufficient [the weapons] conditions.
So, the effect doesn't happen in the solitary presence of the sufficient condition [the weapons] -- that is, absent the necessary condition.
Again, cause and effect works only within a given range or field or certain limits, outside of these limits something else goes on. In our case, this range or field or limits is the existence of a democratic state, such as the current U.S. regime. We should be mindful that in March 2009 former US Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said "U.S. democracy is degenerating into a dictatorship." Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Al Gore have said things that are very similar to O'Connor's remark.
If we don't watch out, we may lose our field.
Historically, leaders of the working class and the rest of the masses have tried to substitute bullshit for weapons, as understood in the Marxist sense as "elements of political and general education" suitable for use in the political area. For over two centuries, the leaders of the working class in the USA have experimented with every type of bullshit, but bullshit regardless of its type doesn't produce revolution.
Rather, bullshit suppresses revolution.
Under democratic conditions, the proletariat, not just the failed "leaders" of the proletariat, wants "weapons"-- that is, wants to know how to win elections. The leaders alone can't be trusted with the weapons. The proletariat itself must ... must ... must have them.
Let us never again forget the first step by the working class, as we have so far forgotten for 200 years
"The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy," the Manifesto says.
Without weapons, in the Marxist sense, the working class can't be "raised."
Without weapons the working class cannot "win the battle for democracy."
Without weapons we can't take even the "first step."
Where are those damn weapons?
The army waits.


A. Shaw, Bernie Sanders is no revolutionary. Winning 'the battle of democracy' is not winning the US presidential election. What pathetic opportunism.

This is so fucking wrong. From the Houston Party...



A. Shaw, Bernie Sanders is no revolutionary. Winning 'the battle of democracy' is not winning the US presidential election. What pathetic opportunism.

It just gets worse and worse. A rep from the KKE would make Mr. Shaw shit himself on sight.

It just gets worse and worse. A rep from the KKE would make Mr. Shaw shit himself on sight.

Just the thought of such an encounter probably gave him a hiatal hernia.

Just the thought of such an encounter probably gave him a hiatal hernia.

Dunno, indominatable opportunism is Shaw's armor. Here Shaw schools us on the true meaning of the Communist Manifesto...



WITH OR WITHOUT WEAPONS? THAT’S THE QUESTION!
by worker

By A. Shaw
Around 1848, two of the world's greatest revolutionaries -- Marx and Engels -- wrote in the Manifesto
"In all these battles, it [the bourgeoisie] sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie,” the Manifesto says.
Let's be specific about these "elements of political and general education."
Let's be specific about these "weapons."?
(1) What are these elements and weapons?
(2) Where are they?
(3) Do they work ?
As for the question (3): Do they work?
Well, the Tea Party and its predecessors over the last two decades armed several hundred thousand reactionaries, lunatics, and crackpots with these weapons. Today, this political force or mass movement or electoral apparatus is a powerful force in the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against the working class and against the rest of the masses.
So, it seems these elements and weapons work.
As for the question (2), Where are they?
Everywhere in the USA -- bookstores, Ebay, libraries, etc. An excellent source are bookstores operated GOP county organizations. The county organizations of the DP are usually worthless. These elements and weapons are often found in campaign manuals or books on how to win elections.. Obviously, the readers or students of campaign manuals should as soon as possible supplement their reading and studies with experience in actual campaigns.
The Bernie Sanders' campaign, still in its early stages, is a splendid resource to supplement one's self-training.
Lenin, the great Russian revolutionary, says "It takes years to train oneself to be a professional revolutionary."
To be sure, the Koch brothers, the degenerate U.S. billionaires, say "It takes years to train oneself to be a professional reactionary."
One highly recommended text is Ronald Faucheux's Winning Elections: Political Campaign Management.
So, it seems the elements and weapons are everywhere, largely abandoned and ignored, especially
by liberals and leftists who prefer to dine on and to digest the foul-looking and foul-smelling bullshit of their failed leaders and idols.
As for the question (1): What are these elements and weapons?
The elements and weapons that farsighted Marx and Engel saw in the middle of the 19th century are merely fields of electoral specialization in which a liberal or leftist can train oneself to be professional or a professional amateur or professional nincompoop.
Among others, these fields of electoral specialization include planning and budgeting, fundraising, targeting, voter contact, free media, paid media, candidate activity and development, opposition research, volunteers, GOTV, anti-voter fraud, etc.
The Tea Party has trained hundred of thousands of its supporters to be real good or even professional in these fields or in the use of these weapons. These highly trained and experienced reactionaries easily prevail over liberal and especially leftist nincompoops.
Generally, well trained reactionaries are "professionals" based on their level of political skill, not thier dependence on their political skills as the only or a major source of income. But increasingly, these "professionals" trained by Tea Bags are getting multi-million dollar fees for a few months work.
Cuban revolutionaries are training and providing opportunities for self-training for Latin American and Caribbean revolutionaries. The implied precondition of being a revolutionary is a serious obstacle to the participation of US liberals and leftists in these Cuban political programs.
So, it seems that weapons are merely electoral skills.
Obviously, if a state is not a democracy, the immediate task of the working class is not winning non-existent elections. The immediate task is then the introduction of democracy or, better still, to win the battle for democracy as Marx and Engels said in the Manifesto. By winning the battle for democracy, Marx and Engels did not mean, like many US liberals and leftists, winning the battle for the bourgeois democracy, Marx and Engels meant the battle for a proletarian democracy, a state in which workers chiefly and democratically exercise state power and in which the workers chiefly and democratically exercise power for the working class.
WEAPONS THE WORKING CLASS CAN USE TO HELP BERNIE?
The weapons that seem most available to the liberal and revolutionary sectors of the working class are volunteers and free media.
The two can creatively be forged into one. Creativity and audacity are exactly what the forging demands.
Traditionally, this is how volunteers were addressed by the campaign.
Hey volunteer,
Do you know how to knock on doors?
Do you know how to use a telephone?
Do you know how to lick a stamp?
Do you know where to buy a bucket KFC chicken?
Volunteers today should learn to respond something like this.
Hey asshole,
I'm here to learn what you do if you do anything in this campaign.
I'll do my share of the doors, telephones, stamps and chicken
But I'm here to get some fucking weapons, not to fuck arounds with assholes.
Bernie himself says this campaign is not about Bernie Sanders.
If it's not about Bernie, then for sure, it's not about your ass.
Remember this, I'm not going to take any shit from you.
In other words, the weapons are not JUST for the leaders and big wheels of the campaign.
Mass movement becomes politically independent only when the mass, among others, possesses weapons because the armed mass, which knows what the leaders know, does not depend on leaders who may be controlled by the political police, chiefly the FBI and G-2 units of the military.
A mass with weapons identifies, exposes, and isolates corrupt leaders whose treachery can cause a mass movement without weapons to collapse.
A mass with weapons is too solid to collapse.
With over 200,000 volunteers signed-in, the campaign may want establish or at least assist in the establishment of a network of two hundred or three hundred volunteer-operated websites called something like LIBERALS AND SOCIALISTS FOR BERNIE (ST. LOUIS) and LIBERALS AND SOCIALISTS FOR BERNIE (NYC) and LIBERALS AND SOCIALISTS FOR BERNIE (Chicago), so on and so forth.
The national network of "volunteer-operated" and volunteer-financed websites lifts the participating volunteers above doors, telephones, stamps, and chicken.

But the proposed operation modifies the concept of free media.
Before Obama 2008, free media meant coverage in the mainstream of the bourgeois media for which the campaign wasn't charged.
Obama 2008 added something new to the concept of free media. 2008 introduced a campaign owned and operated media providing self coverage of the campaign to the masses.
When Obama won in 2008, the sellout president-elect promptly dismantled his electoral apparatus. Obama of course knew he would sellout during his first term. So, the electoral apparatus may have been used against him in his 2012 re-election. So, he dismantled the thing as quickly and as completely as possible.
Obama is a sellout and an Uncle Tom, but he's not a fool.
2008 required a lot of creativity and audacity in regard to free media, but now 2008 is just history.
2016 demands fresh creativity and audacity.
Now, in 2015, what we find is evolving concepts of volunteer and free media forging into one.
Obviously, there are potential complications.
CONCLUSION
With weapons.

This also from Houston Party mailing.

http://www.anonymong.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/stalin-221x300.png?189db0

Talk about "class enemies". Smearing Stalin is soooo leftish.

Talk about "class enemies". Smearing Stalin is soooo leftish.

It is required for entry into ranks of opportunism, it is how the booj can identify those who are 'safe' and pliable, if not liquidationists then helpful idiots like the Trots.

Bernie gets the Markowitz seal of approval, what more do ya need?


My own view is that all sections of the left should rally the class issues facing the working people of the U.S. and also draw people to the Bernie Sanders campaign, emphasizing positively what his enemies will of course emphasize negatively, that is his description of himself over many years as a socialist

http://www.thebellforum.com/showthread.php?t=135170&p=479344#post479344

So don't pay no mind to his voting record, he says he's a socialist....

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN: Senator Sanders, I think it's fair to say and describe you as a dove, but you have also warned that you think ISIS is a dangerous and lethal operation and needs to be stopped. Tell me as you look at what's happening now, and that is that while the air assaults continue and have some effect on their targets, they don't seem to be slowing ISIS in any way. What's your next move?

SEN. BERNIE SANDERS (I), VERMONT: Well, Candy, I think the main point being made is of course ISIS is a brutal, awful, dangerous army and they have got to be defeated. But, Candy, this is not just an American problem. This is an international crisis. This is a regional crisis. And I think the people of America are getting sick and tired of the world and the region, Saudi Arabia and the other countries saying hey, we don't have to do anything about it. The American taxpayer, the American soldiers will do all the work for us.

Most people don't know is that Saudi Arabia is the fourth largest defense spender in the world, more than the U.K., more than France. They have an army which is probably seven times larger than ISIS. They have a major air force. Their country is run by a royal family worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

CROWLEY: Sure. But they have shown no sign at all that they want to go in and neither have the Jordanians although they seem a little more interested or the Turks. And so I'm just wondering since everyone agrees there needs to be ground forces of some sort that are effective, whether if those Arab nations don't step forward as you want them to do and come in on the ground, does the U.S. then pull out its air strikes? I mean, how would -- how do you handle that?

SANDERS: Well, here's -- the question that question that we have got to ask is why are the nations in the region not more actively involved? Why don't they see this as a crisis situation?

Here's the danger, Candy. If the Middle East people perceive this is the United States versus ISIS, the West versus East, Christianity versus Islam, we're going to lose that war. This is a war for the soul of Islam and the Muslim nations must be deeply involved. And to the degree that developed countries are involved, it should be the U.K., France, Germany, other countries as well.

So I worry very much, and I go out around Vermont and around the country, and people are saying, yes, we're concerned about ISIS, but we're also concerned about the collapse of the American middle class. And infrastructure...

CROWLEY: Sure.

SANDERS: ...which is falling apart. The need to create jobs in America. We can't do it alone. It has to be an international and a regional coalition.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/10/12/bernie_sanders_on_isis_this_is_a_war_for_the_soul_of_islam.html

Perhaps this post is misplaced. Perhaps it should be in the 'Philistine' thread.



Bernie Sanders ‘political revolution’
by worker

http://cpusa.org/bernie-sanders-political-revolution/

The presentation below was presented to the CPUSA National Board on June 10, 2015.

The context of the amazing outpouring and response to Bernie Sanders campaign is the uprising underway for a more just society. Across the country, pressure is mounting and social movements are building for a livable wage, to end racist attacks and police brutality, to stop fast track for TPP in the interest of jobs, the environment and democratic rights over corporate rule, to expand Scoial Security and end student debt.

Bernie Sanders is attracting thousands at each event because he presents a specific program squarely on the side of the 99%, challenging income inequality and financial domination of the country and of politics.

His campaign is shaking up the political landscape, "a political revolution,"as he says.

Bernie Sanders is getting a big response from people who are sick and tired of elections being bought by Wall St, people who have become angry and alienated from the political process, people who have been looking for a voice. His appeal is wide. Reports from grassroots house meetings and rallies in the south and mid west reveal that some Democratic leaders are on board, and some independents and Republicans are changing affiliation to support Bernie.

While all the points in his program have long had majority support in the polls, Bernie himself has said that he is stunned by the huge turnouts as he campaigns around the country. Days after he announced, the Wisconsin Democratic convention held a straw poll. Hillary Clinton was chosen by 49% and Bernie Sanders was chosen by 41% of delegates.

Soon after, the South Carolina AFL-CIO passed a resolution calling upon the national AFL CIO to endorse Bernie Sanders as the "strongest candidate articulating labor's values." The resolution says, "Labor must step up to fundamentally change the direction of American politics by refocusing on the issues of our time: growing inequality and pervasive racism; the power of concentrated wealth and its corruption of our democracy; an escalating pension and retirement security crisis, runaway military spending and a militarized foreign policy, Medicare for All, and the need for new, bold solutions to our shared problems."

In other early labor support, the UE General Executive Board endorsed Bernie Sanders. The campaign has been well received by steel worker retirees. An open letter of support from union leaders and members is being circulated on-line.

The latest endorsement comes from Neil Young, after Donald Trump had the audacity to play "Rockin in the Free World" at his campaign announcement yesterday. Neil Young's manager says use of the song was not authorized and that Young is a long-time supporter of Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders has a life-long record and relationship with labor. To create the kind of unity that can move our country forward, such a specific outreach based in his strong record is critical as well with the African American, Latino, Native American, Asian Pacific communities, women and youth.

A national campaign to popularize and build support for the Employ Young Americans Now Act introduced by Bernie Sanders (S 1506) and John Conyers (HR 2714) is a powerful link to both the Fight for 15 and Black Lives Matter. This legislation would provide $5.5 billion for states and local governments to employ 1 million youth from ages 16 to 24 years old.

"The answer to unemployment and poverty is not and cannot be the mass incarceration of young African Americans," Sanders said. "It's time to bring hope and economic opportunity to communities across the country."

The Sanders campaign is a wonderful development for 2016 and beyond in many ways.

1) The Sanders campaign can shift the dialog from the right wing and objectively boost the various initiatives underway around the country for a progressive agenda.

2) The campaign has the potential to inspire people to engage in the political process and increase voter turnout. It has the potential to help create progressive structures, campaigns and coalitions at the local level to shift the political climate.

3) It is already changing the political debate within the Democratic primary and the Democratic Party.

4) Sanders identifying as a democratic socialist opens up long-term discussion about what socialism is and could be in our country, and makes socialism respectable. It offers the possibility to deepen the discussion about socialism, third parties and political independence in and outside the Democratic Party.

All of this is a huge contribution toward the strategic electoral goal of defeating the extreme right wing. Sanders himself has been careful to emphasize he is not campaigning against Hillary Clinton (or Lincoln Chaffee or Martin O'Malley), he is campaigning to take on the corporate agenda of the Republicans and offer positive solutions.

In Vermont, where he was first elected Mayor of Burlington, Sanders always ran independent with the broadest kind of approach and coalition building and with an emphasis on issues that improve people's lives. He is elected to the U.S. Senate as an independent (last election with 72% of the vote) but caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate. He made the decision to run in the Democratic primary because he determined that he could never raise enough money to get heard otherwise in a presidential campaign given current electoral structures.

A winning approach for 2016 starts with the issues and by connecting with emerging social movements Black Lives Matter and the Fight for $15 and local campaigns and coalitions. This is a unifying approach that keeps the focus against the extreme right-wing with a positive agenda.

The Sanders campaign offers a unique opportunity to initiate committees and community conversations on the issues. The doors are wide open to organize as broadly as possible with activists and coalitions.

Campaign house parties and local events can be promoted on-line to spread the word about what Bernie Sanders stands for.

At the grass roots across the country, Bernie Sanders is not necessarily a household name. As well, the corporate media does not want this name and program to be known. Introducing who Bernie Sanders is, what positions he is running on, and the bigger significance of his campaign cam be brought to every community in a way that is inclusive of those in progressive circles who support Hillary Clinton or others.

The South Carolina AFL CIO Resolution is an example of what other organizations could also consider. and share via social media.

Building for the long-term, beyond the election, in local election districts, is an essential ingredient in the strategy to defeat the extreme right wing and go onto the offensive for people's needs.

As peoplesworld.org and cpusa.org launch new websites the ability to share these ideas increases. Combining on-line communications with building door to door in key working class communities can be instrumental in getting out the vote and organizing year round.

Writing up local experiences and analysis for the People's World will attract more new readers and can contribute to bigger coalition building and inspiring the disengaged to get involved.

There are times in history when things move fast. This may be one of those times.



Donbass fights for it's life and we got dreck like this. Ah well, work, work, work....

Hey 'worker', let's talk about Bernie's voting record.

Here is Bernie Sanders:

"We need a strong military, it is a dangerous world. But I think we can make judicious cuts.”

- University of Iowa 2-19-15

"ISIS clearly is a brutal, dangerous organization, we all agree that it has got to be defeated."

- Bernie Sanders

On authorization for Obama to go to war with ISIS:

"I support, have and do, support the President using airstrikes, he has the right to do it, I think that they are working. I support that."

Sound familiar?

So that's what people support when they support Sanders. Continued hyper-militarism in The Homeland.

Even in his auditing pledge he equivocates in that he says "the first thing I would maybe do..."

DESPITE HIS own claims, Sanders has not been an antiwar leader. Ever since he won election to the House, he has taken either equivocal positions on U.S. wars or outright supported them.

His hawkish positions--especially his decision to support Bill Clinton's 1999 Kosovo War--drove one of his key advisers, Jeremy Brecher, to resign from his staff. Brecher wrote in his resignation letter, "Is there a moral limit to the military violence you are willing to participate in or support?"

So outraged were peace activists over Sanders' support of the Kosovo War
that they occupied his office in 1999. Sanders had them arrested.

Under the Bush regime, Sanders' militarism has only grown worse. While he called for alternative approaches to the war on Afghanistan, he failed to join the sole Democrat, Barbara Lee, to vote against Congress' resolution that gave George Bush a blank check to launch war on any country he deemed connected to the September 11 attacks.

Ever since, he has voted for appropriations bills to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, despite their horrific toll on the occupied peoples as well as U.S. soldiers.

Even more shocking, Sanders scuttled any action on a wave of Bush impeachment resolutions that swept Vermont towns in 2006. Like House Majority Leader-to-be Nancy Pelosi, who has promised not to impeach Bush, Sanders argued that impeachment was impractical, and that activists should put energy into electing Democrats.

Interviewer: “You mentioned wasteful military spending. The other day ... I’m sure you’ve heard about the F-35 catching fire on the runway. The estimated lifetime expense of the F-35 is $1.2 trillion. When you talk about cutting wasteful military spending, does that include the F-35 program?”

Bernie Sanders: “No, and I’ll tell you why – it is essentially built. It is the airplane of the United States Air Force, Navy, and of NATO. It was a very controversial issue in Vermont. And my view was that given the fact that the F-35, which, by the way, has been incredibly wasteful, that’s a good question. But for better or worse, that is the plane of record right now, and it is not gonna be discarded. That’s the reality.”

(From "In These Times" and I am afraid that this guy is serious - Dhalgren)

The Political Genius of Bernie Sanders’ Socialism

Bernie’s socialism isn’t a “charade.” It’s a provocation—and a brilliant one, at that.

Bernie Sanders’s star is rising. The New York Times published a story last week about his “revolutionary roots” in Vermont, not long after he drew a crowd of nearly 10,000 people to a rally in Madison, Wisconsin. The “Sanders surge,” as it’s been dubbed, is “becoming a bigger problem for Hillary Clinton,” according to The Hill. “Hillary’s Camp Worries Over Sanders’ Surge in Polls,” as a Newsmax headline put it.

One person not worrying about the Sanders surge, though, is Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), a Clinton ally who “unloaded” on Sanders recently, according to Politico, claiming that he’s way too far outside the mainstream to be electable. “I very rarely read in any coverage of Bernie that he’s a socialist,” she said.

Sen. McCaskill rarely reads any coverage of Bernie Sanders, apparently, since the Vermont senator’s self-identification as a socialist regularly comes up in coverage of his campaign. And far from being a liability, as Sen. McCaskill suggests, it’s actually a stroke of political genius.

It’s fair to doubt whether Sanders actually qualifies as a socialist, as writers across the political spectrum have done. And it’s fair game to affirm that he’s a socialist and call his philosophy “foolish,” as a libertarian publication has done. But doubting that the media actually discusses his socialism? It’s one of the primary reasons that pundits and journalists write about him. A self-described socialist with “revolutionary roots” mounting a bid for the presidency and drawing big crowds—that’s a story.

But whether they praise or condemn him, pundits seem sure how this story will end. He’ll make some waves in the primaries, they argue, but no socialist will be elected president.

Well, maybe. A recent poll showing that 47 percent of the population would vote for a socialist was widely portrayed as potentially good news for Sanders—even though, at 47 percent, socialist ranked last of the 11 options. Atheists were the next lowest category, with 58 percent of respondents saying they would vote for one. The bar is apparently so low for socialists that it’s good news when nearly half of the population would even think about voting for you.

There is some reason for hope in the fact that, as with Obamacare, people have fuzzy notions about what “socialist” means—and support many of the particulars, even if they reject the label. Sanders’s record, especially his time as mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, essentially comes down to higher taxes on the wealthy and strong investment in programs and projects that have broad public support—things like building parks and schools and providing free or low-cost child care.

He certainly is not a socialist in the old-school sense. The conservative columnist George Will believes he isn’t one at all. Will harrumphed recently that Sanders’s self-proclaimed socialism is a “charade” that wilts under scrutiny. “In olden days,” he wrote, “socialism meant something robust—government ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Then … the idea was diluted to mean just government ownership of an economy’s ‘commanding heights.’” For Will, Sanders’s claim on the label represents the total corruption of the word.

It’s true that, judged strictly by his voting record, Sanders is far from a radical. In fact, he isn’t even close to being the most progressive member of the Senate, according to Progressive Punch, which ranks members of Congress by the progressive quality of their voting record. Sanders’s overall lifetime score in the Senate puts him at 19—right in the middle of the Democrats. (Elizabeth Warren ranks fourth. The other senator from Massachusetts, Ed Markey, ranks first.) Sanders is just behind Jack Reed (RI) and Bob Menendez (NJ). He’s just ahead of Martin Heinrich (NM) and Dick Durbin (IL). He has been particularly—and weirdly—anti-progressive on gun control, once voting in favor of allowing handguns in baggage on Amtrak trains.

Yet it’s clear that something sets Sanders apart from Menendez, Durbin and the other Democrats with similar voting records. Perhaps it’s that, by formally keeping his distance from liberalism, Sanders forces fundamental political and moral questions onto the table.

His socialism isn’t a “charade.” It’s a provocation, simultaneously jarring and oddly familiar. And it’s politically brilliant—which is perhaps why it irks conservatives like George Will.

Five decades ago, Sanders’s agenda was called New Deal liberalism. But three decades of policies that cut taxes for the wealthy while privatizing and shrinking the public realm have rendered the old labels and frameworks nearly irrelevant.

As the “Sanders surge” gains momentum, his identity as a socialist will be condemned, celebrated and contested. But it won’t be ignored. The word provokes the media to take note. And when they do, they might discover that Sanders’s preoccupation with equality has deep roots in our past. Our politics, at its finest, has long nurtured the faith that near-term investments in public works pay long-term dividends, that the point of government is to pursue the common good and that inequality is toxic to our democracy.

That faith doesn’t amount to radicalism or socialism in the classic sense, it’s true—Bernie is hardly calling for the dictatorship of the proletariat. But in our current context, his politics come off as downright radical. And it just might be a form of “socialism” that much of the country—more than 47 percent—is ready to embrace once again.

THEO ANDERSON
Theo Anderson, an In These Times staff writer, is writing a book about the historical and contemporary influence of pragmatism on American politics. He has a Ph.D. in American history from Yale University and teaches history and literature seminars at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18154/bernie-sanders-socialism

(From "In These Times" and I am afraid that this guy is serious - Dhalgren

Sure Bernie is a socialist, Hollande is a socialist, Tspiras is a socialist.....which kinda explains why there are Bolsheviks & Communists.

We should start a fucking Bolshevik Party in this country. Bring down the house.

Vile as they are, your mainstream conservative has a better grasp on reality than the liberal/progressive/social dems.


He certainly is not a socialist in the old-school sense. The conservative columnist George Will believes he isn’t one at all. Will harrumphed recently that Sanders’s self-proclaimed socialism is a “charade” that wilts under scrutiny. “In olden days,” he wrote, “socialism meant something robust—government ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Then … the idea was diluted to mean just government ownership of an economy’s ‘commanding heights.’” For Will, Sanders’s claim on the label represents the total corruption of the word.

https://exchange.charter-business.net/owa/?ae=Item&t=IPM.Note&id=RgAAAABXD3xRYFytSL0wgpyHXdS1BwBnktNOfVVlTLB2l9lfTObJANzRomEJAABfZF%2bksbSaQ6SRqAxc7W6oBPlWXxZpAAAJ



However, this writer is having none of that. Bernie is the face of socialism that Philistines are ready to embrace...[sic]

The Not-So Nordic Bernie Sanders
by PAUL STREET

Speaking to George Stephanopoulus on ABC News’ “This Week” three weeks ago, the recently declared Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders identified himself with the “the democratic socialism” of Scandinavia. In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, Sanders told Stephanopoulos, politics and society are “very democratic…health care is the right of all people…college education, graduate school is free…retirement benefits, childcare are stronger than in the United States of America. And in those countries, by and large, government works for ordinary people and the middle class, rather than, as is the case right now in our country, for the billionaire class.”

“I can hear the Republican attack ad right now,” Stephanopolous said, “He wants American to look more like Scandinavia.” Sanders shot back: “And what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong when you have more income and wealth equality? What’s wrong when they have a … higher minimum wage than we do, and they are stronger on the environment…? Look…we can learn from other countries. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on earth, at the same time as we are seeing a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires. Frankly, I don’t think that is sustainable. I don’t think that’s what America is about.”

One could certainly argue with Sanders about how democratic and socialist his “Nordic model” countries really are and about whether or not savage inequality is “what America is about” (maybe it is). Still, it’s nice, I suppose, to see a major party presidential candidate look past the doctrinal blinders of American Exceptionalism to embrace the social and democratic accomplishments of people in other nations and to advance the notion that the U.S. might (imagine) have something to “learn from other countries.”

Revealing Comparisons

Nearly nine years ago, any lingering doubts that I might have harbored about the reactionary nature of the soon-to-announced Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama were undone by reading numerous American-exceptionalist passages in Obama’s 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope. There Obama mused rhapsodically on “just how good” even “our [the United States’] poor…have it” compared to their more destitute counterparts in Africa and Latin America. Obama took this comparison to be evidence for his argument in Audacity that US capitalism – “the logic of the marketplace” and “private property at the very heart of our system[s] of liberty [and] social organization” – had brought Americans “a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history.” Obama omitted considerably less American-friendly contrasts between the US and its fellow rich nations in Western Europe and Asia (Japan), where capitalism comes with
paulstreetconsiderably more social equality and security than can be found in militantly hierarchical nations like Haiti, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United States.

This was a very different approach from that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who Obama has claimed as a major influence and whose bust sits behind the “first Black president” in the Oval Office. A “democratic socialist” like Sanders, King challenged American Exceptionalism in the summer of 1966, when he noted the greater poverty that existed in the United States compared to other First World states. “Maybe something is wrong with our [capitalist] economic system,” King told an interviewer, observing that there was no or little poverty, slums, and unemployment in “democratic socialist” countries like Sweden. The “beacon to the world” and “city on a hill” had something to “learn from other countries” King was suggesting. The learning process, King felt, meant “question[ing] the capitalistic economy” since “an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Against Spiritual Death

But here the parallel between Sanders today and the mid-late 1960s King drops off in a critical way. King’s increasingly open left sentiments (he ended his life advocating mass civil disobedience on behalf of “the radical reconstruction of society itself”) were intimately connected to his righteous and eloquent criticism of the American military empire. For King by at least 1966, the Black-led poor people’s struggle against American poverty and inequality was inextricably bound up with radical criticism of the mass-murderous US war on Vietnam and the US Empire more broadly. King referred repeatedly to what he called the nation’s “triple evils that are interrelated”: racism, economic exploitation (capitalism), and militarism/imperialism. As King explained in a 1967 speech titled “Where Do We Go From Here”: “The problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will ‘thingify’ them – make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them.”

At New York City’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 (one year to the day before he was killed), King described the United States as “the leading purveyor of violence in the world today.” He mentioned some of the horrible things he had learned about US actions in Southeast Asia:

“[The Vietnamese] must see Americans as strange liberators…the people read our leaflets and receive regular promises of peace and democracy – and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs….as we he herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps. They know they must move or be destroyed by bombs. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one ‘Vietcong’-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them – mostly children… What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicines and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?”

King broke with both sides of the American Exceptionalist coin: (A) the notion that the United States is so breathtakingly splendid that it has nothing to learn from the rest of the world and everything to teach others and (B) the notion that the United States is unique among world history’s great powers in the fundamentally benevolent, democratic, humanitarian, and non-(and even anti-) imperial intention and nature of its foreign policies.

For King, it was both immoral and impractical to break with only the first side of the coin. Explaining why he had turned openly and loudly against the Vietnam War, King noted that “a burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1964: I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission – a commission to work harder that I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’ This is a calling which takes me beyond national allegiances …to the making of peace” (Barack Kill List Obama had a different take on his Nobel Peace award).

In a series of lectures on the Canadian Broadcasting System, King reflected on the remarkable wave of race riots that washed across U.S. cities in the summers of 1966 and 1967. He made no apologies for Black urban violence. He blamed “the white power structure…still seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality intact” for the disturbances. He found the leading cause of the riots in the reactionary posture of “the white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change,” which” produc[ed] chaos” by telling Blacks “that they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor.”

King also blamed the riots to no small degree on Washington’s “war in [here he might have better said “on”] Vietnam.” The military aggression against Southeast Asia, King noted, sent poor blacks to the front killing lines to a disproportionate degree. It advanced the notion that violence was a reasonable response and even a solution to social and political problems. It also stole resources from the federal government’s briefly declared and barely fought “War on Poverty.” As King ruefully observed at Riverside Church:

“There is…a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging [against poverty and racism] in America. A few years ago, there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor – both black and white – through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”

Budgetary matters and the particulars of Vietnam aside, King added that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

In answering his “call…beyond national allegiances,” King stood to the portside of leading U.S. 1960s social democrats like Bayard Rustin, A Phillip Randolph, and Michael Harrington. These and other left leaders (e.g. Max Shachtman and Tom Kahn) were unwilling to forthrightly oppose the US-imperial assault on Indochina because of their misplaced faith in pursuing the fight against poverty in alliance with the pro-war Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO.

Rustin, Harrington, and Randolph were practical as well as moral fools on this score. Besides opposing the war on moral grounds, King understood very well that the expenses of empire precluded serious anti-poverty spending.

Bernie’s Imperial Omission

Which brings us back to Bernie Sanders. Anyone who wants to bring the “Nordic model” of “democratic socialism” to the United States must surely confront a core and critical difference between the United States and Scandinavia. Forty-seven years after King’s assassination and despite the disappearance of any credible military rival to the US with the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon budget today accounts for more than half of US federal discretionary spending (symptomatic of “a society gone mad on war”). The US generates nearly half of all military spending on the planet. This giant war and empire (“defense”) expenditure ($1.2-1.4 trillion or more each year) maintains (among other things) more than 1000 US military installations spread across more than 100 “sovereign” nations. “Financially,” the U.S. peace and justice activist David Swanson writes, “war is what the U.S. government does. Everything else is a side show.”

Military outlays on the current U.S. scale carry enormous social, human, and environmental, opportunity costs. They cancel out spending to address massively unmet social, human, and environmental needs – needs that Sanders talks about in knowledgeable, populist, and properly angry terms. The trade-offs are disturbing. As Swanson observed last December:

“The cost of one weapons system that doesn’t work could provide every homeless person with a large house. A tiny fraction of military spending could end starvation at home and abroad. The Great Student Loan Struggle takes place in the shadow of military spending unseen in countries that simply make college free, countries that don’t tax more than the United States, countries that just don’t do wars the way the U.S. does. You can find lots of other little differences between those countries and the U.S. but none of them on the unfathomable scale of military spending or even remotely close to it”(emphasis added).

Military budgets are drastically smaller in Scandinavia, to say the least. Defense accounts for 3.1% of central government spending in Finland, 3.2% in Denmark, 4.3% in Sweden, and 4.8% in Norway.

So where is the call to drastically slash the Pentagon System and introduce a great social and environmental peace dividend in the Sweden- flattering Sanders’ program for social-democratic change on the Nordic model in the United States? Nowhere. As Swanson notes, Sanders’ politics and policy agenda are usefully acronym-ized as “PEP” to mean not just “Progressive Except for Palestine” (standard among top Democratic politicians, the nominally “independent” and pro-Israel Sanders included) but also “Populist Except for the Pentagon.” Sanders’ top 12 proposals include calls for major investments in infrastructure, measures and programs to reverse climate change, an end to corporate welfare, federal support for worker-owned coops, a real livable minimum wage, the restoration of union organizing and collective bargaining rights, equal pay for women, single-payer health insurance (Medicare for All), progressive taxation, expanded Social Security, college affordability, the break-up of the big Wall Street banks, and end to NAFTA, CAFTA, and permanent normal trade relations with China.



This is all good and essential stuff that Leftists, left-leaning progressives, and others have been advocating for quite some time. Still, there are three glaring omissions. First, there’s no call for a Financial Transaction Tax – for a levy on transactions made by the nations’ hugely profitable, taxpayer-subsidized and federally protected financial giants. Such a tax would create significant public revenue to fund federal social and environmental programs.

Second, there’s no reference to the nation’s savage racial disparities or to the intimately related problems of persistent de facto racial apartheid and racist mass arrest, incarceration, felony-marking, and police abuse. This is a glaring oversight in light of Ferguson (Michael Brown), Staten Island (Eric Garner), Baltimore (Freddie Gray) – to mention just the top three racial hotspots of 2014 and 2015 – and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement to protest the ongoing epidemic racist police killings across the country.

Third, and most relevant to the main topic of this essay, there’s nothing on the need to drastically cut the nation’s giant “rogue superpower” military budget, itself a giant form of corporate welfare and the revenue source for “the single biggest contributor to climate change, namely the military” (Swanson). By Swanson’s analysis, this conspicuous and social-democratically self-defeating omission is explained largely by the fact that Sanders (who supported the Pentagon’s installation of a hugely expensive F-35 fighter jet base in Vermont in the name of “jobs” and “growth”) at the end of the day is on board with the American military project:

“What do you invest in infrastructure? It’s not as though Sanders doesn’t know about the trade-offs….he blames ‘the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq’ for costing $3 trillion. He says he wants infrastructure instead of wars. But routine ‘base’ military spending is $1.3 trillion or so each and every year. It’s been far more in recent years than all the recent wars, and it generates the wars as Eisenhower warned it would. It also erodes the economy…The same dollars moved [from the military] to infrastructure would produce many more jobs and better paying ones. Why not propose moving some money [out of the Pentagon]? Why not include it in the list of proposals? In Sanders’ case, I think he’s partly a true believer in militarism. He wants good wars instead of bad wars (whatever that means) despite the belief in ‘good wars’ requiring ongoing military spending. And partly, I think, he comes at it from a deep habit of ‘supporting’ the troops and veterans for both sincere and calculating reasons. He’s also a PEP in the Palestine sense.”

The problem is more than just fiscal and budgetary. It’s also moral and spiritual. If Dr. King were alive today, he would denounce the “spiritual doom” at the heart of the contradiction between the United States’ gargantuan military spending and the comparative paltriness of its welfare state in a time when 1 in 5 US children live in food insecure households and 14.7 million US children live below the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level. At the same time, King, unlike Sanders, would not be able to stay silent about such appalling crimes as US client state Israel’s horrific killing of many hundreds of children in Gaza last year and in 2008. King would never join Sanders in keeping mum about the vicious “collateral damage” inflicted on civilians by President Kill List’s endless jihad-recruiting drone strikes across the Muslim world.

Sanders has transcended one side of the American Exceptionalist trap – the notion that the U.S. has nothing to learn from other countries and people. Great. The other, foreign policy side of the trap still exercises great pull over him as it did over previous U.S. progressives who could not break free from the corporate and militaristic Democratic Party. And here’s the rub: clinging to the second side of the trap (the notion of a good American Empire and “good [US] wars”) tends to render null and void a politician’s effort to act on his or her rejection of the first side by advancing progressive social and democratic and environmental policies of uber-white Scandinavian – or French or German or (in a less Caucasian vein) Latin American (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba?) – inspiration. Is this not an almost embarrassingly elementary lesson of post-World War II US history for any “Left” worth its label? Uncle Sam cannot fund a “Nordic” social democracy to end poverty, provide free and high quality health care, fund college, build green infrastructure, avert global warming and generally advance equality, sustainability and justice at home while also paying for a giant military war and empire machine at home and abroad. He has to choose. And so does Bernie if he wants more Left progressives to take his “democratic socialism” more seriously. Along the way, it would help if he would pay more explicit attention to the United States’ appalling racial disparities and oppression.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05/22/the-not-so-nordic-bernie-sanders/

What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?

By Burkely Hermann

June 11, 2015

This is the part of Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs (1987) when Dark Helmet tells Colonel Sandurz to speed up the ship to “ridiculous speed.”In my view, Bernie Sanders, like Sandurz in Spaceballs, is a chicken for not running against the Democratic Party either in the presidential race or the gubernatorial race in Vermont. That is, in part, why I chose this quote.
This was originally posted on HermannView and has been reprinted here.

Progressive after progressive has supported the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders for President, acting like he is a savior who will “rescue” us from the brutal corporate masters who rule over the United States. As readers may or may not know, I have tried my best to criticize such progressive “heroes” even if it annoys fellow progressives, including articles on Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has a similar voting record to Bernie Sanders. [1] This article aims to criticize Bernie Sanders, and not hold him up in high regard as some on the Left have from time to time.

Any supporter of Sanders can point to his “progressive” credentials of opposing the Iraq War of 2003, and supporting universal (single-payer) healthcare, among others. Some have come to question this progressivism, with a person even arguing to a panel discussion at Left Forum that Sanders was an imperialist and Zionist. [2] Some may say that such talk is absurd and that it can’t be true in the slightest as Sanders, vying for the nomination of the capitalist Democratic Party is fighting the “billionaire class,” unlike Hillary Clinton. The record tells a different story.

In March of this year, when politicians in both capitalist parties were freaked out about the prospect that the DHS, which claims to keep Americans safe but instead violates their rights and spies on them as part of the expansive “anti-terror” bureaucracy that was “justified” after 9/11 would not be funded, Sanders not only claimed that the DHS keeps Americans safe (which is false) but that it is needed because of terrorists “around the world”[3]:


This is not much of a surprise considering that Sanders, an interview onYahoo! News said that surveillance of “potential terrorists” is ok. But, if the government is determining who are terrorists, then I’m not sure how much this will solve since they could consider a large number of people “potential terrorists” and continue surveillance. If I remember right, people such as Glenn Greenwald have taken this position as well, saying that surveillance of “bad people” or “potential terrorists” is ok. Anyone who has a critical eye should be wary of such statements In the same interview, Sanders refuses to criticize Hillary Clinton even after prodding by the interviewer again and again. To be honest, I think that even if Sanders did win the Democratic nomination then the Democratic Party elites/bosses would reject him due to his anti-Wall Street rhetoric and pick Clinton instead. But, I highly doubt he will win.

Moving on, as I noted in my storify about Sanders, he believes in the bad cop/good cop dichotomy, which implies that there are “bad apples” in the police forces of the US, but NOT that it is rotten to the core. This viewpoint falls in line with police reformism as he supports body cameras, somethingwhich I’ve said is not only made by one company, named Pro-Vision Video Systems, but it is would “increase police power,” lead to the profit of the company that makes them, and it “could easily be a reformist effort to pacify the population so they don’t engage in uprisings like those in Baltimore, [and] Ferguson.” Sanders also believes that the job of police isn’t easy. While one could accept it as true, it disregards the brutality and terror that is built into the structure of the police itself, which means that the police either need to be fundamentally reformed or totally reformed…and not replaced with even an worse idea: private security forces.

Using his own statements, Sanders claims that he is “not for sale” but he favors the Israeli bombing of Gaza and Israel in general. As Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss noted, Sanders not only supported Israel in a resolution in July of last year to “support Israel in its attack” and act like Hamas was the “big bad enemy” but he infamously got angry that summer at “pro-Palestinian constituents…that he told them to “shut up”” at a Vermont town hall. Additionally Weiss notes that Sanders, while he has mildly criticized Israeli conduct and bucked the imperial Israeli lobby from time to time, he “cleaves to a very conventional mainstream view of the conflict” which casts Hamas as the one to blame, Arab countries as bad actors and the Palestinian leadership in not involved. At the town hall meeting last summer, he claimed that Israel is defending against “7th century religious fundamentalism” of ISIS, while saying that there needs to be a situation where “Israel has a right to exist in security” and claims that he has been working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for “the last 50 years.” Weiss also writes that Sanders is an “old Jewish guy for whom the establishment of Israel was a glorious response to the helplessness of the European Jewish story” and that not only did Israel plau an “important role in his political progress and in his moving from the city to Vermont as a young man” but he may have been “shaped by the ideals ofLabor Zionism.”

Some could dismiss this and say that his support of the DHS, body cameras, the bad cop/good cop dichotomy and Israel bombing Palestinians in a manner that seems genocidal is only a few issues. But there is more. I am reminded ofthe email interview I did of Marina Brown of the small democratic socialist party, the Liberty Union party in Vermont, last summer. Here’s part of what she said which shadows his recent decision to run for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party:

“Bernie Sanders votes a little more conservatively than the most liberal of the Democrats. I oppose him because he operates as a Democratic politician. He supported Barack Obama, a politician who has spearheaded multiple wars and interventions in literally dozens of countries. We oppose war. There has to be a better way. In standing with Democratic politicians in their wars of aggression he shares in their guilt…Sanders has supported basing the F-35 warplanes in Burlington…Sanders supported the creation of a new position in the US of Director of National Intelligence…The FISA warrants that Sanders voted for are nothing more than rubber stamps by the most corrupt judges…Sanders has supported forcing states to do standardized testing on students…I assume he [Sanders] runs as an Independent because it appeals best to his voters.”

Before I move onto my wariness of Sanders running as a Democrat, I am reminded of what President Obama said jokingly at the White House Correspondents Dinner earlier this year: “Bernie Sanders might run. I like Bernie. Bernie’s an interesting guy. Apparently some folks want to see a pot-smoking socialist in the White House. We could get a third Obama term after all. It could happen.” While some may say this means nothing, in my mind the fact that Obama would say this concerns me. Perhaps this is because Sanderssupports the war against ISIS not with US “ground troops” but with Saudi forces fighting as US proxies (along with other countries). He has alsoapplauded Obama for fighting ISIS which he calls a “fanatical and brutal organization which is a danger to the region and the world” and supported the airstrikes which began the “second” Iraq War. [4] He also supported the confirmation of Loretta Lynch, an attorney General, who made harsh statements in opposition of marijuana legalization and xxx, along with falling in line with the argument that Iran is “building a nuclear weapon” (also seehere). As Gareth Porter told moderate right-leaning publication, The American Conservative in 2014, “at no time has the Iranian government ever intended to develop nuclear weapons.” There are probably more aspects I could add here, but I think it is time to move on.

Sanders, who has argued that the the US is “not a moral society,” as you know is running for the presidential nomination of Democratic Party. Some on the Left have criticized this move, saying that [5]:

Sanders not only won’t beat Clinton but “is this election’s Democratic sheepdog…[a] candidate…to give left activists and voters a reason, however illusory, to believe there’s a place of influence for them inside the Democratic party…the Bernie Sanders show ends, as the left-leaning warm-up act for Hillary Clinton…Bernie’s candidacy is a blast toward the past, an invitation to herd and be herded like sheep back into the Democratic fold…as he warms up the crowd for Hillary. Bernie is a sheepdog” (Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report)
Sanders “for many…offers an alternative [to Clinton]…[but] by steering liberal and left supporters into a Democratic Party whose policies and politics he claims to disagree with, Sanders…is acting as the opposite of an “alternative”…but if Sanders really wanted to participate in mobilizing millions to resist the status quo in US politics, he had options other than launching himself into the circus of a Democratic presidential campaign…he could have set a very different example, with a far greater chance of success, if he ran for governor in Vermont against the Democratic Party’s incumbent, Peter Shumlin…Sanders…could have run for governor as an independent and easily defeated both the Democratic and Republican nominees…Sanders refused to consider an independent presidential campaign…because he didn’t want to compete for votes with the Democrats’ eventual nominee…Hillary Clinton certainly doesn’t regard Sanders as a threat…You can expect that Clinton will agree with Sanders during the campaign…Sanders will follow the well-trodden path of other liberals like Kucinich…Sanders’s retreat is based on a liberal strategy of attempting to transform the Democratic Party from within that has failed for generations…Since he made his arrangement with the Democrats, Sanders has uncritically supported them in Vermont elections…Nationally, Sanders supported Obama in both of the last two elections…With his slide into becoming a Democrat in everything but name, Sanders became less and less radical on a host of issues…Sanders has similarly moderate positions on many social issues….Sanders voted in favor of George W. Bush’s original Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution.” (Ashley Smith in Socialist Worker reprinted in Jacobin)
Sanders’s “supporters today have even less ambition than 1968’s McCarthy supporters, who were challenging the central plank of the foreign policy agenda of a sitting president…Sanders, for his part, won’t even use the rhetoric — he has ruled out running outside the Democratic Party…For those who want to build a stronger left in the US, there is no substitute for the work…of building social movements and struggles at the grassroots and of organizing a political alternative independent of the Democratic Party.” (Lance Selfa in Jacobin, originally published in Socialist Worker)
Beyond these three criticisms, there is my own, which I mentioned earlier and will continue here. If Sanders was a real socialist, then he would NOT run inside of the capitalist Democratic Party. Yes, there have been those socialists and radicals from time to time, ranging from Cornel West to Noam Chomsky, who have supported voting for the “lesser evil” (Democrats), but I refuse to give this argument any merit. It’s not even worth discussing a choice for a lesser evil, it should be rejected outright. Some may say that voting for the Democrats is necessary to beat the “evil” Republicans, but the Democrats are not only evil, but they are almost more evil because they act like they care about the working class and middle class, whatever that means anymore, when in reality they do not, serving corporate masters from here to there. Others may say that “third parties” don’t have a chance against the two parties and that Sanders would have lost if he had run as an independent. This is true, and maybe it is time to focus on electoral contests on the state and local level where those of alternative third parties can win rather than on the national level. Sanders in my view is a bit of chicken for not running against the Democrats in any way or form, just like Colonel Sandurz in Spaceballs. But, perhaps this is too optimistic and naive.

Beyond this, it seems clear to me that Sanders is not a socialist. Paul Streetwrites in CounterPunch that Sanders looking to Scandinavia is deceptive as a “model” for his socialist because he does not call to “drastically slash the Pentagon System and introduce a great social and environmental peace dividend.” Street also writes that even though Sanders has many progressive goals, he does not reference “the nation’s savage racial disparities” and there is nothing pushing for a cut in the military budget instead being, at the “the end of the day is on board with the American military project,” and a believer in militarism in a deep sense as those such as David Swanson have noted. I would go further and say that Sanders isn’t a socialist because I’ve never heard him in support of economic democracy apart from supporting some co-ops, or how the capitalist system needs to go. Instead, Sanders seems to go down the road of Naomi Klein, who to her credit has criticized capitalism’s connection to climate change, who criticizes deregulated capitalism, but not regulated capitalism. This should trouble anyone who is aware of the inherent problems of the capitalist system.

That’s not all. Sanders’s campaign tweeted that in this day and age, “virtually no piece of legislation can get passed unless it has the okay from Wall Street and corporate America.” It is funny that they would say that because some of Sanders’s views would be favorable to corporate and Wall Street interests like the support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, militarism in general (opposing only “bad” wars), supporting the DHS, supporting the bombing of ISIS, and so on. Hey, lets also not forget that Sanders recently voted for an extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which is harshly neoliberal [6] and so on. It is interesting that Sanders voted in favor of this even though he has voted against similar “trade” deals like NAFTA and the TPP in the past.

There is more. Sanders has argued that college should be tuition-free to create a strong economy, “the best educated work force in the world,” to “rebuild our middle class” and to be “competitive in the global economy,” along with expanding programs like Pell Grants. This may sound nice, but it only applies to public colleges and universities, not to private ones. Additionally, even if tuition were made free through a financial transaction tax (a small tax on financial transactions like derivatives), what about room and board or cost of textbooks? That doesn’t seem to be what Sanders is concerned about. At the same time, Sanders’s arguments for such free education almost sound neoliberal, with two of them (the competitiveness and strong economy ones) sounding like a corporate CEO, and not focused on social justice. This way of framing the issue I would say is problematic in a number of ways.

Sanders has argued that there needs to be a “political revolution” and a mass movement, saying his run for the presidency is not about himself. Seriously. Sanders said that “the issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time” but also that his run for president is “not about Bernie Sanders” because “you can have the best president in the history of the world but that person will not be able to address the problems that we face unless there is a mass movement, a political revolution in this country” and that “the only way we win and transform America is when millions of people stand up as you’re doing today and say. ‘Enough is enough. This country belongs to all of us and not a handful of billionaires.’” That doesn’t seem to be a controversial statement and something similar has been said by Chris Hedges in the past. But, if he is to be true to his word, then why isn’t he out in the streets and participating in movement building so that such a “political revolution” he speaks of can be built. Because one candidate running for political office is not a revolution, but rather it is a group of people coming together fighting for a cause or a set of causes, who may or may not have political demands, and if it is truly revolutionary, then it is radical. Sanders can speak about a “political revolution” all he wants, but to me, it is just more rhetoric so he can sound populist and garner votes.

I could move on and criticize the supposed story of Bernie Sanders as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, but for now, this seems like a good start to a more informed criticism. In the end, I have a quote from Eugene Debs, a portrait of whom Sanders has on his wall, who was a dedicated socialist, said in 1904:

“The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles.”



Notes

[1] For articles I’ve written that have been critical of Warren, see “The deception of Sen. Warren’s “populism”“, “Does Elizabeth Warren really care about the average American?“, “Elizabeth Warren is a fraud“, “Elizabeth Warren is not a savior“, “An update about the capitalist reformer Elizabeth Warren“, and “The truth about Elizabeth Warren”

[2] This tweet is part of what I tweeted at this year’s Left Forum and was at the panel titled “U.S. Wars of Aggression & Islamic Jihad: What is the Bigger Danger and How Should the Antiwar Movement Respond?”

[3] According to a February press release, Sanders argued that “we need the Homeland Security Department to be strong and vigilant.” This should concern anyone who cares about surveillance or intrusions by the federal government.

[4] This is only true if one considers that the US was at war against Iraq from 1990 to 2003, with bombing between the invasion in 1990 and the invasion in 2003, and then a continued war until 2011, but then restarted in 2014 with the bombing officially to “counter” ISIS.

[5] Also see Howie Hawkins’s wonderful article, ‘Bernie Sanders is no Eugene Debs‘ which some have criticized, but is interesting nonetheless.

[5] The international trade administration says AGOA offers “tangible incentives for African countries to continue their efforts to open their economies and build free markets” and is in the words of US News and World Report, while AGOA is broadly ineffective, was designed to open “the U.S. market to African products.” As Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Policy and Economic Research wrote in 1998, AGOA “continues in the NAFTA tradition…provid[ing]…new, unlimited access to the U.S. market– most immediately for textiles and apparel…it requires the countries of sub-Saharan Africa to open their markets to imports and foreign investment…[and it] strengthens the hand of transnational corporations, while simultaneously restricting the ability of host countries to tax them.” Public Citizen said something similar, noting that AGOA was “pushed in 1999 by a coalition of U.S.-based oil and other multinational corporations.”

https://zcomm.org/zblogs/whats-the-matter-colonel-bernie-sanderschicken/

We should start a fucking Bolshevik Party in this country. Bring down the house.

Its a good idea. Running it up the flagpole would tell us who is prepared to accept the challenge of developing the necessary rigor and discipline. Once we find out who is down, we set a program and go from there with much focus on organization, propaganda, strategy, tactics, and etc (Lenin goes over this in great detail, with bullet points).

No problem-o, right?

Well..consider The Bell Forum. The tie that binds is taken to be the idea that the material conditions of life dictate the real circumstances that we are confronted with. Beyond this (not so) simple proposition, little more has been worked out. We do not particularly have a perspective on how to structure an organization (Party?) or the process necessary to achieve it. We can point to examples and trends -- KKE, Col Cassad, CP Portugal -- but without a way to connect them to reality in the United States of America.

Still, maybe you're right and these questions are best answered in the crucible.

Serious question. Wanna book a small convention room, set a date, send out announcements to, say, 10 people/groups, take RSVPs and found the All-Americas Communist Labor Party? (analogue of the All Russian Social Democratic Labor Party)

Full time work, shit pay. Best job in the world.

Forgive me for interrupting this thread on "Feeling the Bern" but here is Lenin

In WITBD he reiterates what he began in outline in the article Where to Begin


the character and main content of our political agitation; our organisational tasks; and the plan for building, simultaneously and from various sides, a militant, all-Russia organization.

(his answer to these is largely: Iskra)

20 years later Lenin provides a retrospective of Bolshevism's success in Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder



First, by the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard and by its devotion to the revolution, by its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism.

Second, by its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and - if you wish - merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people - primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people.

Third, by the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct.

Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved. Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrasemongering and clowning. On the other hand, these conditions cannot emerge at once. They are created only by prolonged effort and hard-won experience.

Bolshevism, which had arisen on [a] granite foundation of theory, went through fifteen years of practical history (1903-17) unequalled anywhere in the world in its wealth of experience. During those fifteen years, no other country knew anything even approximating to that revolutionary experience, that rapid and varied succession of different forms of the movement—legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms. In no other country has there been concentrated, in so brief a period, such a wealth of forms, shades, and methods of struggle of all classes of modern society...

PS My brother and I have mulled this idea. A Party newspaper isn't outmoded at all, whatever the appearances. I kind of like крик as an homage to Iskra and Hertzen's The Bell. Someone who speaks Russian could confirm but my understanding is that it means cry, shout, outcry, scream, or bell.

Forgive me for interrupting this thread on "Feeling the Bern" but here is Lenin

In WITBD he reiterates what he began in outline in the article Where to Begin



(his answer to these is largely: Iskra)

20 years later Lenin provides a retrospective of Bolshevism's success in Leftwing Communism: An Infantile Disorder



PS My brother and I have mulled this idea. A Party newspaper isn't outmoded at all, whatever the appearances. I kind of like крик as an homage to Iskra and Hertzen's The Bell. Someone who speaks Russian could confirm but my understanding is that it means cry, shout, outcry, scream, or bell.

'Tocsin' would cover that meaning nicely.

You know I have always been in favor of a newspaper, when CPUSA got rid of their's the writing was on the wall.

Its a good idea. Running it up the flagpole would tell us who is prepared to accept the challenge of developing the necessary rigor and discipline. Once we find out who is down, we set a program and go from there with much focus on organization, propaganda, strategy, tactics, and etc (Lenin goes over this in great detail, with bullet points).

No problem-o, right?

Well..consider The Bell Forum. The tie that binds is taken to be the idea that the material conditions of life dictate the real circumstances that we are confronted with. Beyond this (not so) simple proposition, little more has been worked out. We do not particularly have a perspective on how to structure an organization (Party?) or the process necessary to achieve it. We can point to examples and trends -- KKE, Col Cassad, CP Portugal -- but without a way to connect them to reality in the United States of America.

Still, maybe you're right and these questions are best answered in the crucible.

Serious question. Wanna book a small convention room, set a date, send out announcements to, say, 10 people/groups, take RSVPs and found the All-Americas Communist Labor Party? (analogue of the All Russian Social Democratic Labor Party)

Full time work, shit pay. Best job in the world.

Well shit, and there I was waiting for MLT and ZZ to drop that baby in our laps.....but seeing as that ain't happening, well fuck, it is daunting, but it sure as hell is 'doing something' too.

So whatcha think, Orlando or the Holiday Inn Express in Augusta Ga?

Just guessing off hand what ya think this might cost?

Well shit, and there I was waiting for MLT and ZZ to drop that baby in our laps.....but seeing as that ain't happening, well fuck, it is daunting, but it sure as hell is 'doing something' too.

So whatcha think, Orlando or the Holiday Inn Express in Augusta Ga?

Just guessing off hand what ya think this might cost?

Not that much really. It would depend on the travel costs depending on who the "delegates" are. It doesn't have to be in the South although my brother has this loose theory that the South is basically a separate entity (a idea he picked up from his poli sci days as a parallel to the integration of East Germany). He figures crisis starts at the weakest point of the cell membrane and flows inward to the nucleus (excuse the less than scientific analogy).

Not that much really. It would depend on the travel costs depending on who the "delegates" are. It doesn't have to be in the South although my brother has this loose theory that the South is basically a separate entity (a idea he picked up from his poli sci days as a parallel to the integration of East Germany). He figures crisis starts at the weakest point of the cell membrane and flows inward to the nucleus (excuse the less than scientific analogy).

Heh, if it was just the few of us I'd suggest Atlanta. Your brother should study Upstate SC before formalizing that theory....So, guess 1st step would be to send out enquiries to potentially interested parties?

I am totally inadequate to this task but that's not stopped me before.

I suggest we move this conversation to the 'Refounder' thread http://www.thebellforum.com/showthread.php?t=100726

ML Today are serious about their book reviews by the way. I messaged them and agreed to do a review of verteran historian Richard Rhoades's book Hell and Good Company which is a history of the Spanish Civil War that explores a few of the author's particular points of emphasis (development of medicine in concert with war) and journalistic accounts of the war and anecdote driven interludes of the involvement of prominent figures (not only cultural figures, most notably Picasso whose Guernica graces the cover, either -- we get a blow-by-blow account of Goering' obsequiousness as he sizes up the Fuhrer's initial inclinations to aid Franco; we get derogatory picture of the diminutive Franquito himself -- whose first order is to ban Freemasonry which he laughably sees as the sinister figure-behind-the-curtain; we get JBS Haldane gassing himself in the service of the Republic).

A strong feature of the book is that it chronicles the Republican defense/cause without ponderous discussion of the so-called internecine disputes -- in effect putting the lie to grandiose anarchist claims by fully fleshing out the history without ever feeing the need to take recourse to their shallow presence beyond mentioning them in passing. No Homage to Catalonia here!

Rhodes book is something of a man-on-bloodstained-bombed out-streets style narrative that makes sure it hits the colorful high points -- a tactic which serves as relief from the extremely grim depictions of bloodshed, atrocities, and inhumanity. It is a popular account in the old-school meaning -- not sensationalized but rather about the people themselves and their unfathomable suffering.

Unfortunately, I've been sitting on this assignment for 5 months :(

Interjections on Bernie Sanders
by PAUL STREET

A Response to David McReynolds

I never cease to be amazed by U.S. major party and candidate-centered electoral (and especially presidential) politics’ continuing power to muddle, mystify, and mar liberal, progressive, and even Left hearts and minds. Recently the very clever, decent, and likeable U.S. democratic socialist and pacifist David McReynolds (himself a former Socialist U.S. presidential candidate) published an essay titled “Why Bernie?’ It is a thoughtful reflection in support of Sanders’ campaign to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination – a campaign whose early successes I (unlike McReynolds and from the vantage point of Iowa, ground zero for the “quadrennial electoral extravaganza” in the third year of the four year U.S. election cycle) find thoroughly unsurprising. It is especially provocative coming from a self-described pacifist for reasons that I hope are clear in what follows. What follows is a detailed response through staggered interjection to McReynolds’ defense and support of the Sanders presidential run.

McReynolds: “There has been debate and discussion about the Bernie Sanders candidacy – I’m backing him, here are my reasons why, and the probable limits of his campaign…Back in the 1960’s when Michael Harrington was pushing the argument that we should all go into the Democratic Party, I thought he should have entered the New Hampshire primary, as a socialist, running for the Democratic nomination. I didn’t urge this in a mocking way – I thought it would be very healthy for a democratic socialist to press the flesh, meet ordinary folks, let them see what a socialist looked like, and what socialism stood for. He wouldn’t have won the nomination, but he would have introduced a discussion of socialism into the public dialogue. He was a charming guy, a good speaker, and might actually have helped shift the Democrats away from the their support of the Vietnam War (alas, as followers of socialist history know, Mike’s approach to the Democratic Party was to support the war, until in 1972 he shifted).”

Street: I notice three differences between Harrington and Sanders right off the bat. First, Bernie is not particularly charming; in fact, he’s pretty prickly and outwardly pissed-off (which is fine, but it’s a difference). Second, I seem to recall Harrington in his public presentation always self-identifying as a socialist. Sanders doesn’t generally do that (a point to which I shall return below). Third, while antiwar Leftists might (or might not – I really don’t know the full history here) have had reasons in the early-mid 1960s to think that Harrington might oppose the Vietnam War (my understanding is that his pre-1972 failure was quite predictable in light of his earlier positions vis a vis the early New Left), Sanders has (while opposing “bad wars” like George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq) pretty much advance-aligned himself with the American imperial military project during and before the global war on/of terror. He supported the bombing of Serbia, the bombing of Libya, Israel’s vicious U.S.-equipped attacks on the people of Gaza, the $400 billion F-35 fighter jet project, and more. Beyond some carping about military bloat, he utters barely a word against the planet-cooking Pentagon System, which eats up 57 percent of federal discretionary U.S, spending, accounts for nearly half the military spending on Earth, and maintains more than 1000 U.S. military installations across more than 100 “sovereign” nations.

It is healthy no doubt for “ordinary” Americans to come into contact with a charismatic (charming or not) “democratic socialist” who denounces economic inequality and plutocracy. But it is not particularly healthy for ordinary Americans to be encouraged in the false belief that progressive, even socialist ideals and programs can be meaningfully advanced through U.S. electoral politics and either of the two capitalist political parties (once rightly described by the great American Socialist Upton Sinclair as “two wings of the same bird of prey”). As the International Socialist Organization’s Lance Selfa shows in his carefully researched history of the Democratic Party, “history’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party” (the Democratic organization) has “time and again betrayed the aspiration of ordinary people while pursuing an agenda favorable to big business and U.S. imperial ambitions.” It has also proven itself time and again to be the leading graveyard of grassroots protest and social movements beneath and beyond the nation’s recurrent staggered electoral spectacles, which are deceptively sold to the populace as the only politics that matters. As Noam Chomsky noted eleven years ago:

“The U.S. presidential race, impassioned almost to the point of hysteria, hardly represents healthy democratic impulses…Americans are encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is yet another method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics.’ But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics….The urgent task for those who want to shift policy in progressive direction – often in close conformity to majority opinion – is to grow and become strong enough so that that they can’t be ignored by centers of power. Forces for change that have come up from the grass roots and shaken the society to its foundations include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement and others, cultivated by steady, dedicated work at all levels, everyday, not just once every four years…The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome.”

McReynolds: “Now we have another socialist doing what I thought then, and still think, is a good idea. Bernie Sanders, whom I met in 1980, and who kindly came down to New York City to speak to a Socialist Party convention (I have lost track of the year), and who put together real coalitions of real people and got elected as Mayor of Burlington, then as the Congressman from Vermont (they only have one member of the House) and then as Senator, is off and running, to huge and enthusiastic crowds.”

Street: I’ve heard a number of Sanders speeches since he announced his presidential candidacy. He does not call himself a socialist. He does not call for socialism. He is not running as a socialist. More importantly, perhaps, he does not criticize or even refer to capitalism or the profit system, the underlying political-economic regime that is wired for the endless upward distribution of wealth and power and also, frankly, for the ruination of livable ecology. This is all very different from Eugene Debs, to say the least. (It may even be somewhat different than Norman Thomas, though here I don’t really know.) Sanders rails against “the billionaire class,” against economic inequality, against the paulstreetRepublicans, against FOX News, against the Citizens United decision, and especially against those terrible Koch brothers. He’s running as a strident populist Democrat. In that regard, he’s not really all that different from Dennis Kucinich in 2003-04, Jesse Jackson in the 1980s and even John Edwards in 2007-08, all of whom struck strong populist chords in efforts to reach the Democratic Party’s “progressive base.” I’ve been struck by how reluctant Sanders has been to mention the corporatized Democratic Party as part of the nation’s oligarchy problem. Crazy John Edwards fulminated consistently against “corporate Democrats as well as corporate Republicans” when he ran in the Iowa Caucus eight years ago. During the first Sanders talk I heard last winter, it was left to a smirking graduate student to remind Sanders and his liberal audience that the dismal dollar Democrats and their power-serving president are as much a part of the ruling class assault on equality, democracy, and livable ecology as the Republicans.

Of course the crowds are big! As Sanders notes, the top 10th of the top 1 percent nearly owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of Americans. The Walton family has a bigger net worth than the bottom 40 percent. Poverty and inequality and joblessness and yet overwork work plague the populace, whose not-so democratically elected officials are shockingly beholden to the wealthy few. The media is in the hands of the 1 percent, with deadly results. The Republicans are in fact pathological on numerous levels. The arch-plutocratic Koch brothers are beyond disgusting. The citizenry has been angry about the nation’s savage class disparities and abject oligarchy – America’s “unelected dictatorship of money” (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson) – for many years. I saw Edwards blow the roof of one Iowa town hall after another – to large and enthusiastic crowds – by denouncing the same national plagues in 2007. The Occupy Movement rapidly became a coast-to-coast sensation because of the citizenry’s anger over the New Gilded Age we currently inhabit. Any effective public figure who speaks honestly, knowledgably, and angrily about and against the current reigning corporate and financial oligarchy is going to draw some big and enthusiastic crowds right now.

McReynolds: “I have heard some on the Left criticize Bernie’s determination not to take part in personal attacks on Hillary. I think that is a refreshing stand on his part – I salute him for it.”

Street: It’s way beyond not making personal attacks. I have (in an Iowa City bookstore last winter) heard Sanders call Hillary Clinton “a good friend.” I was taken aback. What kind of democratic socialist is “good friends” with the corporatist and imperialist Hillary Clinton? And what’s so refreshing and salutary about not attacking her? In his bitter but valuable book No One Left to Lie To (a study of the Clintons written in 1999), the late and formerly Left Christopher Hitchens’ volume contained a chapter documenting Mrs. Clinton’s richly triangulation-ist history along with much to suggest that she (like her husband) is a power-mad sociopath. Especially memorable was Hillary’s response, in her role as head of the White House’s health reform initiative, to Harvard medical professor David Himmelstein, head of Physicians for a National Health Program. Himmelstein told her about the remarkable possibilities of a comprehensive, single payer “Canadian style” health plan, supported by more than two-third of the U.S. public. Beyond backing by a U.S. citizen super-majority, Himmelstein noted, single-payer would provide comprehensive coverage to the nation’s 40 million uninsured while retaining free choice in doctor selection and being certified by the Congressional Budget Office as “the most cost-effective plan on offer.”

“David,” Hillary commented with fading patience before sending him away in 1993, “tell me something interesting.” Along with the big insurance companies the Clintons deceptively railed against, the co-presidents decided from the start to exclude the popular health care alternative – single payer – from the national health care “discussion.” (Obama would of course do the same exact same thing in 2009.) What she advanced instead of the social democratic Canadian system that bored her was a hopelessly complex and secretly developed system called “managed competition.” Mrs. Clinton’s plan went down in flames, thanks in no small part to her inflexible arrogance.

An excellent article by the Left commentator Doug Henwood in Harper’s Magazine last November provides a clever and concise catalogue of Mrs. Clinton’s conservative, corrupt, corporate-neoliberal, and imperial record from her years at Yale Law and the Arkansas governor’s office (held by Bill for all but one 2-year term between 1978 and 1992) through her stints in the U.S. Senate (2001-2009) and atop the Department of State (2010-2013). Henwood’s essay is particularly valuable on how the Clintons during their tenure in Arkansas helped “lay…the groundwork for what would eventually hit the national stage as the New Democrat movement, which took institutional form as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).” The essence of the DLC was dismal, dollar-drenched “neoliberal” abandonment of the Democratic Party’s last, lingering commitments to labor unions, social justice, civil rights, racial equality, the poor, and environmental protection in abject service to the “competitive” bottom-line concerns of Big Business. The Clintons helped launch the New Democrat/DLC juggernaut by assaulting Arkansas’ teacher unions (Hillary led the attack) and refusing to back the repeal of the state’s anti-union “right to work” law – this while Hillary began working for the Rose Law firm, which “represented the moneyed interests of Arkansas” (Henwood). Connection with one of the sleazier players among those interests, a Savings and Loan charlatan named Jim McDougal, got them involved in the Whitewater scandal, which involved the Arkansas Governor’s spouse (Hillary) doing legal work at Rose (work about which Hillary lied upon outside investigation) for a shady land speculator (McDougal) who had enticed the governor and his wife (the Clintons) to foolishly invest in a badly leveraged development project.

When the Arkansas-based community-organizing group ACORN passed a ballot measure lowering electrical rates residential users and raising them for commercial businesses in Little Rock, Rose sent Hillary into court to argue a business-backed challenge. As Henwood notes, Hillary “helped to craft the underlying legal strategy, which was that the new rate schedule amounted to an unconstitutional ‘taking of property’…now a common right-wing argument against regulation…”

Is it a “personal attack” to recount this history? No, it’s just factual reporting. If Sanders did criticize Hillary on a personal level, it would probably be politically unwise but it would also be pretty darn understandable. While I tend to resist the tendency to describe the nation’s political and economic elites as sociopaths and evil (I have argued in Z Magazine and elsewhere that the nation’s deeper and more relevant socio-pathology and evil is institutional), I have no doubt that both terms are accurately applied to both of the Clintons.

McReynolds: “Others on the Left feel that Bernie is leading voters into the trap of supporting Hillary when he doesn’t, himself, get the nomination. They feel he should run as an independent if he loses the race for the nomination.”

Street: Well, Sanders has repeatedly said he will “not be a spoiler” and will therefore back the mainstream corporate Democrat (HRC in all likelihood) who wins the nomination to run against the Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election. Having signed up for the Democratic Caucuses and primaries, Sanders cannot practically run as a serious third party candidate in the general election. Anyone who thinks they can talk him into trying to do that (as a write-in candidate perhaps) is being delusional. Sanders makes no secret of his readiness to lock progressive voters down into the standard old Stockholm-Syndrome Lesser Evilist holding cell. In that and other ways, he is part of what the brilliant writers and activists at Black Agenda Report call a Hillary-Bernie “tag team.”

I do think Sanders should have chosen to run outside the two party system – for the governorship of Vermont under the ticket of the Progressive Party. Had he gone that route, he would win that election and then very possibly redeem single payer health insurance (shamefully abandoned by the state’s Democratic governor) in Vermont – something that would qualify as a great progressive triumph.

McReynolds: “Let’s have a little sense of history here – independent candidates for President might help throw the election to one or the other major party candidate but they have absolutely no chance of winning election. Go back to the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948, to the later efforts by Barry Commoner, John Anderson, Ralph Nader. (I leave aside the campaigns of the truly minor party candidates, of which I was one, and of which Norman Thomas was the most distinguished example, because such campaigns were not aimed at winning the office but at providing a platform for dissenting views). These were good men but the enthusiasm of their supporters did not reflect the reality of American politics. In 1948 I was a student at UCLA, the Cold War had just begun, Henry Wallace has been a Vice President under Roosevelt, and his supporters (at least those on campus) were convinced he might win – in the end he didn’t carry a single state (though I think he helped push Truman to the left on domestic issues)…Bernie is not running as a spoiler, but as a serious candidate, reflecting that part of the Left which is, in my view, most important – it is not locked into any of the small ‘officially Left groups’ but it is there, a sometimes almost invisible left in the labor movement, among the elderly, the youth, the people who know our politics is rotten and really want a change.”

Street: “Spoiler” is a deceptive and unduly pejorative term for Nader, Jill Stein, and others who have tried run for the presidency outside the corporate-captive two party duopoly. Speaking about lessons of history, maybe really addressing and changing “our” “rotten” politics and society is not about running as a “serious” (or silly) candidate for president under the existing U.S. electoral regime. The best thing that can be hoped from Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is that it might remind people yet again that, in the words the great radical American historian Howard Zinn, “the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in – in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories.” As Zinn elaborated in a 2008 essay on “the election madness engulf[ing] the entire society, including the left” with special intensity in the year of Barack Obama’s ascendancy:

“The election frenzy seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. …Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes – the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth…But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice…. Let’s remember that even when there is a ‘better’ candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore…..”

Now, to the candidate’s credit, Sanders’ current stump speech shows some solid understanding of this very basic and critical point (though he does not address “matters of war”). He has been saying that corporate plutocracy is so entrenched that it wouldn’t matter who the next U.S. President was without a mass grassroots movement for social and economic justice and ecological sustainability. Of course, that raises the question of why he is focusing people’s energies on a vitality-sucking run as a major party presidential candidate in the latest of “these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas” that Chomsky has described with reason as “yet another method for marginalizing the populace.”

McReynolds: “Bernie has been properly criticized for not being perfect on all issues. I agree with that, he is not perfect. He has a record of supporting some of the worst aspects of the Military/Industrial complex, and, while not nearly as uncritical a supporter of Israel as some think, he has been silent when he should have spoken out. I urge my friends in the Jewish peace movement to reach out to Bernie and try a serious dialogue (not shouting) about why the US links to Israel should be ended (or at least weakened).”

Street: “Not perfect” strikes me as quite an understatement in light of Sanders’ foreign policy record. Bearing in mind that Sanders has supported U.S. client state Israel’s repeated mass murder of Palestinians trapped in the Israel-imposed open air apartheid prison of Gaza, McReynolds should reconsider this statement after going to a quiet place to read aloud the name of some of the 504 children Israel slaughtered with U.S. weapons last summer. Recalling the democratic socialist Michael Harrington’s failure to oppose the U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Chomsky’s phrase at the time) in the middle and late 1960s, think of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looking at photographs of burned and murdered Vietnamese children in Ramparts Magazine in 1965. The dead Gaza children’s names are listed here.



Beyond that grave moral question (also relevant to Sanders positions on U.S. military actions in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Libya), Sanders’ ambitious “homeland” agenda is undermined in a practical political-economic sense by his silence on Empire. This is no small and peripheral matter. It is not an afterthought that only slightly qualifies the overall excellence of Sanders’ candidacy. It’s a huge and central problem, for Sanders’ ambitious and genuinely progressive domestic and environmental agenda cannot possibly be enacted without the conversion of the military industrial complex to peaceful and sustainable production and infrastructure. The veteran peace activist Bruce Gagnon notes, progressive social and environmental policy “victory won’t be within their grasp unless we can talk about the US imperial war project that is draining our nation, killing people all over the world, and helping to increase climate change as the Pentagon has the largest carbon footprint on the planet. Sure taxes on Wall Street speculation will help some, but until we get our hands on the Pentagon’s pot of gold nothing really changes around here.”

McReynolds: “The peace movement should also dialogue with Bernie. He should not get a free pass from any of us. And it is urgent that the “Black Lives Matter” movement meet with Bernie. But let’s be real – the candidate who can prove right on every one of the issues which concerns us is not going to have a very wide base of support.”

Street: I’m really not sure why this passage puts the onus on peace and racial justice activists to initiate discussion with Sanders. Those activists are not purporting to run for the White House. Sanders is. If he’s serious about peace (not likely) and racial justice (probably), then it’s on him to reach out to movements. But here’s another and perhaps more important thought: if you really have to sacrifice the issues of peace and/or racial justice in order to win mass support in a U.S. presidential race, then maybe “serious” U.S. presidential politics isn’t a particularly useful avenue for morally serious Left activism. The great democratic socialist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was asked by antiwar and antiracist progressives to consider running for the U.S. presidency in 1967. He turned them down since (among other things) he was unwilling to take the moral short-cuts involved in that kind of politics.

McReynolds: “Bernie is dealing with what I think are the real issues – the control the 1% has over the country, the obscene power of money in our elections, the massive disparity between the handful of the ultra-rich and the millions who live in genuine poverty. I’m delighted Bernie is doing so well – much better than I had thought he would.”

Street: Why does the imperial warfare state – the Pentagon system that accounts (to repeat) for more than half the nation’s discretionary federal spending and creates the largest single institutional carbon footprint on Earth – not count among “the real issues”? Why not here give Sanders credit for speaking out strongly against anthropogenic global warming, arguably (actually) the single biggest issue of our or any time? And why the surprise at how well Sanders is doing? His big crowds and energy should be absolutely no surprise (for reasons explained XX paragraphs above). The same was true of John “Two Americas” Edwards in Iowa in 2007.

McReynolds: “There are a couple of practical questions. If he doesn’t get the nomination, what will he have accomplished? He will have done something very important, and God help the left sectarians who don’t understand this: he will have made it possible to discuss socialism. He will have made it respectable to use the term. He will have shown there is a mass of people willing to hear a genuinely radical attack on the current corporate structure.”

Street: Here McReynolds gives way too much credit and praise to his friend Bernie Sanders. “Socialism” (rather vaguely understood) has been rising in popularity for some time now in the U.S. The causes include the end of the Cold War, the horrendous performance of U.S. and global capitalism, and even the FOX News’ ironic dissemination and dilution of the term and its meaning. Occupy showed the existence of a “mass of people willing to hear a genuinely radical attack on the current corporate structure.” At the same time, again, Sanders isn’t really talking about socialism (or, for that matter, about capitalism) on the campaign trail. His critique of corporate and financial power is populist, not socialist or radical.

McReynolds: “And what happens if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination and Hillary does? I do not personally dislike Hillary – I’ve never met her. But she has no principles other than power.”

Street: “If Bernie doesn’t get the nomination” – that’s a good one! For a democratic socialist and pacifist like McReynolds, wouldn’t it be enough to know that someone (a) is a warmonger (Hillary is an open Hawk) and (b) “has no principles other than power” to dislike that person? I’ve never met Hillary either. I hope I never do! I’ve certainly learned more than enough about to cultivate a healthy dislike. (Obama, by the way, I met. Couldn’t stand him.)

McReynolds: “I think it will be profoundly outrageous if, in November, the choice is between a Bush and a Clinton.”

Street: Nothing is certain, but those are certainly the Dollarocracy betting odds. Welcome to the oligarchy, comrade. Bernie’s not going to fix it. Let’s hold a new Constitutional Convention to draft a new governmental charter for popular sovereignty (the U.S. Founders’ ultimate nightmare) in the U.S.

McReynolds: “Those of us in the ‘lucky states,’ where the electoral votes are already sure to go one way or the other, can vote our conscience (as I voted Green in New York when Obama ran, and as I will vote Green in 2016) …Whoever the Democratic candidate is, they will be as sure to carry New York as the Republican candidate will carry Texas. But, in swing states, conscience is not so easy to satisfy – because the next President will have Supreme Court nominations to make, and in this country, those nominations are deeply important.”

Street: So lucky McReynolds get to protest-vote for Jill Stein (she of the urgently needed and many sided Green New Deal) but I (in Iowa) don’t. I’d like to see leftists who make the “safe state/contested state” argument move to a contested state and actually mark a ballot for a corporate war Democrat. I can’t do it, personally; conscience won’t let me. But the more relevant point goes to Zinn and Chomsky: “before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools” (Zinn). Far better to spend the lion’s share of one’s activist energies on “the urgent task” of social movement-building beneath and beyond the quadrennial personalized major party “electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome” (Chomsky).

McReynolds: “So yes, in this imperfect world I happily support the man who is not perfect on every issue, but very good on some key ones – and that is Bernie Sanders, a decent, smart, and very serious fellow. So serious that he has even taken to using something on his hair to keep it from flying off in all directions.”

Street: See my comments above on “not perfect.” Harrington had better hair. Debs had none at all. I agree that Bernie seems decent and (very) smart for the most part, but I just can’t shake all those names of murdered Palestinian children that appear in the back of my mind every time I think of Sanders. They just don’t go away. But it’s not really about supporting any specific man or woman, any candidate or politician. We are citizens, not politicians and it’s about issues, institutions, and (as Sanders seems to sense, to his credit) grassroots organization beneath and beyond leaders and elites.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/17/interjections-on-bernie-sanders/

Bernie Out of the Closet: Sanders’ Longstanding Deal with the Democrats
by PAUL STREET


I am glad that the left intellectual and activist Chris Hedges does not support the Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. As Hedges explained in a recent interview on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Sanders’ candidacy lends undeserved credibility to the thoroughly corporatized Democratic Party. Sanders has pledged that he will support the corporatist military hawk Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general presidential election. Sanders stirs up legitimate progressive energy and popular anger and then “funnels it back into a dead political system,” Hedges observes. Sanders fails to confront the American Empire and military state, and, Hedges adds, has unforgivably “abandoned the Palestinians and given carte blanche to Israel.”

I agree on all scores. Hedges’ reasoning is consistent with my own recent writings on interviews on the Sanders presidential sensation. I do, however, want to raise one quibble with Hedges on Sanders’ history – a difference that makes Hedges’ case against Sanders even stronger. “I don’t understand,” Hedges told Nader: “He [Sanders] fought the Democratic establishment in Vermont his entire career. Now he has sold out to it.”

Sanders’ 1990 Deal with the Dems

Sanders did not “f[i]ght the Democratic establishment in Vermont his entire career.” As the left University of Vermont philosopher Will Miller noted in a 1999 essay recounting left peace activists’ occupation of then U.S. Congressman Bernie Sanders’ Burlington, Vermont office to protest Sanders’ support of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the ongoing U.S. War on Iraq, Sanders sold out to the corporate and war Democrats as early as 1990.

Between 1981 and 1988, it is true, Sanders “presented himself to the left outside of Vermont as the leader of the third party movement, vanquishing the two major parties in every Mayoral election.” But in 1988, Sanders got a lesson on the perils of third party politics when he ran for federal office. In the election for Vermont’s seat in the House of Representatives, the independent Sanders and Democrat Paul Poirer divided the majority vote and the contest went to a Republican. Sanders responded by drifting right and cutting a deal with the Vermont Democrats: the party would permit no serious candidate to run against him while he blocked serious third party formation in Vermont and adopted positions in line with the national corporate war Democrats. Miller’s up-close account merits lengthy quotation:

“Bernie – out of office for the first time in eight years – went to the Kennedy School at Harvard for six months and came back with a new relationship with the state’s Democrats. The Vermont Democratic Party leadership has allowed no authorized candidate to run against Bernie in 1990 (or since) and in return, Bernie has repeatedly blocked third party building. His closet party, the Democrats, are very worried about a left 3rd party forming in Vermont. In the last two elections, Sanders has prevented Progressives in his machine from running against Howard Dean, our conservative Democratic Governor who was ahead of Gingrich in the attack on welfare.”

“The unauthorized Democratic candidate in 1990, Delores Sandoval, an African American faculty member at the University of Vermont, was amazed that the official party treated her as a nonperson and Bernie kept outflanking her to her right. She opposed the Gulf build-up, Bernie supported it. She supported decriminalization of drug use and Bernie defended the war on drugs, and so on…”

“After being safely elected in November of 1990, Bernie continued to support the buildup while seeking membership in the Democratic Congressional Caucus – with the enthusiastic support of the Vermont Democratic Party leadership. But, the national Democratic Party blew him off, so he finally voted against the war and returned home – and as the war began – belatedly claimed to be the leader of the anti-war movement in Vermont.”

“Since 1991 the Democrats have given Bernie membership in their Congressional Caucus. Reciprocally, Bernie has become an ardent imperialist. Sanders endorsed Clinton in 1992 and 1996. In1992 he described Clinton as the ‘lesser of evils,’ (a justification he used to denounce when he was what the local press called an ‘avowed socialist’). By 1996 he gave Clinton an unqualified endorsement. He has been a consistent ‘Friend of Bill’s’ from since 1992. One student I know worked on the Clinton Campaign in 1996 and all across Vermont, Bernie was on the stage with the rest of the Vermont Democratic Party Leadership, while the unauthorized Democratic candidate for his Congressional seat was kept out in the audience.”

During the 1990s, the not-so “independent” Congressman Sanders voted for and/or otherwise supported:

* Economic sanctions that killed more than a million Iraqi civilians

* Every U.S. bombing of Iraq from 1992 on

* The sending of U.S. military units to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to threaten Iraq because “we cannot tolerate aggression”

* The objectively racist and mass-incarcerationist Federal Crime bill.

* Every US intervention since elected to Congress–Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Liberia, Zaire (Congo), Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.

Many of Sanders’ liberal fans might be surprised to learn that he voted for a National Rifle Association (NRA)-supported bill to restrict lawsuits against gun manufacturers and against the Brady Bill.

The “leftist” Congressman Sanders liked to send out mailings sends out mailings to veterans that supported the US having “the strongest military in the world” and praised soldiers as sacrificing “for the freedom of Americans.” Sanders repeatedly failed to invite antiwar veterans’ groups to his many veterans events in the state.

By Miller’s account, the “independent” and “leftist” Congressman Sanders’ political trajectory stood well to the right of Black House Democrats like Maxine Waters and Ron Dellums, “who moved paulstreetcontinuously to their left during their Congressional careers.” Sanders, by contrast, “got where he is now by a lurch to the right. He promises working people, the aged, the poor, and the ‘vanishing middle class’ that he will defend them while he repeatedly blocks the building of the anti-capitalist political movement and party that might actual make such promises legitimate.” When a Vermont leftist questioned Representative Sanders in public about his failure to help build a left-progressive alternative to the capitalist party duopoly, Sanders said he was now too busy with his Congressional work to worry about such things.

“The Citizenry Moaned Audibly”

Miller’s essay appeared after he and fourteen other peace activists were arrested for “trespassing” in Sanders’ Burlington office. Seeking to control the public relations damage, Sanders hijacked a regularly scheduled town meeting in Burlington to advance his position on behalf of Bill Clinton’s criminal war on Serbia. By Miller’s observation:

“A general town meeting had already been scheduled for the following Monday, so he turned it to a ‘town meeting on Kosovo.’ Apparently, Bernie Sanders had forgotten what a Town Meeting is…Sanders as the self-appointed moderator/boss opened the evening with naked self-justification: ‘It is a very complex situation’… followed by the ritual of demonization of Milosevic – a technique he has perfected over the last eight years on Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Then he presented the false dilemma that the only alternative to bombing is doing nothing. Sanders said his situation was the same as that of Joschka Fischer’s of the Green Party, Germany’s Foreign Minister, who has outraged his Green Party membership by supporting the bombing his coalition government is carrying out as part of NATO. “

“Back in Vermont the assembled citizenry moaned audibly.”

After the 9/11 attacks, “Bomber Bernie” (as Burlington peace activists dubbed Sanders) voted for the initial 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists that has been cited as the legal justification for U.S. military interventions and endless U.S. “global war on terror” – including the invasion of Iraq (which Sanders opposed along with most Democrats in Congress in 2002 and 2003). He voted for a non-binding resolution expressing support for troops at the outset of the invasion of Iraq. In March 2006, he opposed efforts to bring articles of impeachment against the open arch-war criminal George W. Bush since “the Republicans control the House and the Senate.”

Senator Sanders as a de facto Dem

When Sanders decided to make a bid for an open U.S. Senate seat in 2005, his longstanding service to the corporate Democrats won him the critical endorsement of Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Schumer’s backing meant that no Democrat running against Sanders could receive financial help from the party. Sanders was also supported by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and Democratic National Committee Chair and Chairman and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who described Sanders as an “ally who votes with the Democrats ninety eight percent of the time.” Then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama campaigned for Sanders in Vermont.

As when he was in the U.S, House, Senatorial candidate Sanders made a curious deal with the Vermont Democratic Party: he agreed to be listed on their primary ballot but to decline the nomination should he win, which he did.

The “independent” Sanders has enjoyed a special agreement with the Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate. He votes with the Democrats on all procedural matters in exchange for the committee seats and seniority that would be available to him as a Democrat. (He can break this rule in some exceptional cases if Democratic Senate Whip Dick Durbin agrees, but the request is rarely made.) Sanders is free to vote as he wishes on policy matters, but he has almost always voted with the Democrats.

Consistent with this party loyalty, Sanders refuses to seriously or substantively criticize his “good friend” and Democratic presidential primary “rival” Mrs. Clinton – a militantly corporatist and militarist right-wing Democrat. Sanders has backed Obama’s numerous murderous military actions and provocations around the world, from Libya, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq to China, Ukraine, and Russia. Sanders has said repeatedly that he will not be a third- party “spoiler” in the general election and thus will direct his primary delegates and voters to line up behind Hillary, Inc. in 2016. In his presidential campaign speeches, Sanders has been unwilling to mention the corporatized Democratic Party as part of the nation’s oligarchy problem. Presidential candidate John Edwards fulminated consistently against “corporate Democrats as well as corporate Republicans” when he ran in the Iowa Caucus eight years ago. Sanders, by contrast, focuses almost completely on corporate Republicans.

“But he’s a socialist,” many leftists exult. I’ve heard a number of Sanders speeches since he announced his presidential candidacy. He does not call himself a socialist. He does not call for socialism. He does not criticize or even refer to capitalism or the profit system, the underlying political-economic regime that is wired for the endless upward distribution of wealth and power and the ruination of livable ecology. Sanders rails against “the billionaire class,” against economic inequality, against the Republicans, against FOX News, against the Citizens United decision, and especially against those terrible Koch brothers. He’s running as a strident populist Democrat. In that regard, he’s not really all that different from Dennis Kucinich in 2003-04, Jesse Jackson in the 1980s and even Edwards in 2007-08, all of whom struck strong populist chords in efforts to reach the Democratic Party’s “progressive base.”

Out of the Democrats’ Closet

None of this is a departure from Sanders’ earlier career since 1989. As the shaggy-haired Mayor of progressive Burlington during the Reagan years, Sanders may have been a Sandinista-supporting left politico willing to challenge the two party duopoly. But Bernie cleaned up his too-radical act after his 1988 defeat. He went to “liberal” Harvard’s imperialist Kennedy school and came back to work in tandem with the corporate and militaristic Democrats under the guise of an “independent” and third party political identity. He’s been on the not all-that-left wing of the dismal dollar Dems ever since.

It’s all very different than the story Sanders tells campus town progressives on the campaign trail. According to that narrative, he has joined with the Democrats only this year and because of his pragmatic calculation that third party candidates cannot succeed under the U.S. party and electoral system. In reality, however, the Democrats have been Sanders’ “closet party” (Miller) for the last fifteen years. He’s really just coming out of the closet now for the presidential race, in a Clinton-welcomed effort to help give the Democrats a much-needed fake-populist makeover for the 2016 elections. The great Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs (whose poster hangs in Sanders’ Senate office) would not be impressed.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/21/bernie-out-of-the-closet-sanders-longstanding-deal-with-the-democrats/

New post on Houston Communist Party

Evaluating the Sanders Candidacy
by worker

http://mltoday.com/evaluating-the-sanders-candidacy?utm

By Wayne Nealis
July 21, 2015

Sanders' anti-One Percent message is welcome. Nonetheless, "political independence inside the Democratic Party" is a dead end. Progressives should take independent political action, break dependency on the Democratic Party and defeat the right wing.

The yearning among millions of Americans for a change in politics as usual is evident in the enthusiasm for Senator Bernie Sanders anti-One Percent campaign. In late June, on ABC's This Week, Sanders said he would win because Americans are "...sick and tired of working longer hours for low wages while at the same time 99 percent of all new income generated is going to the top 1 percent and the top one-tenth-of-one-percent now owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent." [1]

Those are fight'n words that have found traction among millions of voters. His message echoes Occupy Wall Street's scrappy call to fight back against the greed and usury of the 1 percent. Those who see the need to build a political movement to challenge the two major parties should closely follow voters' response to his campaign program, as it is a barometer of independent electoral opportunities.

In recent campaign appearances Sanders called for doubling the minimum wage, providing free college education, breaking up the largest banks, creating a universal health care system and expanding union rights. Hillary Clinton and the Democrat's center-right leadership would not support any of these initiatives.

On foreign policy Sanders stands to the left of the Democratic Party's imperialist center, but he is inconsistent. Sanders voted to authorize the invasion of Afghanistan, though he vigorously opposed the Iraq War. In 1999 he voted to authorize President Clinton's use of military force and bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The first of many of U.S initiated illegal regime change adventures to come. Like most of his senate colleagues he refers to Israel as a key ally and friend. He publicly supported Israeli attacks on Palestinians.

He typically goes along with economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., for example, on Iran, Russia, Libya and Iraq before the 2003 war. Knowing sanctions are precursors to military aggression, his support is misguided. During the U.S. and NATO bombing of Libya in 2011, Sanders noted an interview his constituents were upset there was no debate in congress before Obama acted. Yet, when asked if he would support a resolution to authorize the war under the War Powers Act, he said, "We'll see." [2]

In 2013, when Obama proposed bombing Syria Sanders did not come out against the action, even after the Senate Foreign Relations Committee narrowly voted to authorize the campaign. Sanders said constituents calling his offices were nearly unanimous in their opposition, but he was going to continue to listen to the president's arguments. [3] While Sanders does not have a war-hawk record like Clinton, neither is he an anti-war candidate.

What is curious about his otherwise radical sounding campaign is he seldom discusses foreign policy on the stump, in interviews or campaign statements. [4] The campaign website does not mention foreign policy, a critique of drone warfare or ongoing wars. Yet, it is quite clear from polling data that a majority of Americans are as tired of war as they are tried of Wall Street greed.

Could Sanders' silence on foreign policy be to protect Vermont from losing military-related jobs? An air force base near Burlington, under review to be closed or downsized, was recently given a reprieve, when it was chosen to be the home base of the new, $400 billion F-35 fighter plane. Sanders defended the plane and lobbied for it being located in Vermont. Vermont firms also depend on defense department engineering and manufacturing contracts. Sanders knows the political/military establishment is not above threaten critics with loss of contracts.

Perhaps his reticence to discuss U.S. imperialist aggression and interference in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine or closer to home, Venezuela or Honduras, is that it would mean Hillary Clinton would have to defend her hawkish record to a public tired of war. A reasonable question to ask is if his inattention to foreign policy is designed to avoid such a confrontation that could damage Clinton's general election campaign. Or, does he agree with her, as his record in part shows? Many of Sanders' supporters likely disagree with Hillary's record. If so, they should begin asking their candidate some tough questions.

The appeal of Sanders' domestic program No doubt on domestic issues Sanders program for a political revolution resonates with a sizable percentage of the electorate, perhaps approaching 30 to 50 percent depending on the issue. So what are his chances of his winning the nomination? As much as his domestic agenda appeals to the disenchanted among democrats and unaffiliated voters the odds are stacked against him for the nomination as discussed in more detail below.

National polling shows Sanders with a respectable 15 percent of the vote among potential voters considering he has no national organization in place to sustain a general election bid. Among Democrats in early primary and caucus states, like Iowa and New Hampshire, polls shows he may garner support from 30 percent or more. Crowds at campaign rallies continue to grow with an estimated 10,000 in Madison, WI, July 1 and that number again recently in Phoenix, AZ.

These results show there is a constituency around Sanders' social equity domestic agenda on which to challenge to the two major parties. Politically, 2016 is ripe for an independent run for president on a program like Sanders'. Discontent runs high and 50 percent of voters want more choices than the two major parties. The wild card played by social media provides an inexpensive means to reach the public, especially among young voters. Might the response to Sanders been greater if he had to chosen run an independent campaign?

But running for president on a domestic program like Sanders', without a host of like-minded congressional candidates, is strategically flawed. Voters are less likely to take it as a serious effort, see it as a spoiler or symbolic, a flash-in-the-pan campaign. A slate of congressional candidates running on the same program would mark a serious effort at a political revolution. This would attract more local media coverage and extend the organizational capacity of the congressional and presidential candidates without adding additional resources. So, far it appears Sanders has not recruited any sitting or prospective congressional candidates to take up his domestic program. This adds to skepticism about the intent of his campaign.

It appears from outside Sanders and his supporters had insufficient discussion with left, progressive, peace, labor, women's and civil rights groups, immigrant rights and other forces before launching the campaign. Such a discussion even for a symbolic campaign to raise issues is incumbent on someone challenging the center-right, pro-war, corporate forces that control the Democratic Party.

These discussions might have concluded a more effective strategy would be to run as an independent left of center candidate. Even if this were not the outcome, discussions might have generated initiatives to run, left, independent or progressive democrats for House or Senate seats in 2016 and beyond. Sanders would also likely also have been confronted with demands he take a firm stand against the militarist foreign policy of interventions and war.

Why no critique of Democratic Party? Sanders entry into the Democratic primary with little or no critique of the party raises concerns as well. Millions of U.S. workers see the Democratic Party as part of the problem, not the solution – a party solidly in the hands of big business and servants of Wall Street not the working class. The recent fight over Fast Track Trade authority reinforced this sensibility, especially among union workers. Front-runner, Clinton stonewalled aggressive AFL-CIO union leaders demands for her to speak out against Fast Track. Not surprisingly, she refused.

Sanders, on the other hand, vigorously opposed it. He deserves working people's thanks. Still, he has not questioned Hillary on her rebuff of labor or her position on Fast Track. This is after all an issue for what Sanders calls the middle class. Since Sanders is running in the party that gave us NAFTA and is now trying to sell the Trans-Pacific Partnership seems incumbent on him to challenge Hillary.

Aligning a domestic reform agenda like Sanders' within the Democratic Party is to dance with corporate and political figures that categorically oppose that agenda. Furthermore many Democratic elected officials and their corporate backers supported policies that contributed to creating the health care crisis, wage inequality, declining union membership and rising tuition and student debt. The very problems Sanders' program is designed to correct.

I concede the Sanders campaign for the nomination may move public consciousness left and it does resonate with the discontent with politics as usual. As such, it could open future opportunities for independent political action. No doubt, as Sanders concluded, it would be more difficult to reach an audience running outside the Democratic Party. However, it could have been more effective.

The deck is stacked and the game rigged It is a bit naïve to think a candidate who opposes powerful interests within the Democratic Party [5] on major domestic issues can win the nomination. It assumes the entire the party apparatus, that is essentially owned and funded by wealthy donors, will be handed over to a challenger, in this case to a self-describe democratic socialist, whose platform would end private health insurers, raises taxes on the wealthy, support labor law reform and cut profits of pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers. [6]

The last time a non-establishment candidate threatened the Democratic Party, was when George McGovern's anti-Vietnam War insurgency captured the nomination. What happened? Party organizations at many levels sat out the election. Some party benefactors and even officials formed and funded Democrats for Nixon and by covert and overt means subverted the McGovern campaign. After they defeated McGovern, they set about changing party rules so such a challenger could not again upset the proverbial apple cart. These rules have only grown more restrictive and under Bill Clinton and his partners the party rules tightened.

With this in mind, consider the following. The Democratic Party under Obama's leadership kept the idea of single payer health care off public hearing agendas for fear the public might see it as a viable alternative to the president's ACA legislation. In some cases officials had single-payer activists escorted out of hearing rooms or even arrested for attempting to participate. Why? Top party leaders are in alliance with the firms and financiers profiting from health care. These firms, ranging from General Electric, to Medtronic to United Health Care, are not about to support Sanders even if he were to win the nomination. Rest assured they are working behind the scenes to derail Sanders' campaign with their ally Hillary Clinton and other party operatives.

In light of these factors one might wonder whether building an independent electoral organization to run in 2016 might have been a more fruitful and no less difficult. And more importantly, demonstrate a way forward i.e. a working class exit from the confines of the Democratic Party.

Too late in the game, why? If Sanders had signaled his intent even a year earlier, creating an independent campaign network would have been realistic, but in any case a better prepared primary run. Yet, in a Playboy interview, late in 2013, he said he was 99 percent sure he would not run. [8] This timing indicates Sanders late spring debate about running independently or as a democrat might not have been genuine.

His hesitation to break with the Democrats may simply be a practical one. Inside the party makes logistic sense for a politician who has no national organization to mobilize, as for example the Green Party does even though small in numbers. But then the question remains, given the prospect of winning: What is the reason to run? Especially, in the Democratic Party?

Is Sanders intent to influence Hillary's position on the issues? This is as unlikely as changing Hillary or Obama's thinking on TPP. The Democratic Party leadership and financiers? After eight years of experience with Bill Clinton and now Obama's administration and the party's congressional leaders the lesson should be quite clear. Influence the Democrats convention platform? It's likely already agreed upon, and nominees routinely ignore any troublesome plank. Hillary's commitments if elected president? Recall how fast labor unions' signature legislation, the Employee Free Choice Act, disappeared from Obama's agenda. Or, the no NAFTA pledge of candidate, Bill Clinton, after his inauguration.

Yes, again, this last question assumes Sanders has no chance of gaining the nomination. He knows this, regardless of his fight'n bravado on This Week. Even if he had a majority of elected delegates at the Democratic convention he would not be nominated. The center-right party leadership constitutes about 20 percent of the delegate slots more or less ensuring only a pro-business candidate who supports an imperialist foreign policy can be nominated.

A revolution in politics without congressional campaigns? So, what's the purpose of Sanders' campaign? I find it difficult to believe a politician with Sanders decades of experience, is not aware his program has not a chance of succeeding without a congressional re-alignment. This would require building an electoral movement to oust dozens of incumbents, Democrats and Republican's, but he is not advocating or encouraging such organizing for 2016 or in the future.

At the very least, to pass any part of his program would require electing 50 to100 new House members. House Democrats' sponsorship of single payer health care legislation has not exceeded in gaining more than 60 to 80 firm commitments in a decade – nearly 200 votes to few. As for free college tuition, a 180-degree change in power relationships is required.

Sanders often mentions Scandinavian nations' plethora of social benefits compared to Americans, yet workers in these nations won them by organizing unions and political parties that elected majorities in national governments to win their demands for free education, health care and paid parental leave. As well, the threat of workers opting for socialism applied pressure on big business and the wealthy to compromise.

Not to say such a sea change is not possible in the U.S., it is, but the Democratic Party will not be leading it. Given the discontent in the country if labor unions, civil rights and environmental groups and others united behind a domestic program like Sanders' it possible to alter power relations or at least threaten too in as few as two or three presidential cycles, but not in 18 months and not in the Democratic Party. Sanders could contribute to this even now, but so far he is not expanding his campaign to encourage independent action or candidates even to challenge GOP incumbents. Again, one has to ask why?

The good news is that the enthusiasm for Sanders domestic program shows the demands fit the times. Polling analysis indicates perhaps 30 percent of the electorate now supports such a broad economic justice agenda. Enough support on which to begin building an independent electoral and political movement to garner the power to make it happen. Sanders could give this strategy a push by telling his supporters they will need to build a movement outside the Democratic Party to win his program of radical change.

Those who own the Democratic Party, and it is not unions, civil rights or women's groups, will not tolerate using the party to advance Sanders' "new deal" for the working class and poor. Corporate and political operatives spent decades ensuring the party cannot stray from the neo-liberal agenda of free trade, complaint unions, financial deregulation, privatization and an imperialist foreign policy. They are not about to change course.

Breaking with the two-party horse race for president Some will still say that despite these arguments Sanders' run will create excitement about the election and rally voters. To do what? Vote for Hillary? Or, to vote for the Green Party? The Green's candidate Dr. Jill Stein is running on a domestic program similar to Sanders, but calls for a 50 percent cut in the military budget, an end to support for Israeli occupation and a radical change in foreign policy. Which one will Sanders choose to support?

Objectively, it appears Sanders' run inside the party, intentional or not, is a means to rally the progressive, left, civil rights and others to support Hillary as the lessor bad of the two major party candidates. So what's a peace activist, or black lives matter or climate change activist to do? One might consider not spending time and money supporting Sanders and instead, challenge the two parties by taking independent political actions.

First, it is necessary to escape thinking about the two-party horse for president. In 2017 we will have an imperialist, pro-corporate, Wall Street president. Yes, there are serious differences on social issues between the GOP and Democrats, but these can be weathered and deterred, even if the GOP were to win the presidency and a majority in both the house and senate. The left and other forces for social change must jettison the fear of a bogeyman of right wing legislative coups or another Iraq war venture like that of G.W. Bush. This fear effectively makes independent politics and a challenge to the two-party monopoly impossible.

Recall that under Reagan and both Bush administrations, even when the Democrats control one or both houses of congress, anti-working class legislation and war measures passed. And for those worried about an actual right wing take over, whatever that might mean, it could take place with a democrat as president or any combination of majorities in power. It is a small handful of people who would make that choice and all but a few of the real democrats would fall in line. The left must convince other peace and justice groups and individual activists at all political levels it is time to break with the Democratic party. Not in 2018, but now. Even if just to take small steps.

Until the break is made, we cannot know how many people a domestic program like Sanders' might inspire. Only a clear alternative political program will be seen as worth people's time, energy and passion. Such a strategy is not a spoiler role if the goal is to build political force to challenge the two parties. At some point, the risk must be taken, in federal, state and local elections.

And, on the question of war and peace, the past few decades show the only risk is not having an honest, even if small, alternative to demonstrate a way out of the two-party monopoly. Candidates opposing U.S. imperialist foreign policy and backing a Sanders-like domestic program, even if they were to cause a defeat of a Democrat, are not playing a spoiler role. They are giving voters an honest alternative to politics as usual. Workers and youth, in particular, yearn for such a choice.

Making 2016 a referendum on war and peace In 2016 what must be challenged is the endless march to war. If Bernie Sanders would, he might be worth investing time and resources, but so far he has shown no inclination to do so. This is the greatest threat to humanity, more so than global warming. Even unchecked global warming allows years for humanity to adjust, but an accidental or intentional nuclear war? Even nuclear skirmish? No more needs to be said.

For this reason and this alone the 2016 election must become a referendum on war and peace. All other issues balance on this task. Capitalism's global imperial project is economically driven, but has ideological roots in white supremacy, disregard for the earth's resources and environment, for human health, women's rights and even joy in living. All these are manifest domestically.

Two fronts are needed, not just Sanders' domestic front. The two parties of U.S. capitalism are not about to abandon their creator and benefactor. If the goal is to pass Sanders' domestic plan of economic renewal and expand social benefits both of these institutions stand in the way. No doubt strong allies exist among Democrat elected officials at all levels, especially in minority and progressive caucuses, but they will need to defy the center and right forces to do what's right.

Despair is not an option. Inaction is not an option. Instead of pouring resources and time into the presidential race, the more practical and effective strategy would be to focus on congressional races and challenging candidates and incumbents on the question of war and peace, global warming and racial justice. No candidate should be able to hold a fundraiser, rally or news conference without confronting a visible presence of those agitating for peace, equality and justice.

Nearly a year remains before filing deadlines to run independent, left or progressive democratic candidates to challenge pro-war, anti-labor or law and order incumbents. Imagine if 25 independent candidates in 25 House districts, including Green candidates, left and progressives, were run on Sanders' domestic program for hope and change. This work would contribute more to a revolution in politics than Sanders' run.

When he loses his bid for the nomination, will Bernie help lead such an independent movement for his revolution in politics? Would Sanders, his staff and progressive backers support such organizing? So far, Sanders has not encouraged such an initiative, yet it is clear a sea change in congress is required to pass his program. Perhaps, when Sanders loses he and his staff will support Hillary and the status quo?

This is the dead end, no matter the strength of convictions, passions or noble ideas riding the Sanders's wave.

Endnotes

[1] Benjamin Bell, 2015. "Sen. Bernie Sanders Predicts He'll Win White House," June 28, 2015 via This Week. URL: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/sen-bernie-sanders-predicts-hell-win-white-house/story?id=32083075

[2] Fox News 2011, Trish Turner. "Sanders Questions "War" in Libya." March 28, 2011. URL: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/03/28/sanders-questions-war-in-libya/

[3] John Nichols, 2013 "Bernie Sanders: Billions for 'Another War,' but No Money for Needs at Home." The Nation, September 6, 2013. URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-billions-another-war-no-money-needs-home/ .

[4] I reviewed several dozen such items since he announced an found scant evidence of foreign policy. This included an extensive Nation interview by John Nichols, on July 6, 2015, where not one questions related to foreign policy and war. Foreign policy is also missing from stump speeches in Iowa, New Hampshire and Wisconsin.

[5] Consider a few industries that would stand to loose enormous profits by Sanders's program: pharmaceutical, medical device makers, Wall Street firms and health insurers. Individual firms and their management are major players both parties.

[6] Add it up: free post-secondary education, single payer health care, expanding social security, etc.

[7] Source: http://www.playboy.com/playground/view/bernie-sanders-playboy-interview.

worker | July 30, 2015 at 8:54 pm | Categories: Analysis, Bernie Sanders, political struggle | URL: http://wp.me/pKlsL-1Ef
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Let the 'Bernie-Bots' speak for themselves:



I went to a Bernie Sanders rally to ask fans why they ‘Feel the Bern.’ Here’s what they said.
by worker
by Jared Sichel
SOURCE: Jewish Journal
Two weeks ago
Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders was in rally mode at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena on Aug. 10 and the scene was, well, pretty wild.
When the doors opened at 6 p.m., thousands of people were lined up outside hoping to get in before the arena filled to capacity, which it eventually did. Sanders told the crowd that more than 27,000 people were inside the arena and watching on big screens outside. Give or take a couple thousand, that’s totally believable, because it was packed.
The crowd looked mostly young (18-35), but there were plenty of middle-aged folks and senior citizens sporting some combination of Sanders pins, shirts, hats and signs. One older man even had his massive, beautiful dog decked out in some turquoise Sanders getup. The whole thing felt like a mixture of a neighborhood block party and a sports event (and not an L.A. sports event — they tend to be dull and cheerless).

There was a man in a Manning/Snowden ’16 shirt, a veteran who suggested he would support Rand Paul if Sanders weren’t in the race, and even more unkempt beards than you’d see on a trip to Seattle or Portland. Interviews with folks in the crowd were constantly interrupted by the screams that circled the arena as the “wave” made its way around a dozen or so times.
So, why is this grizzly 73-year-old senator from Vermont drawing the largest crowds so far of the 2016 presidential race? Two themes that came up again and again were that he’s not indebted to corporations and that Hillary Clinton isn’t a sufficiently genuine progressive. Asked how they view the “socialist” label attached to Sanders (in the Western European, democratic socialist mold), and whether it would hurt his chances in a general election if he became the Democratic nominee, here’s what some members of the crowd had to say:
Arrah Stamatakis, 27, singer-songwriter
“I’m excited to vote for a real progressive candidate. He offers authenticity more than Clinton does, and I want a single-payer health care system. I want free higher education.
“Hillary voted for the [Iraq] war, and she’s changed her position on many things.”
Brian Petras, 41, entrepreneur
“I feel Hillary has trust issues. I feel like there’s a little bit something that she’s hiding. Bernie’s very direct. He says what he wants. He’s not vague in his positions.
On the socialism label: It’s not socialism. He’s a democratic socialist. He still believes in democracy. He just has [elements] of socialist things that help the population, like health care and expanding Medicaid. He’s not against free markets or anything.”
Jamie Throgmorton, 54, drove 90 miles to attend
“I like him more than Hillary because he’s an outsider. He’s willing to speak truth to power, and I don’t think Hillary really is. I feel like she has a very kind of scripted, polished method that’s safe within the existing political structures.”
On the socialism label: “I think that’s one of the big challenges. You see people throw around that label and it’s, like, just a nasty word, and people don’t even stop to think. They don’t know what it means and we don’t define our terms very well, so I think that’s potentially one of the issues he has to educate people on. What does it really mean? What does he really stand for, and why is that not the right label to throw on it? Or maybe that is the right label, but the label itself kind of has a bad connotation.”

Zoe Raven, 18
“I came because I think Bernie Sanders is at least for my demographic, being a black 18 year old girl, he’s the best candidate to help me and the people that I know become successful and live in a country that’s unified.”
Patti Hollis, attended with her husband and daughter
“I think Hillary’s attached to corporate money.”
On the socialism label: “I need to understand what that word means, what it meant, what it means now, if it’s different.”
Kevin Eden, 27, protein scientist at UCLA
“I like that he’s a populist … Hillary hasn’t really showed that she has any populist agenda so far.”
On the socialism label: “I think a lot of people don’t actually know the definition of socialism and what it means to be a socialist, so the more he talks about what the agenda is of socialism, I think the more people agree. That’s why so many people are here.”

The actual rally began at 7 p.m., with various activists (including comedian Sarah Silverman) pumping up the crowd and making their case for Sanders based on a litany of progressive issues they hope will drive youth voters and the base to the polls during the primaries. #BlackLivesMatter, climate change, immigration, labor, corporate greed, single-payer health care — all were on the table even before Sanders took the stage. When he came out, the primed crowd went nuts — and stayed nuts throughout his nearly one-hour speech.
How much do these rallies really tell us? Polls and primaries will reveal whether they’re indicative of broad enough support for Sanders to truly challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic candidacy. Howard Dean drew big crowds in 2004 and then fizzled out quickly. But, while standing in the middle of a Bernie Sanders crowd, it feels like the Clinton camp should be at least a little concerned.
worker | August 26, 2015 at 8:09 pm | Categories: Bernie Sanders, political struggle | URL: http://wp.me/pKlsL-1FI
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Let the 'Bernie-Bots' speak for themselves:

What a depressing bunch of twaddle. These folks are so divorced from reality, it is almost shocking. I don't think there is any simplification that would work to make them understand or grasp reality - none. They are lost causes...

Is Bernie Sanders a communist?
by worker
Is Bernie Sanders a communist?



By James Thompson



The Bernie Sanders campaign has ignited a great deal of excitement among people of conscience in the United States. Many people are impressed with his progressive ideas suggesting that the US needs to narrow the gap in income between the wealthy and poor working people. Many people are impressed with Sen. Sanders’ support of unions and his position on reducing the military budget. Many people are impressed with Sen. Sanders’ support of expanding and strengthening the social network in the USA.



Do these left leaning positions mean that Sen. Sanders is a communist? Many people are asking this very question.



In order to answer this question, it is important to do some clarification. Although it is widely assumed that the term “communist” implies a monolithic ideology with little or no deviation. Nothing could be further from the truth.



It turns out that communists have historically been involved in never-ending internal ideological struggle. This struggle usually revolves around how much capitalism should be tolerated in a socialist system. In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin advocated that very little capitalism should be tolerated. On the other hand, Leon Trotsky advocated more inclusion of capitalism.



Many European countries currently could be characterized as “Social Democratic.” Left parties within these countries call themselves “socialists.” Social Democratic parties within these countries typically do not oppose capitalism, or imperialism. They generally advocate for a strengthening and expansion of the social network. This is a concept which is met with tremendous hostility in the United States. However, in Europe, once in office, Social Democratic Parties are as harsh as their Conservative Party counterparts and typically advocate stark austerity for working people. It is important to note that they never advocate any austerity for the bourgeoisie.



Mr. Sanders is not opposed to capitalism or imperialism. He does advocate an expansion of the social network and a narrowing of the income inequality in the USA. He is positive about unions and wants to reduce the military budget. No one knows whether this will play in Peoria.



Although many communist parties around the world have embraced social democracy, to many communists this is a perversion of what communists stand for.



Clearly, Sen. Sanders falls in the ballpark of the European Social Democrats. To many people on the left, his views are a breath of fresh air. There is no doubt that his positions are very different from the likes of George Bush, Donald Trump and other right-wing demagogues. However, he does not advocate austerity for the bourgeoisie nor does he advocate an end to imperialist wars.



So the answer to the question “Is Bernie Sanders a communist?” is an unequivocal “NO!”



One defining feature of communist ideology is the goal of raising the working class to the status of the ruling class. Communists believe that the current bourgeois democracy in the United States should be replaced with a workers’ democracy. Communists are opposed to imperialist wars and the oppression of any sector of society. These are not positions that are advocated by Sen. Sanders or any other bourgeois politician.



However, some communists are not fools and realize that the bourgeoisie has been very effective in minimizing the political power of working people in the United States of America. Communists typically realize that not even working people advocate the elevation of their class to the position of the ruling class in the USA.



Many communists are in agreement with Mr. Sanders on narrowing the income gap, expanding the social network and reducing the military budget. However, this does not make Mr. Sanders a communist. Many communists recognize that the reforms that Mr. Sanders advocates would reduce the misery of the working class. Since communists are the indefatigable allies of the working class, we are happy when reforms are implemented which help working people. However, we recognize that reforms do not solve the plight of working people.



So, the reforms advocated by Sen. Sanders, although considered radical by many on the right, would only provide temporary and limited relief for the working class. These reforms might elevate the culture and society in the USA so that it would be closer to that achieved by European countries. However, these reforms could in no way be considered “communist” or even “socialist.”



It is important to remember that there is no viable Communist or Socialist party in the United States. Lenin urged the working class to engage in political struggle in all its forms. Electoral struggle is one means of struggle readily available to working people. Many communists are supporting Bernie Sanders because they realize that at this time he is the most progressive candidate among those who have any chance of winning the oval office. Although some members of the Houston Communist Party support Bernie Sanders, this is an individual decision. The Houston Communist Party does not and will not endorse Bernie Sanders for the office of President of the United States. However, we won’t shed any tears if he wins.

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Bernie’s foreign policy bad for everyone concerned
by worker
August 27, 2015

Foreign Policy, Sanders-Style: Backing Saudi Intervention
by Sam Husseini

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/27/foreign-policy-sanders-style-backing-saudi-intervention/
There’s an old joke about two elderly men at a Catskill resort. One complains: “The food here is horrible.” The other vigorously agrees: “Yeah, I know — and the portions are so damn small!”

Several writers have noted that Bernie Sanders has been scant in terms of his foreign policy — small portions.

But a thornier problem is that the little that he has articulated in terms of foreign policy — the foreign policy issue that he’s been most passionate about really — is extremely regressive and incredibly dangerous. That issue is the role of Saudi Arabia. Sanders has actually pushed for the repressive regime to engage in more intervention in the Mideast.

In discussing ISIS, Sanders invariably has talked about Saudi Arabia being the solution. It’s couched in language that seems somewhat critical, but the upshot is we need more Saudi influence and intervention in the region. In effect, more and bigger proxy wars, which have already taken the lives of hundreds of thousands in Syria and could even further rip apart Iraq and Libya.

He’s said this repeatedly — and prominently. In February with Wolf Blitzer on CNN:

“This war is a battle for the soul of Islam and it’s going to have to be the Muslim countries who are stepping up. These are billionaire families all over that region. They’ve got to get their hands dirty. They’ve got to get their troops on the ground. They’ve got to win that war with our support. We cannot be leading the effort.”

What? Why should a U.S. progressive be calling for more intervention by the Saudi monarchy? Really, we want Saudi troops in Syria and Iraq and Libya and who knows where else? You’d think that perhaps someone like Sanders would say that we have to break our decades-long backing of the corrupt Saudi regime — but no, he wants to dramatically accelerate it.

Even worse, after the Saudis started bombing Yemen with U.S. government backing earlier this year, killing thousands and leading to what the UN is now calling a “humanitarian catastrophe,” and suffering that is “almost incomprehensible,” Sanders continued. In another interview again with Wolf Blitzer in May, Sanders did correctly note that as a result of the Iraq invasion, “we’ve destabilized the region, we’ve given rise to Al-Qaeda, ISIS.” But then he actually called for more intervention:

“What we need now, and this is not easy stuff, I think the President is trying, you need to bring together an international coalition, Wolf, led by the Muslim countries themselves! Saudi Arabia is the third largest military budget in the world they’re going to have to get their hands dirty in this fight. We should be supporting, but at the end of the day this is fight over what Islam is about, the soul of Islam, we should support those countries taking on ISIS.”

Progressives in the U.S. are supposed to look toward the Saudi monarchy to save the soul of Islam? The Saudis have pushed the teachings of the Wahabism sect and have been deforming Islam for decades. This actually helped give rise to ISIS and Al Qaeda. It’s a little like Bernie Sanders saying that the Koch Brothers need to get more involved in U.S. politics, they need to “get their hands dirty.”

But if your point is to build up the next stage of the U.S. government’s horrific role in the Mideast, it kind of makes sense. The U.S. government helped ensure the Saudis would dominate the Arabian Peninsula from the formation of the nation state of Saudi Arabia — a nation named after a family. In return, the Saudis had the U.S. take the lead in extracting oil there and favored investing funds from their oil wealth largely in the West over building up the region, what the activist scholar Eqbal Ahmed called separating the material wealth of the Mideast from the mass of the people of the region. Saudi Arabia buys U.S. weapons to further solidify the “relationship” and to ensure its military dominance.

The Saudis and other Gulf monarchies deformed the Arab uprisings, which transformed oppressive but basically secular and minimally populist regimes into failed states, giving rise to groups like ISIS and allowing Saudi Arabia to largely call the shots in the region. What has happened in the Mideast since the ouster of Mubarak and the so-called Arab uprisings is that the Saudis have been strengthened. Both the Tunisian and Yemeni dictators fled to Saudi Arabia. Mubarak himself was urged not to resign by the Saudis, and the Saudis are now the main backers of the military regime in Cairo.

Why is Sanders doing this? Is there a domestic constituency called “Americans for Saudi Domination of the Arab World”? Well, yes and no. It would obviously play well in the general public to say: “We’ve got to stop backing dictatorships like the Saudis. They behead people, they are tyrannical. They have a system of male guardianship. Why the hell are they an ally?”

But Sanders is unwilling to break with the U.S.-Saudi alliance that has done such damage to both the Arab people and the American people. Now, we have a full-fledged Israeli-Saudi alliance and it must be music to the ears of pro-Israeli journalists like Wolf Blitzer for Sanders to be calling for U.S. backing of further Saudi domination.

Some have argued that Sanders’ candidacy is very valuable — that win or lose, he’s putting the issue of income inequality front and center. But if the candidacy is to be lauded for raising issues of economic inequality, educate the public and galvanize around that that, it’s fair to ask how the candidacy is also deforming public discussion on other crucial issues. If the position of the most prominent “progressive” on the national stage is for more Saudi intervention, what does that do to public understanding of the Mideast and dialogue between people in the U.S. and in Muslim countries?

If the U.S. further subcontracts the Mideast to the Saudi regime, the setbacks and disappointments for peace and justice in the Mideast during the Obama years will be small potatoes in comparison. If the Mideast continues to deform, largely because of U.S. policies backing Saudi Arabia, as well as Israel, all the other things Sanders is talking about regarding economic inequality are arguably out the window. He himself has noted that “wars drain investment at home.”

Or does Sanders think it’s all good if he can set up a scheme whereby the Saudis pay the bills and use their own troops for Mideast wars that the U.S. government backs? Martin Luther King in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech referred to the wars taking funds from the war on poverty as a “demonic destructive suction tube.” But he also referred to just looking at the funding as a “facile” connection, listing several other, deeper, reasons based on other moral grounds for opposing war. But Sanders rarely touches on those other reasons. It’s as though we’ve learned nothing about blowback since 9/11.

Contrast Sanders’ call for an escalation in Saudi Arabia’s proxy wars with what insurgent Jeremy Corbyn — who’s campaign to lead the Labor Party in the UK has caught fire — is saying. He’s been challenging the British establishment about arming the Saudis: “Will the Minister assure me that the anti-corruption laws will apply to arms deals and to British arms exports? Will they involve forensic examination of any supposed corruption that has gone on between arms sales and regimes in other parts of the world rather than suspending Serious Fraud Office inquiries, as in the case of an investigation into the Al-Yamamah arms contract with Saudi Arabia?” See a section on Corbyn’s website on Saudi Arabia and video of his remarks at the House of Parliament just last month, with Corbyn relentlessly raising questions of human rights violations by the Saudi regime.

Instead of adopting Corbyn’s human rights perspective, Sanders has used Saudi Arabia’s massive military spending to argue that it should further dominate the region. Unexamined is how it got that way. Unexamined is the $60 billion arms deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that Obama signed off on in 2010. The BBC reports, Saudi “Prince Turki al-Faisal called for ‘a unified military force, a clear chain of command’ at a high level regional security conference in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.”

So Sanders and Saudi planners seem to be working toward the same ends, as though war by an autocratic state in a critical region can be expected to breed good outcomes. Sanders doesn’t seem to take money from Lockheed Martin — though he’s backed their F-35, slated to be based in Vermont — but his stance on Saudi Arabia must bring a smile to the faces of bigwigs there.

The Black Lives Matter movement has moved Sanders to “say the names” of Sandra Bland and others who are victims of police violence. Those striving for peace and justice around the world need to do the same regarding Sanders and U.S. foreign policy.

Sam Husseini is founder of the website VotePact.org.

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However, we won’t shed any tears if he wins.

That speaks to their status within society. There are plenty of people who WILL be shedding tears no matter who wins -- involuntarily, not based on how they "feel" about the winner.

Does this not sound exactly like what we heard about the Obama campaign in 2008?



Which way for the left in the USA?
by worker

Which way for the left in the USA?



By James Thompson



There appears to be a lot of excitement among people on the left about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders for the office of president of the United States. The excitement is both positive and negative.



Sen. Sanders seems to have struck a chord in his speeches about income inequality and the “billionaire class.” He also calls for a “political revolution.” These ideas are music to the ears of the working class in the United States. These ideas combined with the technical know-how of his campaign have resulted in astonishing crowds over a year prior to election day, 2016.



Sen. Sanders has one of the best voting records in Congress on many issues which the left view as critical. For example, he opposed the Iraq war when this was not a popular or easy thing to do. He, as well as Dennis Kucinich, would probably be subjects of a modern version of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage if Pres. Kennedy was alive to update his classic work.



Sen. Sanders is not stupid and he realizes that the current political environment in the USA is not a pretty picture. Many years of harsh reactionary propaganda have had a negative effect on many people in the US and turned their collective minds to mush. Constant bombardment by neofascist commentators on Fox News have resulted in the US evolving into a zombie nation of super aggressive, xenophobic haters.



Political struggle must be viewed from a developmental perspective. Some years ago, a friend of mine was asked to characterize the labor movement today and he responded “We are fighting as hard as we can to give up as little as possible while we move backwards.” His insightful words are as relevant today as they were then.



The administration of George W. Bush represented a negative period in US history. A campaign of endless wars against multiple nations was launched based on endless lies for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. President Obama, besieged by a reactionary Congress, has been feckless in reversing the atrocities instituted by President Bush.



Sen. Sanders is definitely not ideologically pure. He takes many positions which turn my stomach such as the notion that the drone program should not be stopped and that Saudi Arabia should be called upon to bomb the Middle East.



However, his recognition that there needs to be vast political changes in this country is music to my ears. It is also interesting, but rarely recognized by people on the left, that Sen. Sanders has a history of running and winning as a third-party candidate, i.e. an Independent. He calls himself a socialist, but it is unclear what he means by this. His call for a “political revolution” is also refreshing even though we don’t know what he means by this.



Should people on the left reject Senator Sanders because he is not ideologically pure, even though he is one of their closest allies in Congress?



The election laws in the United States are written to institutionalize the bourgeois parties, i.e. Democrats and Republicans, and to marginalize any third-party efforts. It is impossible to be elected on any party ticket other than the Democrats or Republicans.



It seems that the first task for people on the left is to strongly advocate for major reform of the election laws in the United States. This would include elimination of the electoral college and the initiation of a political system which would provide a level playing field for political parties other than the Democrats and Republicans.



Sen. Sanders is the only candidate for president of the United States in the 2016 elections who has experience running and winning a major office, i.e. U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, while running on a third-party ticket.



A United Front of people on the left to support the campaign of Sen. Sanders is needed. If he is elected, the people who worked to elect him should remain united and demand that he work diligently along with progressive members of Congress to overturn the reactionary election laws in the United States so that democracy in the United States can be strengthened. The same people should call him out if he moves to the right and throws workers under the bus once elected. This 2016 election is not about a personality, it is about the birth of a workers' movement.



As it stands now, even the reactionaries are not free. It is not possible in the United States of America for a rabid reactionary to vote against a socialist or communist.



Only a major change in the election laws in the United States can bring about real political change and move the working class towards the position of the ruling class. This is something only workers can fight for. Clearly, reactionaries and their bourgeois benefactors will not struggle for democracy for the workers.


More rank opportunism from Houston. So, to oppose Sanders from the left is to engage in ideological purity which as we all know is the enemy of the good. Sanders is 'the best we can get' within the American political system. Maybe that is true, so what? This system is incapable of producing the results we want. This is social democrat talk, this cannot ever produce revolution. Which, I think, is the real point.

It was Marx who really first extrapolated upon the idea of ideology; that it was a kind of consciousness deformed by societal and material conditions and forces. Within this the self is falsified. But as Jacoby rightly emphasizes, this is not mere abstraction, but a result of very concrete conditions and which did not exclude what has come to be called *common sense*. For the pernicious notion of common sense is really the most ideological of concepts. Today it is embedded, deeply, with logical positivist bias. The distrust of things which cannot be weighed and measured is doubly dishonest. Firstly, it is an expression of deep anti-intellectualism masquerading as its opposite. Secondly it mystifies what is a form of myth making in science itself. The rise of the phenomenon of ‘bad science’ is almost epidemic, for one cannot open any mainstream paper or web page and not find spurious studies that *prove* one thing or another, or often, increasingly, don’t even attempt to prove anything. Lost amid all this is the conflicted subject. One that experiences a kind of mental stultification. The public, on a day by day basis, navigates through a tsunami of commodity image and micro narrative that expresses almost nothing. For the point is not in the result, but only in the capturing of attention. And the subject so captured is only dimly aware of its own entanglement in a crippling psychic cul de sac. And it is here that art still provides some kind of avenue out of this. And I continue to believe that art which can negate the prevailing system, even if (usually) through its form, and understanding of its own compromised materials, is a kind of very pertinent resistance. To use only one example, the narrative of candidate Bernie Sanders; it is, or should be, obvious that this is a cheap fable, a children’s story that only the most deeply indoctrinated would accept — and it’s not really about acceptance anyway. It’s about the secondary mimetic gloss that is layered over this fairy tale. And again, it’s not even a fairy tale, it doesn’t even rise to the level of fairy tale. For in the brand that is Bernie what should be apparent are the facts of a 28 year career in politics from a marginal and very white state where voting records make clear that the presumptive outsider has almost always, 100% of the time, voted in accordance with his party. Tacit support for Pentagon defense contracts and support for Israeli aggression and occupation are obscured by the style, by the brand. The tousled hair and the untucked shirt tail. Look closely and you see a mean little man, a passive aggressive bully, really, with the feral eyes of a supermarket night manager, or cashier. But substituting for mimesis is a litany of pre-formed excuses, expressed as common sense, as logical (the lesser evil trope) and which provide a brief unsatisfying, but still usable emotional salve. For emotional pain is inscribed on all things which include any kind of narrative about society.

more.....

http://john-steppling.com/2015/09/you-will-not-be-by-that/

More rank opportunism from Houston. So, to oppose Sanders from the left is to engage in ideological purity which as we all know is the enemy of the good. Sanders is 'the best we can get' within the American political system. Maybe that is true, so what? This system is incapable of producing the results we want. This is social democrat talk, this cannot ever produce revolution. Which, I think, is the real point.

Not only reminiscent of the '08 Obama idiocy, but almost word for word the same drivel which lead to support for SYRIZA in Greece last winter.

http://john-steppling.com/2015/09/yo...ot-be-by-that/

Man, this guy is a good read. I am not sure I "get" everything he says, but the parts I get are pretty interesting.

New post on Houston Communist Party


The Sanders paradox: A brief for Bernie
by worker
By William Kaufman



https://www.laprogressive.com/bernie-and-the-left/?utm_source=LA+Progressive+Newsletter&utm_campaign=971ada49d3-LAP_News_17April12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9f184a8aad-971ada49d3-286686353

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/08/the-sanders-paradox-a-brief-for-bernie/

Why Does the Radical Left Feel Threatened by the Bernie Sanders Campaign?

In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities, it seems, but against . . . Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without an ominous recitation of Sanders’s manifold political shortcomings—Sanders exposés seem to have become a thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat.¹

It should come as a startling revelation to no one that Sanders is not and has never aspired to be the next Lenin or Trotsky or even Bob Avakian. We readily concede that his record will not pass every litmus test of anti-imperialist and revolutionary probity—no need to belabor this point any further. But then what are we to make of Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, or even Jill Stein—and other assorted leftish flavors du jour—all of them seemingly quite palatable to these same ideological arbiters of the radical left? These other examples and Sanders are cut from essentially the same political cloth: left social democrats or democratic socialists inclined to challenge entrenched corporate interests through established political institutions rather than overthrowing them from without. Then why the radical cheers (however mixed and muted in some cases) for these other leftish types and the jeers for Sanders, even though they all represent essentially the same political impulse?

Obama’s crass subservience to the interests of the one percent has erased any doubts about this institutional fealty except among hardened neoliberals, tribal Democrats, and the entire on-air lineup of MSNBC.

The answer lies in a hallowed, inviolable principle of the U.S. far left, in fact its most revered first commandment: thou shalt not support, endorse, or even smile at a Democrat. This prohibition is not merely a mindless ideological reflex—it arises from the hard truth that the national Democratic Party is as much a subsidiary of the corporate class as the GOP. Obama’s crass subservience to the interests of the one percent has erased any doubts about this institutional fealty except among hardened neoliberals, tribal Democrats, and the entire on-air lineup of MSNBC. And there is no doubt that past left-talking presidential primary challengers such as Jackson and Kucinich have functioned more as safety valves than catalysts for popular unrest, dissipating it and re-channeling it into the manageable confines of the two-party arena of mock combats. The question, then, is this: Is there something different about the Sanders campaign that warrants support from radicals who have rightly spurned previous forays into the Democratic Party?

This key question immediately begs another, even more fundamental one: How to awaken tens of millions of people from the entrapments of mass hypnosis, prostration, and indifference and into the first halting steps toward recognition and self-emancipation? The quandary is as old as the parable of Plato’s cave—that mythic netherworld of darkness and illusion inhabited by us fallible mortals. The solution—the way out of the cave into the liberating light of knowledge—is as stubbornly elusive now as it was then. But simply naming the problem of the “false consciousness” that stymies the oppressed—as endlessly and vehemently reiterated by the legions of the far left for a small eternity—does not by itself yield a solution, as the long history of leftist impotence and isolation attests. It is understandably frustrating for the leftist sects and sages to have all the answers except that most important one: how to lead the “masses” out of the darkness of ignorance and ideological deception into enlightenment. The leftist groups—with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of left, right, and center—are self-declared leaders without followers, generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small detail: an army.

Ten parts bellowing grandiosity to zero parts real influence, the far left fails a litmus test more important than any it applies to Bernie Sanders: Marx’s call not merely to interpret the world but to change it. So we must ask: at this moment of gathering darkness for our species and planet, in this pivotal presidential campaign season, who is making greater strides toward triggering the mass enlightenment that is the key to empowering the oppressed: Sanders or his left critics? If politics is the art of communication, then Sanders must be judged the winner, hands down.

In fact, the Sanders campaign represents a breakthrough for progressive “messaging” of remarkable scope and impact. Sanders, with his calls for political revolution against the billionaire class, is not just another standard-issue, forked-tongue, feel-your-pain Democrat; at each MSM-covered appearance he blasts out piercing alarms about the radical inequities and irrationalities of the status quo, along with sorely needed solutions—primal truths that would otherwise lie dormant and buried in the scattered isolated islets of far-leftdom.

To dismiss these crucial inroads into mass consciousness as mere diversion, to deride his proposals as milquetoast Keynesian stopgap, betrays the old far-left allergy to the complexity and cacophony of the large stage of life, a debilitating preference for the safety and certitude of the tiny left echo chamber. Sanders’s campaign, whatever its flaws, is thrusting front and center to a mass audience a whole series of principled, critical demands and issues (many of which overlap with those raised in splendid isolation by Jill Stein and the Green Party), the realization of which would markedly advance the material well-being and future prospects of ordinary Americans: $15 an hour minimum wage; union card check to expand organizing rights; improved Medicare for all; expansion (not retrenchment) of Social Security; revamped progressive taxation to reduce income inequality; a Wall Street transaction tax; a rapid transition to renewables to combat climate change; opposition to the ecocidal, neo-fascist TPP, NAFTA, and WTO; an end to the militarization of local police forces; cracking down on hate groups; free tuition at all public universities and colleges to alleviate student debt peonage; paid family leave; and so on. If realized in the aggregate, these demands would challenge the neoliberal logic of the prevailing order.

As a tactical matter, then, the Sanders upsurge is an invaluable tool for the mass dissemination of left themes and solutions right now—a priceless benefit that far outweighs the realpolitik lapses that preoccupy the left-echo-chamber Sanders refuseniks. Now notice that I just used the word tactical. Allow me to explain. Whatever the rough spots in Sanders’s progressive resume, especially on foreign policy, it remains a stubborn tactical reality (and perhaps I will also be forgiven for using the word reality) that it is only through the vehicle of the his presidential campaign as a Democrat that these kinds of progressive issues and solutions can flood the airwaves and touch the tens of millions of desperate but ill-informed Americans who most need to think and hear about them—in most cases, for the first time. This is the unique and irreplaceable value of the Sanders candidacy: it is strewing seeds of mass consciousness around issues of class and inequality and the environment in a way that no other person or party could accomplish right now. Radicals need to ask themselves: How is that a bad thing?

Whatever the outcome of Sanders’s campaign, the sheer scope of the audience for his progressive checklist, his slashing denunciations of the economic and political tyranny of the billionaire class, are green shoots in an otherwise barren political landscape—and who knows how they might flourish in the future?

Whatever the outcome of Sanders’s campaign, the sheer scope of the audience for his progressive checklist, his slashing denunciations of the economic and political tyranny of the billionaire class, are green shoots in an otherwise barren political landscape—and who knows how they might flourish in the future? This is a major breakthrough that has the potential, in countless molecular ways, to burst through the Democratic institutional framework in which it is now embedded—and, by the way, Sanders would not be commanding that mass audience were it not in that framework: hence the Sanders Paradox. To be sure, it’s an inconvenient paradox for inveterate anti-Democrats of the left, but one to be acknowledged and exploited rather than condemned or ignored. The near-zero collective political IQ of the country urgently needs raising by any means possible and necessary, and sooner rather than later, given the catastrophes that are bearing down on us. We can’t afford to disdain any advances right now, no matter how messy or divergent from our ideal scenarios.

Yes, we urgently need an independent activist left party, one that can have a real impact. We also need socialism now, drastic carbon reductions and crash investment in renewable energy ten years ago, and so on. But the realization of those all imperatives presupposes the power of an aroused citizenry armed with at least a rudimentary understanding of the major issues. That is, most assuredly, not the American electorate as of 2015—not by a long shot. Buffeted by outsourcing, unemployment, underemployment, consumer and student debt peonage, underwater mortgages, and the rolling thunder of environmental/ climate/ resource crisis, the mass of Americans still lead lives of quiet desperation—and it remains mostly quiet because they are diverted from their gnawing anxieties and uncertainties by the toxic glitter of corporate culture, a ceaselessly dripping toxin that mollifies, numbs, and stupefies. In the words of Robert Crumb,

What we kids didn’t understand was that we were living in a commercial, commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold. As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world. ²

The result is a woefully detached and undereducated populace, in most of its leisure hours transfixed before glowing rectangles. Walk down the street of any average American town or city (not Berkeley or Seattle or Brooklyn) and ask people if they know who Bernie Sanders is, much less Jill Stein, or even who the vice president is or what the three branches of government are. Then ask them if they’ve ever heard about anthropogenic global warming. You’ll get a surprising number of blank stares, because an alarmingly large percentage of Americans spend most of their waking hours either (a) at work; (b) watching the NFL, professional wrestling, NASCAR, “reality” TV shows, or cotton-candy dramas and comedies; (c) surfing the Internet (and mostly not for news); or (d) chasing down sales at Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club to try to make ends meet. As for civic engagement, the closest most Americans come is when they wait in line at the DMV, pay their taxes, get stopped by the police, or watch Judge Judy. And the small percentage who do take in a bit of news are getting hosed with a steady stream of lies from the Fox News Channel, MSNBC, CNN, or the happy talk crew on the late local news.³
So this is the audience the left must address: not the doughty, battle-ready proletariat of far-left daydreams, but the massively depoliticized and demoralized casualties of the culture industry and neoliberal piracy. In the face of the major inroads Sanders is making against this mass reign of indifference and ignorance, urging the virtues of an independent left party and movement as an alternative is like urging the virtues of fusion energy over solar panels—a great-sounding idea, but one that has no purchase on reality for the foreseeable future. The mass of Americans is not going to advance miraculously from widespread political nescience to applying for membership in the ISO in a single great leap. The far-left push for an independent “solution” is a practical nullity right now and will remain so for some time to come—and hence amounts to self-indulgent posturing in the face of the calamities looming on a near horizon. Blind to these tactical exigencies, Sanders’s far-left detractors merely reinforce the political isolation that they seem to brandish as a badge of virtue; in reality it is a symptom of political debility, a fatal estrangement from the tactical challenges and possibilities of the moment.

Lest some radical critics feel sullied by the intrusion of the word tactical, I must insist that there is no shame in leftists’ thinking tactically at times—in fact, it is a necessity if we are to stay attuned to masses of people in a way that gives heft impact to any conceivable movement against the status quo. Here’s an example of such a critical tactical consideration: At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was part of a coalition that was mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the concrete (and principled!) slogan, “Out Now!”, peaking in the April 1971 march on Washington DC that brought 1 million people to the nation’s capital to demand an immediate end to the war. At that time a chorus of very “principled” far leftists scorned these powerful outpourings—which materially aided the besieged Vietnamese workers and peasants—because the key demand did not, in their view, go far enough or did not address an array of other issues: they argued that we should declaim “Victory to the NLF” or “Smash Imperialism” or “Defend the Rights of Palestinians” and so on. Now the tactical consideration was that pinning the actions to these far-flung ultimatist, simon-pure demands would have winnowed the million marchers to maybe five thousand, thus depriving the action of all material impact on the war while deepening the delusional self-regard of a few enraged middle-class radicals—and damn the Vietnamese workers and peasants in the process.

So much for the general considerations that make at least some degree of critical support for the Sanders campaign a no-brainer for radicals hoping to make even minimal headway against the headwinds of mass ignorance and indifference. Now let’s tick off a checklist of some of the most common far-left complaints about the Sanders campaign, along with brief rebuttals:

Sanders is “sheepdogging” for the Democrats: This is self-fulfilling prophecy that presupposes that the mass of Americans are indeed sheep that can be easily herded into to this or that politician’s pen. This argument would carry more weight if Sanders were merely feinting left, with vague Obama-esque marketing slogans. But clearly he is propounding a refreshingly frank and specific policies to reverse the ever-intensifying inequalities and injustices of the status quo, slashing with finely honed specifics against the abuses of the billionaire elite.4 Even if Sanders loses the nomination, the progressive issues and solutions he is purveying to a mass audience will embed firmly in popular political thought and action, making a future breakaway into political independence easier, not harder.
Sanders has vowed to support whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party: This is really a corollary of the “sheepdogging” thesis, and the answer to it is simple: So what? A bald, rumpled seventy-three-year-old is commanding a mass audience not for sex appeal but for his passion and clarity on substance; he is galvanizing a huge groundswell of issue-focused voters and activists who would otherwise not be engaged in politics at all. A whole generation of voters will be more receptive to any future left campaigns—including independent ones—thanks to his exertions, notwithstanding any personal endorsements he makes a year from now.
Sanders is not a “true” socialist: This is another “so what?” coupled to a “who cares?” Any of the 5,757 varieties of socialists ranging from Bernie Sanders to the Spartacists will tell you that they alone are the true socialists and that all the others are frauds. The Fox News Channel considers Obama a socialist; the Democratic Socialists of America would ridicule this foolishness, but they in turn would be called out as faux socialists by Trotskyist groups like the ISO and Socialist Alternative, who would in their turn be denounced as fraudulent by the ultra-Trot World Socialist Web Site (Socialist Equality Party), who would in yet another turn be reviled as mountebanks by the Mad Hatter-Trot Spartacists. Who, then, has unearthed the Holy Grail of “true” socialism? It’s a hopeless, absurd quest, on a par with defining “God” or the meaning of being. We need only recall that the Bolsheviks, socialists who actually made a revolution rather than merely bloviating about it, deployed as their main agitational slogan not “socialism now” or “nationalize the means of production”—they reached the masses by advancing the very concrete “land, bread, and peace,” sensibly grasping that desperate workers and peasants were more interested in tangibles than abstractions. This is a lesson well worth pondering for the armchair revolutionaries leading the charge against Sanders.
Elections are a trap and diversion from real organizing: See once again the Bolsheviks, who regularly ran in election campaigns as a means of purveying their ideas—it worked pretty well for them. As long as elections are viewed as a tactic in a broader movement-building strategy, it is simply foolish to abstain from the reachout opportunities they afford. This leads to the next point:
The Sanders campaign subtracts energy and resources from independent parties like the Greens: Supporting the Sanders campaign right now vs. building an independent party and movement is not a zero-sum game in which every dollar or ounce of energy devoted to the former is necessarily subtracted from the latter. Sanders is posing progressive and class-based issues with a boldness and bluntness and honesty that set him apart from past progressive Democratic primary aspirants. And no recent left-leaning Democratic presidential aspirant has sparked anything close to the firestorms of enthusiasm springing up around the Sanders campaign. This combination of mass momentum and programmatic boldness make the Sanders campaign a uniquely explosive force in American politics right now. If Sanders cannot win the nomination and endorses Clinton (or whomever) with the usual less-evil incantations, he will, by dint of the power of his campaign, have unleashed energies and insights into the political sphere that will have a life of their own well beyond his campaign and will redound to the benefit of future independent organizing efforts.
Sanders cannot win the nomination or the general election: This is the most curious of the far-left objections to the Sanders campaign. Arun Gupta wrote a whole article for CounterPunch on just this issue.5 The entire essay traffics in MSM horse-race probabilities rather than political substance, as though Gupta were a hedge-fund manager assessing a possible investment rather than a radical seeking the most favorable vehicle for spreading his ideas. He adduces from various sources that (1) Sanders cannot win the nomination and (2) he cannot win the general election—a point that would seem to be moot in view of (1). He prophesies, “Simply put, you have a better chance of Jennifer Lawrence or Idris Elba calling you up and saying they want to be your friend with benefits than Bernie Sanders has of becoming the next president.” But many of those who deride Sanders’s chances will be supporting Jill Stein of the Green Party, whose likelihood of winning the general election is on a par with any of those critics winning both Powerball and Mega-Millions on the same day. Yet Jill Stein’s statistical-hopelessness-unto absurdity will not deter the Bernie contras from touting Stein or some other quixotic lefty independent in the general election. So it appears the far-left deriders of Sanders’s steep odds are not so averse to lost causes after all—purists in this as well, they simply prefer causes that are lost unto near-invisibility. And let’s pose this question to those who argue from probability: What if the long shot Sanders comes through and wins the nomination and/or general election? Then what would you do?
Sanders will not be able to implement his proposals even if elected because he will face opposition in the Congress and the Courts: Sanders himself is the first to acknowledge this point, which is based on a misunderstanding of his purpose in running—he is not presenting himself as a personal savior and cure-all for the world’s ills; he expressly states his intention of using his campaign—and his nomination and election should they come to pass—of spurring the American people to organize to win these goals for themselves. As he stated in a campaign speech in Iowa last month,
Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell you. And that is [that] no matter who is elected to be president, that person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign donors is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the truth. People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It is not just about electing Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating a grassroots political movement in this country.6

The case for radical support for Sanders amounts to this: before we can arrive at point omega from point alpha, we have to traverse points beta, gamma, delta, and so on. There are no magic superleft flying machines that will propel us nonstop over all those intermediate steps from neoliberal despotism to radical democracy—we know this if we are organizing on the ground rather than theorizing in the clouds. The tempo of that journey will depend chiefly on advances in the consciousness of the masses, not advances in the vehemence of far-left declamation.

Some leftists can fantasize that they are doing a great service to humanity by scoffing at the tactical tradeoffs that are essential to building a truly massive, powerful grassroots movement—but in so doing, they’re merely isolating themselves even further from the arenas of real political work and potential mass outreach, like a swami meditating in a cave. Such radicals remind me of the holy men described by Swami Vivekananda:

The highest men are calm, silent and unknown. They are the men who really know the power of thought; they are sure that, even if they go into a cave and close the door and simply think five true thoughts and then pass away, these five thoughts of their will live through eternity. . . . These Sâttvika men are too near the Lord to be active and to fight, to be working, struggling, preaching and doing good, as they say, here on earth to humanity.7

The hour is late. We face planetary emergencies of unprecedented gravity. Some reputable scientists say that it might be too late to avert them. Plato’s vision of humanity trapped in the dark cave—our cave of collective ignorance—is no mere parable: it a prophecy turned all too real. We must nevertheless choose to act as though there is a way out, even if we suspect that our choice is more an affirmation of faith than of reason. The Sanders campaign has mustered enough of an audience to bolster that fragile belief. It is not a panacea—it is a tentative first step of hope that Americans can be roused in sufficient numbers to help save humanity from itself. No person of conscience should refuse to join in that step and push it as far as it can go.

William Kaufman
Counterpunch

God damn that far-left commentairat, they're ruining everything. What is to be done?

Sanders and Lesser-Evilism: Is There No Line You Will Not Cross?
by BRUCE LESNICK


It is much easier to create a mess than to clean up afterwards. But clean up we must. In his piece for CounterPunch, The Sanders Paradox: a Brief for Bernie, William Kaufman constructs a veritable Augean Stables of illogic, sleight of hand and misrepresentations. His snarky argument in support of Sanders’ bid for the Democratic nomination could be summed up as an embrace of the reactionary aphorism, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” (Fred Baumgarten made the same observation in a CounterPunch article referring to a different Sanders apologia.)

The concept, “The perfect is the enemy of the good,” is thoroughly caustic as it can be used to shut down any debate. Find yourself disagreeing with some policy, position or campaign? Hey, the perfect is the enemy of the good. End of discussion.

Kaufman doesn’t utter the horrid maxim explicitly, but he thoroughly embraces its essence. Yes, Kaufman concedes, “the national Democratic Party is as much a subsidiary of the corporate class as the GOP.” But having spoken the required words, he rushes to deride those whose principled opposition to the Democratic Party he views as a “mindless ideological reflex.” The left in the U.S., you see,

…with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of left, right, and center—are self-declared leaders without followers, generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small detail: an army.

…

To dismiss [Sanders’] crucial inroads into mass consciousness as mere diversion, to deride his proposals as milquetoast Keynesian stopgap, betrays the old far-left allergy to the complexity and cacophony of the large stage of life, a debilitating preference for the safety and certitude of the tiny left echo chamber.

This is supposed to be the end of the discussion. Any appeal to principles not to be surrendered must be seen, according to Kaufman, as seeking perfection in an imperfect world. He implies that the left’s failure to exert mass influence today is solely attributable to its obsessive adherence to principle. By Kaufman’s reckoning, the monumental power of U.S. capitalism, the obsequiousness of the mainstream media, the McCarthy witch-hunt, Cointelpro, ongoing government surveillance, infiltration, provocation and even state-sanctioned assassination—from Fred Hampton and Mark Clark to Malcom X and Martin Luther King, Jr—have nothing to do with the political relationship of forces in the U.S. today. It’s all down to too much nitpicking among left groups.

In examining Kaufman’s arguments more closely, one finds logical holes big enough to drive a campaign bus through. For example:

* Regarding how to best fight against capitalism, Kaufman mocks debate among groups on the left: “We need only recall that the Bolsheviks [were] socialists who actually made a revolution rather than merely bloviating about it…” A curious example since Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders were famous for their biting polemics against social democrats and other left tendencies.

* Regarding the efficacy of the left participating in capitalist elections, Kaufman again points to the Bolsheviks “who regularly ran in election campaigns as a means of purveying their ideas”. Yes, but he forgot to mention that the Bolsheviks never once ran as candidates of a capitalist party, and they harshly criticized other self-described leftists who did.

* Even more insidious is this:

At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was part of a coalition that was mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the concrete (and principled!) slogan, “Out Now!”, peaking in the April 1971 march on Washington DC that brought 1 million people to the nation’s capital to demand an immediate end to the war. At that time a chorus of very “principled” far leftists scorned these powerful outpourings—which materially aided the besieged Vietnamese workers and peasants—because the key demand did not, in their view, go far enough or did not address an array of other issues: they argued that we should declaim “Victory to the NLF” or “Smash Imperialism” or “Defend the Rights of Palestinians” and so on.

Yes, “Out Now!” was the correct demand for that movement. But Kaufman conveniently forgets that winning the majority to that perspective took endless meetings, discussions and debates. And those leading the fight for “Out Now!” were some of the very socialists Kaufman now derides for their principled opposition to the Democratic Party politics. Moreover, the chief contender for focus was not the ultra-left slogan “Victory to the NLF”, but the liberal and social democratic push for slogans like “Negotiate Now!” and the desire by some to subordinate the movement to the election of this or that born-again antiwar Democrat.

But let’s cut to the chase. In Kaufman’s view, a political campaign is all about the individual candidate; the party behind that candidate is secondary at best. This approach is upside-down and backwards, as I argued in CounterPunch here. But let’s test Kaufman’s resolve with a thought experiment.

Let’s assume that for unknown pragmatic reasons, Sanders decided to run as a Republican rather than a Democrat. Same person, same speeches, same political message. Would this make a difference? Would this be a bridge too far?

Let’s carry this exercise in reductio ad absurdum one step further. Suppose that for expediency’s sake, to reach a broader audience, Sanders ran not as a Democrat or Republican but on the ticket of some ultra-right party in the mold of Greece’s Golden Dawn. Again, we have the same candidate, same platform, same public speeches, etc. The only difference is party affiliation. Would Kaufman urge support for Sanders in this case?

Any objection that these scenarios are unrealistic or that Sanders would never do such a thing would be evasive and disingenuous. To fully dissect this issue, it’s necessary to declare what position one should take if the above actually occurred.

Within this framework, there are two possibilities. Either the candidate’s party affiliation does matter, or—all other things about the candidate and the campaign being equal—the candidate’s party affiliation makes no difference whatsoever, even in the most extreme circumstances.

Those who adopt the latter position have much to answer for; in particular, “Which side are you on?” Adopting this position, while logically consistent, is absurd in the extreme. Of this option there’s little more to say except, “See you on opposite sides of the battle lines.”

But if one accepts the notion that there is some line that should not be crossed, that the organization and social forces with which the candidate aligns himself/herself could in principle make a difference as to how the candidacy should be viewed, then everything becomes much clearer. In that case, we are left to examine the Democratic Party and consider which side it is on. This is not hard to do. Even Kaufman concedes that the Democrats, like the Republicans, are completely in the pocket of big business.

Kaufman reminds us that the audience we must address is “not the doughty, battle-ready proletariat of far-left daydreams, but the massively depoliticized and demoralized casualties of the culture industry and neoliberal piracy.” Yes, our strategies and tactics must be designed to meet people where they are and through patient organizing and education lead them to fight for a more just and equitable world. But a cardinal rule in this process is to tell the truth. The Democratic Party is not our friend. Nor can it be reformed to do our bidding. The purpose of the Democratic and Republican parties is to keep us enslaved. To pretend otherwise is to sow confusion and carry the ball for the other team.

Nothing has held American working people back more than organized labor’s obeisance to the two corporate parties, together with confusion on this issue by many on the left. Albert Einstein warned, “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” Yet Kaufman would have us believe one can simultaneously oppose and build the Democratic Party.

Ironically, while Kaufman derides the left for its impotence, he fails to fully appreciate the Democratic Party for the obstacle that it is, thus promoting a view which would ensure the impotence of working people and the left for years to come. It’s not just that the Democratic Party is an obstacle to the class consciousness and radicalization of the American working class. Reliance on the Democrats and confusion about the party’s nature are among the chief obstacles.

Sanders raises all kinds of interesting populist issues in his speeches, but he is seeking the nomination of a party that is the proven enemy of the working class and he has promised, citing the lesser-evil doctrine, that he will endorse the Democratic nominee whoever it happens to be. So we can see that progressives like Kaufman and Sanders are not really opposed to standing on principle. It’s just that they have replaced the principles of working class solidarity and telling the truth with the “principle” of lesser-evil politics. This approach has persisted for decades while the labor movement has suffered blow after blow. Borrowing from Sara Palin we have to ask, “How’s that lesser-evily thing working for ya?”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/14/is-there-no-line-you-will-not-cross/

Bernie Sanders Insists Saudi Arabia Should Kill More People
by DAVID SWANSON

Senate Veterans’ Affairs Chairman Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., left, accompanied by House Veterans’ Affairs Chairman Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Monday, July 28, 2014, to outline their agreement on a compromise plan to fix the vast health care system responsible for treating the nation's veterans. A bipartisan deal to improve veterans' health care would authorize at least $17 billion to fix the health program scandalized by long patient wait times and falsified records covering up delays, the bill's chief supporters said Monday. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Senator Bernie Sanders taped a PBS show at the University of Virginia on Monday. I had corresponded with the host Doug Blackmon beforehand, and offered him ideas for questions on military spending and war, questions like these:

1. People want to tax the rich and cut military spending, which is 54% of federal discretionary spending according to National Priorities Project, but you only ever mention taxing the rich. Why not do both? What — give or take $100 billion — is an appropriate level of military spending?

2. Do you agree with Eisenhower that military spending creates wars?

3. Can you possibly be serious about wanting to keep the wars going but have Saudi Arabia play a bigger role? Do you approve of Saudi Arabia dropping U.S. cluster bombs on Yemen?

4. Would you approve of John Kerry promising Israel $45 billion of free weapons over the next decade?

5. Jeremy Corbyn was just elected leader of the Labour Party. He wants to pull out of NATO. Do you? He wants to unilaterally disarm of nuclear weapons? Do you? He wants to end drone murders and wars. Do you? Are you both socialists?

Blackmon at the very end asked Sanders to say something about foreign policy. Sanders replied with the 2002 Iraq vote. Then Blackmon mentioned Saudi Arabia, including its slaughter in Yemen, but rambled on until it became an unrelated softball. Sanders nonetheless brought it back to Saudi Arabia and insisted that Saudi Arabia should “get their hands dirty” and take a much bigger role in a war against ISIS and generally lead the wars with U.S. support.

Who has dirtier hands than Saudi Arabia? Is this some kind of a sick joke?

After the taping of the show, a member of the audience asked “But how will you pay for it?” What the “it” was went unstated, but presumably it wasn’t the military which is considered cost-free in such discussions. Sanders answered with progressive taxation. No mention of the military.

Later in the audience Q&A, Sanders brought up Eisenhower without mentioning the military.

Here are tips for future interviewers of Bernie Sanders:

As you know, Bernie Sanders focuses on money issues, taxing the rich, spending on the poor, but has thus far been permitted to engage in the general practice of speaking only about the 46% of federal discretionary spending that it not military.

Nobody has asked him about the 54% that by the calculation of National Priorities Project is military. Nobody has asked him if Eisenhower was right that military spending produces wars. Here are 25,000 people who want to know whether and how much Sanders would want to cut military spending.

He’s silent on the public support for two, not one, great sources of revenue: taxing the rich (which he’s all over) and cutting the military (which he avoids).

When he is asked about wars and says Saudi Arabia should pay for and lead them, nobody has followed up by asking whether the wars are themselves good or not or how the theocratic murderous regime in Saudi Arabia which openly seeks to overthrow other governments and is dropping US cluster bombs on Yemen will transform the wars into forces for good. Since when is THAT “socialism”?

If you go to Bernie’s website and click on ISSUES and search for foreign policy it’s just not there. He recently added the Iran agreement, after the fact, in which statement he says that war should “always be on the table” even though the U.N. Charter ban on threatening war makes no exception for candidate websites.

If Senator Sanders were to add anything about war in general to his website, judging by his standard response when asked, it would be this:

The military wastes money and its contractors routinely engage in fraud. The Department of Defense should be audited. Some weapons that I won’t name should be eliminated. Some cuts that I won’t even vaguely estimate should be made. All the wars in the Middle East should continue, but Saudi Arabia should lead the way with the U.S. assisting, because Saudi Arabia has plenty of weapons — and if Saudi Arabia has murdered lots of its own citizens and countless little babies in Yemen and has the goal of overthrowing a number of governments and slaughtering people of the wrong sect and dominating the area for the ideology of its fanatical dictatorial regime, who cares, better that than the U.S. funding all the wars, and the idea of actually ending any wars should be effectively brushed aside by changing the subject to how unfair it is for Saudi Arabia not to carry more of the militarized man’s burden. Oh, and veterans, U.S. veterans, are owed the deepest gratitude imaginable for the generous and beneficial service they have performed by killing so many people in the wars I’ve voted against and the ones I’ve voted for alike.

He’s silent on how much he’d cut the military, even within a range of $100 billion. He’s silent on alternatives to war. He’s usually silent on U.S. subservience to Israel. (Does he favor $45 billion in more free weapons for Israel paid for by the U.S. public whom he usually wants to spare lesser expenses than that?)

Jeremy Corbyn just won leadership of the Labour Party in England by promoting socialism at home and actively opposing wars and seeking peace. What is Bernie afraid of?

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/15/bernie-sanders-insists-saudi-arabia-should-kill-more-people/

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/16/the-yemen-tragedy-and-the-ongoing-crisis-of-the-left-in-the-united-states/

The Yemen Tragedy and the Ongoing Crisis of the Left in the United States
by AJAMU BARAKA


“… it is Western propaganda that is capable of mobilizing the masses for whatever ends or goals anywhere in the world. For whatever reasons, it can trigger coups, conflicts, terrible violence, and ‘strive for change.’ It can call the most peaceful large country on earth the most violent; it can describe it as the real threat to world peace; and it can call a bunch of Western nations that have been, for centuries, terrorizing the world, the true upholders of peace and democracy, and almost everybody believes it. Almost all people in the West believe it.”

– Noam Chomsky and Andre Vltchek, On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare

“… trenches of ideas are more powerful than weapons.”

– José Martí

150325154927-03-yemen-unrest-0325-restricted-super-169

After months of horrific scenes of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean where literally thousands of human beings were dying at sea, European public opinion was finally mobilized to respond to this movement of people. However, the anguished expressions of concern from the general public and government leaders in Europe was a far cry from the response that met the first wave of migrants that was largely African.

In response to that migration, European authorities openly talked of launching military attacks on the boats in Libya to stop the “flood” of these “illegal” immigrants into Europe, even after experts cautioned them that military attacks would result in even more deaths at sea.

What changed? The racial composition of the majority of the migrants shifting away from Sub-Saharan Africans to refugees from the various conflict zones of Iraq and Syria, captured in the image of the globally disseminated image of Aylan Kurdi, the Kurdish child from the devastated city of Kabani. But even more importantly, European and U.S. propaganda could exploit this flow of humanity from Syria politically.

This example is pertinent to the discussion here because it raises two issues related to Yemen: first, the ease in which public opinion is influenced by Western propagandists (I include both the official state entities responsible for psy-ops directed at the public and the corporate media that largely collaborates with these efforts because of shared ideological positions and worldviews), and secondly, how humanitarian concerns are selectively manipulated to prepare and justify military attacks from the U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination.

In Yemen, six months of relentless and seemingly indiscriminate bombing by the repressive Wahhabaist dictatorship of Saudi Arabia has cost the lives of over four thousands human beings, who according to the United Nations and major human rights organizations have been primarily civilians.

Along with this wanton murder, the Saudi government and its allies from the contemptuous gang of corrupt Arab monarchies known as the Gulf Cooperation Council benefit from the diplomatic cover and military support from the equally contemptuous U.S. state. Together, they have created a humanitarian catastrophe in one of the poorest nations on the planet.

Yet, for the majority of the people in the U.S., the carnage in Yemen simply does not exist because it has not been in the interests of the rulers to draw the attention of the American people to it.

Therefore, the U.S. public is unaware that the U.S. is participating in the naval blockade of a country that imports 80% of its food by sea. They don’t know that the bombing, blockade, and massive displacement has resulted in widespread famine with more than 78% of the population now in need of humanitarian assistance. They never read the report from Peter Maurer, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who said that “Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years.”

And while U.S. propagandists are preparing the people for an even more direct intervention into Syria, using the absurd pretext that somehow the imposition of a “no fly zone” is an appropriate response to the humanitarian concerns of refugee flows from Syria to Europe, the humanitarian emergency created by the war in Yemen is largely uncovered and outside the bounds of polite conversation in the U.S.

This conspiracy of silence has translated into impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It has meant that the central role played by the U.S. in this criminal assault occurred without any opposition from mainstream politicians or most radicals and leftists in the U.S.

Do Non-European Lives really Matter to White Leftists?

The political reaction to the killing spree in Yemen that now eclipses the murderous assault on Gaza by Israel, has not only been met with indifference but many leftists and radicals in the U.S. have given their support to Bernie Sanders who said very clearly that under his administration the Saudi’s would be given even more latitude to carry out military operations in the Middle-East. The Sanders’ position is that the Saudi’s needed to get their “hands a little dirty.” For Bernie and his supporters, the mischief that the Saudi government and private individuals have been engaged in across the region financing groups like ISIS wasn’t dirty enough.

After years of drone attacks from the U.S., the end of the agony of the people of Yemen is nowhere in sight. These attacks targeted weddings, funerals, first responders to an initial drone attack and so-called signature strikes where an anonymous person is murdered because he fits the behavior profile of a “terrorist.” After pounding the country into rubble with six months of terror from the sky, the Saudi’s are now involved in ground operations in Yemen that will only increase the death toll and the humanitarian disaster.

This is the world that a President Sanders promises—continued war crimes from the sky with drone strikes and Saudi led terror in support of the Western imperial project.

This is not to suggest that everyone who might find a way to support Sanders is a closet racist and supporter of imperialism. I know plenty of folks of all backgrounds who “feel the Bern.” There is, however, an objective logic to their uncritical support that they cannot escape and which I believe represents the ongoing crisis of radicalism in the U.S. and Europe.

The Sanders’ campaign, like the Obama phenomenon before it, does not offer a program or strategic direction for addressing the current crisis and contradictions of Western capitalist societies. Instead, it is an expression of the moral and political crisis of Western radicalism. This crisis – which is reflective of the loss of direction needed to inform vision, and fashion a creative program for radical change – is even more acute in the U.S. than Western Europe. Yet, what unites both radical experiences is a tacit commitment to Eurocentrism and the assumptions of normalized white supremacy.

In their desperate attempt to defend Sanders and paint his critics as dogmatists and purists, the Sanders supporters have not only fallen into the ideological trap of a form of narrow “left” nativism, but also the white supremacist ethical contradiction that reinforces racist cynicism in which some lives are disposable for the greater good of the West.

And as much as the ‘Sandernistas ’ attempt to disarticulate Sanders “progressive” domestic policies from his documented support for empire (even the Obamaite aphorism “The perfect is the enemy of the good” is unashamedly deployed), it should be obvious that his campaign is an ideological prop – albeit from a center/left position – of the logic and interests of the capitalist-imperialist settler state.

The silence of the left on Yemen is not a trivial matter. The fact that so many white leftist supporters of Sanders can politically and psychologically disconnect his domestic program from his foreign policy positions that objectively support U.S. and Western neoliberal hegemony means that not only have they found a way to be comfortable collaborating with imperialism, but that they have also decided that they can support the implicit hierarchy that determines from an imperial perspective that lives in the White West matter more than others.

What this means for those of us who are internationalists and believe in the equal value of all life is that we have to question the sincerity of individuals who claim that black lives matter while supporting someone who clearly believes that Israeli lives matter more than Palestinian and Yemeni lives. And that the pro-democracy fighters in Bahrain should be subjected to the policing and murderous assault by the gangster regime in Saudi Arabia.

It means that if today leftists in the U.S. can find a way to reconcile the suffering of the people of Yemen and Gaza and all of occupied Palestine for the greater good of electing Sanders, tomorrow my life and the movement that I am a part of that is committed to fighting this corrupt, degenerate, white supremacist monstrosity called the United States, can be labeled as enemies of the state and subjected to brutal repression with the same level of silence from these leftists.

And since tomorrow has already happened in the past with the repression of the Black Liberation Movement, when it happens again we will not be surprised – but this time we will be ready.

The Sanders Trap
History shows that Bernie Sanders’s campaign will raise lots of hopes — and do little to strengthen the Left.
by Lance Selfa

Many activists and writers on the Left welcomed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s announcement that he would challenge former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

The April 30 declaration of a number of Occupy activists and others, calling themselves People for Bernie, was emblematic:

We are activists and organizers trying to build a broad, effective movement for democratic change . . . To that end, we support Bernie Sanders in his bid to become the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. We stand firmly behind Senator Sanders as the strongest progressive possibility in the race right now. His commitment to our values is one of long-standing commitment.

The Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) had mounted an online petition calling on Sanders to run in the Democratic presidential primary, on the grounds that “we all need a ‘fighter’ to stand up on behalf of a fair economy that works for all of us, just as Bernie Sanders has done throughout his entire career.”

Echoing the message from the Nation magazine, the PDA argues that Democratic voters “would all benefit from a serious primary challenge based on policy substance and real issues rather than trivial personality differences.”

Crucially, the PDA reaffirmed the importance of Sanders’s campaign taking place inside the Democratic Party primaries: “Sanders understood the very real danger of total Republican control of the US government in 2004, including the then-impending danger of George W. Bush appointments to the Supreme Court, when he supported Democratic nominee John Kerry for President over his long-time friend and ally, Ralph Nader.”

Another pro-Sanders perspective came from Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara. This one was less focused on Sanders himself or his campaigns’ supposed benefits to the Democratic primaries, but on the potential for the Sanders campaign to “build organization and pressure from the left.” Citing the example of the Tea Party’s influence in Republican Party politics, Sunkara proposed that a Sanders run can:

solidify progressives into a coherent voting bloc . . . [S]een as an opportunity for movement building, Sanders’s candidacy could strengthen the left in the long run. The tensions among Democrats are serious and raise the possibility for the realignment of progressive forces on a totally different basis.

Sunkara also asserts that Sanders’s identification with the “socialist” label can help socialists organize and bring their ideas to a national audience: “When [Sanders] fails [to win the Democratic nomination], there’s every reason to believe that radical voices can take his place, carrying the memory of [Eugene] Debs back into the political mainstream.”

The various pro-Sanders positions among these leftists have different shades of emphasis. For example, People for Bernie sounds as if they believe Sanders could actually win the Democratic nomination — a far-fetched proposition even if the frontrunner and presumed nominee Hillary Clinton stumbles in some profound way. The PDA petition, on the other hand, is clearly calling for Sanders to run a vigorous campaign for second place.

Both these appeals hang their hopes on Sanders raising progressive demands in society at large, but especially within the Democratic Party. Sunkara’s position seems to be less focused on Sanders or the Democratic Party, and more on the potential for the Sanders candidacy to help the Left and socialists organize something outside the Democratic Party.

Despite their differences in emphasis, however, each of these appeals for Sanders accept an analysis that the Democratic Party is divided between a “centrist” and a “progressive” wing — and that an underdog national campaign by a genuine liberal can either force the Democrats to commit themselves to more progressive policies, force open the internal party rift and shake up the stagnant US mainstream political scene, or both.

The history of the Democratic Party and its long list of progressive underdogs tells us something different. The reason the party remains firmly in the grip of neoliberalism today is, in part, because these liberal challenges were less successful than their supporters hoped they would be. So the question is: why will Sanders be any different?

While there certainly are real disagreements between the mainstream neoliberals and more traditional liberals of the Democratic Party, that doesn’t mean there’s a fundamental divide within the party. Indeed, the rise of “the new new left” of progressive Democrats celebrated a couple years ago has turned out to be more of a mirage.

But even if we set aside the weaknesses of the party’s liberal figures and accept the characterization of a two-winged Democratic Party, no one could deny that the tensions are a far cry from a couple generations ago, when the Democrats were much more fundamentally rent by the two burning questions of the 1960s and ’70s: civil rights and the Vietnam War.

So how did the liberals do then?

A landslide victory for the Democrats in 1964 — when the civil rights movement was in full swing — gave President Lyndon Johnson the huge congressional majorities that he used to push through a series of reforms, such as Medicare and Medicaid and various “war on poverty” programs, over the next two years.

At the same time, however, Johnson was committed to escalating the Vietnam War, with the support of a majority of Democrats. By 1966, LBJ was raiding the budgets of the war on poverty to fight the war in Vietnam.

The Vietnam-fueled spending binge pushed an overheated economy into an inflationary spiral. The ruling-class consensus that had underpinned the “welfare-warfare” state began to splinter. By 1968, it was clear even to Wall Street that the Vietnam War was “unwinnable” and was causing major damage to the US economy. Johnson’s hope that the Great Society would buy allegiance from the poor blew up in his face. Instead, he faced disintegration in the US Army, insurrectionary riots in all of the country’s major cities, and widespread protest against the war in Vietnam.

One reflection of this discontent was the announcement in November 1967 by Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy that he would challenge Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968. McCarthy was a quirky, but relatively mainstream, liberal who called for a negotiated settlement to the war. Certainly, he was no radical — his main appeal was that he wanted to “restore belief in the American political process” among those who “make threats to support third parties or other irregular political movements.”

To much of the antiwar movement — especially those newly won to opposing Vietnam — McCarthy’s candidacy seemed to transform the situation. Thousands of young activists went “clean for Gene” — cutting their hair and putting on suits, ties and skirts — to canvass for McCarthy during the primary elections in 1968.

The Vietnamese uprising in the Tet Offensive at the end of January 1968 demonstrated to the world that the US was actually losing the war — contrary to all the propaganda coming from the White House and Pentagon. This massive shift of opinion against the war had its echo in the first primary vote in New Hampshire in March, where McCarthy took 42 percent of the vote. Within a few days, LBJ dropped out, saying he wouldn’t seek another term in the White House.

Throughout the Democratic primaries in 1968, voters consistently backed candidates who promised to wind down the war — from McCarthy; to New York Sen. Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated after winning the California primary in June; to South Dakota Sen. George McGovern. But at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the party bosses imposed Hubert Humphrey, LBJ’s pro-war vice president, as the nominee.

To antiwar activists and delegates representing McCarthy and the others, the Democratic establishment offered nothing at all. In fact, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley turned the city into an armed camp, unleashing his police force on protesters in the streets near convention hotels. The images of police beating hundreds of demonstrators were so shocking that Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, a McGovern delegate, denounced them as “Gestapo tactics” on the floor of the convention.

In November — just four years after LBJ had won a landslide victory — conservative Republican Richard Nixon defeated the divided “majority” party with a mere 43 percent of the popular vote. The Democratic Party’s actions in Chicago and its refusal to address the concerns of its grassroots supporters — as well as international events like the May general strike in France and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia “turned a generation of radical activists into revolutionaries,” Joe Allen writes in Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost.

What, if anything, does McCarthy’s campaign for the White House tell us about Sanders today? That thousands of activists drew radical conclusions, despite the ultimate failure of McCarthy’s campaign, would seem to support the idea that a similar effort could lay the groundwork for greater organization of the Left. But a closer look shows the opposite.

First, as important as movements like Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter are, they are nowhere near as widespread or powerful as the antiwar or Black Power movements of 1968 were. Whatever impact McCarthy’s campaign had inside the Democratic Party owed to what was going on outside the party, not the revolt within it.

Sanders’ supporters today have even less ambition than 1968’s McCarthy supporters, who were challenging the central plank of the foreign policy agenda of a sitting president. And even if thousands of antiwar activists drew radical conclusions from their failed efforts to influence the Democratic Party from within, that was certainly not the intention of those who went “clean for Gene.”

In considering Sunkara’s argument about the Sanders campaign, one has to ask, why should the Left advocate for thousands of activists to spend the better part of a year on an effort that nearly everyone agrees is doomed from the start in order to end up with a more radical remnant? Wouldn’t it be better to organize those activists for political independence from the capitalist parties now?

The pig-headedness of the barons of the Democratic Party in 1968 helped create a generation of activists who spoke of “new politics” and radical change. But — and we should keep this in mind when we hear about the potential for a Sanders campaign to create an independent force for change — it’s likely that many thousands more people moved from the McCarthy campaign into the Democratic Party.

That’s because leaders of the Democrats realized that they had to adapt to the political climate by providing the appearance of more openness to young people, women, and people of color.

An internal party commission, led by McGovern and Minnesota Rep. Donald Fraser, convinced the Democratic leadership to change delegation selection and convention rules for the 1972 presidential election. These rule changes diluted the power of party bosses and increased representation of youth, women and people of color.

The results proved very effective for McGovern, who locked up most of the votes he needed to win the presidential nomination before the 1972 convention. The outward appearance of his coalition of supporters — young, multiracial, antiwar, even “hip” — made it seem as if the “Left” really had a chance to take over the Democratic Party.

In reality, McGovern had the backing of a segment of business executives, including cosmetics boss Max Factor III and the CEOs of Xerox and Continental Grain. His campaign pursued a conscious strategy of “co-opting the Left,” in the words of McGovern campaign manager Gary Hart, by recruiting antiwar activists to participate.

But the bulk of US business wasn’t willing to follow the McGovern backers. Neither were the powerful forces inside the Democratic Party that had become accustomed to playing their assigned roles in the setup of Cold War liberalism. The State Department had long before corrupted the AFL-CIO, funneling millions in government money toward building anticommunist unions and parties throughout the less developed world — thus, the mainstream labor movement refused to back McGovern.

By effectively — and sometimes openly — abandoning the liberal McGovern, these sections of the Democratic establishment contributed to his landslide defeat in 1972 against incumbent Richard Nixon.

Even so, the McGovern campaign proved to be a watershed for the regeneration of the Democratic Party over the next generation. Gary Hart went on to become a senator and future presidential candidate himself. Bill Clinton and his future wife, Hillary Rodham, managed McGovern’s campaign in Texas. Sections of the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), formed in 1971 by prominent feminists such as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan to push for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, became key McGovern supporters.

Also in 1972, more than eight thousand black activists participated in the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, to consider a black political agenda that would include independence from the two corporate parties. But Rev. Jesse Jackson, who played a key role in opposing a break from the two-party system at that convention, joined up with McGovern’s 1972 Democratic presidential campaign afterward.

That year may have marked Jackson’s most prominent initial foray into Democratic Party politics, but his presidential runs in the 1980s are the most important to consider as historical precedents for Sanders’s campaign today.

Many sincere activists and antiracists looking for a way to respond to Ronald Reagan’s right-wing policies in the 1980s were drawn to Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns, as well as “insurgent” local campaigns, such as the one that elected Harold Washington as Chicago’s first African-American mayor in 1983.

Sheila Collins, author of The Rainbow Challenge, argued that the National Rainbow Coalition (NRC) represented a solution to the failure of the 1960s civil rights and Black Power movements to consolidate their gains because of “the separation of the social movements from electoral politics.” Others argued that the Rainbow Coalition assembled a “coalition of the rejected” that, if mobilized in the electoral arena, would push American politics to the left. Still others claimed that the Rainbow Coalition offered a way to reinvigorate the movements of the 1960s.

To many Rainbow supporters, the NRC’s electoralism was seen as secondary to its potential as a “political movement,” a description in the NRC’s founding document, which appeared to reach beyond electoral politics. Rainbow politicians’ electoral ambitions were seen as secondary to the “mass movement,” which would provide the push for real reform struggles. Plus, Rainbow supporters argued, activists could use Jackson’s rhetoric and his access to the media to build grassroots struggles, like the movement in solidarity with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

The 1984 Jackson campaign won about 21 percent of the vote in the Democratic primaries, including outright victories in several key Southern states. Nevertheless, the party’s rules limited Jackson’s showing at the convention to only 11 percent of delegates.

With an overwhelming advantage achieved well before the convention, former Vice President Walter Mondale won an endorsement from Jackson without conceding anything. Mondale dismissed all of the Rainbow Coalition’s platform proposals — which, in fact, included only two of the seven proposals comprising a minimum black political agenda, according to two Jackson advisers quoted by political scientist Adolph Reed Jr.

Despite this record, some on the Left, including organizations like the National Committee for Independent Political Action, viewed the Rainbow Coalition as offering a “mass base” of the oppressed to form a possible third party.

But a Rainbow Coalition break from the Democrats was a highly unlikely proposition, no matter how disdainfully the party treated Jackson and the NRC. As Jackson explained at the 1986 conference that transformed Jackson’s campaign into an ongoing organization, “We have too much invested in the Democratic Party. When you have money in the bank you don’t walk away from it.”

In essence, Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition strategy accepted their status as a liberal caucus in a Democratic Party moving rapidly rightward.

After giving the party establishment a little discomfort in 1984, the Jackson campaign took a different tack as the 1988 election season got underway. Jackson opened the race with a much higher level of support. Rather than running an “insurgent” campaign, Jackson focused on a mainstream strategy based on gaining the support of the black Democratic establishment.

Paul Hockenos, writing in the left-wing Guardian newspaper of the era, noted that during the 1988 February New Hampshire primary: “In contrast to 1984, when elected officials and community leaders virtually ignored Jackson, the campaign boasts an impressive list of mainstream endorsements, including Chamber of Commerce officials, four state legislators . . . and the state president of the Association for the Elderly, among others.”

In November 1987 Jackson appointed black California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, one of the most powerful politicians in California, to be chairman of his campaign. Brown insisted that the Jackson campaign would not “appeal excessively to so-called black concerns.” With experienced Democratic hands in charge of the campaign, it was more difficult than ever to distinguish Jackson’s “movement” from any other mainstream Democratic campaign.

After his victory in the 1988 Michigan primary, Jackson dropped references in speeches to his “poor campaign with a rich message.” This was because he had begun to attract support from rich donors and big business. Figures released in April 1988 showed that the Jackson camp pulled in some $2 million in March, only $400,000 short of the eventual Democratic presidential nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.

Nevertheless, big victories in the California and New Jersey primaries gave Dukakis, a dull technocrat, more than enough delegates to lock up the presidential nomination ahead of the July convention in Atlanta. With more than six hundred “superdelegates” — party officials and politicians chosen by the Democratic establishment to assure the selection of an “electable” candidate — committed to him, Dukakis wrapped up the nomination on the first ballot.

Jackson’s forces arrived at the Atlanta convention with much fanfare. But within days of the convention’s opening, Jackson pledged his support for the Dukakis–Lloyd Bentsen ticket in exchange for representation of several of his advisers (including his son) on the Democratic National Committee and in the general election campaign.

Any hope that he would bring a progressive influence to the party platform was quashed for the sake of “unity.” Jackson agreed to withdraw or water down some of his progressive platform planks, and the Dukakis forces were strong enough to soundly defeat three other Jackson proposals calling for increased taxes on the rich and “no first use” of nuclear weapons.

There should never have been any doubt that Jackson would deliver his supporters to Dukakis in the end. That was the whole aim of the operation: Jackson traded his delegates for his own acceptance into the party’s inner circle. In the spirit of party unity, Jackson’s address to the convention endorsed the demands of party conservatives.

Activists who gave so much energy to nominate Jackson then faced the choice of voting for the conservative ticket that Jackson endorsed — a stark illustration of the ultimate problem with the Rainbow Coalition strategy. From the start, the NRC only succeeded in binding activists to the big business interests that really control the Democratic Party.

Despite appearances to the contrary, Jackson’s presidential campaigns weren’t grassroots efforts. If they had been, the NRC would have built independently of the presidential campaigns. But this wasn’t the case, and the NRC withered as all its resources were plowed into Jackson’s election efforts.

Activists who joined the Rainbow Coalition with the aim of building an “independent” Rainbow distinct from Jackson’s Democratic Party campaign found their hopes dashed. Some broke away and tried to focus on other political activity, including independent political campaigns. But many more were absorbed into the Democratic Party. That included sections of the radical left — in particular, Maoist organizations that counted memberships in the thousands in the early 1970s, only to disintegrate during the conservative era that followed.

While many people today might consider this thirty- and fifty-year-old history to have little relevance, it’s worth noting that much of what is being said on the Left today about Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign was said about Jackson’s campaigns in the 1980s. For those who would like a more contemporary example, consider how the string of campaigns of former Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich disappointed left supporters.

Both Jackson and Kucinich ultimately delivered supporters to the more conservative Democrats against whom they had mounted their challenges in the first place. They did this so effectively and seamlessly that it must be said their campaigns aimed to do this from the start.

Candidates like Jackson or Kucinich occasionally flirted with the rhetoric of breaking with the Democrats, but their clear commitment in practice was to bring people disenchanted with the party into the Democratic orbit. And meanwhile, Sanders, for his part, won’t even use the rhetoric — he has ruled out running outside the Democratic Party. History teaches us that the real impact of these inside-outside challenges was to, in the words of Jesse Jackson, “keep hope alive” — but in the Democratic Party.

For those who want to build a stronger left in the US, there is no substitute for the work — however slow and painstaking it might be — of building social movements and struggles at the grassroots and of organizing a political alternative independent of the Democratic Party.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/bernie-sanders-president-socialist-primary/

The economic nationalism of Bernie Sanders
By Tom Hall
1 July 2015

Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is gaining a hearing among the public, due in large part to his focus on economic inequality. The support for the campaign of a politician who calls himself a socialist and regularly denounces the “billionaire class” is a reflection of widespread alienation from the political establishment and growing interest in a socialist alternative.

Sanders’ campaign, however, is designed to channel this growing discontent back within the safe channels of the Democratic Party. None of his proposals challenge the basis of capitalist rule such as private ownership of industry and finance. Instead, he promotes the illusion that serious social reforms can be achieved within the existing political and economic system.

Sanders combines his populist appeals with economic nationalism. Far from pursuing genuinely socialist politics, which is based on revolutionary internationalism, he opposes the international unity of the working class, calling instead for American workers to rally in defense of “their” national state against foreign capital.
The general thrust of Sanders’ argument can be summed up as the following: global trade undermines the sovereignty of the United States and results in the off-shoring of American jobs overseas to authoritarian regimes, resulting in declining living standards for American workers. As an alternative, Sanders proposes various protectionist measures.

This is the content of his stance on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which he has joined congressional Democrats and trade union officials in opposing. A statement released by Sanders declared that the TPP would “undermine US sovereignty,” eliminate protectionist “Buy American” laws, and “reward authoritarian regimes like Vietnam.”

“We need to regroup and come up with a trade policy which demands that corporate America start investing in this country rather than in countries all over the world,” Sanders said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” program.

Virtually unmentioned in Sanders' numerous statements against the TPP is the basic geopolitical agenda that underlies the proposed trade bloc. The TPP is the economic component of the Obama administration’s anti-Chinese “pivot to Asia.” Sanders does not want to raise this issue because he, along with his congressional colleagues in both parties, supports such an aggressive policy towards China.
His interest in opposing the trade deal is to divert popular anger over unemployment, wage cuts and austerity along reactionary nationalist lines.

Since his election to Congress in 1991, Sanders has repeatedly attacked the extension to China of “most favored” trade status, called Normal Trade Relations in the parlance of the federal government. His very first piece of legislation as a congressman was a 1992 bill he co-sponsored with the current Democratic House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, attacking the extension of most favored status to China, which was later vetoed by George H. W. Bush.

Since then, Sanders has sought repeatedly to repeal Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China on protectionist and nationalist grounds. During one such initiative in 2005, he declared that “Corporate America—with the active support of the president of the United States and the congressional leadership-is selling out the American people and making China the economic superpower of the 21st century.”
On the basis of this political line, Sanders has aligned himself with openly right-wing figures. One Republican congressman, in supporting Sanders’ 2005 effort, denounced the production of American flags in China. Echoing this sentiment, Sanders in 2011 attacked the Smithsonian Institute, on the occasion of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington, for selling Chinese-made busts of American presidents in its gift shop, calling on the museum to sell only American-made products.

Sanders, alongside Ron Paul, the right-wing libertarian Republican, sponsored another bill in 2005 calling for the US to withdraw from the World Trade Organization (WTO). A spokesman for Paul claimed that thanks to the WTO, which China joined in 2001, “Our trade competitors now have a bureaucratic means to gang up on us.”

Following the favored propaganda line of American imperialism, Sanders’ attacks on Chinese trade are often couched in “human rights” rhetoric. In 1998, he co-sponsored a resolution, which passed unanimously, criticizing China’s human rights record and calling on the president to make Chinese diplomatic missions in the US contingent on the inflammatory demand that the US be allowed to establish a diplomatic office in Lhasa, Tibet.

Sanders has, under the guise of “human rights,” supported numerous imperialist interventions, including the NATO war in former Yugoslavia and the current war against ISIS. Sanders’ use of this line with respect to China has an unmistakable political significance.

While he attacks China for its mistreatment of minorities, Sanders has for many years distinguished himself by a nativist stance on immigration. He has sought to scapegoat immigrants in the US for the declining living standards of the American working class. This has won Sanders plaudits from right-wing layers, such as the TV host and anti-immigrant racist Lou Dobbs, who called Sanders “one of the few straight talkers in Congress.”

For years, Sanders has attacked the federal visa program, blaming guest workers for high unemployment and low wages. “You have massively high unemployment for young people, yet we’re talking about expanding visas so that young people from abroad can serve as life guards, become ski instructors, become front desk people, when young people in this country desperately need jobs to pay for a college education,” Sanders told the Washington Post in 2013.

In 2007, Sanders and Republican Senator Chuck Grassley pushed for the suspension of visas for any company announcing layoffs. Sanders has focused particularly on the H-1B visa program, through which American corporations are able to hire highly skilled workers from abroad. Though the program is relatively small, with a cap of 65,000 visas per year, Sanders claims that it has caused a flood of foreign workers pushing Americans out of their jobs.

In 2009, he co-sponsored an amendment, also with Grassley, suspending the use of H-1B visas for banks that accepted federal bailout money. The American Immigration Lawyers Association denounced the amendment as “[creating] a climate of jingoistic divisiveness.”

Sanders has publicly backed Obama's reactionary immigration policy. The administration’s miserly immigration “reforms,” such as the DREAM Act, provide temporary relief from deportation in exchange for paying back taxes and providing the government with detailed personal information, which could be used in future proceedings. Meanwhile, Obama has deported more immigrants than any other president in history and has bragged that under his presidency there are more “boots on the ground” along the US-Mexico border than ever before.

Sanders’ brand of nationalist populism is a phenomenon with deep historical roots in the US. In the 1980s, jingoistic “Buy America” campaigns were utilized by the trade union bureaucracy to disorient and demobilize workers in the face of a plant-closing and wage-cutting offensive by American capitalism. This found its most noxious expression in the racist anti-Japanese campaigns of the United Auto Workers, in which Japanese-made cars were smashed with sledgehammers, and which culminated in the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American worker, in Highland Park, Michigan.

It is no accident that sections of the trade union bureaucracy have come out in support of Sanders’ campaign. They share not only Sanders’ nationalist outlook, but his political goal of disorienting the working class.

While populists such as Sanders claim to be on the side of the American worker, they are in reality working to enforce the continued domination of bourgeois politics over the working class. They promote the line that American workers should seek the protection of “their” national state from the world economy and foreign governments and corporations (as well as “treasonous” American corporations doing business overseas).
Sanders’ overriding political concern is to head off a challenge to American capitalism from the working class by propping up the Democratic Party. This is what accounts for his nationalist politics and his decision to run in the Democratic primaries.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/07/01/sand-j01.html

1) Sanders supports Israel and has supported Israel's aggression against Palestine- Sanders supports US military support of Israel;

2) Sanders supports an increase in Saudi Arabia's attacks on Yemen;

3) Sanders supports the US Military Industrial Complex;

4) Sanders supported US attacks on Kosovo;

5) Sanders supports US attacks on ISIS and the entire narrative;

6) Sanders backed the buildup in the Persian Gulf during GHWB Gulf War;

7) Sanders supported sanctions in Iraq even as the Iraqi body count passed 1.5 million;

8) Sanders supported Bill Clinton when he sent military units to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in October, 1994- Bernie supported this because “we cannot tolerate aggression.”

9) He supported US intervention in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Liberia, Zaire (Congo), Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.

10) Sanders has voted for appropriations bills to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan;

11) Sanders supported pro-war measures--such as a March 21, 2003, resolution stating, "Congress expresses the unequivocal support and appreciation of the nation to the President as Commander-in-Chief for his firm leadership and decisive action in the conduct of military operations in Iraq as part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism";

12) Sanders opposed immediate withdrawal from Iraq;

13) Sanders opposed any action on a wave of Bush impeachment resolutions that swept Vermont towns in 2006;

14) Sanders defends the Lockheed Martin F-35 program the epitome of Pentagon waste;

15) Sanders approved a $1 billion aid package to the coup government in Ukraine, aiding and abetting Nazis;

16) Sanders supported he objectively racist and mass-incarcerationist Federal Crime bill;

17) Votes with Democrats 96% of the time and caucuses with them actively working against third party candidates who challenge Democrats;

18) Has expressed admiration for Hillary Clinton and has stated he will support her if she gets the nomination;

19. Sanders supports sanctions against Russia. This is an act of war and Sanders does not explain why he is just parroting talking points from former George W Bush advisers and Zbigniew Brezinski.

20. Sanders will continue the racist war on drugs and has only proposed reforms on mandatory minimums already brought up by.....Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush.

21. Sanders has signed declarations for regime change in Iraq and Iran while in Congress.

22. On Iran Sanders, "repeats the discredited mantra that the United States must make war in order to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear nation when even the CIA said that it never had that capability."

23. "Sanders has voted for a measure that has advanced urban school privatization, deepened educational race disparities, and deepened the hold of deadening standardized testing pedagogy over minority student: the No Child Left Behind Act. He is a supporter of the state and federal Common Core States Initiative, another key part of the neoliberal-racist schools agenda." Paul Street

In 1993, Bernie voted YEA on HR 2446 - Military Construction Fiscal Year 1994 Appropriations Bill, which provided $3.63 billion for military construction.

That same year, he also voted in favor of S J Res 45 - Authorization for Use of US Armed Forces in Somalia, which authorized President Bill Clinton to use US troops in Somalia for the purpose of providing logistical support to the United Nations peacekeeping force.

In 1994, Bernie voted in favor of HR 4453 - Military Construction FY95 Appropriations bill, which provided $2.52 billion for military construction.

The following year, Bernie voted in favor of HR 3107 - Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, which "imposes sanctions on persons exporting certain goods or technology that would enhance Iran's ability to explore for, extract, refine, or transport by pipeline petroleum resources, and for other purposes."

In 1997, Bernie voted for HR 2159 - Foreign Operations FY98 Appropriations bill, which included: $3 billion for Israel, including $1.8 billion in military assistance and $1.2 billion in economic assistance; $2.12 billion for Egypt, including $1.3 billion in military assistance and $815 million in economic assistance; $770 million for former Soviet Republics; and $215 million for international narcotics control and law enforcement.

He also voted for HR 4059 - Military Construction FY99 Appropriations bill, which provided $2.82 billion for general military construction.

In 1998, Bernie's name was included as a YEA vote on HR 4655, the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, which expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the aim of the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power. President George W. Bush later used the Iraqi Liberation Act to provide justification for military action for the 2003 invasion.

In 1999, Bernie voted for HR 2465, which provided $4 billion for military construction, and he voted for HR 3196, which provided: $2.16 billion for military and economic assistance to Israel; $760 million for military and economic assistance to Egypt; $535 million for Eastern European and the Baltic States, including $150 million for assistance to Kosovo; $300 million for military and economic assistance to Jordan; and $285 million for international narcotics control.

Bernie's was a staunch support for Clinton's 100-day bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo in 1999. These were war crimes.

In 2001, Bernie supported HR 1954, which extended the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act of 1996.

Following the 9/11 attacks, Bernie voted in favor of H J Res 64 - Authorization for Use of Military Force, which allowed President Bush to use the United States Armed Forces against anyone involved with 9/11 and any nation that harbors these individuals.

In 2003, Bernie supported HR 5010, which provided $355.1 billion in appropriations for the Defense Department for fiscal year 2003 - an increase of $37.5 billion from 2002 - as well as: $71.6 billion for procurement of aircraft, missiles, weapons, combat vehicles and shipbuilding; $7.4 billion for ballistic missile defense; and $58.4 million for foreign aid, which includes humanitarian assistance, foreign disaster relief and de-mining programs.

He also voted in favor of HR 2800 - Foreign Operations Appropriations, FY 2004 bill, which granted $1.8 billion in military and economic assistance to Egypt and $2.2 billion for Israeli military assistance.

In 2004, Bernie supported HR 4613, which allocated $25 billion for emergency defense spending for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and $77.4 billion for the procurement of new weapons.

In 2005, Sanders supported HR 2863 - Defense Department FY2006 Appropriations Bill, which provided $50 billion for ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2006, Bernie voted for HR 5631, which provided $70 billion for ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2007, he supported HR 1585 - National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, which granted $187.14 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan operations.

In 2009, he voted in favor of HR 2647, which authorized $309 million for research and evaluation, procurement, or deployment of an alternative Missile Defense System in Europe, and also allowed the
Secretary of Defense to increase the active-duty number for the US Army to a number greater than otherwise allowed by law up to the 2010 baseline plus 30,000 troops.

During the same year, he called closing the torturous gulag at Guantanamo a "complicated issue" and ultimately rejected a proposal to shut it down.

In 2011, Bernie co-sponsored S. Res. 85, which urged the UN Security Council to take action to protect civilians in Libya from attack, including the possible imposition of a no-fly zone over Libyan territory.

In 2014, Bernie came out in favor of levying economic sanctions (an act of war) against Russia: "The entire world has got to stand up to Putin," he said. "We've got to deal with sanctions."

Bernie also didn't object to having his name included - by unanimous consent - in S.498, which backed Israel's brutal, summer-long military assault against Gaza.

Bad History: Bernie Sanders’ Specious Take on Barack Obama’s “Big Mistake”
by PAUL STREET

Leftish Democrats can’t seem to stop quoting something the nominal “democratic socialist” and (to use an old but in this case accurate Lenninist term) “social chauvinist” Bernie Sanders has been saying about Barack Obama since at least last May. Here’s a useful synopsis of Sanders’ take on Obama from an interview he did two weeks ago on MSDNC, I mean on MSNBC:

“I happen to have a lot of respect and affection for Barack Obama. Obama’s biggest political mistake that he made is after his brilliant campaign in 2008 was that he basically said to the millions of people who supported him, ‘thanks for getting me elected, I will take it from here.’ I will not make that mistake. If I`m elected president, trust me, we`ll be directly involved and working with millions of people who will tell the billionaire class their day is over, they`re not going to get it all. They`re going to start paying their fair share of taxes. We are going to create millions of jobs. We are going to raise the minimum wage. Wall Street will pay a tax on speculation whether they like it or not because millions of people now will be involved in the political process.”

A similar but more elaborate version of Sanders’ Obama breakdown appeared in in an interview he did with the Des Moines Register Star three weeks ago:

“In 2008, Barack Obama ran one of the great campaigns in the history of the U.S.A. A brilliant campaign, an extraordinary campaign, he rallied the American people. But what happened the day after he was elected? Essentially, in so many words, he said ‘Thank you, America for electing me, I’ll take it from here. I believe that I can sit down, I can negotiate with John Boehner, I can negotiate with Mitch McConnell. I think they’re fair people and I think we can reach some decent compromises.’ Now, he was wrong in two regards. These guys never had any intention of seriously negotiating with him and they set more obstructionism than at any point in modern American history. But second point, given the powers of corporate America and the large campaign donors, you cannot change America unless millions of people are standing behind you, and that is the difference between me and Barack Obama. It is not just, ‘vote for me, I have great ideas.’ It’s ‘you are going to have to be with me the day after the election. Its vote for me because I can’t do it alone.’” [1]

There are five very basic and serious problems with Sanders’ take on Obama’s “mistakes”:

1 No self-respecting and actual leftist should “have a lot respect and admiration for Barack Obama.” Consistent with his longstanding “vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal” (Adolph Reed, Jr. 1996) worldview (that is pro-corporate, pro-Wall Street, and state-capitalist) – honed at Columbia University, Harvard Law, the University of Chicago, the foundation world, and the corporate-financialist Hamilton Project – Obama has betrayed progressive- and populist-sounding campaign rhetoric (indispensable for elections but highly dispensable in making policy) and his “progressive base” from the beginning of his presidency and indeed his political career. The list of those Obama has thrown under the runaway buses of neoliberal capitalism, military empire, and white supremacy is impressive. His resume of perfidy includes:

*the labor movement, betrayed and abandoned on global trade, labor law reform, the Wisconsin rebellion, and the wage- and job-slashing terms of the much-ballyhooed auto bailout.

*environmentalists, abandoned and betrayed on offshore drilling, hydraulic fracturing, global carbon emission reduction-efforts, green jobs programs, and more.

*civil libertarians, abandoned and betrayed on Guantanamo, rendition, warrantless wiretaps, secret kills lists, whistleblower protection, domestic drones, the infiltration of protest organizations, and more.

*health care activists, abandoned and betrayed on single-payer, drug prices, and affordable care in general.

*the antiwar community, betrayed by Obama’s provocative wars, militarism, bellicosity, and militarism in the Middle East, Southwest Asia, Eastern Europe, Asia, and (last but not least) Africa.

*Black America, which voted in record numbers for the first technically black president but has gotten nothing from the all-too post-racial Obama as he has presided over the greatest reduction in Black net worth in modern U.S. history.

The main victims of Obama’s predictable and in fact predicted[2] deceptions have not been activists but the broad populace, which has seen wealth and power concentrated yet further upward during his “hope” and “change” administrations. (There is, of course, one group of Americans who have clearly escaped the bus wheels in the Age of Obama: the very predominantly white corporate and financial elite. “Despite all the criticism that President Obama has received lately from Wall Street,” the New Yorker’s perceptive economics writer John Cassidy noted in November of 2010 (the same month when the Tea Party Republican Party took back the U.S. House in the absurd name of fighting “Obama socialism”), “the Administration has largely left the great money-making machine intact. A couple of years ago, firms such as Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs faced the danger that the government would break them up, drive them out of some of their most lucrative business lines – such as dealing in derivatives – or force them to maintain so much capital that that their profits would be greatly diminished…” None of these things – all supported by technically irrelevant majority-progressive public opinion – materialized, reflecting the moneyed elite’s success in defining “realistic” policy options for a president who wanted a second term.)

2. The always corporate-sponsored, neoliberal, imperial, and white-pleasing Barack Obama and his handlers (David Alexrod, David Plouffe and others) did not run a wonderful and well intentioned progressive campaign. They conducted a deeply manipulative big money marketing operation that seduced millions of progressive-leaning Americans into falsely thinking that they were joining a popular movement for social-democratic change by casting a ballot for a smooth-talking and telegenic candidate who – unbeknownst to most voters – was owned by the nation’s corporate, financial, and imperial wealth and power elite. The “deeply conservative” (Larissa MacFarquhar in the The New Yorker in the May of 2007) essence of the candidate and his agenda was evident to anyone who looked beneath the misleading imagery and branding. It was understood by the historically deleted John Edwards campaign, which predicted that a “corporate Democrat[ic]” Obama presidency would do precisely what Sanders accuses it of having done: trying to solve the nation’s problems by “sitting down at a big negotiating table with Big Business and the Republicans” (a strategy that Edwards said would fail since corporate America and the GOP would “eat everything at the table”). It’s not for nothing that Advertising Age hailed the Barack Obama campaign as the “Marketer of the Year” in 2008.

3 The newly elected Obama did not really say “okay I’ll take it from here.” He said “it’s about you” (about the people) and then kept “it” (presidential politics and policy) in the hands of the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire: the Wall Street and Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) crowd. The nation’s wealth and power elite deeply influenced and indeed permeated his campaign, his transition team, and his cabinet. The ruling class had every reason to expect a conservative neoliberal and imperial presidency, which arose on the basis of record-setting campaign contributions from Wall Street. Two and a half weeks after Obama’s victory in the 2008 election, David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and member of the CFR, commented on the president-elect’s corporatist and militarist transition team and cabinet appointments with a musical analogy. Obama, Rothkopf told the New York Times, was following “the violin model: you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.” Obama’s cabinet was loaded with elite agents of corporate and imperial power. Leading players include Defense Secretary and Iraq warrior Robert Gates, carried over from the Bush administration. National Security Advisor James Jones is a former NATO commander known for advocating increased U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil resources. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was a leading Iraq War hawk who approved a Bush plan to attack Iran in late 2007. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel was a leading pro-war and “pro-Israel,” anti-Palestinian Democrat during his congressional career and had been a front man for the North American Free Trade Agreement in the Clinton White House. Obama’s top economic advisor Lawrence Summers was a leading corporate-neoliberal economist and an architect during the 1990s of the financial deregulation that contributed so significantly to the 2008 economic crisis. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was a Wall Street-approved expert in bailing out large and parasitic financial institutions. Obama’s claim that he would provide the “vision” to move such corporate and imperial operatives in a “progressive” direction is like a baseball manager claiming that he’s going to build a team based on speed and defense with a roster full of clumsy, slow-footed, 280-pound power hitters.

Tellingly enough, even mildly progressive U.S. economists like Paul Krugman, and Joseph Stiglitz were blacklisted from the Obama administration. These unradical but left-of-center economists were too much for the Wall Street 1 Percenters who held sway in “socialist” Obama administration.

For economic direction, the new White House preferred regressive corporate-neoliberal hacks associated with Goldman Sachs and with the pro-business economic think tank the Hamilton Project. John R. MacArthur, the president of Harper’s magazine, noted in late March that Summers and Geithner “were “in place precisely to prevent real reform of a banking system that helped put Obama in the White House” (the Providence Journal, March 19, 2009).

3 It was not really a “political mistake” for Obama to fail to mobilize and empower rank and file progressive citizens and movements. As Jon Schwarz explained on The Intercept last June:

“It’s unlikely that Obama’s demobilization of his supporters was actually a ‘mistake.’ As [early Obama strategist Marshall] Ganz put it in 2010, Obama saw his supporters ‘like a tiger you can’t control’; Ganz speculated that the president’s real goal was simply to ‘keep the machine on for the next election.’ In other words, Obama was acting in accordance with what I like to call ‘The Iron Law of Institutions’ — that is, the people in charge of institutions (as Obama was in charge of the Democratic party and his ‘movement’ in 2009) care first and foremost about their own power within the institution, rather than the power of the institution itself….So while the Democratic party itself would have been much more powerful overall if Obama had kept his grassroots mobilized and involved, Obama himself and his most important donors and supporters would have been less powerful within the Democratic party. So Obama let the enthusiasm and activism surrounding his candidacy dissipate, all his supporters stayed home in 2010 and Obama’s party suffered a catastrophic collapse….But from Obama’s perspective, so what? As Boies Penrose, an early 20th-century Republican senator from Pennsylvania, said when he was told that his slate of anti-reform candidates would lose and destroy the GOP: ‘Yes, but I’ll preside over the ruins.’”

Obama hasn’t merely failed to sustain and organize grassroots movements and honor their wishes. He has coldly ignored and actively repressed such movements when they arose. Recall that Obama refused to offer even mild “bully pulpit” support for the remarkable public worker uprising against right-wing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker in early 2011. Obama’s Department of Homeland Security engaged in active coordination of the repression of the Occupy Wall Street movement across the country later the same year.

Obama’s hostility to popular and social movements and organizing is a “mistake” only if one foolishly assumes that the “deeply conservative” and “vacuous to repressive neoliberal” Obama is actually a left-leaning progressive. He is no such thing and never was.

5 “Republican obstructionism” is a convenient and misleading cover for Obama’s deep corporate-financial conservatism – one that ignores Obama’s and the dismal demobilizing dollar Dems’ own central role in the empowerment of the right. The notion that the great supposed wannabe people’s president Obama has been powerless to act on his supposed noble and progressive ambitions because of the combined reactionary and checkmating influences of the Republican Party and its big money and big media (FOX News et al.) backers does not hold up to the record of Obama’s critical first year in office. That first year suggests very strongly Obama had no actual commitment to the progressive- and populist-sounding things he promised on the campaign trail – things that were well within their capacity to enact after Obama and the Democrats’ sweeping victory in 2008. As the liberal author, Harper’s essayist, and onetime Obama fan Thomas Frank observed on Salon last January, it would have been more than good policy (“the economy would have recovered more quickly and the danger of a future crisis brought on by concentrated financial power would have been reduced”) if Obama had enacted populist and progressive measures. It would also have been “good politics,” highly popular with the nation’s mostly white working class majority, something that would “have deflated the rampant false consciousness of the Tea Party movement and prevented the Republican reconquista of the House in 2010.” The financial crisis “worked out the way it did” – with Wall Street unpunished, richer, and more powerful than ever – “in large part because Obama and his team wanted it to work out that way…When historians seek to explain the failures of the Obama years,” the early Obama enthusiast Frank had the decency to admit (though without acknowledging his past hopey-changey-ness), “they will likely focus on a glaringly obvious, and indeed still more hard-headed explanation that the [liberal] apologists for Obama’s enfeeblement now overlook: that perhaps Obama didn’t act forcefully to press a populist economic agenda because he didn’t want to. That maybe he didn’t do certain of the things his liberal supporters wanted him to do because he didn’t believe in them.”[3]

Never mind that the privilege-friendly corporate Democratic Obama year is precisely the neoliberal and deeply conservative Obama that a significant number of supposedly ultra-radical writers and activists (myself included) futilely tried to warn Frank and other liberals about from very beginning of the Obama Syndrome. In any event, there’s no “perhaps” and “maybe” about it.

The Republican obstructionism that followed Obama’s “squandered” opening 20 months needs to be understood as something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Republicans wouldn’t have had their great Tea Party movement takeover of Congress in 2010 if Obama had actually governed in accord with the progressive and populist sentiments of the citizenry instead of the dictates of the nation’s corporate and financial masters.

And what did the Republicans obstruct – the single-payer health insurance, the break-up and/or nationalization (or even just serious regulation) of Wall Street, the financial transaction tax, the dramatically increase minimum wage (to $15 an hour), the large –scale green jobs programs, the re-legalization of union organizing, the free college tuition, the serious attack on climate change, the seriously progressive taxation, and the progressive renegotiation of “free trade” (investor rights) agreements that Bernie Sanders is calling for this year, all receiving majority support in public opinion surveys? The significant rollback of the nation’s gargantuan military budget and global imperial footprint in preference for “peace dividend” social spending that most Americans have long supported and that the imperial-social chauvinist Sanders does NOT seriously embrace (tragically enough since his ambitious progressive domestic agenda is crippled without massive transfers from the military-Keynesian budget to social-Keynesian expenditure)? Hardly! No, Obama met Republican hindrance on a corporatist health care “reform” that only the big six insurance companies and Big Pharma could love and that he took from the Republican Heritage Foundation and Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts – and on other mild Big Business-friendly measures that fell far short of progressive by any meaningful historical measure.

There is perhaps some noble, sincerely progressive, left-leaning, and social-democratic content in Sanders’ notion that no U.S. president could enact seriously democratic domestic without a mass popular movement in place to help him battle the corporate and financial powers that be. But why jump into the latest and next big money-big media-major party and candidate-centered quadrennial electoral extravaganza in the absence of such a movement in the first place? Why dedicated one’s eloquence and energy to major party electoralism and the inherently narcissistic, personality-fixated pursuit of higher office instead of to actual popular, rank-and-file movement building beneath and beyond the staggered, corporate-managed election spectacles? Why channel popular energies into the Democratic Party, the timeworn graveyard of social movements? And here’s a further and (sorry) depressing thought: Sanders’ claim that he cannot undertake serious policy moves against corporate America may well have a dark and victim-blaming side. It leaves the door open for a Sanders’ presidency (very much a long shot) to justify its inevitable deep accommodations with the powers that be with the claim that the people didn’t make him be more progressive.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/25/bad-history-bernie-sanders-specious-take-on-barack-obamas-big-mistake/

The New Repression: If Only Sanders Were More of a Corbyn and Less of a Clinton
by ANDREW LEVINE

In capitalist societies, most people most of the time, are chronically and justifiably discontent – if not with capitalism itself, then with its consequences. Therefore, the story is as old as capitalism itself.

When sufficient numbers of people become sufficiently fed up with what the capitalist system is doing to them, they resist, expectations rise, and nothing changes – not for the better, anyway. One way or another, what C. Wright Mills called “the power structure” wins.

This is how it goes in core regions of the capitalist world. In peripheral areas dominated and bled dry by capitalist states, corporations and banks, the discontent is more intense and the outcomes are more varied. In the end, though, the empire always strikes back. One way or another, it usually wins.

Thanks to globalization and new means of communication, the dynamics of change and stasis in core and peripheral areas have become less distinct than they used to be. Eruptions of discontent in the one seep out into the other, and vice versa.

In core areas especially, synchronization is an old story; think of 1848, 1917, and 1968. But the pace is quickening, and the range now extends to the four corners of the earth.

However, there are still important variations from country to country.

In the United States, there was Obamamania in 2008, despair over Obama’s presidency in 2009, and an eruption of rightwing craziness in 2010. In the elections that year, the Democrats got “shellacked” (Obama’s word). Then, in short order, the reactionaries elected into state and national offices seized the moment – declaring war on the labor movement and on many of the progressive achievements of the twentieth century.

The dynamics varied from place to place but it was the same all over the world. With a global financial meltdown barely averted two years before – and with the bankers, but not their victims bailed out at the public’s expense — 2011 became a pivotal year, a year in which resistance burst forth.

It started with the Arab Spring emanating out from Tunisia to other countries in North Africa and the Near East. The spirit of indignation stirred in Europe too, especially in its southern regions.

The American contribution was, of course, the Occupy Movement that erupted late in the year. It fizzled out, along with many of its counterparts around the world.

One reason why it did has become painfully obvious in retrospect: Occupy never made the leap from creative disorganization to effective political struggle.

That things like this happen is not exactly news; it has been that way from time immemorial. The lesson — that disorganized spontaneity is easily put down by the powers that be — has been learned countless times, and forgotten nearly as often.

Lately, in southern Europe, the people fighting back seem to have gotten the point. But the forces arrayed against them are disabling. This too is an old story.

We Americans, with our “exceptional” institutions and traditions – and with our Democrats and Republicans — are less able than, say, Greeks or Spaniards, to resist in politically effective ways. On the plus side, though, because we live in the belly of the monster, the bullies bossing us around are, for the most part, our fellow citizens; in principle, if not in practice, we can put them in their place.

So far, 2015 is shaping up to be a good year for fighting back; maybe even better than 2011. Fed up with what neoliberal capitalism was doing to them, the Greeks took the lead and did the best they could. They elected a government comprised of genuine Leftists, determined to end the austerity regime imposed upon their country. But with the weak hand they had to play, there was little they could do.

Naturally, demoralization followed. Even so, Syriza, the governing party for the past seven months, managed to get itself reelected last week. Evidently, many Greeks decided that even an inadequate resistance is better than no resistance at all.

Fed up Brits who elected Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labor Party in the UK are on safer ground – because finance capitalists (many of them British themselves) cannot call the shots for Great Britain in the way that they can in Greece, and because the Labor Party is a more deeply entrenched component of the political scene in the UK than the recently formed Syriza Party is in Greece.

But the post-Blair Parliamentary Labor Party is an execrable lot, much like the post-Clinton Democratic Party in the United States; and national and international media have been doing their best to defeat this challenge from the Left.

There was a media onslaught in Greece too; but there all they succeeded in doing was blowing air. Time will tell whether it will be the same in the UK.

Because the Labor Party began its rightward plunge from a higher plateau than the Democrats, Corbyn was not as much of an outlier in the British Parliament as someone cut from similar cloth would be in the U.S. Senate or House of Representatives. He was not quite the last of the Mohicans; only nearly so.

And yet, he won. No one, probably not even Corbyn himself, would have believed it a few months ago. But then nobody would have believed the “Oxi” vote in Greece last summer either. When enough people are enough fed up, unbelievable things happen.

***

America’s Syriza-Corbyn counterpart is, of course, the Bernie Sanders campaign. The comparison is invidious, however; the differences outweigh the similarities.

For one thing, Corbyn taps into a more authentic leftwing tradition than any Democrat could.

The British Labor Party has had a long and complicated relation to socialism but, throughout its history, it did provide a home for genuine socialists; and it did once favor public ownership of major means of production.

Therefore, as an anti-austerity socialist, Corbyn can allude to models within the traditions of his party; Sanders, running as a Democrat, cannot.

There is an American socialist tradition too, though it largely expired after the First World War. But, even in its heyday, American socialism never had a home within the Democratic Party. This is surely one reason why Sanders describes his socialism as “Scandinavian.”

What Sanders sees in Scandinavia are welfare states, strong labor movements, and high degrees of economic equality. He also sees that the Scandinavian countries have, for the first time in human history, effectively eliminated the scourge of poverty.

What he sees less clearly is how they too have been affected by neoliberal globalization, and by the consequences of the Bush-Obama wars.

And, of course, he does not see – no one yet can — what the impact of the global refugee crisis, perhaps the bitterest consequence so far of those wars, will be on the Scandinavian countries’ traditionally harmonious societies.

But even if all is not as good as it seems in Europe’s north, Sanders is certainly on to something. Whether what he is on to is socialism – or only capitalism with some of its kinks ironed out and some of its worst features cast aside — is a different question.

In the near term, it hardly matters, but it is worth pointing out that the Scandinavian model does not so much replace capitalism as tame it. In the sixties and seventies, there was talk, in Sweden especially, of transcending capitalism’s frontiers, but no Scandinavian country has yet, in practice, done much of anything to replace private with social ownership of major means of production.

Sanders is not for that either. His views are left liberal, certainly; and egalitarian. But his socialism falls short of anything like the real deal.

Anywhere else in the world, not being a real socialist, but playing one on TV, would be a bad thing. In the United States, it is a wonderful development – if only for breaking a longstanding taboo and, in doing so, expanding the ambient culture’s universe of discourse just a little.

But, from a broadly progressive point of view, the genuineness – or not – of Sanders’ socialism is among the least important of the problems that his candidacy raises.

A more glaring problem is that Sanders’ radicalism stops at America’s borders. If he has a problem with the way America conducts itself abroad, he keeps it to himself.

Indeed, Sanders’ foreign policy views are indistinguishable from any garden variety Democrat’s. He sees the United States the way that Madeleine Albright did, “as the indispensable nation.”

If he has any quarrel with the Obama administration’s foreign policy in recent years, it is that it is not pro-Saudi enough. Close ties with Saudi Arabia help America’s energy and “defense” industries; Saudi Arabia, in turn, is, and long has been, the main source of ideological inspiration and financial backing for jihadis around the world.

Meanwhile, on keeping American diplomatic, military and economic support for Israel coming, Sanders is barely less awful than such prominent Democrats as Ben Cardin and Chuck Schumer.

The contrast with Corbyn is striking. The new leader of the Labor Party is an internationalist and an anti-imperialist.

Ironically, in this respect, Sanders is actually the better Laborite of the two.

Just as there have been anti-war Democrats, there have been anti-imperialist and anti-nuclear activists who found a home under the Labor Party’s broad tent; Corbyn himself is an example. But the Labor Party’s record on British imperialism is easily as bad as the Democrats’ on American imperialism; and the Labor Party’s willingness after World War II to become a servile junior partner of the United States has been deplorable.

It would therefore be a mistake to give Corbyn’s party affiliation credit for the superiority of his politics over Sanders’. Corbyn shines brighter because he has been a lifelong dissident within the Party he was just elected to lead; not because he stands on its shoulders.

To be sure, Sanders is, or was, an “independent,” not a Democrat. But he caucused with the Democrats, and voted with the Democrats more often than most bona fide Democrats did. As the saying goes, “if it quacks like a duck…”

Of course, no true blue Democrat these days would adopt a “socialist” label the way that Sanders has, but it is worth recalling that it was not always so. In the sixties and seventies, there were many “democratic socialists” who identified with the Democratic Party. The Party leadership tolerated them; they may even have been glad that they were there.

Why wouldn’t they be? The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and later the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), along with other groups and individuals, helped keep independent political forces that might otherwise challenge Democratic candidates from the left at bay.

Like Sanders now, they were both in and not in the Democratic Party. The ambiguity was useful.

When the Clintons took over and remade the Party in their image, this stopped; the Clintons made pandering to plutocrats, not placating leftists, the Democratic Party’s be-all and end-all. It is only in the past few months, thanks mainly to the Sanders campaign, that Democrats again think it makes sense for them not to go out of their way to alienate potential voters to their left. Even Hillary Clinton now seems to have seen the light.

But throughout the many years that the Democratic Party saw fit to shunt aside anyone to the left of, say, Rahm Emanuel or Donna Shalala, Sanders kept at it — from his “independent” perch.

Inasmuch as he has said repeatedly that he would willingly fold his campaign into Hillary Clinton’s – or into some other neoliberal imperialist’s, like Joe Biden’s — if and when it becomes clear that he will not be the nominee himself, his role still seems to be keeping potential dissidents and defectors on board.

Sanders’ willingness to support corporate America’s best friends puts even his vaunted commitment to Scandinavian socialism – or rather to an anti-austerity inflected version of left liberalism — in question.

The New Deal embodied contradictory elements, but its aim was to save capitalism, not to replace it with more rational and humane ways of organizing economic and social affairs. Scandinavian socialists, the vast majority of them, had more ambitious goals in mind. By force of circumstances, they accommodated to the capitalist order, but, in the end, their aim was to transcend its horizons.

If this is what Sanders wants, he has kept his wishes well hidden.

***

The frequency and geographical range of expressions of popular anger – left, right, and center – has picked up in the Age of Obama, but this is not the only change in recent years. The ways that the power structures of the world now counter challenges to their dominance have changed too.

The empire is policed as brutally as ever. Indeed, neoconservative and humanitarian interventionist ideology – plus cluelessness and ineptitude in the highest reaches of the American government — have made matters worse outside the capitalist core.

But within the core, and even at its peripheries, repression nowadays takes a kinder, gentler form.

Not long ago, even mild rumblings of disobedience from states like Greece, or from Latin American countries asserting independence, would bring out the tanks and the colonels.

The coups these days are silent – executed by bankers and bureaucrats in distant lands. Instead of guns, they use computer screens. The empire gets its way, but hardly anyone gets killed or rounded up.

Evidently, the authorities have decided that with cameras on cell phones and social media everywhere, it is better that way.

Will Corbyn have to deal with intra-party coup mongers the way that the Greeks have had to deal with German bankers and EU bureaucrats? It is beginning to look that way. So far, though, the worst he has had to withstand is a barrage of hysterical media diatribes.

Sanders has not had to deal even with that. There could be nastiness ahead, if it looks like Clinton is floundering and that Biden is unable or unwilling to take her place. So far, though, the opposition has been gentle as can be.

It is likely that the Party establishment and their media hacks will continue to pull their punches – maybe even for the duration. Why not? Sanders’ radicalism is hardly threatening, even to the Democratic Party’s paymasters.

He rails against the ravages of neoliberal austerity, but he would be nearly powerless to do anything about it, even were he somehow to be elected. Meanwhile, if Sanders’ stump speeches and television interviews help keep Democratic voters on board, what is the harm in that?

It would be different, of course, if, as he claims he is, Sanders really were leading a “political revolution.” But political revolutions involve bottom up organizing and collective struggles, not top-down electoral campaigns.

Electing someone new to sit in the White House would be, at most only a small part of a political revolution; and electing someone who is in line with the status quo on matters where Presidents can do a great deal on their own, matters of war and peace, would not be part of a political revolution at all.

There is, of course, the possibility that some of Sanders’ radical talk about inequality will catch on and fire up a movement that the powerful will indeed come to fear. To the extent that happens, Bravo Bernie. But would he then still stay on board?

***

Quashing stirrings of resistance is one of the few things that the current occupant of the White House is good at. He knows how to let events play out until they exhaust their protagonists, and then how to channel them into dead end electoral follies.

This is what Obama did to the Occupy movement; he did it so well that it would be fair to compare his studied indifference to Charles de Gaulle’s magisterial aloofness as he successfully defused the revolutionary expectations generated throughout France by the student and worker uprisings of May 68.

Evidently, Obama learned something from his days as a community organizer. He learned how movements fail. Now that he is on the other side, it is only natural for him to put those lessons to use.

Indeed, it looked for many months that he had learned this lesson too well.

In the late winter and early spring of 2011, long before Occupy Wall Street emerged, there was a massive outpouring of resistance in Wisconsin to Governor Scott Walker’s assault on public sector unions.

There was spill over too, of course – in the first instance to other traditionally strong union states nearby where, as in Wisconsin, disgust with Obama’s presidency enabled Republicans to take over state houses and state legislatures.

The plutocracy was salivating at the prospect of doing organized labor in, but also fearful that the fight back would spin out of control. They were wrong to worry. As if by instinct, Obama knew what to do.

That would be – nothing. In Wisconsin and similarly afflicted states, that strategy worked to a tee.

Thanks to Wisconsin’s electoral laws, Walker could not be recalled for an entire year. For the thousands of people occupying the State Capitol, and for their allies around the state, there was therefore a stark choice: escalate the struggle or let it subside. But escalate to what?

A general strike was the obvious answer, but the impossibility of organizing one and sustaining it seemed equally obvious – in much the way that the simultaneous desirability and practical impossibility of a Grexit seemed to most of Syriza’s leaders this past summer. This was America’s Syriza moment.

By the time Walker could be recalled, enthusiasm had faded and the Democratic Party had taken the recall movement over. They nominated the same lackluster Milwaukee mayor that Walker had defeated the year before, while the national Party, chaired by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, withheld funds that she thought better spent reelecting Barack Obama.

Wasserman Schultz’s nefarious role in keeping the Democratic Party in its Clintonite straightjacket is now widely understood, but it was already evident to anyone following events in Wisconsin four years ago.

The real villain, though, was Obama himself, the past master of malign neglect.

Had he campaigned against Walker in heavily African American areas of Milwaukee and in the industrial cities along Lake Michigan – where, for reasons that don’t exactly confer credit upon their residents, he was still popular – Obama could almost certainly have made a decisive difference.

He was even nearby as the recall election began, hobnobbing with zillionaire donors in Minnesota and Illinois. But all he could be bothered to do was send an encouraging tweet the night before Election Day.

Were Obama not preternaturally lucky, this sin of omission could have done the Democratic Party and the larger world a great deal of harm. Obama put Scott Walker on the map; he made the GOP’s most nefarious donors – not just the Koch brothers – think that Walker was God’s gift to them, the very flunky who would serve their interests best.

Obama could have nipped the Walker phenomenon in the bud. Instead, he made that risible simpleton a leading candidate for the Republican nomination.

Thank God, yet again, for Donald Trump! It was he, not Obama, who did Walker in.

The Democrats’ lucky spell continues too – because although Trump is one scary dude, he is actually the least scary of the entire Republican lot.

Nothing could be scarier than the prospect of another Bush let loose upon the world, except perhaps the thought that the two non-politicians currently biting at Trump’s heels – Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson – might win.

Fiorina is a failed anti-abortion businesswoman even more bellicose, clueless and inept than Hillary Clinton. Carson is a fundamentalist brain surgeon – don’t ask how or why! – an unabashed Islamophobe, and, on matters pertaining to governance, a certifiable ignoramus.

Walker would have been as bad or worse. We dodged that bullet, but no thanks to Obama or Wasserman Schultz. With the Trump phenomenon sucking in all the air, Walker imploded in upon himself, taking a whole lot of Koch brothers’ money with him. Maybe there is a God, after all.

Because the other buffoons in the running are not significantly less awful, and because most Americans outside the Republican base aren’t stark raving mad, the presidency will almost certainly stay in Democratic hands in 2016.

Therefore, if, in his heart of hearts, Sanders actually were more like Corbyn and less like Clinton or Obama, he could easily get away with taking principled progressive positions on foreign and military matters. There are a lot of people out there who would have his back; and many more who would urge him on.

Sanders’ progressivism is bifurcated: leftish, by American standards, on economic issues; dead center on foreign affairs. It is hard to take someone like that seriously, no matter how heartfelt his passion for diminishing inequality.

If nothing else, a more coherent political orientation would make his candidacy more credible, enhancing his ability to take neoliberal austerity on with more than just idle words.

Lyndon Johnson had extraordinary political skills, and he assumed the presidency at a propitious moment, when the stars were aligned just right for constructing a Great Society. But even he discovered, to his regret, what happens when you try to combine guns and butter.

If he failed, back at a time when America really was strong enough, economically and militarily, to call the shots around the world, what could Sanders do now? The short answer is: not much – not so long as he and the Democrats’ foreign policy establishment continue to see eye to eye.

But were Sanders’ foreign and domestic politics more of a piece – were he more of a Corbyn and less of a Clinton — perhaps he really could get something like the political revolution he talks about going.

He couldn’t lead it, no one could, but he could help catalyze it – by breaking free from the clutches of hapless Democratic Party poobahs, accepting leadership instead from the people they purport to represent.

Don’t count on it, though; it’s not his way.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/25/the-new-repression-if-only-sanders-were-more-of-a-corbyn-and-less-of-a-clinton/

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/...-of-a-clinton/

What do we know about this Corbyn guy? The leftish are falling all over themselves but I haven't seen that from known British communists on twitter.

What do we know about this Corbyn guy? The leftish are falling all over themselves but I haven't seen that from known British communists on twitter.

I think these two articles describe what I sense we could expect from Corbyn though I admit to knowing next to nothing about the man himself:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/15/corb-a15.html

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/20/corb-a20.html

Murray Bookchin, “The Bernie Sanders Paradox: When Socialism Grows Old”
08/31/2015 by mc.murphy 1 Comment

By aligning with the Democrats, Sanders is giving tacit approval to the very party that launched 1918 First Red Scare, overseen by Woodrow Wilson, as well as the 1947 Red Scare, begun by Harry Truman. This is the same Democratic Party that jailed Socialist Party Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs (allegedly Bernie’s hero), red-baited the living daylights out of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign in 1948, revoked Paul Robeson’s passport in 1950, gave final allowance for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and brought American terror to Korea and Vietnam. Expropriate the expropriators or cash in, what’s a socialist to do? – Andrew Stewart, The Prophet Farmed: Murray Bookchin on Bernie Sanders – Counterpunch

“Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006) was an anti-capitalist and vocal advocate of the decentralisation of society along ecological and democratic lines. His writings on libertarian municipalism, a theory of face-to-face, assembly democracy, had an influence on the Green movement and anti-capitalist direct action groups such as Reclaim the Streets, as well as the democratic confederalism of Rojava.

In 1971, he moved to Burlington, Vermont with a group of friends, to put into practice his decentralist ideas” – wiki

*****
The posters that appeared all over Burlington — Vermont’s largest city (pop: 37,000) in the winter of 1980-81 were arresting and provocative. They showed an old map of the city with a label slapped across it that read: “For Sale.” A bold slogan across the top, in turn, proclaimed that “Burlington Is Not for Sale,” and smiling amiably in the right-hand corner was the youngish, fairly well-known face of Bernard Sanders, sans tie, open-collared, almost endearingly shy and unpretentious. The onlooker was enjoined to rescue Burlington by voting for “Bernie” Sanders for mayor. Sanders, the long-time gubernatorial candidate of Vermont’s maverick Liberty Union, was now challenging “Gordie” Paquette, an inert Democratic fixture in City Hall, who had successfully fended off equally inert Republican opponents for nearly a decade.

That Sanders won this election on March 3, 1981, by only ten votes is now a Vermont legend that has percolated throughout the country over the past five years. What gives Sanders almost legendary qualities as a mayor and politician is that he proclaims himself to be a socialist — to many admiring acolytes, a Marxist — who is now in the midpoint of a third term after rolling up huge margins in two previous elections. From a ten-vote lead to some fifty-two percent of the electorate, Sanders has ballooned out of Burlington in a flurry of civic tournaments that variously cast him as a working-class hero or a demonic “Bolshevik.” His victories now make the New York Times and his trips outside of Burlington take him to places as far as Managua, where he has visited with Daniel Ortega, and to Monthly Review fundraising banquets, where he rubs shoulders with New York’s radical elite. Sanders has even been invited to the Socialist Scholar’s Conference, an offer he wisely declined. Neither scholarship nor theory is a Sanders forte. If socialist he be, he is of the “bread-and-butter” kind whose preference for “realism” over ideals has earned him notoriety even within his closest co-workers in City Hall.

The criss-crossing lines that deface almost every serious attempt to draw an intelligible sketch of the Sanders administration and its meaning for radicals result from a deep-seated paradox in “bread-and-butter” socialism itself. It trivializes this larger issue to deal with Sanders merely as a personality or to evaluate his achievements in the stark terms of lavish praise or damning blame. A sophomoric tribute to Sanders’ doings in the Monthly Review of a year ago was as maladroit as the thundering letters of denunciation that appear in the Burlington Free Press. Sanders fits neither the heaven-sent roles he is given in radical monthlies nor the demonic ones he acquires in conservative letters to moderate dailies.

To dwell heavily on his well-known paranoia and suspicious reclusiveness beclouds the more important fact that he is a centralist, who is more committed to accumulating power in the mayor’s office than giving it to the people. To spoof him for his unadorned speech and macho manner is to ignore the fact that his notions of a “class analysis” are narrowly productivist and would embarrass a Lenin, not to mention a Marx. To mock his stolid behavior and the surprising conventionality of his values is to conceal his commitment to thirties’ belief in technological progress, businesslike efficiency, and a naive adherence to the benefits of “growth.” The logic of all these ideas is that democratic practice is seen as secondary to a full belly, the earthy proletariat tends to be eulogized over the “effete” intellectuals, and environmental, feminist, and communitarian issues are regarded as “petit-bourgeois” frivolities by comparison with the material needs of “working people.” Whether the two sides of this “balance sheet” need be placed at odds with each other is a problem that neither Sanders nor many radicals of his kind have fully resolved. The tragedy is that Sanders did not live out his life between 1870 and 1940, and the paradox that faces him is: why does a constellation of ideas that seemed so rebellious fifty years ago appear to be so conservative today? This, let me note, is not only Sanders’ problem. It is one that confronts a very sizable part of the left today.

Sanders is by no means the sole focus of this paradox. The fact is that Sanders’ problems, personal as they seem, really reflect problems that exist in Burlington itself. Contrary to the notion that Vermont is what America used to be, the state — and particularly, Burlington — is more like what America is becoming than what America was. The major corporations in the city and its environs are IBM and GE — and the GE plant in Burlington makes the only Gatling gun in the United States, a horrendous fact that should by all rights trouble any socialist mayor. The Old North End, Sanders’ sans-culottes wards (Numbers Two and Three), consists in large part of home-bred Vermonters who work in service, repair, and maintenance jobs when they have jobs at all. The remaining four wards are filled with newcomers to the city and with elderly people who have the luck to own their homes.

Basically middle-class in work and values, the form a pepper mix of old Vermonters and “new professionals,” a term that embraces anyone from insurance brokers, real-estate operators, and retailers to doctors, lawyers, and professors. Hippies still mingle freely with Yuppies; indeed, in egalitarian Vermont, there is a reasonable degree of intercourse between the wealthy, the well-to-do, and the poor. What is most important: Burlington is a town in frenzied transition. A sleepy little place some fifteen years ago with bacon-and-egg diners, hardware stores, clothing emporiums, and even a gun shop in the center of town, it is becoming a beehive of activity. Electronics in all its forms is moving into Vermont together with boutiques, inns, hotels, office buildings, educational institutions — and in Burlington, particularly, a thriving academic establishment that draws thousands of students and their parents into its commercial fold.

The problems of “modernization” that confront the town produce very mixed reactions — not only in its inhabitants but in Sanders. A large number of people feel plundered, including some of the plunderers, if you are to believe them. Burlington is living evidence that myth can be real, even more real than reality itself. Accordingly, myth holds that Burlington is small, homey, caring, crime-free, independent, mutualistic, liberal, and innocently American in its belief that everything good can happen if one so wills it to be. This glowing American optimism, in my view one of our national assets, often lives in doleful contradiction with the fact that if everything good can happen, everything bad does happen — including union-busting, growing contrasts between rich and poor, housing shortages, rising rents, gentrification, pollution, parking problems, traffic congestion, increasing crime, anomie, and growth, more growth, and still more growth — upward, inward, and outward.

The tension between myth and reality is as strong as between one set of realities and another. Burlingtonians generally do not like what is happening, although there are far too many of them who are making the most of it. Even the alleged “benefits” of growth and modernization are riddled by their own internal contradictions. If there are more jobs and little unemployment, there is lower pay and rising living costs. If there are more tourists and a very amiable citizenry to receive them, there is less spread of income across social lines and more robberies. If there is more construction and less labor shortages, there are fewer homes and more newcomers. Office-building and gentrification go hand in hand with fewer small businesses and far too many people who need inexpensive shelter.

Very crucial to all of this is the conflict of values and cultures that “modernization” produces. Basically, Burlingtonians want to keep their city intimate, caring, and liberal. They like to believe that they are living an older way of life with modern conveniences and in accord with fiercely independent values that are rooted in a colorful past. It is this underlying independence of Vermonters generally, including newcomers who are absorbed into Burlington, that makes the clash between a lingering libertarian Yankee tradition and a corrosive, authoritarian corporate reality so inherently explosive. Ironically, Bernard Sanders owes his present political career to the irascible public behavior this libertarian tradition produces, yet he understands that behavior very little. To Sanders, Burlington is basically Detroit as it was two generations ago and the fact that the town was “not for sale” in 1981 carried mixed messages to him and his electorate. To the electorate, the slogan meant that the city and its values were priceless and hence were to be guarded and preserved as much as possible. To Sanders, all rhetoric aside, it meant that the city, although not on an auction block, had a genuinely high price tag.

Whether the electorate who voted for him was less “realistic” than Sanders is not relevant: the fact is that both saw the “sale” of the city from different, if not radically opposing, perspectives. Both, in fact, were guided by varying “reality principles.” The electorate wanted a greater say in the city’s future; Sanders wanted to bring more efficiency to its disposition. The electorate wanted to preserve the city’s human scale and quality of life; Sanders wanted it to grow according to a well-designed plan and with due regard for cost-effectiveness. The electorate, in effect, saw Burlington as a home and wanted to keep its emphasis on old-style values alive; Sanders, together with many of his opponents, saw it as a business and wanted its “growth” to be beneficial, presumably to “working people.”

This is not to deny that Burlington has its fair share of economic predators and political operators or that property taxes are very important and material problems ranging from shelter to the cost of food are very real. But this town also has a deep sense of municipal pride and its highly independent, even idiosyncratic, population exudes a form of local patriotism that fades as one approaches larger, less historically conscious, and less environmentally oriented communities. Sanders would never admit that for Burlingtonians, the electorate’s independence has begun to clash with his fading regard for democratic practice; that technological “progress” and structural “growth” can arouse more suspicion than enthusiasm; that the quality of life runs neck and neck as an issue with material benefits. Indeed, for Sanders and his administration (the two are not necessarily identical), thirties socialism is notable for the fact that it rescues the marketplace from “anarchy,” not that it necessarily challenges the market system as such and its impact on the city. In Sanders’ version of socialism, there is a sharp “business” orientation toward Burlington as a well-managed corporate enterprise.

Herein lies the greatest irony of all: all rhetoric aside, Bernard Sanders’ version of socialism is proving to be a subtle instrument for rationalizing the marketplace — not for controlling it, much less threatening it. His thirties-type radicalism, like Frankenstein’s “monster,” is rising up to challenge its own creator. In this respect, Sanders does not make history; more often than not, he is one of its victims. Hence to understand the direction he is following and the problems it raises for radicals generally, it is important to focus not on his rhetoric, which makes his administration so alluring to socialists inside and outside of Vermont, but to take a hard look at the realities of his practice.

Sanders’ Record

SANDERS’ CLAIM that he has created “open government” in Burlington is premised on a very elastic assumption of what one means by the word “open.“ That Sanders prides himself on being “responsive” to underprivileged people in Burlington who are faced with evictions, lack of heat, wretched housing conditions, and the ills of poverty is not evidence of “openness” — that is, if we assume the term means greater municipal democracy and public participation. What often passes for “open government” in the Sanders cosmos is the mayor’s willingness to hear the complaints and distress signals of his clients and courtiers, not a responsibility to give them any appreciable share in the city’s government. What Sanders dispenses under the name of “open government” is personal paternalism rather than democracy. After six years of Sanders’ paternalism, there is nothing that resembles Berkeley’s elaborate network of grassroots organizations and councils that feed into City Hall.

When it comes to municipal democracy, Sanders is surprisingly tight-fisted and plays his cards very close to his chest. Queried shortly after his 1981 election on a local talk-show, You Can Quote Me, Sanders was pointedly asked if he favored town-meeting government, a very traditional form of citizen assemblies that has deep-seated roots in Vermont townships. Sanders’ response was as pointed as the question. It was an emphatic “No.” After expressing his proclivity for the present aldermanic system, the mayor was to enter into a chronic battle with the “Republicrat” board of aldermen over appointments and requests that were to be stubbornly rejected by the very system of government that had his early sanction.

Sanders’ quarrels with the board of aldermen did not significantly alter his identification of “open government” with personal paternalism. As an accepted fixture in Burlington’s civic politics, he now runs the city with cool self-assurance, surrounded by a small group of a half-dozen or so aides who formulate his best ideas and occasionally receive his most strident verbal abuse. The Mayor’s Council on the Arts is a hand-picked affair, whether by the mayor directly or by completely dedicated devotees; similarly, the Mayor’s Youth Office. It is difficult to tell when Sanders will create another “council” — or, more appropriately, an “office” — except to note that there are peace, environmental, and gay communities, not to speak of unemployed, elderly, welfare, and many similar constituents who have no “Mayor’s” councils in City Hall. Nor is it clear to what extent any of the existing councils authentically represent local organizations and/or tendencies that exist in the subcultures and deprived communities in Burlington.

Sanders is a centralist and his administration, despite its democratic proclivities, tends to look more like a civic oligarchy than a municipal democracy. The Neighborhood Planning Assemblies (NPAs) which were introduced in Burlington’s six wards in the autumn of 1982 and have been widely touted as evidence of “grassroots democracy” were not institutions that originated in Sanders’ head. Their origin is fairly complex and stems from a welter of notions that were floating around Burlington in neighborhood organizations that gathered shortly after Sanders’ 1981 election to develop ideas for wider citizen participation in the city and its affairs. That people in the administration played a role in forming assemblies is indisputably true, but so too did others who have since come to oppose Sanders for positions that have compromised his pledges to the electorate.

Bernard Sanders’ view of government appears in its most sharply etched form in an interview the mayor gave to a fairly sympathetic reporter on the Burlington Free Press in June, 1984. Headlined “Sanders Works to Expand Mayor’s Role,” the story carried a portrait of the mayor in one of his more pensive moods with the quote: “We are absolutely rewriting the role of what city government is supposed to be doing in the state of Vermont.’ The article leaped immediately into the whole thrust of Sanders’ version of city government: “to expand and strengthen the role of the [mayor’s] office in city government:” This process has been marked by an “expanding City Hall staff,” an increased “role in the selection of a new fire chief,” “a similar role in the Police Department,” and “in development issues, such as the proposed downtown hotel.” In response to criticism that Sanders has been “centraliz-ing” power and reducing the checks and balances in city government, his supporters “stress that citizen input, through both the Neighborhood Planning Assemblies and expanded voter output, has been greatly increased.” That the Neighborhood Planning Assemblies have essentially been permitted to languish in an atmosphere of benign neglect and that voter participation in elections hardly equatable to direct participation by the citizenry has left the mayor thoroughly unruffled.

A FAIR CONSIDERATION of the results produced by Sanders’ increased role in city affairs provides a good test of a political strategy that threatens to create institutional forms for a Burlington version of New York’s Mayor Koch. The best case for the mayor appears in the Monthly Review of May, 1984, where a Pollyanna article written by Beth Bates, “a writer and farmer,” celebrates the virtues of Sanders’ efforts as “Socialism on the Local Level” — followed, I might add, by a prudent question mark. Like Sanders’ own claims, the main thrust of the article is that the “socialist” administration is “efficient.” Sanders has shown that “radicals, too, can be fiscal conservatives, even while they are concerned that government does the little things that make life more comfortable” like street repair, volunteer aid to dig paths for the elderly after snowstorms, and save money. The administration brings greater revenues into the city’s coffers by modernizing the budgetary process, principally by investing its money in high-return institutions, opening city contracts to competitive bidding, centralizing purchasing, and slapping fees on a wide range of items like building permits, utility excavations, private fire and police alarms, and the like.

That Sanders has out-Republicaned the Republicans should not be taken lightly. Viewed in terms of its overall economic policies, the Sanders administration bears certain fascinating similarities to the Reagan administration. What Sanders has adopted with a vengeance is “trickle-down” economics — the philosophy that “growth” for profit has a spillover effect in creating jobs and improving the public welfare. Not surprisingly, the City’s 1984 “Annual Report” of the Community and Economic Development Office (a Sanders creation) really begins with a chunky section on “UDAG Spur Development.” UDAGs are Urban Development Action Grants that are meant to “leverage” commitments to growth by the “private sector.” The Office celebrates the fact that these grant requests to Washington will yield $25 million from “the private sector” and “create an estimated 556 new full-time, permanent jobs, and generate an additional $332,638 per year in property taxes.” Among its many achievements, the grant will help the owners of the Radisson Hotel in Burlington (an eyesore that is blocking out part of Burlington’s magnificent lake view, and a corporate playground if there ever was one) expand their property by “57 guest rooms and an additional 10,000 square feet of meeting and banquet space. A new 505 space parking garage with covered access to the hotel will be constructed. The Radisson Hotel will now be able to accommodate regional and association conventions. The project also includes expansion of retail space (32,500 square feet) within the Burlington Square Mall. Construction has begun, and the project is scheduled for completion in late 1985.” The other grants are less lascivious but they invariably deal with projects to either construct or rehabilitate office, commercial, industrial, and department-store construction — aside from the noxious Sanders waterfront scheme, of which more shortly.

One seriously wonders who this kind of descriptive material is meant to satisfy. Potential employees who commonly sell their labor power for minimum wage-rates in a city that is notoriously closed to unionization? The Old North Enders who are the recipients of scanty rehabilitation funds and a land-trust program for the purchase of houses, an innovative idea that is still to fully prove itself out? A few small businessmen who have received loans to develop their enterprises or others who have had their façades improved in what Sanders celebrates as an attempt to “revitalize” the Old North End, an area that is still one of the most depressing and depressed in Vermont? The ill-housed and elderly for whom the office-building spree makes the limited amount of low-income housing construction seem like a mockery of their needs? Apart from the condos and so-called “moderate-income” houses that have surfaced in part of the city, housing for the underprivileged is not a recurring theme in Sanders’ speeches except when the mayor is on an electoral warpath. After a tentative stab at some kind of “rent control” which was defeated at the polls on the heels of a huge propaganda blitz by well-to-do property owners, the administration has been reticent about raising rent-control issues generally, let alone making a concerted effort at educating the public about them. Burlington, in effect, is witnessing what one journalistic wag has appropriately called “gentrification with a human face.” Indeed, such crucial issues as housing for the poor and elderly, unionization of the grossly underpaid, environmental deterioration, and the rapid attrition of old, socially useful, small concerns that can no longer afford the soaring downtown rentals — all have taken second place during the past year to big structural schemes like a waterfront plan. More so than any other Sanders proposal, this plan has opened a long overdue schism between the mayor and his popular supporters in the Old North End, the most radical constituency in Burlington.

SANDERS’ WATERFRONT PLAN is burdened by a highly convoluted a history that would take an article in itself to unravel. The 24.5-acre property, owned partly by the Vermont Central Railroad, the Alden Corporation (a consortium of wealthy locals), and the city itself, faces one of the most scenic lake and mountain areas in the northeast. Paquette, Sanders’ predecessor, planned to “develop” this spectacular site with highrise condos. Sanders has made the demand for a “waterfront for the people” a cardinal issue in all his campaigns. Civic democracy was ostensibly served when an open meeting was organized by the administration in February, 1983, to formulate priorities which the public felt should be reflected in any design. Broken down by wards in NPA fashion, the meeting’s priorities centered around walkways, open space, public access, restaurants and shops, even a museum and wildlife sanctuary — and, in addition to similar public amenities, mixed housing. Whether these priorities could have been met without a UDAG is highly problematical. What is fascinating about Sanders’ response, even before the UDAG was refused, was the clutter of structures that grossly compromised the whole thrust of the public’s priorities: a second version of a Radisson-type hotel, a retail pavilion that spanned half the length of the city’s pedestrian mall, a 1200-car parking garage, an office building, a narrow public walkway along the lakeside — and an ambiguous promise to provide three hundred mixed housing units, presumably “available for low and moderate income and/or handicapped people:” Even so, this housing proposal was hedged by such caveats as “to the extent feasible” and the need to acquire “below-market financing” and rent-level “subsidies.”

Following the refusal of the UDAG, the plan resurfaced again from City Hall with two notable alterations. Mixed housing disappeared completely even as a promise — to be replaced by 150 to 300 condos priced at $175-300,000 each (a typical Burlington houses sells for $70-80,000) and public space, meager to begin with, was further attenuated. From a residential viewpoint, the “waterfront for the people” had become precisely an “enclave for the rich,” one of the verbal thunderbolts Sanders had directed at the Paquette proposal.

The privileges accorded by the waterfront plan to moneyed people are a reminder that only token aid has been provided to the poor. The methods employed by Sanders to engineer public consent for the plan have been especially offensive: the blitz of ads favoring the mayor’s and Alden Corporation’s version of the scheme, in which Sanderistas found their names listed with those of the most notorious union-busters in the state, stands in sharp contrast with the relatively weak campaigns launched by City Hall on behalf of rent control and improved housing.

Public reaction came to a head when the electorate, summoned to vote on a bond issue to cover the city’s contribution to the plan, produced startling results. Despite the sheer frenzy that marked the mayor’s campaign for a “yes” vote, the ward-by-ward returns revealed a remarkable shift in social attitudes toward Sanders. Although a two-thirds majority is needed to carry a bond issue in Burlington, Wards 2 and 3 of the Old North End voted down the bond issue flatly. So much for the reaction of Sanders’ “working-class” base which had given the mayor his largest pluralities in the past. Ward 4, a conventional middle-class district, regaled the mayor with barely a simple majority of five votes, and Ward 5, the most sympathetic of his middle-class constituencies, a flat fifteen-vote rejection. Sanders’ highest returns came from Ward 6 — “The Hill,” as it has been called — which contains the highest concentration of wealth in the city and its most spacious and expensive mansions.

For the first time, a Sanders proposal that patently placed the mayor’s public credibility on the line had been soundly trounced — not by the wealthiest ward in Burlington which alone supported the bond issue by a two-thirds vote, but. by the Old North End, which flatly rejected his proposal. A class issue had emerged which now seems to have reflected a disgust with a rhetoric that yields little visible results.

THE ULTIMATE EFFECT Of Sanders’ aging form of “socialism” is to facilitate the ease with which business interests can profit from the city. Beyond the dangers of an increasingly centralized civic machinery, one that must eventually be inherited by a “Republicrat” administration, are the extraordinary privileges Sanders hasprovided to the most predatory enterprises in Burlington — privileges that have been justified by a “socialism” that is committed to “growth,” “planning,” “order,” and a blue-collar “radicalism” that actually yields low-paying jobs and non-union establishments without any regard to the quality of life and environmental well-being of the community at large.

Bernard Sanders could have established an example of a radical municipalism, one rooted in Vermont’s localist tradition of direct democracy, that might have served as a living educational arena for developing an active citizenry and a popular political culture. Whether it was because of a shallow productivist notion of “socialism” oriented around “growth” and “efficiency” or simply personal careerism, the Burlington mayor has been guided by a strategy that sacrifices education to mobilization and democratic principles to pragmatic results. This “managerial radicalism” with its technocratic bias and its corporate concern for expansion is bourgeois to the core — and even brings the authenticity of traditional “socialist” canons into grave question. A recent Burlington Free Press headline which declared: “Sanders Unites with Business on Waterfront” could be taken as a verdict by the local business establishment as a whole that it is not they who have been joining Sanders but Sanders who has joined them. When productivist forms of “socialism” begin to resemble corporate forms of capitalism, it may be well to ask how these inversions occur and whether they are accidental at all. This question is not only one that must concern Sanders and his supporters; it is a matter of grim concern for the American radical community as a whole.

http://mosquitocloud.net/murray-bookchin-the-bernie-sanders-paradox-when-socialism-grows-old

The Bernie and Trump Trap: Beyond the Dead-End of Imperial Politics
Submitted by Danny Haiphong on Tue, 09/29/2015 - 15:32


“Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are here to rescue the system with a dose of fear and hope.” Trump’s open-air racism instills fear in racial minorities and people who consider themselves “liberal" or “progressive.” Sanders gives them foolish hope that the Democratic Party can be changed from within. Grassroots movement politics is sidetracked, because “presidential elections are where movements go to die, as the anti-war movement exemplified directly after the election of Barack Obama.”

The Bernie and Trump Trap: Beyond the Dead-End of Imperial Politics
by Danny Haiphong
“The development of the Mass Black Incarceration State and the explosion of US military warfare throughout the globe have done little to solve the system's political crisis.”

There are few moments more difficult for the development of a genuine mass movement against imperialism than the Presidential election season. Generally, this period involves massive investments on the part of the ruling class in candidates who will take the reigns of Washington and continue the reproduction of imperialism's crisis ridden system. For the last eight years, the ruling class developed a superstar in President Barack Obama. His regime was able to intensify the war on workers and oppressed people everywhere, especially Black people, without significant challenge. But in 2016, the conditions are different. The end of the Obama era means that the electoral trap will inevitably take a different form.

The trap has already begun to take shape in the current Presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Sanders has risen up as the Democratic Party’s “progressive” face. Despite his use of the word "socialism" to describe his politics, Bernie's platform is rife with blood-soaked support for war-driven countries such as Saudi Arabia and hostility toward peace-seeking nations such as Russia and China. He recently disrespected socialist Venezuela by calling Hugo Chavez a "dead communist dictator." These words scream hypocrisy. Bernie’s commitment to the war machine reveals that his primary purpose is to appeal to those who were positively affected by the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter development and move them to vote Democrat. This is why he has pandered to labor unions and has held private meetings with #BlackLivesMatter activists.

“Sanders recently disrespected socialist Venezuela by calling Hugo Chavez a "dead communist dictator."

If Bernie's purpose is to channel people into the Democratic Party, Donald Trump's calling is to move the opposition rightward. His open-air white supremacy has a visceral and viral affect. But Trump's anti-migrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric is to be expected under the rule of centuries of racist, capitalist development and decades of prolonged capitalist crisis. Trump is the bogeyman that instills fear in those who call themselves "liberal" and "progressive" and reactionary hope in what Gerald Horne deems as the historic conservatism of the white workers in the US. His no-filter campaign has the effect of creating an illusion of warfare between two parties that ultimately work for the same imperialist state. Because there is no "more effective evil" in this round of elections, the bourgeoisie has intensified the facade of polarization between the capitalist parties to compensate.

This facade presents a steep trap for forces working to build a revolutionary mass movement in the US. The Bernie and Trump trap reveals the weaknesses inherent in imperialism’s crisis. A condition of stagnation plagues imperialism. And the crisis emanates directly from capitalist development itself. At this stage of development, capitalism has outstretched its capacity to advance a higher rate of profit over time for the capitalist class and simultaneously account for the expanding costs of upkeep. The exponential growth of technology (a fixed cost) has forced capitalists to wage a multifaceted and endless war on workers and nations everywhere to keep profits bloated. But this war has exacerbated the fact that production far outpaces consumption. And the increase in exploitation and war inevitably leads to more poverty and more chaos. These developments have created a non-stop search by the rulers of the system for temporary measures to score quick profits and extend the system’s hegemony.

So what do Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have to do with the US capitalist crisis? Their campaigns are a manifestation of the growing desperation of the ruling class. Economic measures such as austerity, bank bailouts, privatization, and the mass unemployment and impoverishment that come with them have not brought relief to the capitalist crisis. The development of the Mass Black Incarceration State and the explosion of US military warfare throughout the globe have done little to solve the system's political crisis. If anything, these measures in their totality are forever sharpening the contradictions inherent in the system itself. As these contradictions become more acute, the war on the consciousness of workers and oppressed people becomes all the more important for the ruling class.

“Trump’s no-filter campaign has the effect of creating an illusion of warfare between two parties that ultimately work for the same imperialist state.”
The Bernie and Trump trap is a critical weapon in this war on consciousness. Bernie's early success can be attributed in part by Occupy Wall Street's impact on the overall political debate and the growing debt and joblessness of former union workers and student professionals. Yet his supposed pro-worker orientation is completely contradicted by his support for the US-sponsored massacres in Yemen, Ukraine, and Palestine (to name a few). As for Trump, his success can be credited to the general rightward political direction of the US in the last three decades of capitalist development. This rightward direction is a product of capitalist consolidation in the political realm. Crisis has brought the Democratic and Republican Party together policy-wise in service of imperialism. The Democratic Party should share much of the blame, as it has worked hand over foot to save the profitability and power of the ruling system during the most delicate phase of its life.
So the situation for the capitalist system is grim. The Black vote has always been a significant measure of the ruling system's legitimacy to the masses, especially for the Democratic Party. In 2016, Black voters that have the ability to make it to the polls may stay home. This is of great concern to Washington. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are here to rescue the system with a dose of fear and hope. Bernie is the hope and Trump is the fear. The bourgeoisie hopes that this combination of forces will drive their respective constituencies to settle for one of the two brands of imperialist politics available in 2016.

In the final analysis, Wall Street and the capitalist class will decide which imperialist party rules in 2016. Presidential elections are where movements go to die, as the anti-war movement exemplified directly after the election of Barack Obama. The bourgeoisie is not so much concerned as to whom the masses lean toward during elections but rather the effectiveness of the victorious candidate's rule. Capitalism's prolonged and endless crisis has created conditions that make this election cycle of 2016 critical for those in power. It will test the durability of the capitalist system in a post-Obama period where the seeds of resistance have been planted by the struggle against police brutality. Capitalism is banking that this election will draw people into electing politicians instead of building movements. This is the basis of the Bernie and Trump trap we must fight.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie_and_trump_beyond_imperial_politics

snip

While Sanders poses no threat to the “alternative-consensus” logic, his candidacy does afford trade unionists an opportunity to combat the unproductive political rigidity of the US labor movement top leadership that has invariably backed corporate Democrats. By supporting the Sanders candidacy, unionists can challenge the subservience of the leadership to the Democratic Party mainstream.

It would be opportunist -- and dishonest -- to turn a blind eye to Sanders’ limitations, but it would be sectarian, the opposite error, to ignore that he has excited the hopes of parts of the US progressive electorate -- liberals, students, social democrats, and a few unions. That base is important to unions and to the left.

In the working-class movement, sectarianism is a policy or practice that isolates the left from masses of people in struggle , as a result of ideological and political rigidity or dogmatism. The best elements in the Sanders campaign will be striving to push him to better positions now, and after the campaign, seeking to gather in the forces in his base who see the need for more advanced, genuinely independent candidacies. If they take up that seond task, they can avoid the great mistake of 2009, waiting around for Obama to organize the potentially independent forces (people of color, youth, first-time voters) that he set in motion to win in November 2008.

That fight is a fight worth having and a small step for political independence.


- See more at: http://mltoday.com/article/2264-bernie-and-beyond/30#sthash.SElveJLY.hzJETByY.dpuf

http://mltoday.com/article/2264-bernie-and-beyond/30

This argument would have some substance if the groups mentioned as supporting Sanders did so significantly or had weight. Union support should not be sneered at and is the strongest part of the argument. How much, who, and when will add or subtract to/from that argument. Self-styled progressives ain't nothin' but hipster liberals and get no consideration. Students have traditionally been in the vanguard of the left but long term residency in the imperial center seems to have dampened that fire. The drastic falling off of political activity after the draft ended speaks to short term self seeking. If the Republican clown show ends and the Paul boy gets some traction he's suck away a lot of Sander's youth vote for the hip and shamelessly self-serving.

Ain't nothing set in stone, I suppose that things could play out in such a fashion that we might want to support Sanders for some tactical reason that I cannot now imagine. But do ya wanna bet?

snip

While Sanders poses no threat to the “alternative-consensus” logic, his candidacy does afford trade unionists an opportunity to combat the unproductive political rigidity of the US labor movement top leadership that has invariably backed corporate Democrats. By supporting the Sanders candidacy, unionists can challenge the subservience of the leadership to the Democratic Party mainstream.

It would be opportunist -- and dishonest -- to turn a blind eye to Sanders’ limitations, but it would be sectarian, the opposite error, to ignore that he has excited the hopes of parts of the US progressive electorate -- liberals, students, social democrats, and a few unions. That base is important to unions and to the left.

In the working-class movement, sectarianism is a policy or practice that isolates the left from masses of people in struggle , as a result of ideological and political rigidity or dogmatism. The best elements in the Sanders campaign will be striving to push him to better positions now, and after the campaign, seeking to gather in the forces in his base who see the need for more advanced, genuinely independent candidacies. If they take up that seond task, they can avoid the great mistake of 2009, waiting around for Obama to organize the potentially independent forces (people of color, youth, first-time voters) that he set in motion to win in November 2008.

That fight is a fight worth having and a small step for political independence.


- See more at: http://mltoday.com/article/2264-bernie-and-beyond/30#sthash.SElveJLY.hzJETByY.dpuf

http://mltoday.com/article/2264-bernie-and-beyond/30

This argument would have some substance if the groups mentioned as supporting Sanders did so significantly or had weight. Union support should not be sneered at and is the strongest part of the argument. How much, who, and when will add or subtract to/from that argument. Self-styled progressives ain't nothin' but hipster liberals and get no consideration. Students have traditionally been in the vanguard of the left but long term residency in the imperial center seems to have dampened that fire. The drastic falling off of political activity after the draft ended speaks to short term self seeking. If the Republican clown show ends and the Paul boy gets some traction he's suck away a lot of Sander's youth vote for the hip and shamelessly self-serving.

Ain't nothing set in stone, I suppose that things could play out in such a fashion that we might want to support Sanders for some tactical reason that I cannot now imagine. But do ya wanna bet?

I can't see any difference between this piece and any piece by Webb, et al, back in 2008 in support of Obama. There is no "movement" associated with Sanders, just "progressive" Democrats who will vote against the Republican in November '16 regardless of who the nominees are.
If "we" are talking about getting involved in this contest, I would say it would have to be some third party (or forth, fifth or sixth party). Bernie Sanders is a less articulate, white Obama (yeah, a "white" one). Danny Haiphong, of Black Agenda, is much closer to it than this piece from mlt. Really just replace "Obama" for every "Sanders" or "Bernie" and I swear, it is from 2008.
All we need is Tin coming in and saying, "Hey guys, he's a 'SOCIALIST!"

In the working-class movement, sectarianism is a policy or practice that isolates the left from masses of people in struggle , as a result of ideological and political rigidity or dogmatism. The best elements in the Sanders campaign will be striving to push him to better positions now, and after the campaign, seeking to gather in the forces in his base who see the need for more advanced, genuinely independent candidacies. If they take up that seond task, they can avoid the great mistake of 2009, waiting around for Obama to organize the potentially independent forces (people of color, youth, first-time voters) that he set in motion to win in November 2008.

That fight is a fight worth having and a small step for political independence.

While they remind us of the definition of 'sectarianism' let me refresh them oo the definition of OPPORTUNISM, which they somehow contort to mean disdaining the Sanders campaign. Let me also recall for them the definition of SOCIAL CHAUVINISM.

Perhaps they will duck the charge of opportunism by pointing out that it is unclear what "opportunity" presents itself. They counsel abandoning all principles..for nothing in return.

Sanders is explicitly pro-Imperialist. He is not so different from Trump in that he can't wait to inform you of this fact..even in situations where it might be considered unseemly.

If these guys wanna support "their" ruling class, that is their prerogative under the capitalist political system -- there's plenty of room under the Big Tent. Flash the secret sign -- a cross eyed look to prove your philistine credentials -- and they'll let anyone in. Except the Left.

The fact that they know all of this and still talk themselves into it anyway..

..pass the prozac, please.

Put this another way. Rather than personalities, what program is at stake?

Living Wage for all?
Citizenship for all?
Healthcare for all?
Childcare for all?
End police violence?
Public Education for all?
Massive prison amnesty/release program?
Withdrawal of all US forces internationally?
Nationalize the banks?
Guaranteed social security retirement?
Guaranteed right to organize?
Workplace democracy?

http://john-steppling.com/2015/09/yo...ot-be-by-that/

Man, this guy is a good read. I am not sure I "get" everything he says, but the parts I get are pretty interesting.

Smells like a hippie to me.

Smells like a hippie to me.

Yeah, mebbe. So what? ;>)

Way outta my league, I get about a third of his references excluding the art and architecture which I know zero about, but some of his observations are pretty sharp.

Sanders is explicitly pro-Imperialist. He is not so different from Trump in that he can't wait to inform you of this fact..even in situations where it might be considered unseemly.

I heard a clip from Trump this morning, he said that things would be much better in the Middle East if Gadhafi, Saddam were still in power and maybe we should look again at Assad (paraphrasing). Bernie would never squeeze enough balls into his sack to say anything like that. The only thing positive I can say about Trump (and it cannot be said about Bernie) is, Trump says whatever he thinks at any given moment. A lot of what he thinks is shit, but at least he doesn't mind telling you.

Yeah, mebbe. So what? ;>)

Way outta my league, I get about a third of his references excluding the art and architecture which I know zero about, but some of his observations are pretty sharp.

I hope the Kid ain't listening, but Hegel sounds pretty damned hippie to me - and if Kid knew me in the day, he'd a thought for sure I was one, heh. Except that I worked all the damned time - never could figure out how real hippies could live without working...

I hate what I don't understand :)

Put this another way. Rather than personalities, what program is at stake?

Living Wage for all?
Citizenship for all?
Healthcare for all?
Childcare for all?
End police violence?
Public Education for all?
Massive prison amnesty/release program?
Withdrawal of all US forces internationally?
Nationalize the banks?
Guaranteed social security retirement?
Guaranteed right to organize?
Workplace democracy?

The Democratic Party would not endorse, even pay lip service, to any of that. All they got is Lesser Evilism and that is mockery of reality. Supporting the Democratic Party is not advancing socialism, it is capitulation.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/111-2009/s32

The reality of professed progressive Bernie Sanders
Posted on September 10, 2015 by bhermannview
Bernie Sanders calls for
Bernie Sanders calls for “selective” drone strikes in an interview on ABC News (Also relevant is this article). The image uses an image of Sanders collaged with a drone firing a missile and victims of drone attacks in order to show the absurdity of his remarks.
Bernie Sanders seems to be a topic that’s not gonna get old anytime soon. Everytime I want to stop writing about him, it turns out that there is more to uncover which reveals the true reality of Sanders. Using links from a recent storify which brought together tweets about Sanders, and other public figures, along with some of my own research, I wrote this article.

Bernie Sanders and Bosnia

Recently, a video surfaced on twitter where Bernie Sanders justified the brutal US bombing in Bosnia, despite the fact he voted against a resolution which said that US ground troops shouldn’t be used “to enforce a peace agreement in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina” unless their deployment is approved by the US Congress.

In the video,which I have to thank Michael Arria for bringing it to my attention, Sanders, in 1999, justifies a bombing campaign in Bosnia but says it in such a way that he doesn’t say he supports such actions up-front. Rather, you have to read into what he is saying in order to figure it out. In the first part of the video, Sanders quotes from a member of the German Green Party, Joschka Fischer. Bolding in the following section is my emphasis:

“Let me begin by saying that if anyone thinks there is a simple solution to this problem [in Bosnia], then you know very little about this problem. It is an enormously complicated, enormously enormously difficult, and there are honest, sincere people on all sides of this issue. Let me begin my remarks by quoting an interview which took place, was written up in Newsweek on April 13th. As many of your know, the German government is currently a coalition government of the majority Social Democrats working with the Greens. And the foreign minister happens to be a member of the Green Party. His name is, I’m probably pronouncing it wrong, Joschka Fischer. And let me quote from the interview he gave to Newsweek: “I am a member of the Green Party and am sitting here giving an interview in NATO headquarters. I never dreamed about that. But [we cannot] accept Milosevic’s policies and bow our knees in front of this ethnic cleansing. I became a student radical, a real leftist–I never was a pacifist because I was fighting [a] revolution. I was against Vietnam because I always thought Vietnam was a colonial war. But my generation [asked] our parents, [this is German] “Why could [the Holocaust] happen in Germany–and why didn’t you resist?” This is the question we have to ask ourselves now.” Then Newsweek says, “you see a direct parallel to the Nazi era?” [and then he responds] “I see a parallel to that primitive fascism. Obviously, the ’30s are back, and we cannot accept that.” And then later on in the interview, the question is “Aren’t some people in your party [the Green Party] unhappy with your position on Kosovo?” Answer: “Obviously! There are many pacifists who cannot accept it, but, on the other hand, my generation was brought up with two experiences. The first is “Never Again War.” And the second is “Never Again Auschwitz.” It means standing up against genocide. It’s a contradiction, but we have to live with it. If we accept Milosevic as a winner, it would be the end of the Europe I believe in.”

The quotes from Fischer clearly don’t recognize the dangers of “humanitarian” intervention which some accurately call “humanitarian” imperialism which recently manifested itself in the 2011 war in Libya, and which some hawks want to emulate it in Syria despite the disastrous consequences. Sanders goes on to say that Fischer’s position is “very close to where I am coming from” which is is worrisome. Likely, this is why one audience member remarks “..You’ve sold out” [1] with fellow audience members, clearly hard-core Bernie supporters, responding with respond with “Oh shut up” and “Shut up.” Sanders then goes on to justify the bombing, saying its a “terrible situation,” acting like those who are anti-interventionist and truly antiwar are out of their minds, possibly even implying that they don’t understand the history of Bosnia:

“I have spent my entire life fighting against war and I’m opposed to virtually every United States intervention. And yet we are standing here today wrestling with this terrible situation. For those good friends of mine, many of them, whose sincerity is not in question, who say they detest war, they are appalled as I am about the bombing of civilian areas in Belgrade, who say “Stop the bombing, bring the troops home!” then I ask you to think about what happens to the eight hundred thousands men, women, and children who have been pushed out of their homes! [this is where Sanders gets pretty angry and “fiery”] What do you do to a war criminal who had led, for the first time in modern history, the organized rape, as an agent of war, of tens of thousands of women? What do you do to a butcher who has lined up people and shot them? [Do] you say to them “you have won Mr. Milsoveic, we are not going to stand up to you, we are going home” [?] If you do that, what do you think happens next? Do you think he says, “I won this war,” that’s the end of it? Anyone who understands anything about the history of this man understands that is not the case. So as a member of Congress, as your Congressman, these are the issues I have to deal with.”

Sanders then goes on to say that a massive ground force, “500,000 NATO troops” marching in and throwing out “that bastard out of Kosovo once and for all” is problematic because it would lead to enormous casualties, and “guerrilla warfare for years and years.” He also says that he doesn’t want to see another war like the Vietnam War in Bosnia with “thousands upon thousands of men and women coming home in body bags,” to which the audience claps unsurprisingly. Weirdly enough, while Sanders says that no civilized society should reward or tolerate ethnic cleansing, that he is against a ground war, he says there are few choices, and that, I quote, “I don’t know what to do, but I’ll tell you what I am doing, what I am trying to do.” Huh? From here (5:26), Sanders goes on to explain his meetings with members of the Russian Duma as part of a congressional delegation, praises Clinton’s efforts in working with the Russians on the Bosnian war, and so on.

Then we have his conclusion (starting at 9:27), where he says that there isn’t “an easy solution” and that he was “on the phone…with the White House,” telling them his concerns, which isn’t a surprise since he defended Clinton the year before from Congressional Republicans who called for his impeachment, since he considers what is happening in Bosnia to be “a complex problem.” Sanders then says that he and other sympathetic senators are going to try and “put as much pressure as we can on the White House” with the help of “our friends in the Russian Duma,” so that the “the NATO people and Yugoslavia [can] sit down and negotiate a cease-fire with the simultaneous withdrawal of Yugoslavian troops and to begin the difficult negotiation establishing the armed peacekeeping force and the political future of Kosovo.”

Some may feel that Sanders’s position is much more moderate than that expressed by Bill Clinton and others pushing for war, wondering what the problem is with what he said. There are a number of problems with his support for a no-fly-zone, even though he doesn’t put it that plainly, in Bosnia. For one, the “bombing of Serbian forces during the Bosnian civil war” was, as Chris Harman notes, one of the many military operations conducted by Bill Clinton with “increasing regularity through the 1990s.” [2] Other such operations ranged from the landing of US troops in Somalia, which Sanders supported, the bombing of a supposed al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, and the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan because they thought it created chemical weapons, which turned out to be horribly wrong. Additionally, as Harman notes, the NATO forces, led by the United States, “set out systematically to degrade the infrastructure of Serbia because its leader, Milosevic, had not gained permission before emulating the viciousness of a score of US clients around the world and attacking the country’s Albanian minority.” [3]

If one looks back into the history more, more problems develop with Sanders’s position in favor of the Bosnian war. Howard Zinn writes that instead of using diplomacy, the Clinton administration used force to “solve” the problems in the Balkans which arose out of a break up of the Yugoslavian republic ten years earlier which had led to “ensuing conflicts among the separated elements of a once united country” and the failure of the 1995 Dayton Accords to deal with problems around Kosovo. [4] In an international gathering in Paris, only two terms were proposed: “NATO control of all of Kosovo, and NATO military occupation of the rest of Yugoslavia” which was rejected by the Serbian National Assembly which called for negotiations toward reaching a “political agreement on a wide-ranging autonomy for Kosovo,” but this was ignored, and US-led bombing began, which led to the displacement of 800,000 people after the first three months. [4] Beyond this, the bombing in Yugoslavia led to “an untold number of civilian casualties” until a peace agreement was signed on June 3rd, ending the 75-day bombing which begun on March 24th, a compromise between an accord the Yugoslavians had rejected and the proposal by the Serbian National Assembly on March 23rd, one day before the bombing. [5] For someone who says point-blank that he has spent his “entire life fighting against war” is is “opposed to virtually every United States intervention,” it is telling that Sanders did NOT mention the proposal by the Serbian legislature once in defense of the bombing campaign.

Its sad when someone like Noam Chomsky has more sense than Bernie Sanders. This is evident even though he reflects the “very hard” nature of what to do in Bosnia, he still says that the Serbians are “human beings too, you know, and it’s not like the position of these Serb peasants up in the hills is zero.” [6] Elsewhere, Chomsky says that nothing changed on the ground of Serbia until the KVM monitors were withdrawn and the US and U.K. started the bombing campaign, with “terrorist” groups such as the Kosovo “Liberation” Army (KLA-UCK), becoming “freedom fighters.” [7] After the war, as Chomsky notes, such groups once again became seen as “terrorists.” As James Bissett put it in the Toronto Star in July 2001, “long before the bombing it was NATO countries themselves that were inciting violence in Kosovo and attempting to de-stabilize that Serbian province” with the CIA and British Special Armed Services “arming and training Kosovo Liberation Army members in Albania to foment armed rebellion in Kosovo.” Bissett writes that the plan was to lead to a NATO intervention which would overthrow Slobodan Milosevic and allow the “aging and increasingly irrelevant military organization with a reason for its continued existence.” He also notes that NATO, after finishing its bombing campaign, “stood by and submissively allowed the KLA to murder, pillage and burn,” refused to disarm KLA fighters despite a UN resolution as it converted this “ragtag band of terrorists” into a new force: “the Kosovo protection force” led by an alleged war criminal, Agim Ceku. There’s much more that Bissett notes that I’m not going to mention here, as its chronicled in his article.

While I could write more about the war in the Balkans in the 1990s which Sanders gave his support to, I think what I have written here is a good start to more informed criticism and to criticize the actions of the “no-fly-zone” war itself.

Looking at Sanders’s voting record

In previous posts I’ve written about Sanders, I’ve looked some key votes by Bernie Sanders over the years. Thanks to Seven Days Vermont, a personal blogspot (which links to the voting records), and other sources including roll calls of the US Senate here, here, here, here, here, and here, I look into this voting record once again.

sanders votes

While I won’t go into specifics about all of these votes, there are a few which are of interest. For instance, in his 2009 vote on Guantanamo Bay Prison (Gitmo), only a part of the total base there, he explained his vote against a proposal to shut it down by saying that:

“A number of important questions remain unanswered regarding the rather complicated issue of not just how you close down the facility, but what you do with the prisoners. Are there some who should be released, are there others who should be returned to their home countries, are we confident that under Bush the correct determinations were made with respect to these prisoners’ status as ‘enemy combatants’? In order to answer these questions, President Obama has appointed a high-level committee of top administration officials who will be issuing a report in the coming months. I think that it is prudent to review that plan they develop before we spend $80 million in taxpayer money.”

Basically Sanders is saying that it should be up to a review by top Obama administration officials to decide the fate of Gitmo rather than taking a bold stand. By this I mean he would declare that the damn prison should be closed, a prison which has resulted in the death of at least six individuals. Currently, purportedly, top officials are trying to “reduce” the population of detainees at the prison, which can only be released with the approval of the Secretary of Offense/“Defense,” and close the “the detention facility in a responsible manner that protects our national security,” which still holds 116 detainees. [8] Despite this, in 2011, Obama declared that “continued law of war detention is warranted for a detainee subject to the periodic review…if it is necessary to protect against a significant threat to the security of the United States,” and so on, basically justifying the continued detention of people in Gitmo.

Beyond the detention facility, there is a naval base in Guantanamo which occupies over 5,880,483 square feet, with 1,362 buildings, according to the US military’s count. Furthermore, the base, which occupies 45 square miles, supposedly, according to the official site, ensures, “regional security” in the Caribbean, supports U.S. Navy, and Coast Guard ships, while helping the wicked Department of Homeland (In)Security “care” for migrants, and helping “control the flow” of undocumented immigrants into the United States. Yet, the “official history” of the base which boasts about their “self-sufficiency” doesn’t mention, like Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch, the “context for seizure of Gitmo or the US military’s three imperialist occupations of Cuba (1898-1902, 1906-1909, 1917-1922)” as I noted in Dissident Voice. The context is that the land occupied by the Gitmo base was “taken during the [imperialist] Spanish-American war of 1898, then codified in the Cuban-American treaty of 1903” which was signed during a time when the sovereignty of Cuba was limited. Despite such a reality, Sanders has never, to my knowledge, called for the closure of the Guantanamo naval base and giving the land back to the Cubans. Instead, he has only said rhetorically that he thinks the prison should be shut down “as soon as possible” in 2009, when he voted to keep the prison open! Such a position not in favor of closing the whole naval base at Guantanamo once again shows that it is laughable to say that Sanders is a radical in any sense of the word.

Moving beyond this, records also show that Sanders voted for Lorretta Lynch for US Attorney General, who thanked cops after the Baltimore riots, claiming they were the “peacemakers.” She clearly has a history that numerous people have written about, which I won’t elaborate here, but these accounts show why his vote for Lynch, who has a net worth which puts her in the one percent and worked at big law firms for much of her career, makes it questionable that he is behind Black Lives Matter. [9] Additionally, Lynch, in a questionaire, says “I am a registered Democrat for voting purposes,” that when she was an associate at Cahill Gordon (1984 – 1990), she “researched and wrote memoranda of law, took and defended depositions, and engaged in discovery practice,” and that when she worked for Hogan & Hartson, her client base included varied corporate entities including “pharmaceutical companies, a communications entity, automotive companies, airlines, accounting firms, and defense contracting firms.” In her responses to questions from Senators she argued that she would work with the appropriate agencies to “ensure that national security and public safety are our top priorities in the enforcement of our immigration laws,” that she would work to “achieve consistent policies for the apprehension, detention, and removal of undocumented aliens,” that she believes that “obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment,” that she was ok with reaching settlements with big banks rather than working to convict them of crimes, that drones will be used by the Justice Department in certain instances, and so on.

Sanders also gave his support to Harold Koh, voting for his confirmation for Legal Advisor to the US State Department. Koh, infamously, had views on extraterritorial drone strikes which supported the use of force, even when in violation of international law, saying that AUMF (2001) justifies the strikes. Such a degree of imperial American exceptionalism, in support of extrajudicial assassinations of the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and “associated forces” did not lead Sanders to say anything on the matter at all. This speech by Koh in March 2010 even earned him praise from the Wall Street Journal!

It is important to note that Koh expressed these views after he had been confirmed, but still, Sanders voting for Koh is problematic. Koh argued in the past that the Congress needed to be consulted by the President “before engaging in war” in a 1990 legal brief, he argued in favor of Haitian refugees interned at the Gitmo naval base, and he served in the administrations of Reagan and Clinton as noted here. However, Koh is a “highly partisan liberal Democrat” who made Harvard Law School have a reputation as a “far friendlier place than Yale for Federalist Society types.” This is important because the Federalist Society is, as noted by Freddie Lake, an organization that “has its roots in the College Republicans” who are a group of people who “specialize in distraction, deception, and intimidation in order to advance their extremist agenda on the unwary.” Lake also writes that the organization began in the 1970s, the College Republicans and a campus chapter of the Federalist Society at Columbia University, which feeds into the Society, engaged in dirty tricks, deception, they tried to stop people front speaking, they took notes on professors in order to report them to “Campus Watch,” they engaged in intimidation, they used school funds inappropriately, they stole student posters, and so on. The Society has also argued in favor of “the perverse Hobby Lobby decision,” that they would empathize with a Young Fascists League if it existed, they have helped increase the power of the executive, and is funded by the Koch Brothers. It is also of note that Obama climbed to head the Harvard Law Review after he cut a “deal with right wing students linked to the arch-reactionary Federalist Society” as Paul Street noted in 2011.

On top of this, even as Koh, among others, argued against military commissions, he claimed that “the United States has a constitutional court system of which we are rightly proud…its functioning is a worldwide emblem of the workings of justice in a democratic society.” If that’s an expression of American exceptionalism, I don’t know what is. Additionally, since 2010, he has come out sort of against the drone program but he wants “clarification, not abolition, so that illegal practices can be dressed by as legitimate” in the words of Norman Pollack. He has also claimed that the release of the US State Department cables by Wikileaks would put “lives at risk,” that the war in Libya in 2011 wasn’t a war so the War Powers Resolution couldn’t apply to it, claimed that drone policy architect John Brennan was equivalent to a priest, he declared that the US couldn’t support the extradition of Pinochet and told human rights groups that if they supported the 1999 bombing in Yugoslavia, Madeline “the price was worth it” Albright would meet with them.

Beyond this, it is clear that Koh is well-read and knowledgeable, just looking at his profile on the Yale Law School site and curriculum vitae. The latter notes he served as an attorney of the US Justice Department in the 1986 case of Nicaragua v. United States, defending the US government which argued that the court didn’t have the authority to take the case, in which the US engaged in, as the Nicaraguan government argued, the support, aid and direction of “military and paramilitary actions in and against Nicaragua,” including but not limited to the support of the Contras and mining of Nicaraguan harbors. In years afterward, Koh claimed that, in a dense legal paper, that “an international crime, by definition, is an act that has been condemned not only by the United States, but also by the governments of all civilized nations,” he was the counsel for Royal Dutch Shell in a case in which they were accused by Ogoni people, who live in Nigeria, of complicity “in human rights abuses” against them “including summary execution, crimes against humanity, torture, inhumane treatment, arbitrary arrest, wrongful death, assault and battery, and infliction of emotional distress.” Beyond this, in 2012 he supported the position that the US could defend itself from “cyberattacks” with the use of force in a hostile manner!

While I could go beyond this, and mention Koh’s other views, which include not making “the crime of aggression” a crime the International Criminal Court can charge an individual of a government with, which conveniently exempts the US from responsibility from wars that have been blatant wars of aggression, along with Israel’s attacks on Gaza, but I think readers get the point that Koh has some utterly horrible views. The fact that Sanders voted for the confirmation of this slimebag, even if Koh is a legal expert, is deeply disturbing as it shows that he’s legitimizing the rationale of Koh in some way or another.

There’s one more aspect I’d like to talk about. As the Bernie supporters continue to go through my entries about Sanders, almost on a regular basis, one pointed out that Sanders voted against No Child Left Behind (NCLB) eventually. If you use the links pointed out by the commenter, this seems to be correct. Still, it is disturbing that Sanders voted for this when it came around for a vote the first time. At the same time, this doesn’t take into account that he voted FOR the reauthorization of NCLB, a “reformed” version, after his amendment for youth jobs failed in the US Senate. Beyond this, the authorization has been “needed” since 2007, even though the House voted to reauthorize it in 2013 (also noted here), and this round of “reform” of NCLB is giddily supported by the assistant editor of The Atlantic, Alia Wong. This is despite the fact, according to Wong, the “reform” does the following: (1) keeps in place “the same testing requirements as No Child Left Behind” but information has to publicly available; (2) prohibits the federal government from “requiring states [to] use a specific set of standards” but mandates that states adopt ““challenging” math, science, and reading standards that ensure kids are prepared for college or vocational pursuits;” (3) states wouldn’t be “required to evaluate teachers nor use test scores as a metric for assessing them;” (4) the funding formula of NCLB would remain; and (5) it would shift to states the “decisions about how test scores are used to assess school and teacher performance.”

Sanders’s vote for this is further disturbing because the Student Success Act, drafted by Congressional Republicans, has overlap with this “reform” since it also wouldn’t require states to evaluate teachers or use text scores to evaluate them; it prohibits the federal government from “prescribing…stands such as Common Core;” and it gives states control over accountability of teachers and schools. However, it only differs in two respects: it includes a “school-choice provision that would make public money “portable” and it allows states to “opt out of federal accountability requirements if they develop their own plans.” While there are some disagreements between Dems and GOPers on these two versions of NCLB “reform,” I could see both parties coming together in a compromise bill. And if Sanders votes for that, his vote against NCLB in 2001 won’t matter anymore.

Sanders on education “reform,” Hillary Clinton, proxy wars, and much more

There are numerous statements Sanders has made which deserve more analysis. Some of these revolve around education “reform” which is arguably in a neoliberal manner. In 2012, Sanders declared to Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, that he supported the Race to the Top Program, pushed by the Obama administation, a neoliberal program which is, as Bruce Dixon argued, “the direct cause of our national wave of school closings and mass teacher firings from Philly to Atlanta and Los Angeles to Rhode Island.” In that press release, Sanders is quoted as saying that “it is unacceptable that nearly $5 billion of federal “Race to the Top” funding has been distributed while Vermont and many other states have not received a penny” and that, in Vermont, “there is widespread – near unanimous – opposition” to the law’s inflexible mandates.” The press release summarizes Sanders as saying he was disappointed that Vermont couldn’t get a waiver from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, and that NCLB is “fundamentally incompatible with the state’s education model.”

In following years, Sanders continued to assert his approval for Race to the Top (RTTT). In 2013 he declared, after Vermont won a $37 million dollar grant, as part of the RTTT program, that “this major federal grant will significantly improve early-childhood education in our state and better prepare our kids for school and the challenges and opportunities in life.” Later that year, he also called for NCLB “reform,” with the legislation including a program “developed by Sen. Bernie Sanders that would allow schools to move away from standardized testing, broaden the curriculum and allow educators to focus on the critical thinking and teamwork skills that are vital in the 21st century economy.” That press release also said that Sanders had worked to ensure that small states such as Vermont can “effectively compete for the Education Department’s competitive grant programs like “Race to the Top.””

This connects with what Sanders told an NPR interviewer earlier this year. Sanders said that “black lives matter; white lives matter; Hispanic lives matter” and that matters affecting blacks are not only “police matters” and “gun control matters” but are “significantly economic matters.” He also declared that he wanted to challenge the “billionaire class” (the capitalist class) by making them pay more in taxes so there could be the creation of “millions of jobs for black kids, for white kids, for Hispanic kids.” That might sound good to some, but once again Sanders is ignoring the reality that racial and economic matters are intertwined, that race, class, and gender are tied together, along with race, patriarchy, and capitalism itself. [10]

Moving on, Sanders once again sidesteps criticizing Hillary Clinton, saying that he wants to win the campaign, to stand up for the “middle class.” He says, and I quote, “I personally respect Hillary Clinton, and I like her…My goal right now is to win this election….My goal is to win this campaign by running on the issues that the American people feel strongly about.” What Sanders says about the two political parties in the interview is interesting. He describes the Republican Party as “completely dominated by big money and right wing folks” but he gives the Democratic Party some slack by saying it is “too much controlled by corporate money,” implying that they still serve the populace to some extent, not that they are a capitalist party. Still, Sanders argues that no president, can “deal with the problems facing the middle class, the disappearing middle class, the growth and grotesque level of income and wealth inequality, the high unemployment rate,” only mobilization of the American populace, and a “strong grass-roots movement” can do that. While that’s noble, Sanders is not at the head of such a movement in the slightest with his one-man “political revolution.” Interestingly, on the topic of the two-party dictatorship/duopoly, Sanders was even more pointed on the issue back in 1998, than he is now, which shows how he has changed, even since then. Here’s what he said:

You have two political parties that are controlled by monied interests. You have a corporate media. When you talk about consolidation, you are talking about oil and gas, banking, and perhaps most importantly, the media – where there are very few voices of dissent regarding our current position on the global economy.”

That Bernie Sanders, who had some rhetoric like that, has left, and instead we have someone who believes we should have a strong DHS and that the Kurds should be armed, which would benefit American arms manufacturers. Arming them may also be problematic because if the US government doesn’t know who they are arming, as it shown by the Syrian crisis, the weapons could end up in the hands of fundamentalists and extremists, which would further destabilize the region. More specifically, he declared that he supports arming the Kurds “even that’s a difficult issue to make sure that the people that we arm today don’t turn against us tomorrow. But I think providing arms for those people who we can trust and providing air support is in fact something we should be doing” even as he fears that the US could get sucked “into a quagmire and being involved in perpetual warfare year after year after year.” Still, this statement implies that he supports a no-fly-zone over Kurdish-controlled areas, which is very telling. At the same time, he has supported sanctions against Iran in the past and insinuates that Iran is on the stage to “obtaining a nuclear weapon” despite evidence from US and Israeli intelligence agencies to the contrary.

There’s more than this. Sanders told a member of US Uncut recently that the F-35 program was “a very controversial issue in Vermont” and that while it has, in his words, “been incredibly wasteful,” he’s sticking with it. Carl Gibson of US Uncut adds to this, by writing that the F-35, made by Lockheed Martin, is “the epitome of Pentagon waste” and while he acknowledged it was wasteful, he seems to not want to “risk the wrath of voters angry about job losses related to F-35 manufacturing, assembly, and training if the program were to be cut,” and that Sanders’s defense of the F-35 “means that despite everything else, Sanders is still just a politician.” If that isn’t enough, consider that Sanders does NOT want to end the drone program. In an interview for ABC News he declared that

“I think we have to use drones very, very selectively and effectively. That has not always been the case. What you can argue is that there are times and places where drone attacks have been effective. There are times and places where they have been absolutely counter-effective and have caused more problems than they have solved. When you kill innocent people, what the end result is that people in the region become anti-American who otherwise would not have been.”

Such a defense of drone attacks is not only disgusting, but it shows his “I’m against war” front is BS. This not surprisingly has incurred the wrath of those such as Mike Flugennock who argued that Sanders calls for revolution while funding Israel barbarity in Palestine, and that he has pushed to get “a base in his home state for a fighter jet whose development ran into trillions of dollars, and already has a reputation for being one of the biggest pain-in-the-ass fighters the Air Force ever had?”

From here, perhaps it is right to move onto his views in the international arena. Seven Days Vermont is a good place to start on this, saying that Sanders has “been vague on the vexing question of how best to respond to the brutalities committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS” since he hasn’t opposed the “bombs-away approach” of the Obama administration, he echoes Obama “in saying the U.S. must not commit ground troops,” he has said that Saudi Arabia and other “Arab states hostile to ISIS” should become involved in the war against ISIS. The article also notes that Sanders has “no apparent problem with development of the F-35 stealth bomber,” and he opposed the demand from “peace activists” in the 1980s that a “local General Electric plant be shut down and converted to civilian production,” a factory that was “making guns that were shipped to Central America for use against leftist forces.” On his viewpoints in the Middle East, which well-known progressive Norman Solomon says, are “very palatable to corporate America,” he enhanced this when he talked to Thom Hartmann in September 2014 on his show. He told Hartmann that he felt that Arab countries needed to step up to the plate:

“This is an enormously complicated issue…The last thing we want to do is have troops involved in a never-ending war…what do you do…do you simply say “we shouldn’t be involved”? Well, maybe, that’s not a totally crazy concept. I disagree with it though. I that it [ISIS] doesn’t go away…we’ve got to come up with a solution that does not get us into a never-ending war which gives support to those who are prepared to fight ISIS which makes this not an American effort, but an international effort which deals with these guys in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, these multi- multi-billionaire authoritarian countries who have made huge amounts of money from oil. Well, you know what? They’ve got to start putting some money into this as well. And Kuwait as well.”

While this may sound anti-interventionist to some in the sense that the US would not be at the front, charging ahead, it is deceptive. The countries that Sanders is pushing for the role of those, who are US proxies, which is, as I noted in the past, problematic because the Saudi regime has supported “organizations which have made the Syrian civil war even more bloody or their connections to terrorist groups” and that he is calling for “US allies to fight ISIS and serve as US proxies” which receive US weaponry time and time again. Adding to this, calling for countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to be involved in fighting ISIS does something deeper: it would result in the reinforcement of such brutal dictatorships. Some may think that Sanders is being paid by these governments to say this, but I think he is being strategic, but I would argue in a false way. Some may also say that if the US armed and assisted such Arab nations in fighting ISIS that this would enable a form of Arab nationalism. I highly doubt that considering the history of the United States in relation to it as Andrew Gavin Marshall notes in a detailed post:

“…pro-Western governments in the Middle East stood on unstable ground, threatened by the ever-expanding wave of Pan-Arab nationalism and indeed, Pan-African nationalism spreading from North Africa downward. The United States, however, noting the power vacuum created by the defeat of Britain and France in the conflict, as well as the increasing support from the Soviet Union for nationalist movements in the region as elsewhere, had to decide upon a more direct strategy for maintaining dominance in the region…the Eisenhower Doctrine…approved in early 1957, calling for the dispersal of “$200 million in economic and military aid and to commit armed forces to defend any country seeking assistance against international communism,” explaining that, “the existing vacuum…must be filled by the United States before it is filled by Russia”…in the Middle East, Libya, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan endorsed the doctrine in the hopes of receiving economic and military aid (even before the U.S. Congress approved it), King Hussein of Jordan endorsed it, and funds were further given to Iraq and Saudi Arabia…The main opposition to the Eisenhower Doctrine came from Syria and Egypt. Nasser later reflected that the doctrine appeared to be “a device to re-establish imperial control by non-military means”…This was not, as it turned out, far from the truth…Thus, while the strategy was presented as a means to prevent Soviet “penetration” of the Middle East, the actual content and objectives of the strategy being formulated were directly related to checking Egyptian influence in the region and beyond…It’s important to note how Arab nationalism is described as “the extreme pro-Soviet” course when it actually represented a “Third Force” not allied to either the West or East…Further problems include the threat to Western economic interests in the area…the conservative forces in the region, especially Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, remained increasingly distrustful of Nasser, and thus welcomed the Eisenhower Doctrine…Western influence had increased among the conservative Arab regimes over the preceding year…While the conservative Arab allies were hesitant to pursue aggressive American policies against Syria, Turkey seemed to be ready for war”

Sanders’s policies in terms of calling for Arab nations to fight for US imperialist objectives connects with what else he has said. In fall 2014, Sanders declared at a fundraiser in Madison, Wisconsin, that “Do I think we should play a role in trying to rebuild the Iraqi army, reach out to some of the so-called Syrian moderates…and give them our support? I do. It is an enormously complicated issue. I don’t know that one can simply turn one’s back on it.” He also was quoted as saying that “President Obama is absolutely right in his efforts to judiciously use air strikes, which at this point have shown some success.” So, once again, Sanders showed his support for the imperialist policy of the Obama administration in terms of supporting airstrikes against ISIS, and supporting the “Syrian moderates” even as he did not want to train the said “rebels.” This interlinks with his push for an “intelligent, rational approach” to foreign policy that would have a reduction in military spending, is wary of war, but calls for multilateralism as he told NPR. However, he also declared to NPR that such multilateralism would include the US intervening in countries, but with other countries assisting them in an attempt to “deal with Russia, to deal with ISIS and deal with other national security threats.” This may sound sensible, but it has a problem. Even if the US acts in a coalition with other countries instead of unilaterally, this doesn’t change the fact that such wars and actions can still be fundamentally imperialist. For instance, WWII was a multilateral effort, even across ideologies, but it is still fundamentally an imperialist war even though some call it a “people’s war.”

Finally I turn to a recent ABC News interview. In the interview, Sanders declares that he is someone who is “going to take on the billionaire class and make an economy for ordinary people, not just those on the top” but he also alludes to his future support of Hillary Clinton by saying that his supports are “not necessarily anti-Hillary Clinton, they’re pro-Bernie Sanders” and that it is “not anti-Hillary Clinton.” In the interview, he also says that he voted against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which continued the war from 1991 when it was continued by bombings through the 1990s, but that he wants to bring “the world together, our allies together, not do it alone, to take on ISIS, to deal with the other threats and problems around the world.” He then goes on to say that he voted against the invasion of Iraq in 1991, but that Saddam Hussein could have gotten out of Kuwait in a way that involved the “pressure of sanctions and international pressure to resolve these conflicts” instead of war, and that he supports Obama’s “effort to make certain that Iran does not get a nuclear weapon.” He goes on to say that he isn’t afraid to use military force: “War is the last resort, not the first resort…there are times when you have to use force, no question about it…I think using our military is an option, obviously, that we will always have under certain circumstances, but it is the last option.” He then declares that Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia should “get in and take on ISIS as well as other countries in that region” and that the United States should be supportive, working “with other countries,” because, in his words, “but the United States cannot always be the only country involved in these wars.” He then declares something that sounds like “limited” imperialism to me when he says the US should have the strongest military in the world, use military force but only as “the last resort,” and support the doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P):

“I believe that the United States should have the strongest military in the world. We should be working with other countries in coalition. And when people threaten the United States or threaten our allies or commit genocide, the United States with other countries should be prepared to act militarily. But I think when we look at our recent history, again especially the war in Iraq, I think history will record that is a terrible mistake which had led to massive destabilization and many other problems. So, yes, there are times when you have to use military force, no question about it. I am prepared to do that. But that is the last resort.”

Was Sanders ok with a “sacrifice zone” for nuclear waste?

In the 1990s, Sanders was ok with making a community a sacrifice zone for a nuclear dump. Some may not believe that at first, but the Institute for Social Ecology has the full story. They write that in 1994, the Vermont legislature passed a bill that established an “unprecedented compact with the states of Maine and Texas to dispose of nuclear waste” which eventually was signed into a nuclear deal by President Clinton after it passed the US Congress in 1998. The Institute notes that this deal means that “all of the nuclear waste except for spent nuclear reactor fuel rods” will be shipped down the nation’s highways to the very small town of Sierra Blanca, Texas, which currently only has 553 people, which is “an impoverished, predominantly Mexican-American community,” still to this day, less than 16 miles from the Mexican border.” As the post describes, this town has land that “is more demanding of its inhabitants than are many other places,” and is occupied by few people who live in a place where “poverty is common and where jobs are few” which “entails sacrifice or…risk,” but the fact that there is “low population and little industry,” there is “clean air and water.” However, the post notes that it like other places of the world, it is “being swept up the schemes of faraway interests,” with then-governor of Texas George W. Bush and Bernie Sanders both seeing the region as a sacrifice zone. Some activists met with Sanders, one of the leading proponents of the compact, spent several days at “an antinuclear activist camp in southern Vermont,” and they had a “large antinuclear rally in the southern Vermont town of Brattleboro” where two residents of Sierra Blanca spoke.

The post also noted that the Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club, working with activists in West Texas, “gave the issue a high priority in its summer campaigns, due to the impending congressional vote,” that Jim Hightower, a renowned populist as of now, “played an especially vocal role in ushering the nuclear compact through Congress,”and that there were falsehoods in the arguments for Texas dump. The Institute also noted that those who met with Sanders were “astonished by [his]…vehement and unrelenting support for shipping nuclear waste 2400 miles to West Texas,” as he said it was “the best site geologically, he claimed, much better than having nuclear waste scattered across the country,” which sounds a lot of environmental racism. The post also noted that Sanders in August 1998 claimed that he was no longer interested in the Texas dump site, claimed that “Texas is the best place to get rid of this waste” which has racial undertones, that Leahy and Sanders both advocated for the dump.

There is more to add to this story as well. A 2006 article in the Socialist Worker notes that Sanders worked with George W. Bush to “lead the charge for dumping nuclear waste from Vermont’s Vernon reactor in Sierra Blanca, an impoverished town inhabited mainly by Chicanos on the border with Mexico.” The article also says that Bush and Sanders “worked to pass the Maine-Vermont-Texas nuclear waste compact, and then took advantage of Bill Clinton’s decision to allow interstate transportation of low-level nuclear waste” to a community that was “already a toxic waste dump.” Another article noted that Sanders met twelve Sierra Club activists in March 1998, who would not denounce the compact, and as a result, “the campaigners marched on Governor George W. Bush’s home in protest of the upcoming bill.” An article by activist and writer Olive Hershey added to this that Sanders didn’t listen to activists, that “my position is unchanged, and you’re not gonna like it” and that he wasn’t going to visit Sierra Blanca because he was “running for re-election in the state of Vermont.” There’s much more I could talk about, but if you wish to read more, I refer you here. As one site notes, the site eventually wasn’t built there due to the residents “vehemently oppos[ing it]…because of health and environmental concerns,” meaning it was put somewhere else instead.

This story is very instructive as it shows that Sanders is a sneaky and deceptive fellow who does not really truly have the back of the working class or the poor. Robert Bullard, who some call the “father of environmental justice” talked about such environmental racism that Sanders doesn’t seem to recognize:

“…I started connecting the dots in terms of housing, residential patterns, patterns of land use, where highways go, where transportation routes go, and how economic-development decisions are made. It was very clear that people who were making decisions…were not the same people who were “hosting” these facilities in their communities. Without a doubt, it was a form of apartheid where whites were making decisions and black people and brown people and people of color, including Native Americans on reservations, had no seat at the table…This has been going on for a long time under Republicans and Democrats, and the central theme that drives all of this is race and class…From coast to coast, you see this happening. It’s not just the landfill, it’s not just the incinerator, it’s not just the garbage dump, it’s not just the crisscrossing freeway and highway, and the bus barns that dump all that stuff in these neighborhoods — it’s all that combined. Even if each particular facility is in compliance, there are no regulations that take into account this saturation. It may be legal, but it is immoral. Just like slavery was legal, but slavery has always been immoral…It’s no longer overt policy to practice environmental racism in this country, yet it keeps happening. Where is the locus of the problem now? Now it’s institutional racism. You don’t have a lot of individuals out there wearing sheets and hoods. Instead you see it as the policies get played out. On their face, policies may appear to be race-neutral. They say, “We’re going to look at unemployment, poverty rates, and educational level,” but the poorest areas oftentimes correspond to racialized places.”

What other people think about Sanders

As this article draws to a close, it is important to focus on the viewpoints of others on Sanders. It starts with views of the standard bearer of the democratic socialist Liberty Union Party, Peter Diamondstone, an old and former ally of Sanders. Diamondstone argues that “Sanders and I suffered a hostile divorce. He was moving to the right, and I was moving to the left,” and that Sanders is “a different political person than he was in the good old days. It’s changed, big time. It’s two different people. The Liberty Union platform is really borrowed in large part from Sanders. There are things he did for Liberty Union that need to be remembered.” He is also quoted as saying that “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he [Sanders] became the candidate. He’s talking to the people. But it’s not a message of socialism. People call him that. You can’t be socialist and talk about rebuilding the middle class. Socialists want to destroy all the classes.” I tend to agree with the idea that it isn’t a message of socialism. Even the Daily Caller says that while he is “drawing major crowds and helping drive the Democratic Party’s voter registration and mobilization efforts among liberals disenchanted by Wall Street-friendly Clinton,” that he shunned “some of his closest personal friends as he moved away from Vermont socialist circles…[who] said there’s no love lost between them.” Additionally, the World Wide Socialist Site (WSWS) also argues that “as a comparison of Sanders’ positions to these core conceptions of socialism makes clear, his “socialism” is a ruse to prevent the emergence of the real thing.”

It is not a surprise that people would disagree with Sanders considering that even Steve Wozniak, “who co-founded the tech giant with the late Steve Jobs,” urged followers to back Bernie Sanders. Wozniak, as noted by The Hill, “has donated to both sides in recent presidential elections but has leaned more toward Democrats” including President Obama (2008), John Kerry (2004), and Howard Dean. If that doesn’t sound like he is tied into the establishment, it is important to consider Sanders’s longstanding deal with the Democrats, and his role in CorporateCare/Obamacare. Lee Fang claims in the Omdiyar plaything, The Intercept, that over the years Sanders has put in funding “for health centers in appropriation bills signed by George W. Bush, into Barack Obama’s stimulus program, and through the earmarking process.” Fang goes even further by saying that Sanders, “in a series of high-stakes legislative maneuvers, Sanders struck a deal to include $11 billion for health clinics in the law,” which was praised by “dozens of Republican lawmakers, including members of the House and Senate leadership,” which allowed Sanders to “build support for the bill by focusing on health clinics.” He also claims that Sanders’s role in “securing the funds for the ACA is barely mentioned on his Senate website, [but] the image gallery is adorned with pictures of Sanders beaming a smile as he breaks ground and cuts ribbons for various health clinic openings in Vermont.” If this is indeed to be believed, then it puts in question his support for single-payer healthcare since he is supporting a corporate, private system by pushing CorporateCare through Congress.

There is much more. Sanders was criticized by Sam Husseini in his must-read post about Sanders backing Saudi intervention in the Middle East. In this post, he writes that Sanders has called for the “repressive [Saudi] regime to engage in more intervention in the Mideast,” saying that we “need more Saudi influence and intervention in the region” even though there would be “more and bigger proxy wars, which have already taken the lives of hundreds of thousands in Syria and could even further rip apart Iraq, Libya and other countries.” Husseini questions this by asking “why should a U.S. progressive be calling for more intervention by the Saudi monarchy?,” that if your point is “to build up the next stage of the U.S. government’s horrific role in the Mideast” then his approach “kind of makes sense” since “Saudi Arabia buys U.S. weapons to further solidify the “relationship” and to ensure its military dominance.” He also writes that Sanders is “unwilling to break with the U.S.-Saudi alliance that has done such damage to both the Arab people and the American people,” that if the US subcontracts the Mideast to “the Saudi regime, the setbacks and disappointments for peace and justice in the Mideast during the Obama years will be small potatoes in comparison,” and that “his stance on Saudi Arabia must bring a smile to the faces of bigwigs there” at Lockheed Martin.

Then there’s perspectives such as those of US Uncut on Sanders’s views in regards to immigration. They correctly note that while Sanders has “become a darling of progressives, yet when it comes to immigration he’s closer to Donald Trump than any sensible position” since he said that opening up borders would “substantially lower wages in this country” and they say that if Sanders can express openly such “right-wing myths on immigration without much of a challenge, it’s quite clear how much progress needs to be made.” The US Uncut folks also argue that in their view, “the most sensible and humane immigration policy is the one never been mentioned by any member of Congress or the media: grant full amnesty and citizenship to all immigrants living in the US, create a streamlined pathway for citizenship, decriminalize drugs, and tear down the US-Mexico wall.”

In another direction, some have argued that Sanders is as pro-Israel as it comes, and is is definitely a Zionist. A political consultant and the managing director of Bluelight Strategies, Aaron Keyak, was quoted as saying that “I know he’s often rated as the most liberal senator. When I see Senator Bernie Sanders, I see someone who is a typical pro-Israel Jewish Democrat.” Later, Keyak also argued that “I think the people who find it surprising that Bernie Sanders is pro-Israel are some of the same people who are quick to paint progressives as anti-Israel. He prefers for Israel to have a left of center government, but he still fundamentally supports Israel.” This is important to note because Sanders has trumpeted around that he skipped the Netanyahu speech, but this fundamental reality of Sanders is relation to Israel. This reality means that Sanders will never once again say, as he said during a video (going to 13:56), that “what is going on in the Middle East right now is obviously a tragedy. There’s no question about it. The sight of Israeli soldiers breaking the arms and legs of [Palestinian] Arabs is reprehensible. The idea of Israel closing down towns and sealing them off is unacceptable.”

There is more beyond these viewpoints. Some have argued that Sanders (and Jeff Jeffords) have “been embraced as Independents,” and Sanders “was criticized for not doing enough to build an alternative to the Republicans and Democrats” but he ignored it. Others noted that it would have seemed ridiculous to predict in the 1970s that Sanders would “stand on the White House lawn in support of an embattled Democratic President, or become a Democrat himself,” and that he would back “Barack Obama for President from a seat in the US Senate,” a time by which he had “effectively neutralized any Democratic opposition in Vermont – without officially joining the party.” As the critic argued, “it was one of the more remarkable journeys in US political history. An irascible “third party” outsider had become a player in the national political establishment.” Beyond this, there was an article in Seven Days Vermont that argued that “rarely does a news cycle pass without Bernie’s mug appearing on MSNBC in a live shot from the Capitol,” noted that “he campaigned for the president’s reelection in New Hampshire” in 2012, that “he continues to caucus with the party’s Senate majority” even as he continues to caucus with Democrats, and “tends to vote in favor of major Democratic initiatives…only to rail against their shortcomings later.”

Those aren’t the only ones who are critical of Sanders. In an article in Seven Days Vermont, former and current employees of Sanders are quoted, and they described Sanders as a “rude, short-tempered and, occasionally, downright hostile” who seems to mistreat “the people working for him.” The article quotes some as saying they “endured frequent verbal assaults,” that the “senator is prone to fits of anger,” and that he was an asshole who “yelled in meetings all the time,” even as some victims of “his management style aren’t entirely negative about their former boss. Steve Rosenfeld, who wrote a book about the 1990 campaign of Sanders, quoted Sanders as saying “Some people say I am very hard to work with. They say I can be a real son of a bitch. They say I can be nasty, I don’t know how to get along with people. Well, maybe there’s some truth to it.” The article also quotes another person as saying that “Everything was done at the last second. He made all the decisions” and noting that Sanders has considered reporters “corrupt, shallow, stupid or a combination thereof.”

There are others concerned as well. One group, called Radical Progressives, argued that they were waiting for a supporter of Bernie Sanders to provide an example of Bernie “tangibly pushing the Democrats that he has caucused with for 25 years in the progressive/leftward direction” or a law in which he “voted against the wishes of the Democratic establishment on,” but they said that they don’t know of any examples “where he went against the wishes of the mainstream Democrats to block bad legislation from happening.” Then there’s Normon Solomon who argues that Sanders “blamed Republican hawks for getting the U.S. into Iraq,” called for “progress against waste and cost overruns at the Pentagon,” and that in the war against ISIS “the U.S. government should act jointly with regional allies such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey.” Solomon noted something that should give everyone pause: “when pressed for details on military intervention, Sanders has indicated that his differences with the Barack Obama administration are quite minor.” It is also of note that even moderate liberal reformist Robert Naiman of “Just Foreign Policy,” which backed the nomination of Chuck Hagel, who previously sat on the board of Chevron, says that Bernie show publish the text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): “How about Bernie? He voted “no” in the Senate on fast track. But has he done everything he could do to stop it? Here’s one thing Bernie could do that he hasn’t done: He could publish the text of the TPP.” Seemingly, Sanders, or any of the other Senators who possess the text of the TPP have not considered this possibility.

Then there’s the comments of Michael Parenti and Jeff Cohen of Roots Action. Starting with Parenti, who seems to be sorta in favor of Sanders, says he used to be close political friends with Sanders in the early 1970s, that he “remained good friends with Bernie. I gave him moral and monetary support in his successful campaigns for Mayor of Burlington, then U.S. House of Representatives” but that he eventually broke with Sanders over his support for the Yugoslavia war. He continues by saying that Sanders, like “many liberals and some Trotskyites and anarchists…shoulder to shoulder with NATO and the CIA and the Clinton White House in the destruction of Yugoslavia, the 78 days of bombing, drenching Serbia in depleted uranium, leaving Serbia with the highest cancer rate in Europe and breaking up Yugoslavia.” Still he says that he is a Democrat “although he calls himself a socialist and an independent,” and that while he does have some good viewpoints on social issues, his foreign policy likely hasn’t improved since the 1990s. Unlike Parenti, Cohen seems to be a bit more ga-ga over Sanders, claiming to know Sanders cine the 1990s, that Sanders purportedly has a “background in the early ’60s…[in] civil rights,” and that Sanders should excite progressives. When he was challenged about the fact that Sanders supported “the three strikes rule of the first Clinton administration…No Child Left Behind, and…Race to the Top, which…horrifically and negatively impact black and poor communities in terms of education and of course incarceration,” Cohen said that while he Sanders has “supported President Obama or President Clinton more than he should have,” he was endorsed by Cornel West, a position which was recently criticized by Ajamu Baraka in Dissident Voice, so its all fine! He also claimed that the interruptions by Black Lives Matter folks have improved Sanders’s politics, and that people should put Sanders through activism. At one point Cohen laughably claims that Sanders has “been a radical leftist, a socialist, his whole life. That’s very different from Obama, who is always retreating from the socialist label” which is a total lie if you just look at his record, and that it was right for Sanders to tactically run “inside the Democratic party caucuses and primaries” because it has allowed him to get “the media attention that he has.”

Then there’s right-wing populist Matt Taibbi who once published an article with so many errors that its just ridiculous. Taibbi goes the most ga-ga over Sanders, hat-tip to Kevin Wagner for pointing me to this article, writing that he had “spent over a decade living in formerly communist Russia. The word “socialist” therefore had highly negative connotations for me, to the point where I didn’t even like to say it out loud.” However, he felt redeemed because Sanders was, in his view, “not Bukharin or Trotsky” because “his concept of “Democratic Socialism” as I’ve come to understand it over the years is that an elected government should occasionally step in and offer an objection or two toward our progress to undisguised oligarchy.” Taibbi explains that this also means “not giving tax breaks to companies who move factories overseas, [and that] our government should at least not finance the disappearance of the middle class,” while also saying that if this “does qualify as radical and unserious politics in our day and age” then we should “admit how much trouble we’re in.” At the end of his article Taibbi boldly declares “Congratulations, Bernie. Good luck and give ’em hell.” While this is troubling, it is also very telling as it says that Sanders is not radical at all.

Then there’s the responses of the two black queer women who interrupted Bernie Sanders, Mara Willaford and Marissa Johnson of BLM Seattle. One of the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter organization, Alicia Garcia, responded to criticisms of the interruption by arguing that they “respect local autonomy” of the 26 BLM chapters, that those “two sisters who did the action have received all kinds of vitriol” and that the “last week has shown me (actually confirmed for me) is that populism can be really dangerous and tend rightward.” One of the two people who interrupted Sanders, Marissa Johnson, was quoted in The Stranger, which reprinted what she said from another source, as making a powerful statement by Sanders and the crowd there. Johnson said that in their context, “confronting Sanders was the equivalent of confronting the large, white, liberal Democrat, leftist contingent that we have here in Seattle who not only have not supported BLM in measurable ways but is often very harmful and is also upholding the white supremacist society that we live in locally.” She also said that the “the un-respectability, and the tactic, the way we went about it—every single part of it was very intentional,” that Sanders “should have been courting BLM,” that the “the work that I[she] do[es] in particular is agitational work,” and that she is “definitely for anything that pulls people further left,” instead of a certain politician, for “anything that gets people asking more questions, and gets us closer to actually dismantling the system that has never, ever, ever, ever done anything for black people and never will. So I’m really trying to see my people get free by any means possible.”

Then there’s the criticisms of Kevin Wagner, who lives in Vermont of Sanders. He criticized Sanders for voting for the horrid and racist 1994 crime bill, for not doing anything over the fiscal cliff, that Sanders was defending Clinton rather than attacking her, and mocking Sanders for purporting to be a “bold, anti-establishment politician.” Wagner also argued that the assumption underling the Sanders’ campaign “is that people are giving up on the system, and that’s bad for some reason.” This is important to note because it makes it clear that Sanders is not running a radical campaign but wants to establish some version of the status quo that reaffirms people’s beliefs in “the system.” The article that he links to, by the horrid John Nichols, says that Sanders, giving his pitch to members of the Democratic National Committee, said that “my friends, the Republican Party did not win the midterm election in November: We lost that election. We lost because voter turnout was abysmally, embarrassingly low, and millions of working people, young people and people of color gave up on politics as usual and they stayed home. That’s a fact.” Nichols also quoted Sanders as saying that “Democrats will not retain the White House, will not regain the Senate or the US House, will not be successful in dozens of governor races across the country, unless we generate excitement and momentum and produce a huge voter turnout,” and that in this time and need, “we do not need more establishment politics or establishment economics,” but the system should be reinforced still, but in a different way.

Wagner went on and said much more. In other tweets, he said that Sanders believes he is a socialist because of social democracy in Scandinavia, which is true, that Sanders is a “good example of how our society has pretty much no idea what socialism is at this point” which I might agree with, that Sanders might not have integrity for not speaking up against “Shumlin’s austerity or betrayal of single-payer,” and that while Sanders isn’t “funded by elite interests…he works for a party that is” which isn’t seen as corrupt. Wagner goes on to say that Sanders didn’t condemn cuts after the time as part of the sequester, that leverage wasn’t used to stop such cuts which could have included “wider relief from sequestration cuts,” and that Sanders is saying he supports BLM but asks if he still stands behind “his strong support for pro-cop Lynch?” All of this makes it no surprise that he would say the following: “If you’re tired of hearing about Bernie Sanders, I can relate; imagine how tired *I* am as about the only person in VT who doesn’t love him.”

Wagner also brings up the fact that the Sanders campaign is saying that Sanders supports “humane” animal agriculture, which he isn’t convinced by. The reason is, in part, as he argues, Sanders “cosponsored the Egg Products Inspection Act,” which turns out to be accurate, the same law that the Humane Society of the United States “negotiated w[ith] the egg industry to preempt stronger state laws.” Wagner also argues that ““humane” animal agriculture is at least a big a scam as “humanitarian intervention” which even those such as Noam Chomsky agree with, saying that “I don’t think we should have factory farming; the free-range business is mostly a joke.” For more on the inspection law, sources seemed to confirm, to some degree at least, what Wagner said. One article said that, in the view of Joe Miller, general counsel at Rose Acre Farms, HSUS caved big time, and that this “opens the doors to HSUS and allows them to get into the legislative process of regulating how animals are taken care of,” but that the United Egg Producers (UEP) didn’t cave into HSUS, but it was the other way around, by putting the “cages in place, put[ting]…them in law. That’s a huge cave in on HSUS’ part.” A post on the Humane Society website showed that industry and business were working together on such bipartisan legislation: “the Humane Society of the United States and the United Egg Producers applaud the introduction of S. 820 and H.R. 1731, the Egg Products Inspection Act Amendments of 2013” which would “ratify an agreement between the egg industry and animal welfare groups to improve the treatment of 280 million laying hens used in U.S. egg production, while providing a stable future for egg farmers.” Beyond this, other sites noted that even PETA in an e-mail action alert to donors, warned them that the amendments “could keep hens used by the egg industry confined to cages forever” and it is an “unlikely pairing” of the HSUS and the United Egg Producers “to make the Egg Products Inspection Act Amendments of 2012 a top legislative priority in Congress this year.” Such criticisms aren’t a surprise considering those who argue against the rotten egg bill, as some call it.

There were other criticisms of Sanders as well. Abby Martin asked “why doesn’t @BernieSanders understand that denouncing US corporatism means little without confronting US militarism?” without criticizing what Cohen had to say or responding to any comments on her tweet as of yet. Others argued that Sanders “boasts abt not voting 4 the wars, but neglects 2 mention that he voted 2 fund them,” that he may be the only “presidential candidate ever to lose the black vote because his stans harass and annoy black folk on Twitter,” that he “reassured [people that he]…will murder just the deserving people with his drones,” and that he “also voted to extradite Assata Shakur from Cuba, to have her punished her on U.S soil.” While I could include other criticisms, from those ranging from Murray Bookchin to others, I’ll put that in a footnote. [11]

Conclusion

There isn’t much I can say in conclusion to this article. But what I can say is that Sanders is not who he may seem on the surface. Unless people realize this, then they will be duped into supporting a politician who supposedly cares about the “middle class” and the average American worker. I’m not saying that people should vote for Hillary Clinton or a Republican, rather I’m saying that people should become politically conscious and realize that the hope of Sanders is an illusion. If people don’t realize this, then when Sanders endorses Clinton for the Democratic nomination, which seems evident, then people will be disillusioned, might not want to participate in politics and will lead to greater apathy.

Notes:

[1] I can’t tell what the audience member says before “you’ve sold out” but if anyone can help with that, that would be great.

[2] Harman, Chris. A People’s History of the World. pp. 600-1.

[3] Ibid, 601.

[4] Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States, 660.

[5] Ibid, 661.

[6] Chomsky, Noam. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. 171.

[7] Chomsky, Noam. 9/11. 91.

[8] See the Bloomberg News article titled “Six Yemenis Released From Guantanamo Bay, Sent to Oman,” June 13, 2015.

[9] See articles in CounterPunch (see here, here, here, here) and elsewhere (see here, here, and here).

[10] Some have said that Sanders “suffers from a disease called color blindness” and others have said that Sanders’s reluctance to “acknowledge the color line may not be solely a product of myopia or electoral exigencies. It could reflect his socialist ideology.” I don’t think it reflects such an ideology but rather his focus on wealth and income inequality over anything else rather than his non-existent socialism.

[11] Criticisms from Murray Bookchin on Bernie Sanders are here, here (response to Bookchin), and here (his response back to the response). Other articles include one which focused on those who worked for the wife of Bernie Sanders which some see as “extremely dictatorial” and others as just managerial, an article titled “Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week,” and this article.

https://bhermannview.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/the-reality-of-professed-progressive-bernie-sanders/

Beware of (Colonel) Sanders
Posted on June 12, 2015 by bhermannview
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Building off my previous article, I thought it would be good to write another article about Bernie Sanders in order to continue the conversation.



I start with a story from an person who interned with Bernie Sanders, Kristen Martin, who writes about her experience in Socialist Worker. Martin tells an interesting story, saying that Sanders is “widely beloved by his constituents” but that “despite Sanders’ progressive rhetoric…Bernie for President will only serve to pull dedicated activists out of movement work, away from building an independent alternative, and into the Democratic Party machine.” She continues on, saying that that in the summer of 2012, when she interned for Sanders, there was the fight over the basing of the F-35s, and most of the time, concerns of his constituents were “dismissed as unserious by office staff” as coming from “people [that] just really don’t get it.” Martin also writes that not only was “Sanders’ support for the basing of the F-35s was critical to the project’s eventual success” and that she found herself protesting her own “boss at a Vermont Democratic Party fundraiser…and putting my job on the line.” In retrospect, she writes that if she had done her research she would have found that Sanders had voted numerous times for the budget of the US military, weapons going to Israel, and activists she knew “being thrown out of Sanders’ office for protesting his support of the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia.” Martin ends her article by saying that “Bernie does not stand on the side of the oppressed or exploited on principle, but only when it falls in line with his political project” but rather that “we must engage with those who are pulled to Sanders’ message and offer them a much broader vision for the U.S. left…[a left] that fights on its own terms for working-class revolution.” She ends her article with a boom:

“Ultimately, neither Sanders nor any other politician can lead us to the alternate society we fight for. We must build it for ourselves. It turns out that Sanders does have a picture of Eugene Debs in his office–though one can only imagine what Debs would have to say to Bernie today.”

Beyond this article there was an article by Paul Fleckenstein, also in Socialist Worker, that criticizes Sanders. What Fleckenstein writes goes beyond what Martin wrote, as he notes that: in 1985 Sanders partnered with developers to champion “a seven-story hotel and 300 mostly upscale condominiums” which was defeated by committed activists; he supported “one Democratic presidential candidate after another, starting [with] Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980” and Walter Mondale in 1984; and by the 1990s he was “backed by Vermont’s Democratic Party establishment.” [1] He continues on, noting that Sanders only “made calls to management in support of the drivers’ demands” after union members and committed activists “organized a strong strike that won widespread public support” last year; that he was silent as the Governor of Vermont, Peter Shumilin, pushed through a budget that “cuts programs for the most vulnerable, undermines environmental protections and eliminates of hundreds of union jobs through layoffs and early retirement;” he has “consistently voted to restrict visas for skilled workers to come into the U.S.;” and that his populism “puts him more in alliance with a wing of U.S. capital that seeks advantages through trade and investment restrictions, not the international working class.” [2] Fleckenstein continues, writing that Sanders not only voted for the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act in 1994 which sent “billions of dollars to states to beef up local police forces and prisons, and that expanded the federal death penalty,” but he said recently that anti-racist issues weren’t his “my cup of tea,” and he said that police had “a very, very difficult job,”along with voting for AUMF in 2001, and supported the decade of sanctions and military blockade against Iraq. [3] He continues by noting that Sanders’s votes show support for “the NATO war in ex-Yugoslavia in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and war budgets to finance the occupation of Iraq” and he “targets the billionaire Koch brothers, the Republicans and climate-change deniers–but barely mentions the equally culpable role of the Democratic Party.” [4] Fleckenstein concludes by saying that:

“Sanders’ history shows what happens when you accept the restrictions and limitations that come with “political realism.” The lesson of history is that radicals who attempt to change the system from the inside end up changed themselves…What the struggles for social change need today is not a liberal outsider running a long-shot campaign in the Democratic presidential primaries, but a clear break from the Democrats on the basis of a left-wing political alternative…In this election, like past ones, the place for radicals is building any independent challenges to the two parties of the status quo.”

I could go on and go into other criticisms of Sanders in Socialist Worker but I won’t. Instead, its best to bring in some of my own analysis. [5] This starts by looking at Bernie Sanders’s record on war and military intervention. Its not comprehensive, but it includes six of the major conflicts since the 1990s and 2000s (Iraq Wars in 1990, 2003, 2014; war in Libya (2011); war in Afghanistan; war in Kosovo). [6]

record

This record doesn’t really prove much of anything except that Sanders supported wars that have resulted in the deaths of over 27,000 people, at minimum, [7] along with supposedly 6,000-10,000 ISIS fighters. [8] And that’s horrible because even though he opposed other wars, this proves that he isn’t truly antiwar but supports wars when it seems that it is either in his interest or other interested parties.

To go further, yesterday I tabulated his votes for military budgets over the years. [9] In the below chart, the blue colored sections indicate a Democratic-controlled Congress, and grey colored sections indicate a Republican-controlled Congress:

record2

This chart shows that during the 1990s, Sanders voted against military budgets six times and for it one time. However, if the vote where the bill was passed without objection is included in the mix as an effective “yes” vote (he could have raised an objection), then it comes to five votes against military budgets in the 1990s, and two votes for military budgets. This may make some think he was a peacenik or something, but you also have to look at the votes in the 2000s as well. Of the sixteen votes on military budgets in the 2000s, Sanders voted against eight of them, and voted for five of them. If the unanimous consent on NDAA 2010, NDAA 2011, and NDAA 2014 is put as a “yes” vote, then that means Sanders’s “yays” and “nays” on military budgets are effectively tied. If you add the effective “yes” votes and the other votes together, from the 1990s to the present, it means that Sanders voted against fourteen military budgets and for ten military budgets. This doesn’t cast Sander’s as a peacenik, but it rather casts him as a strategic voter, and it shows that he is ok with spending on the war machine, but not at others. This is explained more in detail in my post titled “Bernie Sanders and military budgets.”

Also, of importance is comparing these votes on the passage of the bill to votes on conference reports. [10] Here’s a chart to start that off.

record3

This chart doesn’t prove much other than that Sanders switched his vote from “Yes” to “No” three times in the votes for NDAA 1993, NDAA 2013, and NDAA 2015. Otherwise, the vote he made on the passage of the bill and conference report remained the same. If you use the votes on the conference reports as the final vote, it is clear that Sanders may have ultimately voted against, if you exclude the voice vote and “no vote,” fourteen military spending bills, but he voted, but the broadest measure, seven military spending bills. Of those bills, it means that Sanders voted for $4.185 trillion dollars in military funding, if you use these numbers. If that is minimized to only “yes” votes, that still means that Sanders voted for $2.77 trillion dollars in military funding.

If the smaller number, $2.77 trillion dollars, is used, it along could pay the salaries of 3,240,000 workers, including 100,000 of each of the following occupations: physician assistants, high school teachers, elementary school/kindergarten teachers, librarians, airline pilots, writers & authors, auto mechanics, special education teachers, barbers & hairdressers, camp counselors, post-secondary teachers, telcom technicians, microbiologists, comic book artists, environmental scientists, editors, retail workers, registered nurses, agricultural workers, postal workers, musicians (who would earn 105,120 a year and the average pay is $24 an hour), nutritionists, bakers, carpenters, electricians, composers, museum workers, cooks, metal & plastic workers, welders, cutters, solderers, & brazers, preschool teachers, school & career counselors, and 10,000 of the following occupations: physicians, geoscientists, veterinarians, and geographers. This would leave over 2.6 trillion left to use, which could be used to pay for free college tuition for everyone in the country ($40 billion), to buy out student loan debt ($1.2 trillion), to double the incomes of those in poverty ($347 billion), if we provided comprehensive healthcare to everyone ($300 billion), fundamentally reform and double the foreign aid budget of the United States (another $50.3 billion), funding the building of worker co-ops and cooperative workplaces ($100 billion), fund national referendums on pertinent national issues ($100 billion), build 10,000 houses (each costing $167,539), pay off a part of existing credit card debt of Americans ($200 billion), and have over $184 billion left over to use for good social ends, whatever those may be (I just can’t think of any other good ideas). In summary, regardless of whether you use the broader or narrow definitions of what Sanders voted for, it is clear that what Sanders voted for, in terms of military budgets, is outrageous, and should be concerning for any person who is disturbed about the current level of military spending of the United States.

For further investigation, I looked at votes on 30 important pieces of legislation over the years. [11] Here’s what I came up with:

corrected2

While this record shows that he voted against nineteen horrible bills, there is much more than that. [12] It shows that not only did he vote against the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which regulated handguns (does he care about gun control?), but he voted FOR/Said Yes (in the case of unanimous consent by the Senate or “no objection” declarations by the House) a number of pieces of legislation*:

The Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a Clinton-era crime bill, which expands the death penalty “to cover about 60 offenses,” increases penalties for “gang members” and suffering immigrants, puts in place a three-strikes rule for some of those who have “three or more convictions for serious violent felonies or drug trafficking crimes,” and authorizes the prosecution of certain people under 13 when charged with “certain serious violent crimes,” even though it also bans specific types of “military-style assault weapons” from being manufactured and prohibits sale of firearms to certain people. The law also puts in place the registration of sex offenders which has been broadly criticized, it increases money for “border control,” deportation of immigrants, money for states to incarcerate undocumented immigrants, and so on.
The “Mickey Mouse” Protection Act, officially called the Copyright Term Extension Act, which was even described by the moderate magazine, The American Conservative, as extending the copyright of Mickey Mouse “for another twenty years, and perhaps indefinitely if future corporate lobbying efforts bore similar fruit.” This law, which serves as part of the modern copyright regime in the US, in more general terms extended the copyright term for another twenty years which means that it will be longer before a work goes into the public domain, which not surprisingly didn’t make librarians happy.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which another part of the modern US copyright regime, it tilts the balance toward copyright holders by imposing “rules prohibiting the circumvention of technological protection measures,” setting limits on liability for copyright infringement “for online service providers (OSPs),” expands “an existing exemption for making copies of computer programs,” and so on. Basically this law, which implements a international treaty, also makes it illegal for people to circumvent measures copyright holders put on their work to prevent copying like DRM even if there isn’t copyright infringement, which has rightly angered people.
The Iraq “Liberation” Act which supposedly called for the US to support the opposition in that country, but it really dedicated the US to regime change in Iraq which meant Saddam Hussein would be overthrown with the help of US funds to undermine his regime. While Saddam was horrible in many ways, this law clearly meant that the US was wanting to undermine a government for what was seemingly imperialist goals since this law set the stage for the 2003 war in Iraq. This is indicated by the fact that the Republican Platform declared that: “we support the full implementation of the Iraq Liberation Act, which should be regarded as a starting point in a comprehensive plan for the removal of Saddam Hussein and the restoration of international inspections in collaboration with his successor.”
The Commodity Futures “Modernization” Act in investment-speak made it legal “for traders to trade single stock futures even though they were being traded in other parts of the world” but in more plain language the law created an “unregulated market in derivatives and swaps,” which while it didn’t “cause the economic downturn itself, it was a propellant of the crisis, accelerating the collapses of major financial companies across the globe” as argued by the Sunlight Foundation.
The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 expands the “intelligence” apparatus by creating the position of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center, the National Counterprofileration Center, National Intelligence Centers, and the Joint Intelligence Community Council, while expanding criminal punishment for those accused of terrorism.
Sequester Act #2 (American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012) raised certain taxes on those who had over 400,000/500,000 but payroll taxes were increased, numerous corporate tax breaks were extended, tax deductions and credits for those earning $250,000 (for individuals) and $300,000 (for couples) were reinstated, and the sequester was bumped two months forward.
The Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2015 which increases funding for the Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (anti-immigrant to the core), and the U.S. Secret Service along funding the TSA, FEMA, Coast Guard, and the creepily-named “Office of Biometric Identity Management.”
The US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014 which declares that the US is a “major strategic partner” of Israel and that: the US military will give weapons to Israel; that the US and Israel should have “cyber cooperation;” that the US should help Israel pay for its magical missile systems; and so on.
What you think of these votes is up to you. But to me these votes indicate that Sanders is not what he seems to be at first glance.

There is more beyond looking at the votes of Bernie Sanders. And this doesn’t include the support of Bill McKibben, who heads 350.org, a nonprofit which heavily favors the Democratic Party, Chris Hayes acting horrible again, or saying that Sanders doesn’t use rhetoric but that Hillary Clinton does (not true, both use rhetoric). Rather it is that Sanders, despite his prized “independent” status, is being supported by the Democratic National Committee, which sent out pro-Sanders spam recently. Some might think that this, and his caucusing with the Democrats would cause radicals to step away from Sanders. The Young Democratic Socialists (YDS) did quite the opposite, engaging in full support of Sanders:


This may confuse some people since the YDS claims to fight for “democratic socialism” but it isn’t much of a surprise since their parent organization, the Democratic Socialists of America or DSA argued that they are not a separate party from the Democrats, and they work with movements to “strengthen the party’s left wing” and that they will “continue to support progressives who have a real chance at winning elections, which usually means left-wing Democrats” and pathetically support third-party efforts “at some point in the future [when]…an alternative national party will be viable.” As many radicals and those critical of the Democratic Party will attest, this is a losing battle, and it makes the DSA almost an organ of the Democratic Party, a “leftist” one, if that even exists. Additionally, it means the DSA doesn’t want to support third-party efforts, which is disturbing because it means the status quo of just two parties will remain in place. So much for their vision of democratic socialism, which they argue is a “vision of a more free, democratic and humane society.”

Moving on, Sanders recently posed a weird plan to pay for war funding: make the Pentagon pay for it. This supposed “war tax” might sound nice as it would require the raising of new revenues to pay for wars. However, not only does this only cover “overseas contingency operations” which some have called the “new name for the war on terror” but Congress will just raise more money. They wanted to do that under the secretive NSC-68, which suggested that “the Government increase taxes and reduce other expenditures” in order to pay for increased military spending, so why wouldn’t they do that now? I could see the wars still continuing on with Congress just raising money for it. Literally, this “war tax” pushed by a supposed “military community hero” doesn’t do anything to stop war. In fact, one cold say that it might even encourage it.

Finally there is the case of Sanders sorta stealing a quote from Hugo Chavez. While Chavez took the quote from protesters on the streets, he said it in a speech, and Sanders said something that was inspired by the quote but WITHOUT attribution. Some annoyed liberals got mad at me for making this argument, but I can care less. Sanders said his quote, “if the environment were a bank, it would have been saved by now” in the context of slamming Republicans for climate inaction. But Chavez’s quote was from a speech during the Copenhagen summit in 2009, which was broadly anti-capitalist (bolding is my emphasis):

“…Let’s not change the climate, let’s change the system! And consequently we will begin to save the planet. Capitalism is a destructive development model that is putting an end to life; it threatens to put a definitive end to the human species. And another slogan calls for reflection. It is very in tune with the banking crisis that swept the world and still affects it, and of how the rich northern countries gave aid to bankers and the big banks. The U.S . alone gave, well, I lost the figure, but it is astronomical, to save the banks.They say in the streets the following: If the climate were a bank it would have been saved already….And I think that’s true. If the climate were one of the biggest capitalist banks, the rich governments would have saved it…the United States has the machinery to make money, to make dollars, and has saved, well, they believe they have saved the banks and the capitalist system.”

In my view, the use of the quote by Sanders is wrong because Chavez was using it in a way that was anti-capitalist (and anti-imperialist one could say) while Sanders was using it as a partisan point to bash Republicans. That’s not right.

That’s all I have to say for now. I look forward to hearing your comments.

Notes

*In the original article I wrote that Sanders voted for the Export-Import Bank Reauthorization Act of 2012 which reauthorized the Export-Import Bank until this year which was “even more surprising that Sanders would vote for this and not be outraged at how it helps big corporations.” I have since learned that was incorrect since he voted against this law. This sentence has been removed so the article is fully correct. In the additional article I also noted that Sanders voted for the No Child Left Behind Act, which was called the “most sweeping education-reform legislation since 1965” by PBS and was described by SourceWatch as forcing states to “give students annual standardized tests and show improvement…[with] all students are expected to be “proficient” and that states “that fail to meet benchmarks are penalized through a variety of methods, including a reduction in federal education funding.” Some critics say that while the law “pretends to champion disadvantaged children, the law is likely to condemn those students to educational poverty, narrowing goals to focus upon basic reading and math skills.” However, I have since found out that Sanders did not vote for this law in the final vote after it had gone through the conference report process. He did vote for the law on the vote for passage but not when it was being voted on for passage after the conference report.

[1] In sourcing this, Fleckenstein cites an article in a Vermont paper on the subject, and a video on facebook of the protest in 1985. Also see Mother Jones, Questia, and a quote from Howard Dean.

[2] For this Fleckenstein cites articles in Socialist Worker (see here, here, here, here, and here), along with voting records (see here and here)

[3] Fleckenstein cites in this case VoteSmart, an interview with NPR, an interview on CNN, and other sources (see here and here)

[4] Fleckenstein cites numerous sources including AlterNet, and Socialist Worker.

[5] For other criticisms see “What should the left say about Sanders?“, “Sanders dodge on Black Lives Matter“, “Supporting Sanders sends the wrong message,” and “Sanders isn’t a left alternative.” For articles on the F-35 planes being built, see “Putting planes before people” and “Vermont says no to the F-35.”

[6] For this chart, I used numerous sources including the Wikipedia entry on the 1991 bill authorizing war in Iraq, voting records of the House of Representatives (see here, here, and here), Sanders’s own website (see here and here) and other sources (see here and here).

[7] This counts the death of at minimum, 26,000 civilians, in the war in Afghanistan, 3,489 soldiers in that same war, between 489 and 523 civilians killed by NATO in Kosovo (that’s a low estimate) along with the death of two who died in the crash of an Apache Helicopter, 1,500 insurgents purportedly killed, between 1,031 and 5,000 Yugoslavian soldiers killed, and three Chinese soldiers killed (for the claims of the last two numbers see here). Not included is the over 8,600 who died during the war in Kosovo itself, which NATO was involved in

[8] In January of this year, the US ambassador claimed that 6,000 ISIS fighters were killed but in a recent ABC News interview, which was clearly horrid propaganda, military officials said that 10,000 ISIS fighters “sounds like a good number.”

[9] Sources for this information include Senate voting records (see NDAA 2015, NDAA 2014, NDAA 2013, NDAA 2012, NDAA 2009, NDAA 2008), House voting records (see NDAA 2007, NDAA 2006, NDAA 2005, NDAA 2004, NDAA 2003, NDAA 2002, NDAA 2001, NDAA 2000, NDAA 1999, NDAA 1998, NDAA 1997, NDAA 1995, NDAA 1994, NDAA 1993, NDAA 1992), and actions on certain bills (see NDAA 2015, NDAA 2015 (again), NDAA 2011, NDAA 2011 (again), NDAA 2010, NDAA 1996). These records do NOT concern votes on conference reports, like this one, but on the passage of the bill itself.

[10] Sources include voting records/info. on NDAA 1992, NDAA 1993, NDAA 1994, NDAA 1995, NDAA 1996, NDAA 1997, NDAA 1998, NDAA 1999, NDAA 2000, NDAA 2001, NDAA 2002, NDAA 2003, NDAA 2004, NDAA 2005, NDAA 2006, NDAA 2007, NDAA 2008, NDAA 2009, NDAA 2010, NDAA 2011, NDAA 2012, NDAA 2013, NDAA 2014, NDAA 2015,

[11] I used House voting records (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here), Senate voting records (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), and specifics about certain bills (see here, here, here, here, here, here).

[12] He voted against, according to the chart, the NAFTA Implementation Act, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Antiterrorism and effective death penalty Act of 1996, Defense of Marriage Act, Trade Act (Fast Track), Bush Tax Cuts, Bush Tax Cuts II, Homeland Security Act, USA “Patriot” Act, “Protect” America Act of 2007, Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, Reauthorizing Patriot Act provisions in 2006, Bailout of 2006, US-Korea Trade Agreement, US-Columbia Trade Agreement, US-Panama Trade Agreement, Sequester Act #1 (Budget Control Act of 2011), and the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2015.


https://bhermannview.wordpress.com/2015/06/12/beware-of-colonel-sanders/#comments

Bernie Sanders backs Obama on Syria war
By Patrick Martin
7 October 2015

In a statement to the Washington Post Saturday, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders declared his support for the Obama administration’s current policy of bombing Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and opposed, for now, the more aggressive intervention proposed by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, his main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Clinton issued a statement Thursday calling for the unilateral imposition of an American no-fly zone in Syria, directed at both the rudimentary air force of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the Russian warplanes that last week began airstrikes against US-backed Islamist forces fighting the Assad government.

“We must be very careful about not making a complex and dangerous situation in Syria even worse,” Sanders said. “I support President Obama’s efforts to combat ISIS in Syria while at the same time supporting those in that country trying to remove the brutal dictatorship of Bashar Assad.”

He added, “I oppose, at this point, a unilateral American no-fly zone in Syria, which could get us more deeply involved in that horrible civil war and lead to a never-ending U.S. entanglement in that region.”

In directly aligning himself with the foreign policy of the Obama White House in the Middle East, Sanders underscored that he is not running as an “antiwar” candidate or offering any alternative to the policy of increasing military aggression by American imperialism around the world.

His reference to opposing a no-fly zone “at this point” reflected carefully chosen language. He was leaving open the option for supporting such a measure, which could quickly develop into a direct conflict between the US and Russia, some time in the future.

He did not even refer to Clinton’s position, suggesting that he wanted to downplay the differences over foreign policy with the Democratic frontrunner.

These statements are in line with previous comments from Sanders. “The entire world has got to stand up to Putin,” he said last year, amidst an aggressive campaign against Russia spearheaded by the Obama administration.

In late August, as he began to surge in the polls, Sanders was asked whether Iran or Russia should see his previous record as an indication that he would hesitate to use force as president. “Well, I think they would be making a very, very big mistake,” he replied. “I believe that the United States should have the strongest military in the world.”

The latest statement of Sanders on war in Iraq and Syria came only hours before a huge rally in Boston, Massachusetts, where he addressed a crowd estimated at 25,000 for more than an hour without making the slightest appeal to widespread antiwar sentiment.

Until recently, Sanders had not commented on any foreign policy question, confining his campaign entirely to domestic issues, particularly the growth of economic inequality.

His web site still makes no explicit reference to the Obama administration’s year-long military campaign in Iraq and Syria, except to describe ISIS as one of the “serious threats” facing the United States, adding, “Senator Sanders is committed to keeping America safe, and pursuing those who would do Americans harm.”

The site makes no reference whatsoever to one of the principal weapons of the Obama administration, drone warfare, a clear indication that Sanders supports a continuation of the policy of unrestricted assassination of individuals targeted by the White House for extermination.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/10/07/sand-o07.html

Sanders pledges his campaign to save Democratic Party
By Patrick Martin
31 August 2015

In a speech Friday afternoon to the Democratic National Committee, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders portrayed his presidential campaign as the only way to rebuild popular support for the Democratic Party and save its electoral prospects in 2016.

It was the first time that Sanders, a nominal independent through a quarter century in Congress, has appeared before the leading body of the Democratic Party. The occasion was a summer session of the DNC addressed by four of the five declared candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Sanders pointed to the indications of popular support for his campaign, including large crowds at rallies, hundreds of thousands of volunteers and small contributors, and especially “many young people who have not previously been involved in the political process.”

Then he told his audience, consisting largely of members of the DNC and elected officials, that they needed this infusion of political energy to revive the political fortunes of the Democratic Party.

“The Republicans did not win the mid-term election in November,” he argued. “The Democrats lost that election because voter turnout was abysmally low, and millions of working people, minorities and young people gave up on ‘politics as usual’ and stayed home.”

This is certainly true: the right-wing policies of the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress, on war, government spying, cuts in social programs, and attacks on the jobs and living standards of working people, dashed the illusions of those who had turned out to elect Obama in 2008 and re-elect him in 2012.

Sanders continued: “In my view, Democrats will not retain the White House, will not regain the Senate, will not gain the House and will not be successful in dozens of governor’s races unless we run a campaign which generates excitement and momentum and which produces a huge voter turnout. With all due respect, and I do not mean to insult anyone here, that will not happen with politics as usual. The same old, same old will not be successful.”

Referring to the growth of economic inequality, he declared, “We need a political movement which is prepared to take on the billionaire class and create a government which represents all Americans, and not just corporate America and wealthy campaign donors. In other words, we need a movement which takes on the economic and political establishment, not one which is part of it.”

Given that Sanders was addressing an audience consisting entirely of the political establishment, or at least its Democratic half, political operatives beholden to and controlled by “corporate America and wealthy campaign donors,” his appeal might seem peculiarly misdirected.

Sanders was not, however, suggesting an actual change in course by the Democratic Party. He was merely proposing that the Democrats adopt a different kind of political packaging to better conceal the right-wing character of this corrupt, pro-corporate organization, and he offered himself as the packager-in-chief. How else to interpret his suggestion that the Democratic Party embrace a “political revolution” against a political establishment of which it is a core institution?

Sanders’ concern about the declining support for the Democratic Party is not motivated solely by worries over its electoral prospects in 2016. The enormous pent-up anger among workers and young people threatens to develop independently of and in opposition to the entire political establishment and the capitalist system that it defends. Sanders and his supporters among the organizations that orbit around the Democratic Party are seeking to prevent this from taking place.

The completely phony character of Sanders’s populist rhetoric was underscored by his appearance Sunday on the ABC News interview program “This Week.” He was asked by host Martha Raddatz about his silence on issues of foreign policy and national security, for which he had only the lame explanation that his campaign has only been up and running for three and a half months.

Raddatz noted that Sanders had voted against the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2002 Iraq war resolution, but for the 2001 resolution after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which the Bush administration used as authorization for the US attack on Afghanistan. She then asked him, “Is that only when we’re attacked?”

Sanders answered, “No, not at all. You know, I think using our military is an option, obviously, that we will always have under certain circumstances, but it is the last option.”

He added that in the case of the war with Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, “the United States cannot do it alone. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has the third largest military budget in the entire world. They’re going to have to get in and take on ISIS as well as other countries in that region. The United States should be supportive. We should be working with other countries. But the United States cannot always be the only country involved in these wars.”

In other words, the civil war that is destroying Iraq and Syria should be expanded through the involvement of other Arab countries, especially the ultra-reactionary Saudi monarchy, whose medieval policies include the persecution of religious minorities, frequent public beheadings of individuals judged to have violated Islamic law, and complete suppression of democratic rights.
Raddatz then asked Sanders whether Iran or Russia might take his record as indicating a reluctance to use force. The candidate replied, “Well, I think they would be making a very, very big mistake. I believe that the United States should have the strongest military in the world.”

He went on, in response to a further question about the use of drone-fired missiles, to say, “You can argue that there are times and places where drone attacks have been effective, there are times and places where they have been absolutely counter-effective and have caused more problems than they have solved. When you kill innocent people, what the end result is that people in the region become anti-American who otherwise would not have been. So, I think we have to use drones very, very selectively and effectively.”

These remarks are the most extensive comments that Sanders has made on the military operations of American imperialism since he launched his campaign to become its “commander-in-chief.” The Democratic candidate was seeking to reassure the military-intelligence apparatus that a President Sanders would be just as much its puppet as Barack Obama. ABC News was in no doubt about the significance of the interview, headlining its report, “Sanders Says He Would Be Prepared to Use Military Force.”

This clear declaration of loyalty to American imperialism and its machinery of endless warfare makes nonsense of all Sanders’s populist rhetoric about taking on Wall Street and the billionaire class. His declaration of support for the interests of the American ruling class abroad is at the same time a declaration of support for its policies within the United States.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/08/31/sand-a31.html

Texans defend Sierra Blanca community against nuclear waste disposal, 1996-1998
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Anti-Nuclear Power Movement (1960s-1980s)

In 1991, the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority (TLLRWDA) began searching for a disposal site for dangerous toxic waste in the Hudspeth County area. According to the 1983 La Paz agreement, Hudspeth County falls in a no-contamination zone surrounding the Mexican border. Regardless, the TLLRWDA selected Sierra Blanca, a small low-income town in an environmentally fragile region.
In 1992, local Bill Addington responded by forming the foundation “Save Sierra Blanca,” which opposed the establishment of the disposal site and rallied support among the primarily Spanish speaking population, who did not have access to information about disposal. In 1992, Texas agreed to dispose of nuclear waste from Maine and Vermont in exchange for $55 million, which caused outrage in the local group. The group then allied with the Nuclear Responsibility Network to form the Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund (SBLDF).
On 5 June 1996, the SBLDF dispatched five hundred children from Acuna, Mexico, along with their parents, mayor, and city council members to Austin to protest the establishment of the disposal site to Governor George W. Bush. The campaigners marched, and conducted a sit-in and a vigil.
By August 1997, seven hundred people in Sierra Blanca (almost everyone in the town) signed a petition against the establishment of the waste site. Twenty other Texas counties, as well as ten cities and two Mexican states had passed resolutions against the disposal of nuclear waste in their jurisdictions as well. Addington and his supporters led a demonstration at an El Paso community college, competing for attention with a rally for George W. Bush. At the demonstration, the SBLDF members carried banners, while Addington and several others also donned costumes with nuclear symbols on them.
The protest gained enough media attention to attract the notice of Merco Joint Venture, the corporation who the TLLRWDA had contracted for disposal. Merco retaliated against the SBLDF by burning Addington’s lumberyard, submitting his property to surveillance, and even at one point threatening his life.
On 16 September 1997, the U.S. House of Representatives stopped the Texas-Vermont-Maine compact in a vote of 243 to 176. This marked the first time nuclear disposal had even been debated as a possibly negative solution. Governor Bush wanted the compact reintroduced; his forces combined with that of the nuclear lobby made sure it was passed when next voted on in 1997.
When President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, Addington and allies went directly to the media. Sources such as the Washington Post and the New York Times reported on the “environmental racism” of the Sierra Blanca case. 60% of the town’s residents were poor and Latino, yet the compact and the TLLRWDA’s environmental report had not been translated into Spanish and distributed. The state department had already been receiving pressure from the Mexican government, and the negative American press did not help.
On 16 April 1998, several months before the Texas Radioactive Waste Bill was set to go before Congress, Mexico’s Green Ecologist Party announced that several of its members and the Mexico City councilman Jose Luis Rodriguez began a 24-day hunger strike. They spent the duration of the strike on the bridge between Juarez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas. They carried letters of protest from Mexican Congressmen, which pointed to the violation of the La Paz Treaty.
On 11 May 1998, twelve Sierra Club activists met with Vermont Representative Bernie Sanders, but he would not denounce the bill. In response, the campaigners marched on Governor George W. Bush’s home in protest of the upcoming bill. There was no response from the governor.
On 26 July 1998, three hundred Mexicans and Americans blockaded the Juarez-El Paso bridge in protest of the bill. That same month, the SBLDF sent two representatives to an environmental rally in Vermont to speak on behalf of their community. Campaigners from Vermont were so inspired by the SBLDF representatives that they staged protests at a nearby nuclear plant. The Citizens’ Awareness Center and the Nuclear Information and Resource Center supported and organized these protests.
Although the bill passed on 20 September 1998, Texas officials denied the necessary licensing for the establishment of a disposal site in the Sierra Blanca region due to vast social pressure ignited by the SBLDF and their partners. The project was officially shut down by the State of Texas on 22 October 1998.

Research Notes
Sources:
"Bill Addington Interview." Interview by David Todd and David Weisman. Briscoe Center for American History. University at Texas, Austin, 28 Mar. 2001. 25 Feb. 2011. <http://glifos.cah.utexas.edu/index.php/TexLegacyProj:Addington_bill_2136>.
"Environmental Justice Case Study: The Struggle for Sierra Blanca, Texas Against A Low-Level Nuclear Waste Site." University of Michigan. 25 Feb. 2011. <http://www.umich.edu/~snre492/blanca.html>.

"Proposed Sierra Blanca Radioactive Waste Dump Fact Sheet." 25 Feb. 2011. <http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/aware/blanca-fact-sheet.pdf>.

Schafran, Alex. "Sierra Blancans Fight Toxic Dump in Border Town." Network News: National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR). 25 Feb. 2011. <http://www.nnirr.org/news/archived_netnews/sierrablanca.htm>.

"Texas Regulators Vote Against Sierra Blanca Nuke Waste Dump." Livestock Weekly. 25 Feb. 2011. <http://www.livestockweekly.com/papers/98/10/29/whlnukedump.asp>.

Tokar, Brian, and Gary Oliver. "The Texas-Vermont-Maine Nuclear Dump: Bringing Environmental Racism Home." ZMagazine. 25 Feb. 2011. <http://www.zcommunications.org/the-texas-vermont-maine-nuclear-dump-by-brian-tokar-and-gary-oliver>.

Name of researcher, and date dd/mm/yyyy:
Lydia Bailey and Rebecca Contreras, 20/4/2013 and 10/5/2011

http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/texans-defend-sierra-blanca-community-against-nuclear-waste-disposal-1996-1998

The Texas-Vermont-Maine Nuclear Dump: Bringing Environmental Racism Home

Brian Tokar and Gary Oliver

The Green Mountains of Vermont evoke an image of rolling hills as far as the eye can see, snow-covered mountain peaks and sparkling clear rivers, rough hewn farmsteads and a unique variety of down-home progressive politics. In April of 1994, the Vermont legislature passed a bill establishing an unprecedented compact with the states of Maine and Texas to dispose of nuclear waste. Now that this nuclear deal has passed the U.S. Congress and been signed into law by President Clinton, “low level” nuclear waste from the three states — actually all of the nuclear waste except for spent nuclear reactor fuel rods — can be shipped across the nation’s highways to the town of Sierra Blanca, Texas. Sierra Blanca is an impoverished, predominantly Mexican-American community less than 16 miles from the Mexican border.

A world away from the lush Green Mountains of Vermont there is a river, not all that large as rivers go in the wider world, but in this desert country it is called the Rio Grande. Thanks to an earlier war of expansion it forms a national boundary between a Third World nation and another Third World situated on the fringe of what is often called the most advanced country on earth. It rises in Colorado and passes through dammed lakes and pepper fields in New Mexico before it becomes the sewer for the city of Juárez and the obstacle that pilgrims seeking a better life must cross on their way to El Norte. For a time it stretches through planted fields, and then it turns southward, away from roads and towns into the great open spaces known as the Despoblado. This is part of the vast Chihuahua desert, and it is empty to those without appreciation for its life forms and for its scale. To others it is some of the most breathtaking country there is.

Harsh and delicate, this land is more demanding of its inhabitants than are many other places, and so fewer humans choose to live there; often moving to such a place, where poverty is common and where jobs are few, entails sacrifice or, at best, risk. Others come because low population and little industry have in the past meant clean air and water. It is a land that has attracted artists, like Donald Judd, and seekers, like Woody Guthrie and Ambrose Bierce. Like other once-isolated parts of the world, it is being swept up the schemes of faraway interests.

Texas governor George W. Bush and independent congressman Bernie Sanders both see it as a sacrifice zone.

This past August, Vermont activists were visited by a delegation of long-time antinuclear activists from West Texas, three of whom spent ten days touring Vermont and meeting with both activists and public officials. They testified at the State House, and before the State Nuclear Advisory Panel. They participated in a five day walk for the abolition of nuclear weapons, met with Rep. Sanders, one of the compact’s leading proponents, and spent a few days at an antinuclear activist camp in southern Vermont. On August 22, they were joined by two Sierra Blanca residents, who spoke at a large antinuclear rally in the southern Vermont town of Brattleboro. The rally, the camp, and a subsequent civil disobedience action at the gates of Vermont’s sole nuclear plant, were part of an effort by the regional Citizen’s Awareness Network and the D.C.-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service to launch a major new Nuclear Free New England Campaign, and rekindle some of the energies that made nuclear power such a powerful public issue in New England in the late 1970s and early eighties.

The Texans shared many years of experiences of fighting the Sierra Blanca nuclear dump, a struggle that has already lasted some fifteen years. Vermonters heard of numerous encounters with the nuclear industry and Governor Bush’s representatives. They were told about concrete test canisters that are already cracking, and of dramatic testimony presented in innumerable public gatherings against the proposed dump. We shared documentary evidence showing that all of the arguments put forward in favor of the dump are misleading and essentially fraudulent. We all gained a much clearer understanding of the politics of nuclear waste in the late 1990s, and the unseemly political maneuvers which have created this nuclear atrocity in our names.

The Vermont legislature’s 1994 compact vote followed several months of hearings in which a few Vermont towns agreed to consider a burial site for nuclear waste. The towns were rewarded handsomely for their initial interest and, not surprisingly, only the town of Vernon — “company town” for Vermont’s only nuclear plant — agreed to take the process any further. Vernon was deemed to be geologically unsuitable for nuclear waste burial, so the search for an alternative began. The Texas legislature had passed a bill authorizing the siting of a nuclear waste dump within an approximately 20 mile by 20 mile portion of arid Hudspeth County (see below) and was actively seeking customers. The “compact” approved by the Maine and Vermont legislatures commits the two states to each contributing some $27 million to the project, enough to cover most of Texas’ construction bill for the facility.

Twenty Texas counties and five Mexican states passed resolutions against the dump, and the Mexican Congress has repeatedly expressed its opposition, but public discussion of the nuclear compact in Vermont seemed limited to an occasional Letter to the Editor. This spring, however, a number of events helped re-energize the debate. On April 16th, a city councilor from the town of Juárez, Mexico, just across the Rio Grande from Sierra Blanca, began a 24 day hunger strike, which brought numerous letters of protest from Mexican officials to the planned nuclear dump. A number of Vermont activists once again began to take notice.

The Vermont chapter of the Sierra Club, in cooperation with activists from West Texas, gave the issue a high priority in its summer campaigns, due to the impending congressional vote. On May 1st, Texas activist and radio host Jim Hightower went to Burlington to speak at a major fundraiser for Bernie Sanders, who has played an especially vocal role in ushering the nuclear compact through Congress. Sierra Club members and others gathered outside the Sheraton Hotel to voice their objections to the Sierra Blanca dump and Vermont’s role in creating it. Hightower made his objections clear in his speech to hundreds of Sanders supporters inside.

On May 11th, about a dozen activists met with Sanders at his office. The delegation included two University of Vermont students who had just completed a thorough analysis of the scientific arguments in support of the Texas dump; they found numerous unanswered questions and more than a few outright falsehoods in the proponents’ arguments. Several participants in the meeting were astonished by the “independent” congressman’s vehement and unrelenting support for shipping nuclear waste 2400 miles to West Texas. It was the best site geologically, he claimed, much better than having nuclear waste scattered across the country, and besides, how dare we accuse Bernie Sanders of environmental racism? The August meeting with the Texas delegation featured Sanders at his most obstinate, insisting that he’d done the right thing and that he was no longer interested in the issue now that the compact bill had passed the House.

Nuclear Politics, Texas-Style

On July 29 in the U.S. House debate on the Texas-Maine-Vermont nuclear waste compact, Rep. Bernie Sanders, a sponsor of the bill, had argued that the compact and the dump site were unrelated issues. He also said that “the evidence is clear that Texas is the best place to get rid of this waste.” In an August meeting he told several of us that he is “confident that Texas will do the right thing” in siting the dump. Rep. Sanders has faith in the process as it is practiced in Texas.

Here’s a quick recap of that process. After eight years of being run out, legislated out, and litigated out of site after site, the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority (TLLRWDA) found itself in 1991 many millions of dollars down and still at square one. To its rescue that spring rode the Texas Legislature with HR 2665, which decreed that “notwithstanding any other law,” the site must be located within Hudspeth County and in an area “circumscribed on the north by 31 degrees north latitude, 15′ and 00″; on the south by 31 degrees north latitude, 00′ and 00″; on the east by 105 degrees longitude, 00′ and 00″; and on the west by 105 degrees longitude, 22′ and 30″.” This law, which drew a 370 square mile “box” around the town of Sierra Blanca, on the eastern side of the county, was the response of nuclear utility district legislators to the January decision in a state court throwing the Authority out of its previous site, on the western side of Hudspeth county, on the grounds that it had violated its own siting criteria by disregarding or misrepresenting geology and hydrology, among other things. The state officials cut a back room deal with El Paso County, the plaintiff — move the site farther east, and we won’t sue again.

By 1992 the Authority had selected the Faskin Ranch within the “box” and was taking steps to acquire it. Gayle Schroder, whose company owned the land, later told the San Antonio Express-News that the move surprised him, since at that time no state scientists had asked permission to set foot on the ranch, nor had they tested the land for fissures or faults, nor had they drilled test wells to check the groundwater. But they bought the 16,000 acre ranch (for a 440 acre dump — room for growth) anyway, and, a month after they announced their intent, another dumper, MERCO Joint Venture, appeared from nowhere to buy another Sierra Blanca ranch in order to meet their July deadline for providing a site for “beneficial use” land application of New York City’s urban industrial sewage sludge. NYC was under a court order to cease poisoning the ocean with the stuff, and New York law forbade such “beneficial use” application of the heavy metal-laden toxic on that state’s agricultural land, so it had hired haulers like MERCO to find places where protections were nonexistent or more pliant. The result: the largest sewage dump in the world, on 150 square miles of high Chihuahua desert, with a second such ranch currently filing for a similar registration. More polluters fouling the air and water make it tougher to determine specific blame, so dumps beget dumps.

With a site at last, the TLLRWDA set about to build a scientific argument for its already-determined location by commissioning studies and identifying “experts” to speak on its behalf. By 1996, when the draft license was issued by the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, the license application had swelled from these efforts into a 60,000 page, 28 volume document. A concerned citizen wanting to monitor or challenge the state’s case might be expected to need a considerable amount of time and expertise, especially if that citizen possessed limited or no fluency in English, the only language in which the document is available.

Sierra Blanca has a largely Mexican-American population, and the percentage of Spanish-speaking residents is high, as one might expect, along the entire length of the border. This is an area where colonias, communities without water and sewage facilities, are still constructed, where US companies build factories in Mexican border towns and house their managerial staff across the river, and where the US Government maintains an army, complete with checkpoints, a network of radar balloons, an electronic surveillance grid laid out over rough, sparsely populated terrain, and, sometimes, camouflaged troops hidden in the brush along footpaths where drug traffic is suspected. Such a patrol last year shot and killed Esequiel Hernández, a high school student herding his goats, in the county immediately downstream from the proposed nuclear dump site. Poverty and unemployment are high, and the seat of government in Austin is over 500 miles distant.

That the State of Texas had sought from the outset to find a community in which English is a second language is not even a matter of speculation; it was the advice given by two Texas A&M professors in their state-commissioned public opinion study in 1984, at the beginning of the state’s search for a likely site. The general public everywhere is going to oppose this dump, they found, and the more that people feel they know about the project, the higher their level of opposition is likely to be. “A preferred methodology may be to develop public information campaigns targeted at special populations. One population that might benefit from such a campaign is Hispanics, particularly those with little formal education and low incomes. This group is the least informed of all segments of the population. The Authority should be aware, however, that increasing the level of knowledge of Hispanics may simply increase opposition to the site, inasmuch as we have discovered a strong relationship in the total sample between increased perceived knowledge and increased opposition.”

The issuance of a draft license for the dump kicked in a process in which public hearings and qualified court opposition is allowed. Nearly 600 people, from Texas and other states and from Mexico, asked to speak, and many asked to present their opposition in court. Two Administrative Law Judges determined who might be “affected parties” in the case, rejecting, among others, the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Coahuila ( the “deep pockets” for commissioning studies and experts, dump opponents noted) but accepting governments from three Texas counties, plus the cities of El Paso and Juárez. With the individuals and groups also admitted , the number of parties in the case came to 21.

Two years of legal proceedings ensued, with the nuclear utilities and the State, represented by the TLLRWDA, the TNRCC Executive Director whose office had issued the draft license, and the TNRCC’s Public Interest Counsel, in theory the voice for the people of Texas. The two PIC attorneys, after conducting their own investigation, oppose license, but their budget, determined by the pro-dump Executive Director, has not allowed for commissioning studies or hiring expert witnesses. Dump opponents, strapped for funds, provided few witnesses to contest the State’s parade of witnesses. The 1997 Texas Legislature provided the Authority with $5.6 million for the “licensing process.”

Even so, the two judges ruled in July, 1998 that, in their opinion, the license should not be issued. The state, they said, had failed to adequately characterize an earthquake fault directly below the site. In fact, the state had failed to recognize a fault beneath its own test trench until the two judges pointed it out; in the hearings , the Texas dump agency had referred to the fault as an “anomaly.” Compact opponents have mapped out 64 significant earthquakes that have occurred in the vicinity within the past 70 years, and possible links to the Sierra Blanca fault have not been fully studied.

The State had also overlooked the socioeconomic effects of the dump. The Texas Authority’s socioeconomic “expert” had gone so far as to predict that, even if the dump should leak, it might benefit Sierra Blanca, since Superfund sites are eligible for all sorts of federal benefits. The July decision read, in part: “The [judges] believe, moreover, that these two areas of deficiency are not only cumulative but compound one another. The Applicant’s disinclination to examine fully the on-site fault can only heighten those socioeconomic issues relating to public perception and confidence in the project that the Applicant has markedly failed to address in this proceeding to date.” The Judges noted that there is no rule or law in Texas that requires the State to consider environmental justice in issuing this license.

Gov. Bush’s Democratic opponent in this fall’s elections, along with many journalists, viewed the judges’ ruling on socioeconomic issues as the first official validation of the dump opponents’ claims of environmental racism in the siting process. While Hudspeth County may have only 2300 residents living in an area the size of Connecticut, nearly a third of them live in the town center of Sierra Blanca, just five miles from the proposed dump site. On July 26th, over 300 people joined state officials from both sides of the border in blockading the international bridge at El Paso/Juárez to protest both the dump and the compact.

The Texas Judges’ ruling was called a Proposal For Decision, meaning that it is no more than their advice to the three TNRCC Commissioners, all appointed by dump backer, Governor George W. Bush, whose statements that he is unsure whether he wants to run for President in the year 2000 are as widely believed as were Bill Clinton’s sex disclaimers. The nuclear industry, which has been trying to establish a dump somewhere, anywhere, for over 25 years, will likely be highly supportive of a candidate who delivers, and the nuclear industry, through GE and Westinghouse, owns NBC and CBS.

Texas and Vermont both currently ships their n-waste to a dump in Barnwell, South Carolina, but that state has added a surcharge, and resultant high dumping fees displease the industry. The Texas dump license provides for the State to “recover its costs,” not to profit, from the waste generators. That means that the more waste that the dump can attract, the cheaper those fees will be, and to that end, the Legislature has pursued Bernie Sanders’ beloved compact with Maine and Vermont. The compact, which passed the Texas House in 1993 by (anonymous) voice vote, attracted little attention at the time. Sierra Blanca’s own State Representative’s yea vote went unreported in his district for a year and a half; it came to light only because Sierra Blanca grocer Bill Addington traveled to Maine, where a public referendum was held on waste disposal issues, to ask Mainers to vote against poisoning his home. They didn’t listen, and in the debates he was told of his Representative’s vote, which somehow was known in Maine but not in Texas.

Compact supporters, like George W. Bush, argue that the agreement will protect Texas from being obligated to accept waste from more than three states, but a loophole allows five Bush-appointed commissioners to accept any amount of waste anytime from anyone. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin and Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota added an amendment, passed by both houses this year, to limit waste to three states; the amendment was stripped in conference committee. The Boston Globe recently reported that most of the remaining New England states are also contemplating sending their nuclear waste to West Texas.

Downplaying Nuclear Hazards

Texas’ and Vermont’s arguments for the dump also rest on hydrological arguments, but while the region averages only a few inches of rainfall a year, rains are often “cataclysmic,” in the words of one area resident, creating fissures that channel water deeply and unpredictably. Sierra Blanca averages twelve inches of rain a year, while the already leaking Hanford nuke dump in Richland, Washington gets six inches, and the leaking dump at Beatty, Nevada gets only four. Despite the claimed average depth to groundwater of several hundred feet, Sierra Blanca resident and grandmother Maria Mendez reported at the August gatherings in Vermont that none of her neighbors’ wells are any deeper than 70 feet.

In addition to all the site-specific arguments, there is the likelihood of serious trucking accidents en route to any distant nuclear dump. The probability of such accidents should be apparent to anyone who has traveled the nation’s interstate highways of late. The planned route would carry nuclear waste some 2400 miles from Vermont, along a route that follows Interstate 84 west out of Hartford, CT., to 81 along the Appalachian Mountains, to Routes 40, 30 and 20 and 10 through such major cities as Nashville, Memphis, Little Rock and Dallas. Activists along the route are discussing various means of highlighting the dangers, including physically blocking trucks if necessary. These actions would give an entirely new meaning to the now-coveted “Made in Vermont” label.

Proponents of the dump, such as Bernie Sanders and Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, also downplay the actual contents of the “low level” nuclear waste that would be shipped to the Texas site. Waste that is designated “high level” by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission contains just one component: the extremely radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods, which are now submerged underwater at reactors sites across the country in anticipation of a federally-mandated burial ground. Residents of Nevada have vehemently resisted government plans to bury these used fuel rods in the Yucca Mountain region, just an hour from Las Vegas.

Low level waste is everything else, from the control rods that absorb excess radioactivity and prevent a nuclear chain reaction, to used reactor components and, eventually, the walls of the reactor itself. The longer a nuclear reactor operates, the more radioactive these components become, and the greater the variety of long-lived “transuranic” (heavier-than-uranium) wastes that is generated. Proponents make much of the least radioactive components: gloves, tools, and medical waste. According to Department of Energy statistics compiled by the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, medical waste contributed only 0.004 percent of all the radioactivity in Vermont, Maine and Texas’ low-level waste stream through 1994. By volume, the nuclear power industry contributes about 85 percent of all low level waste nationally. A large portion of the remainder is of short half-life — the radioactivity decays away in a manner of weeks or months — and would essentially cease to be radioactive after just a few years of carefully contained storage.

By commingling all the various “low level” waste components, the industry gains sympathy from those concerned about the benefits of nuclear medicine, for example, but in the long run unnecessarily compounds the problem. The first step in any more sensible solution to the problem of nuclear waste is to keep the various components separated in terms of the strength and duration of their radioactivity. The second step is to shut down Vermont Yankee and other operating reactors, so as to stop generating more waste, and the third step is to keep the reactor components exactly where they are — above ground and subject to constant monitoring.

There is no place in Vermont, Texas, or anywhere on earth, where nuclear waste can be safely buried. What Texas is proposing is essentially an unlined trench, in which the waste will be buried in concrete canisters; the one test canister that is available for public view is already cracking. The record to date is one canister unloaded, one crane accident. Twenty years ago, antinuclear activists said there was no viable solution to the problem of nuclear waste and that all reactors operating at the time should be shut down. While no new reactors have been ordered since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, each of the 100+ reactors that are now operating presents the same fundamentally unsolvable dilemma.

This summer’s renewed debate about nuclear waste and the Texas compact has touched a number of raw nerves, and put Vermonters face-to-face with an issue that many would rather wish away. Building a nuclear waste dump and importing waste from other states to fill it are not popular ideas in Texas either; one doesn’t mention them in campaigns unless pressed. Demonstrations are frequent. Texas has seen years of marches, parades, sit-ins, international bridge closings, hunger strikes, and benefit concerts on the issue. When a utility-funded puppet group called Advocates for Responsible Disposal (currently under the gun for illegal communication during the hearings with TNRCC Commissioners) generates op-ed pieces from its stable of sympathetic medical and research professionals in Texas, unpaid responses from outraged opponents appear all across the state.

Why such a push? Utilities want a discount dump, of course, but the nuclear industry most emphatically wants a new dump, a dump that, however primitive in reality, can be touted as a state-of-the-art solution to the old problem of nuclear waste disposal. A planned new generation of quick-to-construct, quick-to-license nuclear plants can rely on this dump, once the technology is tested in the Third World countries where successive U.S. Presidents have been promoting our nuclear technology. The cry of Clean Power, No Greenhouse Gases has replaced the old chant of Power Too Cheap To Meter that accompanied the first nuclear plants in the 1950s.

George Bush, the undeclared Presidential candidate, continues driving this project forward, aided by most of the Congressional delegation of the three compact states. The EPA is cooperating by not requiring an Environmental Impact Statement on this “state” facility. The licensing hearing was scheduled for Oct. 22, just two weeks before the Texas gubernatorial election that is supposed to demonstrate Bush’s widespread support to the Republicans who will be considering their options for the millennium.

Should the license be denied, leaving it to the 1999 Texas Legislature to draw yet another box around another luckless community, there is an option. On September 16 the TNRCC commissioners received a letter from the oil-bust town of Andrews, located near the New Mexico border in the Texas Panhandle, urging the commissioners to consider their town as an alternative to Sierra Blanca. A private company there already operates a dump for chemical wastes and a “storage and processing” site for low-level and mixed radwaste, and boosters claim that it enjoys wide public support. The company, Waste Control Specialists, is coincidentally half-owned by one of George Bush’s biggest campaign contributors. If the Governor is forced, kicking and fighting, to toss the dump to a backer who is sure to be grateful in the 2000 race, it may not prove too painful a briar patch.

Meanwhile, la lucha sigue. In October international demonstrations, including shutdowns of all five El Paso-Juárez bridges are planned for the Día de la Raza, October 12th. On the same day a group of Mexican officials and elected representatives will have begun a three day hunger strike outside the United Nations in New York, following an early October rally in Vermont.

In Vermont, residents still cherish the image of the Green Mountain State as an environmentally pristine place, and tend to overlook any realities that may tarnish this image. The horrific idea that the state is addressing its nuclear waste problem by shipping it to a politically powerless West Texas community is beginning help illuminate the real consequences of the complacency and arrogance that too often characterize public debate in Vermont, as well as in many other places where it remains politically acceptable, even in “progressive” circles, to ignore the harsh underside of the thin veneer of 1990s style “American” affluence.

http://social-ecology.org/wp/1998/10/the-texas-vermont-maine-nuclear-dump-bringing-environmental-racism-home/

Bringing together criticism of Bernie Sanders
Posted on June 27, 2015 by bhermannview


Bernie Sanders might just be a little like Colonel Sanders not only partially in appearance, but also his demeanor to some extent, and that he is a salesperson of his beliefs. This might be stretching it, but maybe its a valid comparison. (see here, here, here, here, here for articles about Colonel Sanders’s image)
This month I’ve written numerous posts about Bernie Sanders, due to his presidential campaign, in which I’ve criticized him time and time again. Some, like users such as “RDS,” who has commented on two of my critical articles, has said, among other comments, that my criticism isn’t serious, that I wrote an “attack” piece that wasn’t following some (of their) guidelines about what serious criticism is, and seemingly implied that I should support Sanders first and then criticize him. I refuse to do this. If the word serious means something that is earnest, thoughtful, important, critical, and meaningful, then my criticism is exactly that and nothing more. Moving past this, I thought it would be good to bring together my criticisms of Bernie Sanders into one post, so it is helpful for readers. Here it goes [1]:

Criticism #1: Sanders supported the DHS (Department of Homeland (In)Security) in its time of need earlier this year, claiming falsely that the DHS keeps Americans safe and is needed because of terrorists “around the world” (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #2: Sanders said that surveillance of “potential terrorists” is ok, which is a problem because if the government is “determining who are terrorists” then they could “consider a large number of people “potential terrorists” and continue surveillance.” This is the same position which is also held by those such as Glenn Greenwald, which boils down to that surveillance of “bad people” or “potential terrorists” is ok. (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #3: Sanders refuses to seriously “criticize Hillary Clinton” even after “prodding by the interviewer again and again” in a Yahoo! News interview, and elsewhere. (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #4: Even if Sanders won the Democratic nomination, then “Democratic Party elites/bosses would reject him due to his anti-Wall Street rhetoric and pick Clinton instead” but it seems unlikely he’ll win (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #5: Sanders “believes in the bad cop/good cop dichotomy” which implies that there are “”bad apples” in the police forces of the US, but NOT that it is rotten to the core” which lines up with police reformism since he reports body cameras, which seem to be an effort that would “increase police power” (and police surveillance perhaps), and he believes that “the job of police isn’t easy” which is an opinion which “disregards the brutality and terror that is built into the structure of the police itself” (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #6: Sanders favors “the Israeli bombing of Gaza” supports Israel generally, which is a view some corporations who profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine, their wars with Hamas, or “are involved in the Israeli economy” would easily accept. Sanders also infamously told pro-Palestinian constituents in a Vermont town hall last summer to “shut up.” It is also of note that Sanders seems to, even with mild criticisms of Israeli conduct, casts Hamas as the one to blame in armed conflicts, and that Israel seemingly played an important role in his political progress (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #7: Sanders supports the war against ISIS but with the US “leading from behind,” which includes Saudi troops (among other countries) acting as US proxies. He also supports US airstrikes against ISIS which began another Iraq war (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #8: Sanders supported the confirmation of the current Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, who made statements opposing marijuana legalization and supporting civil forfeiture, among other subjects (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #9: Sanders fell in line with the false and absurdist argument “that Iran is “building a nuclear weapon”” since they are NOT doing so at all (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #10: If Sanders was a real socialist, “he would NOT run inside of the capitalist Democratic Party.” Even though there have been “socialists and radicals from time to time…who have supported voting for the “lesser evil” (Democrats)…I refuse to give this argument any merit” because in my mind it isn’t “worth discussing a choice for a lesser evil, it should be rejected outright.” (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #11: While it it is true Sanders “would have lost if he had run as an independent” it might be time to “focus on electoral contests on the state and local level where those of alternative third parties can win rather than on the national level” and Sanders is “a bit of chicken for not running against the Democrats in any way or form” (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #12: Sanders is not a socialist, even though he supports the Scandinavia model, since he hasn’t called to drastically reduce the Pentagon budget or to address racial disparities, even though he has “many progressive goals.” Additionally, Sanders, to my knowledge has never spoken “in support of economic democracy apart from supporting some co-ops, or how the capitalist system needs to go [away]” and instead he had criticized “deregulated capitalism, but not regulated capitalism.” (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #13: Sanders voted for the “an extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which is harshly neoliberal” even though he “voted against similar “trade” deals like NAFTA and [would vote against] the TPP” (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #14: While Sanders “argued that college should be tuition-free to create a strong economy,” this plan only applies “public colleges and universities, not to private ones,” doesn’t cover the costs of room and board or textbooks, and his arguments “for such free college tuition almost sounds neoliberal, with two of them…sounding like a corporate CEO, and not focused on social justice.” (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #15: Sanders has argued for a political revolution and that his run for president isn’t about himself, but if he is true to his word then why isn’t he “out in the streets and participating in movement building so that such a “political revolution” he speaks of can be built.” I say this because “one candidate running for political office is not a revolution, but rather it is a group of people coming together fighting for a cause or a set of causes, who may or may not have political demands, and if it is truly revolutionary, then it is radical.” (see my post, “What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?” for more details)

Criticism #16: Sanders supported, by voting for them, the war in Kosovo, the war in Afghanistan, and the “third” (or second, depending on how you count) war in Iraq which have “resulted in the deaths of over 27,000 people, at minimum…along with supposedly 6,000-10,000 ISIS fighters” which is horrible because it “proves that he isn’t truly antiwar but supports wars when it seems that it is either in his interest or other interested parties.” (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #17: Sanders voted against the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which regulated handguns which brings up the question if cares about gun control (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #18: Sanders said yes in a voice vote to the Clinton-era crime Bill, the Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994, “which expands the death penalty “to cover about 60 offenses,” increases penalties for “gang members” and suffering immigrants, puts in place a three-strikes rule for some of those who have “three or more convictions for serious violent felonies or drug trafficking crimes”…authorizes the prosecution of certain people under 13 when charged with “certain serious violent crimes…[and] puts in place the registration of sex offenders…it increases money for “border control,” deportation of immigrants, money for states to incarcerate undocumented immigrants, and so on.” The law may have some good elements, one could say, like restrictions on assault weapons, but it has a number of horrid elements as well. (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #19: Sanders supports two elements of the modern copyright regime in the United States, since he didn’t voice any objection to the bills, which are the the “Mickey Mouse” Protection Act, which “extended the copyright term for another twenty years which means that it will be longer before a work goes into the public domain,” and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which “tilts the balance toward copyright holders….makes it illegal for people to circumvent measures copyright holders put on their work to prevent copying like DRM even if there isn’t copyright infringement” (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #19: Sanders voted for the the Iraq “Liberation” Act which called for the US, supposedly, to “support the opposition in that country” but actually “dedicated the US to regime change in Iraq which meant Saddam Hussein would be overthrown with the help of US funds to undermine his regime” and it set the stage for “2003 war in Iraq.” (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #20: Sanders voted for the Commodity Futures “Modernization” Act, within a bigger appropriations act, which simply created an “unregulated market in derivatives and swaps” which was a major contributor to the 2007 economic crisis (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #21: Sanders voted for the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 which clearly expands the “intelligence” apparatus through the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center, the National Counterprofileration Center, National Intelligence Centers, expands “criminal punishment for those accused of terrorism” and so on. (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #22: Sanders voted for the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which even though it raised certain taxes on some rich folks, “payroll taxes were increased, numerous corporate tax breaks were extended, tax deductions and credits for those earning $250,000 (for individuals) and $300,000 (for couples) were reinstated, and the sequester was bumped two months forward.” (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #23: Sanders voted for the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2015 which “increases funding for the Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement..and the U.S. Secret Service” (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #24: Sanders voted for the US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014 which “declares that the US is a “major strategic partner” of Israel and that: the US military will give weapons to Israel…that the US should help Israel pay for its magical missile systems; and so on.” (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #25: Sanders has a “weird plan to pay for war funding”: make the Pentagon pay for it. While this supposed “war tax” might seem nice, as it would “require the raising of new revenues to pay for wars,” it only covers “overseas contingency operations” and “Congress will just raise more money” for war as they wanted to “under the secretive NSC-68.” In my view, “I could see the wars still continuing on with Congress just raising money for it” and this “war tax” might not stop war, it might even “encourage it.” (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #26: Sanders sorta stole a quote from Hugo Chavez, who took “the quote from protesters on the streets” but said it “in a speech” and Sanders “said something that was inspired by the quote but WITHOUT attribution.” This is a problem because what Sanders said was “in the context of slamming Republicans for climate inaction” while Chavez’s quote “was broadly anti-capitalist” and the use of the quote was wrong because Chavez was using it in an anti-capitalist way while “Sanders was using it as a partisan point to bash Republicans” (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details)

Criticism #27: On the topic of military budgets, Sanders is clearly concerned about Pentagon waste as he has voted for numerous military budgets because his amendments to check such waste were attached. But, even though he dislikes such waste and calls for “small cuts here and there, but he is unable to connect this with the “strong military” that he consistently says that he supports.” In my view, this is an absurd position because it means that “Sanders is completely ok with a huge war machine as long as there isn’t “waste,”” which is contradictory “because such a huge machine will inherently produce waste.” Also, it is of note that I interpreted his use of “strong military” or “strong defense” to mean big, strong military, like the one that exists now. Voting for any military budget in this day and age, and before (especially since 1945) is a wrong against the people of the world, regardless of your reasons. (see my post, “Bernie Sanders and military budgets” for more details)

I could go on with my criticisms, but I think it is best to list some of my other criticisms of Sanders before moving on. These include his contributors including, as of 2013, the American Wind Energy Association, “the hub of the wind energy industry,” Intel Corp., Torchmark, and American Crystal Sugar, along with “investments in the real estate industry.” (see “Be Wary of those Fake Socialists,” I don’t have the same views now, like the use of articles by Thomas Naylor, but this post is still broadly instructive)

Other criticisms of Sanders include:

Endorsing “a less violent alternative to the Bosnian conflict but not a non-violent one while endorsing military strikes in Bosnia in 1999!” (see “Congressman Bernie Sanders” and “Be Wary of those Fake Socialists.”)

Sanders supported the Iraq War In 2003, and refused to talk to opponents to the Bosnian war, and supported sanctions against Iraq (see “Bernie Sanders Hedging His Bets“)

Sanders supported Bill Clinton as a “lesser evil,” he has supported “pro[Iraq]-war [of 2003] measures,” scuttled any “action on a wave of Bush impeachment resolutions that swept Vermont towns in 2006,” has “consistently defended Israel through it worst crimes against Palestinians and Arabs,” he argues “for protectionist policies and economic nationalism,” he “supported other anti-immigrant bills” (see “A Socialist in the Senate?“)

Marina Brown of the Vermont democratic socialist party, the Liberty Union Party, said that Sanders “votes a little more conservatively than the most liberal of the Democrats. I oppose him because he operates as a Democratic politician” and has supported Barack Obama, along with supporting the “basing [of] the F-35 warplanes in Burlington,” supported “the creation of a new position in the US of Director of National Intelligence,” he voted for “FISA warrants…[which]are nothing more than rubber stamps by the most corrupt judges” and he “has supported forcing states to do standardized testing on students.” Additionally Brown said that Sanders “runs as an Independent because it appeals best to his voters” and that she has never heard Sanders “advocating the nationalization of very many companies or resources.” (see “VT socialist party comments on ‘democratic socialist’ Bernie Sanders“)

A former intern for Bernie Sanders, Kristen Martin, writes about how Sanders will, despite his progressive rhetoric “serve to pull dedicated activists out of movement work, away from building an independent alternative, and into the Democratic Party machine” and that concerns of his constituents about the basing of the F-35s were “dismissed as unserious by office staff” along with Sanders supporting the basising of the F35s, which was ” critical to the project’s eventual success.” Martin eventually explains that she eventually found herself protesting her “boss at a Vermont Democratic Party fundraiser…and putting my job on the line” and that if she had known she would have found pictures of activists she knew “being thrown out of Sanders’ office for protesting his support of the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia.” (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details along with the original article).

Paul Fleckenstein writes that in 1985 Sanders “partnered with developers to champion “a seven-story hotel and 300 mostly upscale condominiums”” which was defeated by committed activists, he supported numerous Democratic presidential candidates, was backed by the Democratic Party establishment by the 1990s, was silent on the seemingly austerity budget passed by Governor of Vermont, Peter Shumilin, has voted for “restrict visas for skilled workers to come into the U.S.” and voted for “war budgets to finance the occupation of Iraq” (see my post, “Beware of (Colonel) Sanders” for more details along with the original article)
This is only a small sampling of the criticisms of Sanders. You don’t have to agree with them, but I thought they would add to my criticisms of Sanders. I don’t really have anything more to say about Sanders at this point. I could address the pro-Sanders articles floating around, but I want to take a break for now on articles about Bernie Sanders and move onto other topics. That’s all.

Notes

[1] My original post said that Sanders “voted for the Export-Import Bank Reauthorization Act of 2012 which “reauthorized the Export-Import Bank until this year,” a bank that many have called corporate welfare.” I have since realized that was incorrect since Sanders voted AGAINST this act, not for it. I must have read it wrong when I first posted about that. This part of the article has been removed in order to make it fully correct. The same is the case for when I said that Sanders “voted for the No Child Left Behind Act which penalizes states that fail to meet federal benchmarks for education, with the law as part of a neoliberal effort against education some would say.” I found that Sanders voted against this in the final vote on the conference report, so it has been removed from this post.

https://bhermannview.wordpress.com/2015/06/27/bringing-together-criticism-of-bernie-sanders/

BERNIE SANDERS

He’s everyone’s favorite…Bernie Sanders. He had his widely known “Bernie Buster” against the extension of the Bush Tax Cuts. However, there is a dark side to him… Let us consider some his contributors which should raise eyebrows:

American Wind Energy Association, “the hub of the wind energy industry” which has GE Energy, American Electric Power, BP Wind Energy, and JPMorgan Capital Corporation on its Board of Directors and one shouldn’t forget that there is a big amount of resistance against them (here, and here) Don’t get confused if you see any commentary against wind power by the business-friendly Manhattan Institute which is funded by ExxonMobil, and Koch Industries

Intel Corp., a huge IT company

Torchmark, a multimillion financial holding company

American Crystal Sugar, a big sugar cooperative

Also he has investments in the real estate industry. A letter was published by a former staffer noting that Sanders endorsed a less violent alternative to the Bosnian conflict but not a non-violent one while endorsing military strikes in Bosnia in 1999!

In 2003, Ron Jacobs wrote another critical article, noting that Sanders voted to endorse the Iraq War:

“Sanders may have voted against the budget that cut these veteran’s benefits, but by voting to support Bush’s war…history will most likely judge him to have sided with that leadership…At one time, Sanders claimed to be a socialist…[now] Sanders is not a socialist and is not that progressive, especially when it comes to matters of war and peace. Instead, Bernie’s politics are reminiscent of the Social Democrats of Germany during and after World War I… For those of us with a memory longer than the average US news reporter, we can remember Bernie’s staunch support for Clinton’s 100-day bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo in 1999. I served as a support person for a dozen or so Vermonters who sat-in in his Burlington office a couple weeks into that war. Not only did Sanders refuse to talk with us via telephone…he had his staff call the local police to arrest those who refused to leave until Sanders spoke with them. The following week Sanders held a “town meeting” in Montpelier, VT., where he surrounded himself with sympathetic war supporters and one university professor who opposed the war and Bernie’s support for it. During the question and answer part of the meeting, Sanders yelled at two of the audience’s most vocal opponents to his position and told them to leave if they didn’t like what he had to say. They chose to remain and point out that Bernie’s style of democracy seemed awfully authoritarian…So called progressive politicians who do not draw the link between corporate America’s wars and its attack on social security, health care, the minimum wage, forty- hour work week, and other issues working people consider important are doing us a disservice…Judging from Bernie’s support for the current war on Iraq, the sanctions against that country, and his support for previous US adventures in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, one wonders if Sanders thinks so, too.”

Thomas H. Nayor continues this criticism noting that “Bernie Sanders, the ideological leader of Vermont, is not only not a socialist, but he is not even a political liberal. He is a technofascist war monger disguised as a liberal. Bernie has never known a Pentagon military program which he did not want to embrace. He’s in bed with Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor, and the Sandia Corporation, the weapons of mass destruction producer.” Ashley Smith adds onto this criticism, noting that:

“everyone…has heralded the election of the first socialist senator in U.S. history, an independent who will stand up to the two mainstream parties, oppose war, roll back corporate power and lead the fight for workers and the oppressed…[however] Sanders’ election to the Senate doesn’t represent a radical departure from politics as usual…Howard Dean, said on the NBC’s Meet the Press, “He is basically a liberal Democrat, and he is a Democrat at that–he runs as an Independent because he doesn’t like the structure and money that gets involved.”…one study found that 38 other congressional representatives had a more progressive voting record [than him]…. In 1992, he supported Bill Clinton as a “lesser evil,” though he later abandoned this impolite phrase to unapologetically endorse Democrats for the White House ever since…In the 2006 Senate election, he didn’t even really run as an independent. The Democrats cut a deal with Sanders–they wouldn’t run a candidate against him, in exchange for him supporting Democrats in other races…He also accepted a large donation from Hillary Clinton’s Political Action Committee, HILLPAC, which featured him as one of its most important candidates. Sanders in turn backed Democrats against third-party alternatives…He has promised to caucus with the Democrats in the Senate, and the media thus takes him for granted as part of the new majority in the Senate. For veteran Sanders watchers, this capitulation to the corporate Democrats and their apparatchiks is nothing new. He has made it one of his missions to agitate against voting for Ralph Nader, the Green Party and, in some cases, Vermont’s Progressive Party…DESPITE HIS own claims, Sanders has not been an antiwar leader…His hawkish positions–especially his decision to support Bill Clinton’s 1999 Kosovo War–drove one of his key advisers, Jeremy Brecher, to resign from his staff…So outraged were peace activists over Sanders’ support of the Kosovo War that they occupied his office in 1999. Sanders had them arrested…While he called for alternative approaches to the war on Afghanistan, he failed to join the sole Democrat, Barbara Lee, to vote against Congress’ resolution that gave George Bush a blank check to launch war on any country he deemed connected to the September 11 attacks. Ever since, he has voted for appropriations bills to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, despite their horrific toll on the occupied peoples as well as U.S. soldiers. Sanders has been critical of the war on Iraq, but he has supported pro-war measures–such as a March 21, 2003, resolution stating, “Congress expresses the unequivocal support and appreciation of the nation to the President as Commander-in-Chief for his firm leadership and decisive action in the conduct of military operations in Iraq as part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism.” He also opposes immediate withdrawal from Iraq…Even more shocking, Sanders scuttled any action on a wave of Bush impeachment resolutions that swept Vermont towns in 2006…This summer, Sanders voted for House Resolution 921, which gave full support to Israel’s murderous war on Lebanon. He also voted for HR 4681 that imposed sanctions on the Palestinian Authority with the aim of removing the democratically elected Hamas government. In response, longtime War Resisters League leader, David McReynolds sent a public letter to Sanders, stating, “Because of your vote of support for the Israeli actions, I would hope any friends and contacts of mine would not send you funds, nor give you their votes.” Indeed, Sanders has consistently defended Israel through it worst crimes against Palestinians and Arabs. Unsurprisingly, some Sanders staffers have also worked with the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC)–including David Sirota, now a Democratic Party strategist, and Sanders’ former communications director Joel Barkin. Finally, in perhaps his worst betrayal yet, Sanders joined a host of liberal Democrats including Barbara Lee and John Conyers to vote for HR 282, the Iran Freedom Support Act–which bears a striking resemblance to the resolutions that set up the framework for the war on Iraq. The act stipulates that the U.S. should impose sanctions on Iran to prevent it from developing weapons of mass destruction and distributing them to aid international terrorism. It also calls for the U.S. to support democratic change in the country, thereby establishing all necessary pretexts for a war on Iran…instead of agitating for internationalist solutions like cross-border unionization, as proposed by the global justice movement against neoliberalism, Sanders argues for protectionist policies and economic nationalism. Sanders’ support for the Democrats confounds his position…Sanders’ economic nationalism has led him to look for allies among Republican right-wingers…Sanders defends his alliances with protectionist Republicans…In cooperating with right-wing populists, Sanders reinforces American nationalism and its attendant racism toward immigrants…He has consistently voted for the rights of women, gays and lesbians, and racial minorities…However, he downplays all these questions in favor of a populist appeal on economic issues…On some pivotal issues, Sanders does worse than subordinate the demands of the oppressed–he joins in the attack…For example, Sanders claims to oppose the death penalty, but he voted for Bill Clinton’s 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which broadened the scope of the federal death penalty and laid the foundation for Bush’s “war on terror” and attacks on civil liberties…In 2004, Sanders was put to the test of whether he would stand up against state-sanctioned murder, and he failed. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft used Clinton’s act to override Vermont law and force a federal death penalty trial for Donald Fell, who was eventually convicted and sentenced to die. Throughout this trial, Sanders remained on the sidelines…Sanders has joined the Democratic Party in its attacks on immigrant rights. While he voted against the reactionary bill sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner and passed by the House last year, he has supported other anti-immigrant bills. He has consistently voted to restrict visas for skilled workers–like the L-1 Nonimmigrant Reform Act, which he himself cosponsored, arguing that it was wrong for corporations to import workers when they are laying off U.S. employees…Sanders voted for the Border Tunnel Protection Act that criminalizes digging tunnels under the border, and anyone who uses them. And he voted for the Marshall Amendment to the 2007 Homeland Security bill that funds electronic verification of employment eligibility.Sanders has begun to trumpet green issues, especially global warming…After getting elected mayor with the slogan “Burlington’s Not for Sale,” Sanders attempted to cut a deal with developers for hotel construction on the city’s waterfront and other projects in its wetlands…Once in the House, Sanders made one of his worst environmental decisions. He worked with then-Texas Gov. George Bush to lead the charge for dumping nuclear waste from Vermont’s Vernon reactor in Sierra Blanca, an impoverished town inhabited mainly by Chicanos on the border with Mexico…Sierra Blanca, already a toxic waste dump, has thus been poisoned for generations…Sanders’ positions on energy are also tinged with nationalism. He repeatedly calls for US energy independence from the Middle East, even though most U.S. oil comes from other countries like Venezuela. Such demagogy plays into the widespread anti-Arab racism that surrounds oil politics…it is a bit hard for Vermont leftists to believe the national reaction to Bernie Sanders…Sanders is leaving a party behind–the Democratic Party. Whatever his betrayals, Sanders can still give an excellent speech about the evils of corporate power and the barbarity of class inequality, but he does so as a fellow traveler of the corporate Democrats, who he supports even as they move further and further to the right…if we want a genuine socialist alternative, we should follow the lead of Sanders’ hero, Eugene Debs, who said, “The differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties involve no issue, no principle in which the working class have any interest.”

If this isn’t enough consider another one of Naylor’s articles that notes that now, Vermont “find[s] itself under the political control of five hard-core military superhawks committed to transforming Vermont into the Pentagon’s flagship state for reinvigorating and expanding the military’s presence in the Northeast…Senators Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders, Congressman Peter Welch, Governor Peter Shumlin, and Adjutant General Michael Dubie have teamed up to form what is effectively a defacto Vermont Military Mafia for promoting increased defense spending in Vermont and the rest of the Northeast…Leahy, Sanders, Welch, and Shumlin all pretend to be political liberals, which they are not…One of the Vermont Military Mafia’s most successful ventures to date involved recruiting the U.S. government-owned Sandia National Laboratories to Vermont…As evidence of how effective this cozy relationship has been, Leahy, Sanders, and Welch recently announced that President Barack Obama had nominated Michael Dubie to be Deputy Commander of the U.S. Northern Command, NORTHCOM…But does it mean that the state of Vermont must sell its soul to Lockheed Martin and the American Empire to support war against the enemy of the month chosen by our sociopathic leaders to demonize? Apparently, so.” Such criticism is added to by Jozef Hand-Boniakowski in a 2006 piece: “Here in Vermont, representative Bernie Sanders, the darling pseudo-Democrat, is running for the US Senate. Vermont’s “independent” and “progressive” had to be shamed into supporting representative John Conyers’ resolution on impeachment hearings. Recently, Bernie Sanders imported Democratic Senator Barack Obama to give his campaign a boost. Way to go Bernie, as Barack Obama is already supporting Bush’s next war in Iran. Shame on Bernie Sanders for his comments on impeachment. His comments the day after four Vermont towns voted for impeachment implied that impeachment talk is “impractical” with the Republicans in control of House and Senate. By choosing practicality over justice, Bernie, and his fellow Democrats, are saying that prosecution for breaking the law must wait for the jury to be gerrymandered. What system of justice is this?”

I end with an article once again by Thomas M. Naylor about the myth of Bernie Sanders:

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has recently been elevated to near godlike status by the political Left in the United States. Some of his fans have even suggested that he should challenge Barack Obama in the Democratic Presidential Primary. The more often he is accused of being a socialist by his political enemies on the Right, the more convinced the Left becomes that he surely walks on water. Although Sanders may have once been a socialist back in the 80s when he was Mayor of Burlington, today, a socialist he is not. Rather he behaves more like a technofascist disguised as a liberal, who backs all of President Obama’s nasty little wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Since he always “supports the troops,” Sanders never opposes any defense spending bill. He stands behind all military contractors who bring much-needed jobs to Vermont. Senator Sanders rarely misses a photo opportunity with Vermont National Guard troops when they are being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. He’s always at the Burlington International Airport when they return. If Sanders truly supported the Vermont troops, he would vote to end all of the wars posthaste. Senator Patrick Leahy, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Congressman Peter Welch could hardly contain their enthusiasm over the news that Burlington International Airport had been named as a possible site to house the Air Force’s new F-35 fighter jet scheduled to replace the Vermont Air National Guard’s aging fleet of F-16s. The new high-tech instruments of death will cost $115 million a pop in sharp contrast to the F-16s which cost a mere $20 million each. From whom might these F-35s protect Vermont? Possibly, Canada, separatist-minded Quebec, upstate New York, the New Hampshire Free State, or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? Why on earth would anyone want to invade Vermont? Vermont has no military bases, no large cities, no important government installations, and no strategic resources unless you count an aging nuclear power plant. What if Canada, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, or even the U.S. Marines were to invade the Green Mountain state? Just what would they do with it? Would all of the black-and-white Holsteins be confiscated, or perhaps the entire sugar maple crop be burned? Imagine trying to enslave freedom-loving Vermonters. Good luck! Vermont is too small, too rural, and too independent to be invaded by anyone. It is a threat to no one. Furthermore, Vermonters, not unlike the Swiss, tend to stick to their own knitting rather than intruding into the affairs of their neighbors. Vermont has always been that way and probably always will be. Major General Michael Dubie, head of the Vermont National Guard, has expressed the hope that the Vermont Guard might be morphed into a center for unmanned drone aircraft. Sanders, not unlike President Obama, thinks drones are cool. Sanders is the darling of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee and the right-wing Likud government of Israel. He has done everything within his power to keep the myth of Islamic terrorism alive. He never questions the U.S. government’s unconditional support of Israeli acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. It is as though these are nonevents. Last, but by no means least, is the U.S. government-owned Sandia National Laboratories. For over two years Sanders and former University of Vermont President Daniel Fogel have been encouraging Sandia to open a satellite laboratory in Vermont. Sandia, whose historical origins can be traced back to the Manhattan Project in World War II, designs, builds, and tests weapons of mass destruction. The Vermont laboratory envisaged by Sanders would not be involved with nuclear weapons but rather would be engaged in projects related to energy efficiency, renewable energy, and electric grids. Sandia, interestingly enough, is operated under contract by Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the world. Lockheed Martin produces F-35s and drones. General Dubie, who has close ties to Lockheed Martin, recently received an honorary doctorate from UVM. No one at UVM seems to care whether or not the University gets in bed with a manufacturer of atomic bombs. Bernie Sanders loves to rail against Corporate America, Wall Street, and the super-rich, but has nothing to show for it. He’s done little to constrain their power and influence. But everybody on the Left loves Bernie.

https://interestingblogger.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/be-wary-of-those-fake-socialists/

Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party and socialism
15 October 2015

The Democratic Party debate on Tuesday night reflected the growing nervousness of the political establishment and the ruling class as a whole over the explosive class tensions building up within the United States.

In one form or another, all five of the candidates participating in the event made use of left-sounding rhetoric in regard to economic issues. Martin O’Mally, the former governor of Maryland, spoke of “an economic injustice that threatens to tear our country apart.” Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the current front-runner, proclaimed that her campaign would center on raising wages. At one point she said it was necessary to “save capitalism from itself.”

Bernie Sanders, the self-described “democratic socialist” senator from Vermont, repeated his calls for a “political revolution” to “take back our government from a handful of billionaires and create the vibrant democracy we know we can and should have.” There is an obvious incongruity in criticism of inequality coming from the field of Democratic presidential candidates. The country has been headed by the Democratic Obama administration for the past seven years, a period of record growth of social inequality. Since 2009, Obama’s first year in office, 95 percent of income gains have gone to the top one percent.

As Tuesday’s debate underscored, the Democrats are endlessly repackaging themselves in a non-stop marketing effort, hoping to rekindle support from a disillusioned and alienated public by adopting a new brand, slogan, etc. Virtually no effort is made to align today’s positions with yesterday’s or reconcile their words with their deeds.
Now, this party of Wall Street and American imperialism is scrambling to adapt itself rhetorically to the reality of a working class that is being radicalized, the better to carry out the ruling class’ policies of austerity and war.

At the center of these efforts is Sanders, who has over the past several months risen rapidly in the polls, attracting crowds of thousands and even tens of thousands to his rallies. Between April and October, Sanders’ national poll numbers have increased from about four percent (compared to Clinton’s 60 percent) to about 25 percent (compared to Clinton’s 40 percent). He has taken the lead in New Hampshire and is tied with Clinton in Iowa.

The popularity of the Sanders campaign has surprised media commentators, who take it for granted that a “socialist” label dooms any political figure in the United States. In fact, Sanders has garnered support precisely because of his appeal to a deep and growing hatred of the capitalist system.

In terms of his actual politics, however, Sanders proposes nothing that is genuinely socialist, or even radical, for that matter. On Tuesday, he repeated his calls for a series of modest reforms, including raising the minimum wage, investing in infrastructure, establishing equal pay for women, and making public college and universities free through a tax on financial transactions.

Aside from a vague call to “break up” the largest banks, Sanders did not propose any measures that address the relations of production or the economic dominance of the capitalist class. There was no suggestion that industries or banks should be nationalized, a basic component of socialist politics. Nor did he explicitly call for a redistribution of wealth.

Even within the tradition of American politics of an earlier period, Sanders’ proposals are thoroughly conventional. Most, if not all of them, would fit comfortably within the program of the Democratic Party or even the Republican Party 50 years ago.

Compare his statements to the platform of the Socialist Party in 1936, then headed by the reformist Norman Thomas. It proposed the “social ownership and democratic control of the banks, mines, railroads, the power industry and all key industries.” The party’s platform in 1912—when Eugene Debs won 6 percent of the national vote—called for the nationalization of major industries, the requisitioning of food and storage warehouses to reduce the cost of living, and the collective ownership of the banking and currency system.

Sanders proposes to do the impossible: ameliorate social inequality without touching the foundation of the power of the capitalist class.

As he rises in the polls, Sanders very deliberately seeks to reassure the other main center of power in the United States—the military-intelligence apparatus. On Tuesday, he declared that he is “prepared to take this country into war if that is necessary.” Insisting that he is “not a pacifist,” Sanders pointed to his support for the war in Kosovo under
Clinton, the war in Afghanistan launched by the Bush administration, and the Obama administration’s present war policy in Syria and Iraq.

These statements followed on previous comments that he would make use of drones, Special Forces “and more,” and that the United States “should have the strongest military in the world.” On Tuesday, he added a call for the prosecution of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Sanders’ support for imperialist war abroad says far more about his politics than his proposals for social reforms at home. All of the wars he backs are being waged in the interest of the ruling class and its program of global domination. It is impossible to oppose the economic policy of the corporate and financial elite at home and support its policy abroad.
The pro-war positions of Sanders are of a piece with his economic nationalism. His criticisms of social inequality are invariably tied to denunciations of “our disastrous trade policies.” Sanders lines up squarely with the trade union bureaucracy and sections of the Democratic Party in seeking to divert working class anger over layoffs and unemployment along nationalist channels, which serve to pit American workers against their class brothers and sisters around the world. At the same time, this “America-first” appeal deflects attention from the real source of workers’ oppression, the capitalist system, and lines up US workers behind their American bosses.

As for Sanders’ “political revolution,” it boils down to nothing more than expanding voter turnout behind the Democratic presidential candidate, whomever that is. Thus, he spoke Tuesday of the necessity “to have one of the larger voter turnouts in the world, not the lowest.” He added that “Democrats at the White House on down will win when there is excitement and a large voter turnout, and that is what this campaign is doing.”

It could not be clearer. Sanders’ primary function is to prevent mounting social opposition from taking an independent political form.

Those organizations that have promoted the Sanders campaign—from sections of the trade union apparatus to groups such as Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organization—do so with this same conscious aim: Not to advance the cause of socialism, but to demoralize opposition by smothering and derailing the striving of the working class to break free from the capitalist two-party system.

The experience in Greece over the past year has shown the consequences of this type of politics. The Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza), which came to power pledging to end austerity, is now administering a new round of austerity measures, more brutal than those that went before, dictated by the banks and the European Union. Sanders and his backers play a parallel role in the United States.

To advance its interests, the working class requires an entirely different perspective. Millions of workers and youth are coming into conflict with the capitalist system, and socialism is once again a specter haunting the ruling class.

The fight for socialism, however, means the international unification of the working class in a struggle against the ruling class and all its representatives. It means the expropriation of the banks, financial institutions and major corporations and a radical redistribution of wealth. All the basic social rights of the working class—including the right to a job, a livable income, health care, education, a secure retirement—are in direct conflict with a social system that subordinates everything to the dictates of the corporate and financial aristocracy.

A genuine socialist program can be realized only when the working class is organized and mobilized as an independent political force, in the United States and internationally, to take political power and reorganize economic life on the basis of social need, not private profit.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/10/15/pers-o15.html

The donald called Bernie a communists, henious insult to all communists except those CPUSA opportunists.

Bernie is a 'socialist' who does not say 'working class', what the fuck kinda socialist is that?

Nutshell:


It could not be clearer. Sanders’ primary function is to prevent mounting social opposition from taking an independent political form.

Nutshell:

That, and the immediate function of being Hilary's sheepdog. Don't know how any supposed leftist could stomach Bernie's 'Benghazi bonmot'. How obvious can ya get, another example of how the ruling class apparently doesn't care how shoddy their games are, such hubris.

That, and and the immediate function of being Hilary's sheepdog. Don't know how any supposed leftist could stomach Bernie's 'Benghazi bonmot'. How obvious can ya get, another example of how the ruling class apparently doesn't care how shoddy their games are, such hubris.

Their contempt for the working class is unbearable. Well, underestimate your enemies at your own peril.

Leave it to Markowitz to make my point, neither Markowitz nor Sanders are Left.


What a debate. It is almost over. But before th Pundits try to spin it, Bernie was the catalyst. The called him a socialist and he said that democratic socialism means morality, fairness. He talked of a political revolution, which means workers and the whole people voting out the reactionaries who represent th corporations and the rich. He took on Wall directly. And he didn't let Anderson Cooper phase him.



Bernie won the debate for the labor and the left and the people. Hillary Clinton had some moments but they were mostly on generality. And she did play the Gender card over and over again. A progressive woman President would be a major breakthrough for the nation. Elizabeth Warren is such a woman. Hillary Clinton really isn't



These are my first responses. Martin O'Malley was also very good, better than Hillary Clinton. Webb was ridiculous, a cold warrior trying to revive the cold war against China.



Bernie ended right now saying that it will be the millions of people standing up to the billionaires. Without that, no one will be successful

http://www.thebellforum.com/showthread.php?t=140520


Whadda maroon.

Whadda maroon.

Just wait till next September and Marko the Maroon will be saying how progressive Hillary is and a woman, to boot! 'Maroon' is far too kind...

A couple months ago, the Pentagon announced it would proceed with its plan to base the F-35 death planes at Burlington, Vermont’s airport. The news was met with surprise by many Vermonters. After years of fighting the basing, these Vermonters believed that the democratic process which Vermont prides itself on would win over the military and a political system bought and sold by the industry that beds down with that military. Those in favor of the planes’ basing stated that businesses around the Vermont National Guard base would fail if the planes were not based in Vermont. This was simply not true. Also not true was their claim that the basing will provide a massive influx of jobs. Despite the projections of pro-basing advocates (who claimed over a thousand jobs might be at risk), the number of jobs in play was never more than a couple hundred. Of those jobs, several were military and will probably be filled not by Vermont residents but by military members temporarily stationed in Vermont.

The amount of money spent to design and build the F-35 is incredible. Each plane costs millions of dollars. Literally. Tens of millions. In an economy whose primary attribute is the exponentially expanding difference between the wealth of a few versus the growing poverty of the many, the plane’s continued funding is inexcusable. If your name is Senator Bernie Sanders, supporting the plane’s construction is inexcusable in itself; to demand that it be based in the state you represent in Congress is telling the people of that state you do not care about their heating costs, their children’s schools, or the fact that their dollar buys less every paycheck. To support that basing when many people voted for you precisely because you ran against military boondoggles, war, and the ever expanding corporate state is just plain insulting. Questions about this contradiction are something Senator Sanders must answer in his next election campaign. Given his recent suggestion he might run for President, he may well be answering those questions on a much bigger stage than that afforded him in Vermont. No matter what, the questions should be asked—until he answers them.

The support of Vermont’s other senator, Patrick Leahy, comes as no surprise. After all, among his top campaign contributors one can find at least two of the world’s largest war profiteers: General Dynamics and General Electric. Furthermore, his former top Senate staffer, Daniel Ginsberg, is an assistant secretary of the Air Force. In addition, Leahy’s seat on the Senate’s Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Defense and its power in determining how much money the Pentagon gets every year, may well have influenced the Pentagon’s decision. According to a Boston Globe story, however, even Leahy has something of a problem with the overall cost of the plane.

In what can only be described as a cynical decision that illustrates the nature of a political system dominated by an unholy bond between Wall Street and the Pentagon, that same story reported that Leahy’s office said that, since the development of this plane was going to happen, then Vermonters should get their fraction of the war machine’s silver. Like the majority of the Burlington City Council’s support of war criminal Lockheed Martin’s “green plan” to set up shop in Vermont a few years ago, it seems that almost every Vermont politician has their price.

There is an alternative to the cynical attitude that rationalizes taking blood money since, after all, somebody will and it might as well be Vermont. Instead of accepting the status quo that bleeds taxpayers dry in the name of national security, citizens can demand politicians work towards creating genuine security that is not based on a constant threat of war. Monies demanded by corporations whose interest lies in the creation and maintenance of fear could be used to rebuild communities, beginning with those ravaged here by the corporate search for greater and greater profit. The transference of taxpayer monies to profiteering arms manufacturers and their cohorts in the Pentagon should end. Despite the overwhelming mainstream media message telling us otherwise, such a scenario is possible.

The nature of our political system does not even require politicians to be corrupt in any legal sense of the term. The domination of that system by what Dwight Eisenhower termed the military-industrial complex is so complete even supposedly antiwar representatives will rationalize their acceptance of the status quo. Consequently, Vermonters saw Bernie Sanders support the funding of Washington’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. Earlier, voters in Vermont were subjected to his vocal, insistent and even combative support for Bill Clinton’s bombing of Yugoslavia. While both Sanders and Leahy decry elements of the National Security Agency’s surveillance of hundreds of millions of people around the world, they lend their support and signature to a plan to base elements of the armed wing of the warfare state in Burlington.

The NSA surveillance and the F-35s are part of the same machine. They are all included in the umbrella known as national security and they are all part of a system that manipulates the public with fear and nationalism. To make it worse, this is all done in the name of freedom; a freedom that is chipped away each and every time a phone call is recorded, an email logged, a fighter plane flies over, and a dollar given to the Pentagon. There is a reason big business supports the basing of the F-35s in Vermont. They hope to get a piece of the supposed bounty those planes will bring. The health of their lesser customers is irrelevant. The Pentagon and its corporate buddies are moving in. If it is in their way, they will take your house (if it’s in their flight path), your tax money, and someday, maybe even your child.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/11/the-pentagon-gets-what-it-wants-again/

What I learned about Bernie Sanders
Kristen Martin recalls her time as an intern for Bernie Sanders, in a contribution to the left's discussion of Sanders' campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

June 1, 2015
Residents protest outside a Democratic Party fundraiser against the basing of the F-35 warplane in Burlington (Paul Fleckenstein | SW)
Residents protest outside a Democratic Party fundraiser against the basing of the F-35 warplane in Burlington (Paul Fleckenstein | SW)
TO THOSE who have spent any significant amount of time in Vermont, it is clear that Bernie Sanders is widely beloved by his constituents. The support for "Bernie," as his supporters fondly call him, was clear on May 26 as thousands flocked to Sanders' presidential campaign kickoff rally on the edge of Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont.

The "People's Assembly," organized by a group including former Occupy Wall Street activists and environmentalists, spoke to a deepening anger felt by working-class Americans. Sanders, who is running as a Democrat, rightfully condemned the fact that "one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans" and cited the Fight for 15 campaign as a source of inspiration.

In a political arena filled with the likes of war hawk Hillary Clinton and misogynist Ted Cruz, Sanders' words were a welcome departure from the mainstream. But despite Sanders' progressive rhetoric and the Occupy-esque excitement of his campaign launch, Bernie for President will only serve to pull dedicated activists out of movement work, away from building an independent alternative, and into the Democratic Party machine.

As a developing socialist, I, too, considered the possibilities of Sanders' political project when I went to intern for him in the summer of 2012. Although skeptical about calling Sanders a "socialist," I wondered whether he could be a vehicle for our side to fight back. And of course, I was eager to meet the man who hung a portrait of Eugene Debs (one of my own radical idols) on his wall.

I spent that summer in two alternate worlds. By day, I worked in Bernie's office clipping newspapers and writing letters to constituents, and by night I organized with the International Socialist Organization, building panel discussions about Palestinian liberation and fighting back against the basing of F-35 bombers by the U.S. military at Burlington International Airport.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

THE FIGHT around the F-35 came to define the political moment in Vermont that summer, with debate raging between activists fighting the imperial, economic and environmental consequences of the F-35s, and the Democratic Party operatives forcing the basing on the small Vermont town, with the full support of the Congressional delegation--including Bernie Sanders.

The basing of the F-35s promised to have devastating consequences for Vermonters, including plummeting home values and adverse health impacts that would disproportionately impact minority and low-income populations. This is not to mention the grotesqueness of the deal itself, with trillions of dollars being spent on aircraft meant to bomb foreign countries, instead of on schools, infrastructure or health care--a contradiction that one would assume Bernie would acknowledge.

But the lines were clearly drawn in Sanders' office. Constituent after constituent poured into the office to express dismay at the F-35 proposal, recounting stories of their home values being destroyed or of the terror that their child faced hearing bombers in school every day.

Most of the time, these concerns were dismissed as unserious by office staff--they were often characterized as the concerns of "anarchists" who couldn't possibly understand the art of politics. Bernie has no influence on military decisions, they kept repeating--these people just really don't get it.

In reality, Sanders' support for the basing of the F-35s was critical to the project's eventual success. Sanders had nothing to say about the burden that the basing would place on working-class Vermont families, and he didn't want to hear from constituents who said otherwise. As both an activist and an intern, I was forced to choose whether to stand with the people of Vermont or with a politician who remained out of touch with grassroots activism.

I ultimately found myself protesting my own boss at a Vermont Democratic Party fundraiser, dodging the gazes of my co-workers and putting my job on the line. This continuous tug between the two forces continued throughout the summer. I bit my tongue as I worked through ribbon cuttings and town halls, while struggling to remain involved in political organizing beyond Sanders and the Democrats.

I still looked to Sanders for a political lead, hoping to eventually understand his political end game. What did he have to say about the occupation of Palestine? What did he think of our continuing imperialist interventions in the Middle East?

Had I done my research, I would have discovered Sanders' frankly hawkish positions on foreign policy. It only takes a brief search to uncover his ardent support for Israeli apartheid, his repeated authorizations of funding for the U.S. military budget, and even his initial vote for Bush's original Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution that began the war on Afghanistan. I would have even discovered pictures in the local newspaper of activists I knew being thrown out of Sanders' office for protesting his support of the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia.

Needless to say, Sanders was not the anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist folk hero I had hoped he would be.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IN DETAILING this experience, I aim not to raise the question of the purity of Sanders' politics or whether he represents the "perfect" political candidate. Those on the left can and should support candidates with whom they may not share agreement on every political issue, but with whom they can work to build an independent left that begins to challenge the hegemonic political structure.

Even before Sanders declared he was running as a Democrat in this presidential election cycle, he caucused with the Democratic Party in the U.S., hedging his bets on them as a vehicle for accomplishing change, despite the fact that the Democrats have never been anything but a party of the ruling class. When it comes down to it, Bernie does not stand on the side of the oppressed or exploited on principle, but only when it falls in line with his political project.

I can only speak to my own experience working in the office of Bernie Sanders, but after a few months, it became clear to me that electoral politics so closely tied to the Democratic Party could only be a dead end for those seeking revolutionary change. The experience was one of the key reasons I eventually joined the International Socialist Organization, which had a clear vision of working class self-emancipation.

My own experience is a miniscule example of the choices the left will face come next year, when Sanders throws his full support behind Hillary Clinton as the eventual Democratic presidential nominee, as he has every intention of doing. In the here and now, we must strategically decide the best way to spend our limited political capital. Principled activists who throw their political efforts into "Bernie for President" will find themselves orienting on the Democratic Party, rather than on the numbers of people who are beginning to come to radical conclusions.

The openings for radical politics in this moment are apparent, whether we throw ourselves into the nationwide rebellion against police brutality and racism, or join the fight in schools against standardized testing, or walk the picket line with striking oil workers. And of course, we must engage with those who are pulled to Sanders' message and offer them a much broader vision for the U.S. left--a left that fights on its own terms for working-class revolution. These are strategies that aim to build a left in the U.S. that has not existed for decades--an aim that Bernie Sanders, in practice, does not share.

As a friend recently reminded people on Facebook, using the words of Eugene Debs, "[I]f you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out."

Ultimately, neither Sanders nor any other politician can lead us to the alternate society we fight for. We must build it for ourselves. It turns out that Sanders does have a picture of Eugene Debs in his office--though one can only imagine what Debs would have to say to Bernie today.

http://socialistworker.org/2015/06/01/what-i-learned-about-bernie-sanders

Bill Maher and Bernie Sanders Debate Socialism: U.S. is ‘Already a Socialist Country’
Oct. 18, 2015 10:42am Kaitlyn Schallhorn
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/10/18/bill-maher-and-bernie-sanders-debate-socialism-u-s-is-already-a-socialist-country/#
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders sparred with Bill Maher during a segment of his HBO show Friday evening over the connotation of socialism and the efforts of his presidential campaign.

Sanders, a self-described socialist and Independent vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, said while appearing on “Real Time with Bill Maher” that his campaign, among other things, is focused on fixing the perceived income and wealth inequality — an issue he said was deemed by Americans as immoral.



“See, Bernie, you always say that, and I think even the Republicans are not for income inequality,” Maher argued. “They hear that but it doesn’t compute that that’s going to be solved by socialism. Socialism is the programs they already like. They like social security. That’s socialism. They like Medicare, they like the [Department of Veteran Affairs], they like the military. It’s already a socialist country.”

Sanders disagreed with Maher’s assertion that the U.S. is a socialist nation and contended that his campaign needs to “remind people” that healthcare is a “right” for citizens of other major countries. The presidential candidate also touted more of the issues that make up his platform, including free public college tuition and criminal justice reform — although Maher said the senator still wasn’t doing enough to make the connotation of “socialism” less taboo.

“We have to make the movement, if you like, to correlate what we’re talking about,” Sanders said. “Because on every one of the major issues I am talking about, the American people agree.”

“I don’t think most Americans realize they’re already socialists,” Maher said.

At the beginning of the segment, Maher said he wanted to help Sanders secure the nomination, but the political commentator also criticized Sanders’ plan of taxing the top one percent to pay for his programs as not being enough financially. Specifically, Maher criticized Sanders for not being able to implement a single-payer healthcare plan in his state of Vermont as the costs were too high.

“Well, I’m not the governor of the state of Vermont. I’m the senator from the state of Vermont,” Sanders said in response. “Tell me, why is it that every other of the major countries on Earth…”

“They control both ends of it,” Maher interrupted. “If you’re saying that the government is going to pick up the tab but not make the insurance companies, the hospitals and the doctors not gouge people, then we are going to break the budget. It has to work both ways. So you’re going to make the hospitals do that?”

Eventually Sanders agreed that his proposals could all be paid for by not just taxing the top one percent but ”may have to go down a little lower than that but not much lower.”

Watch Maher and Sanders spar on “Real Time with Bill Maher” below.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDRxbQlpqmo

This is what passes for political discourse, a self-styled socialist allowing a smarmy lightweight libertarian to define socialism for him. Hey, what about them means of production, Bernie?

This is what passes for political discourse, a self-styled socialist allowing a smarmy lightweight libertarian to define socialism for him. Hey, what about them means of production, Bernie?

Christ, that is toxic. And nobody, and I mean 'nobody', can ever mention the means of production. You might as well shit on an American flag being held by Jesus...

Christ, that is toxic. And nobody, and I mean 'nobody', can ever mention the means of production. You might as well shit on an American flag being held by Jesus...

Man, You just ain't "feeling the Bern". If ya wanna know what it's like, get the clap.

Bernie Sanders backs the prosecution of Edward Snowden
By Tom Hall
17 October 2015

The support by Bernie Sanders for the prosecution of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, which he voiced during Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, is a damning exposure of the pro-imperialist politics of this self-described “socialist” politician.

Sanders attempted to distinguish himself from his fellow candidates only by calling for a “lenient” sentence for Snowden. “He did break the law, and I think there should be a penalty to that,” Sanders declared. “But I think what he did in educating us should be taken into consideration.”

In fact, the Vermont senator’s arguments were essentially similar to those of the other four candidates on the Las Vegas stage, all of whom sought, in one way or another, to distance themselves from the widely hated NSA programs while at the same time reaffirming their support for the military-intelligence apparatus.

Sanders’ call for leniency in the case of Snowden rings false, since once in the clutches of the American criminal “justice” system, he would face the full vengeance of the state machine. And there are clear warnings. Chelsea Manning was tortured while in military custody, and is currently serving over three decades of jail time for leaking diplomatic documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. The editor of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has been forced to seek asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in order to avoid being extradited to the United States on espionage charges.

In the case of Snowden, given calls for his murder by officials within the state apparatus, there is no guarantee that once in custody he would even live to see a courtroom.

The argument that Snowden’s courageous stand is a crime deserving of punishment reveals far more about Sanders than his rhetorical denunciations of government spying. While calling for a lesser sentence for Snowden’s “crimes,” he has not called for the arrest and prosecution of the government officials responsible for actual crimes against the people of the United States and the world, through the dragnet surveillance program. These include above all Obama himself, whom Sanders is seeking to succeed as president. Nor did he offer any criticism on this score Tuesday of Hillary Clinton, who as Obama’s
secretary of state for four years was directly involved in these and countless other crimes.

Sanders, like the entire political establishment, views the precedent set by Snowden, as well as the outpouring of mass support for him among the population, as extremely dangerous. This support reveals the depth of popular hostility to the Pentagon, CIA and NSA after a generation of unending war and repression. Such fears have only been further fueled by the revelations that have followed Snowden, including a large-scale leak this week of documents related to Obama’s drone war program.

At a Vermont town hall meeting in February 2014, Sanders said, “Look, you don’t want to have a situation where everybody who works for the government suddenly wakes up and says, ‘you know, I think I’ve gotta reveal this information despite any oath or agreement that I made.’ You’re gonna have chaos.” He continued, “He broke the law. I think that clearly…there should be an effort to enter into a plea agreement.”

Conscious of the danger presented by these social tensions to the American political establishment, expressed in near-record-low voter turnout and a deep disaffection with the entire political establishment, Sanders has intervened in the 2016 elections to corral the leftward shift in mass sentiments back into the safe channels of the Democratic Party. His oft-repeated call for a “political revolution,” although it is obviously directed to workers and youth looking for an alternative to the corporate-controlled political system, has been defined down by Sanders to a call for improved voter turnout in order to elect more Democrats to public office.

Nevertheless, he is appealing to broad layers of the population, particularly the youth, who consider Snowden to be a hero. This is what accounts for his more ambivalent rhetoric on government spying, calling for various “reforms” while making a less strident denunciation of Snowden than his fellow candidates.

In reality however, Sanders completely supports American imperialism’s twin policies of war abroad and repression at home. Indeed, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday, Sanders issued bellicose threats against Russia, called for a major escalation of the war in Syria using Saudi ground troops (a stance he reiterated at Tuesday’s debate), and declared his support for the drone warfare of the Obama administration. When asked whether “counterterrorism” under a Sanders presidency would include “drone strikes and special forces,” Sanders replied, “Well, all of that and more.”

Much of Sanders’ appeal derives from his longstanding claim to be a “socialist.” But his support for the prosecution of Snowden, which ultimately reflects his support for American imperialism, is incompatible with the basic principles of socialism. For well over a century, genuine socialists have fought to develop an opposition to imperialism within the working class internationally, counseling workers that the “main enemy is at home.”

Socialists have sought to base this opposition on the scientific understanding that imperialist war abroad is inextricably bound up with the bourgeoisie’s class war at home, and that imperialism, as Lenin said, was reaction “all down the line.” Thus, the erection of the scaffolding of a police state in the United States, exposed most graphically by the courageous revelations made by Edward Snowden, is the necessary consequence of the drive by American capitalism for world domination.

It is impossible to oppose inequality within the United States, as Sanders claims to do, while supporting American aggression abroad. Indeed, it is highly significant in this regard that under the banner of the “War on Terror” the ruling elite have erected a surveillance infrastructure directed in the first instance against the American population.

Workers should take Sanders’ call for the prosecution of Edward Snowden as a warning. Sanders is opposed not only to the right of workers to know about the crimes committed by “their” government. Above all, he is determined to prevent a political break by the working class with the two-party system.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/10/17/sand-o17.html

Bernie Sanders endorses Obama’s decision to keep troops in Afghanistan
By Patrick Martin
19 October 2015

In a television interview Sunday, Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders made his most categorical statements yet of his willingness to use military force in support of the foreign policy goals of American imperialism.

Speaking on the ABC program “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” the Vermont senator gave his backing to Obama’s decision this week to keep nearly 10,000 troops in Afghanistan through the end of 2016, and at least 5,000 troops indefinitely. He also refused to define any circumstances in which he would rule out the unilateral use of military force.

Reacting to the Taliban takeover of the key city of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan, a debacle for the troops of the US puppet regime in Kabul, Obama reversed his previous decision to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan by the end of next year.

In response to a direct question about whether he backed the decision to keep nearly 10,000 troops on the battlefield of a war that has gone on for more than 14 years, Sanders responded: “Well, yeah, I won't give you the exact number. Clearly, we do not want to see the Taliban gain more power, and I think we need a certain nucleus of American troops present in Afghanistan to try to provide the training and support the Afghan Army needs.”

Stephanopoulos then asked about the candidate’s statements during last Tuesday’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas on the use of US military force, when Sanders pointed to his vote to authorize the Afghanistan war in 2001 as proof that he was willing to use force. What were the circumstances in which “a President Sanders would authorize unilateral action to use force,” the ABC anchorman asked?

Sanders replied, “Well, I’m not going to get into hypotheticals.” Then the following exchange took place:

SANDERS: I think sensible foreign policy and military policies suggest that it cannot be the United States of America alone which solves all of the world’s military…

STEPHANOPOULOS: In all circumstances?

SANDERS: Well, of course, you know, I’m not saying, you know, I don’t want to get into hypotheticals. I didn’t say in all circumstances.

In other words, pressed on his rhetorical commitment to form military-diplomatic coalitions to pursue US foreign policy goals, Sanders declined to set limits on what he as president might do unilaterally. The supposed advocate of “democratic socialism” and “political revolution” fell back on a standard talking point of would-be commanders-in-chief for US imperialism.

“I don’t want to get into hypotheticals” simply means, “I want a free hand to use force whenever the military-intelligence apparatus demands it.”

While Sanders was happy to denounce George W. Bush’s decision to go war in Iraq as one of the worst decisions ever made in US foreign policy, he made no reference to the devastation created by Barack Obama’s interventions in Libya, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan.

Sanders is in no sense an “antiwar” candidate. He uses demagogic condemnations of “millionaires and billionaires” and the growth of social inequality to appeal to working people and young people who are deeply opposed to American militarism, but only to divert their attention from the growing danger of the imperialist war. His support for the policy of the ruling class abroad exposes his pretense of opposing the policy of this same ruling class within the United States.

Even on the infrequent occasions when he has discussed the disastrous consequences of US policy in the Middle East, it is only from the standpoint of American nationalism, not genuine opposition to imperialist war. Once in a while, Sanders bemoans the casualties suffered by American troops or the waste of resources better used at home, but he has never indicated any sympathy for the people of the countries targeted for destruction by US military interventions.

His comments Sunday on Afghanistan were typical. Sanders made no mention of the latest atrocity there by US forces, the deliberate bombing of the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, which killed at least 22 people: three doctors, nine other staff of the aid agency, and ten patients.

His silence is only part of a much broader policy, observed by all the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, who despite their incessant mudslinging maintain a united front in covering up for the war crimes carried out by the US military.

In this they are joined by the corporate-controlled media, which has largely ignored the revelations—reported by the Associated Press and then dropped—that US special operations forces were well aware of the hospital’s existence and location, and deliberately targeted it for incineration by an AC-130 helicopter gunship.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/10/19/sand-o19.html

Bernie and Hillary: the Sheepdog and the She-Wolf in Vegas
by PAUL STREET


Left critics of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign inside the dismal, dollar-drenched, corporate-neoliberal and imperialist Democratic Party were born out by the first Democratic presidential debate in Last Vegas last week. In his first exchange with the CNN host Anderson Cooper and Hillary Clinton, Sanders spoke in terms consistent with Bruce Dixon’s early identification of Sanders as a “sheepdog” candidate – a “contender” whose basic mission is to rally reasonably disaffected voters and non-voters to the corporate and military Democrats by fueling the illusion that meaningful progressive change can be achieved by voting for history’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party. Here’s the exchange, initiated when Cooper challenged the notion that a self-declared “socialist” could be electable in a U.S. presidential race:

COOPER: Senator Sanders. A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?

SANDERS: Well, …we’re gonna explain what democratic socialism is. And what democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country own almost 90 percent — almost — own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. That it is wrong, today, in a rigged economy, that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent. That when you look around the world, you see every other major country providing health care to all people as a right, except the United States. You see every other major country saying to moms that, when you have a baby, we’re not gonna separate you from your newborn baby, because we are going to have — we are gonna have medical and family paid leave, like every other country on Earth. Those are some of the principles that I believe in, and I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.

COOPER: Denmark is a country that has a population — Denmark is a country that has a population of 5.6 million people. The question is really about electability here, and that’s what I’m trying to get at. You — the — the Republican attack ad against you in a general election — it writes itself. You supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. You honeymooned in the Soviet Union. And just this weekend, you said you’re not a capitalist. Doesn’t — doesn’t that ad write itself?

SANDERS: Well, first of all, let’s look at the facts. The facts that are very simple. Republicans win when there is a low voter turnout, and that is what happened last November. Sixty-three percent of the American people didn’t vote, Anderson. Eighty percent of young people didn’t vote. We are bringing out huge turnouts, and creating excitement all over this country. Democrats at the White House on down will win, when there is excitement and a large voter turnout, and that is what this campaign is doing.

COOPER: You don’t consider yourself a capitalist, though?

SANDERS: Do I consider myself part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little by which Wall Street’s greed and recklessness wrecked this economy? No, I don’t. I believe in a society where all people do well. Not just a handful of billionaires.

COOPER: Just let me just be clear. Is there anybody else on the stage who is not a capitalist?

CLINTON: Well, let me just follow-up on that, Anderson, because when I think about capitalism, I think about all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families. And I don’t think we should confuse what we have to do every so often in America, which is save capitalism from itself. And I think what Senator Sanders is saying certainly makes sense in the terms of the inequality that we have. But we are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America. And it’s our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok and doesn’t cause the kind of inequities we’re seeing in our economic system. But we would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the history…

COOPER: Senator Sanders?

CLINTON: … of the world.

SANDERS: I think everybody is in agreement that we are a great entrepreneurial nation. We have got to encourage that. Of course, we have to support small and medium-sized businesses. But you can have all of the growth that you want and it doesn’t mean anything if all of the new income and wealth is going to the top 1 percent. So what we need to do is support small and medium-sized businesses, the backbone of our economy, but we have to make sure that every family in this country gets a fair shake…not just for billionaires.

I am struck by seven ugly things in this give-and-take. First, there is the former CIA employee Cooper’s ridiculous neo-McCarthyite identification of past opposition to the CIA and Reagan administration’s bloody and illegal war on Nicaragua as proof of one’s un-electability. As Robert Naiman noted on the Huffington Post, “Millions of Americans ‘supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua’ in the 1980s…..Opposing the CIA’s illegal war in Nicaragua was a mainstream, popular position at the time, as shown by the passage of the Boland Amendment by Congress. It’s only in the pro-war, pro-Empire bubble of big US media that having opposed the illegal CIA war on Nicaragua could be portrayed as an electoral liability without any evidence. The big media use of the term ‘electability’ is a convenient carrier for pro-war, pro-Empire prejudice…” Indeed.

Second, there is the inanity of Cooper reducing Sanders’ opening comments on social-democratic policies in “every other major country” to just “Denmark” – and of Sanders’ depressing failure to correct him on that inanity (though it should be noted that Sanders is wrong to claim that “every other major country provid[es] health care to all people as a right,.”)

Third, there is the childishness of Cooper’s suggestion that there is something odd about Sanders not considering himself “a capitalist.” As the historian Laurence Shoup reminds us in his latest book, “The two major classes in the United States today are a numerically small capitalist class and a very much larger working class. The capitalist class is characterized by ownership of large amounts of capital, obtained mainly though investment in and control of organizations that organize production, distribution, and financing of the economy. The working class lacks such ownership and needs to the labor market to secure employment.” The capitalists, Shoup notes, “are a very small percentage of the population.” They are certainly less 2 percent of the population, if that high. It doesn’t get much more basic than that,

Fourth, there is Sanders’ enfeeblement of the meaning of the phrases “socialism” and “democratic socialism.” By any meaningful historical gauge, democratic socialism is about collective property and popular self-governance with workers’ control and real participatory democracy. In Sanders’ diluted Wonder Bread branding, democratic socialism means the existence of decent welfare programs, universal health insurance, and reduced economic inequality in an “entrepreneurial” (capitalist) nation with high voter turnout.

Fifth, there is Sanders’ admission at the end of his second comment that what “this [his] campaign” is about is increasing voter excitement and turnout for the corporate-neoliberal Democratic Party. Translation: Bernie is running to help the militant corporatist Hillary Clinton and the rotten, Wall Street-captive and imperial Democratic Party practice what the formerly left Christopher Hitchens caustically but all-too accurately called (in his 2000 book on the Clintons) “the essence of American politics….the manipulation of populism by elitism.” It’s about sheepdoggery. Sanders said nothing in his response to Cooper about how the struggle for social justice goes beyond major party mass-marketed-big money-big media-candidate-centered and quadrennial electoral extravaganzas. He utterer not a word about how that struggle requires a powerful grassroots popular sociopolitical movement beneath and beyond the periodic, money-drenched, and highly time-staggered elections that pass for “politics” – the only “politics that matters” – in the U.S..

Sixth, there was the absence of any meaningful definition of capitalism. An amoral, sociopathic, accumulation-mad, growth-addicted, and inherently chaotic, eco-cidal system of class rule, capitalism is distinguished by private ownership of the means of production and finance and their operation for private profit. It has a long run default tendency towards the increased concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. It is a system unworthy (to say the least) of public rescue. It is actively ruining livable ecology and poses severe and active, ongoing threats to the American middle class (which has been disastrously attacked and weakened by capital in the U.S. over the last four), to the broad working class majority, and indeed to life itself. Lacking any serious, deeply rooted definition or critique of capitalism as an historical political economy, Sanders had nothing substantive to say in properly critical response when Mrs. Clinton said that capitalism built “the greatest middle class in history” (whatever that means) and argued that the system should be “saved from itself.”

These are not small and merely semantic matters. Humanity is currently at a juncture where it either saves itself from the profits system or dissolves into ever deeper barbarism and environmental self-annihilation. The problem with capitalist “growth” isn’t just how its outcomes are distributed. It also and relatedly what that growth is doing does to livable ecology, which amounts to environmental self-annihilation by all serious scientific accounts now. That’s not just a difficulty with “casino capitalism” – the hyper-financialzed neoliberal and global capitalism of the last four plus decades – that Sanders feels save denouncing. It’s a problem with any and all phases and forms of capitalism, including even and indeed especially the anomalously high-growth Keynesian capitalism of the post-World War II era, when U.S.-led world capitalist expansion brought humanity to the precipice of full environmental catastrophe. These are basic facts of species life and death that Sanders cannot or will not publicly acknowledge.

Seventh, there is the apparent agreement of both Sanders and Clinton with the thoroughly deceptive. U.S. Chamber of Commerce-promoted myth that small business provides “the backbone of the U.S. economy.” Small and medium-sized business do no such thing. The U.S, economy is hitched above all and by far and away to the fortunes and designs of big monopoly and finance capital, as Mrs. Clinton and her self-described “good friend” Mr. Sanders both certainly know. Consistent with his misplaced paean to small business, Sanders called in Vegas for the break-up, not the nationalization (the obvious and longstanding, actually socialist position) of the nation’s giant financial institutions.

The watered-down nature of Sanders’ status as a “self-described socialist” (self-described indeed!) was further demonstrated when he said in Las Vegas that the United States was being turned into “an oligarchy as a result of Citizens United.” The revolting Citizens United ruling is of course a horrific and authoritarian low-point in the odious history of plutocratic jurisprudence. But no remotely thoughtful leftist should share the senator’s continuing obsession with a 2010 Supreme Court decision that was made long after the onset of neoliberal capitalism restored abject and unabashed plutocracy in the U.S. (not that actual plutocracy had ever gone away in the U.S.). And here he might want to revisit the high court’s horrible 1976 Buckley-Valeo decision which absurdly established big plutocratic political money as “free speech.”

The deeper reality is the underlying conflict between capitalism (seriously understood as an inherently wealth- and power-concentrating system of class rule) and popular self-governance. “We must make our choice,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louise Brandeis wrote in 1941: “We may have democracy in this country or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” If Sanders actually believes that the contemporary version of this problem in the U.S. dates from Citizens United (I doubt that he does), then he is very badly mistaken. The regressive and de-regulated, post-Keynesian/”post-Fordist” neoliberal era that has brought us to the current New Gilded Age dates from at least the middle 1970s. It’s guiding authoritarian and “free market” doctrine is, as Shoup has recently reminded us, “capital’s default position, the direction that the system always pushes toward, taking into account the level of class struggle from below.”

The most remembered line of the debate was Bernie’s statement that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about [Hillary Clinton’s] damn e-mails.” Here Sanders further demonstrated his sheepdog commitment to the dollar-drenched and neoliberal party of Robert Rubin, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the arch-neoliberal Barack Obama. A left candidate who was serious about defeating the Clinton machine would hardly be in the business of helping provide Hillary cover on her criminal and classically neoliberal use of a private corporate e-mail server for public sector (the State Department no less) communications. He would not have allowed himself to be badly outflanked on his portside by Mrs. Clinton on gun control and the NRA.

And, no small point, he would not have let Hillary – a reigning historical She-Wolf of neoliberal capitalism (second in that regards perhaps only to Margaret Thatcher) – get away scot-free with her deeply deceptive description of herself in Vegas as a lifelong true-“progressive” friend of working people and the poor. The historical record does not remotely match her claim, as Sanders certainly knows:

* Clinton applauded her husband’s vicious presidential elimination of public family cash assistance for poor families through a vindictive welfare “reform” (elimination) that has had disastrous consequence for the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

* As early members of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the co-strategists and operatives Bill and Hillary Clinton helped trail-blaze the development of the neoliberal “New Democrat” movement, which pushed the Democratic Party to abandon its last lingering commitments to labor unions, racial and social justice, and environmental protection.

* Hillary voted (as a US Senator) for legislation advanced by Wall Street to make it more difficult for poor families to use bankruptcy laws to get out from under crushing debt.

* Hillary said the following in her role as the head of the Clinton administration’s failed corporatist health reform initiative to a leading national physician and health care activist when he told her in 1993 that Canadian-style single-payer health insurance (a key part of Bernie Sanders’ campaign platform) was supported by more than two-thirds of the U.S. populace and was certified by the Congressional Budget Office as the most cost-effective plan on offer: “David [Himmelstein], tell me something interesting.” Along with the big insurance companies the Clintons deceptively railed against, the “co-presidents” Bill and Hillary Clinton decided from the start of their 1990s reign to exclude the popular health care alternative – single payer – from the national health care “discussion.” (Obama, for whom Sanders expresses great admiration, would do the same exact same thing in 2009).

* As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton called the arch-corporatist, regressive, anti-worker, secretive, authoritarian, and eco-cidal Trans-Pacific Partnership (which she now claims to oppose, just as Bill Clinton once deceptively claimed to oppose the North American Free Trade Agreement) “the gold standard in trade agreements” for “open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field.”

This and much more is consistent with the fact that Hillary Clinton “operates in a world awash in money and connections and a very privileged place” (the New York Times last spring) while fraudulently posing as a “populist” who is “in touch” with the concerns of everyday working Americans and who is bothered that “the deck is stacked” in favor of the rich. She has given speeches to leading Wall Street firms (and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange) for more than $200,000 each – more than four times U.S. median household income – as part of her effort to build a preemptive “money machine” meant to block rivals from making serious primary and caucus challenges.

Any leftist who has paid the slightest serious attention to U.S. politics since the early 1990s should have heard loud alarm bells ringing when Hillary Clinton described herself in Vegas as “a progressive…[b]ut a progressive who likes to get things done [and who] know[s] how to find common ground… even dealing with Republicans [with whom she]… found ways to work together.” Sound familiar? It should. It is straight out of the spurious, fake-progressive, arch-authoritarian, and neoliberal Bob Rubin-Bill Clinton-Barack Obama-DLC-Hamilton Project-Brookings Institute-Council of Foreign Relations playbook, written by and for the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire. The key phrase is “likes to get things done” – a way of consigning the basic and reasonable social-democratic programs and economic justice measures long and irrelevantly supported by most Americans to the realm of non-viable, pragmatically unrealistic, “extremist: and “do-nothing” fantasy.

Sanders clearly went into last week’s debate with no intention of calling out Mrs. Clinton on the coldly callous disingenuousness of her progressive and populist pretensions, which are richly consistent with Hitchens’ dictum. The nominally socialist candidate’s silence in this regard matches Dixon’s description of him. It fits Sanders’ early promise not to be a “spoiler” who “helps the Republicans” by damaging the Democrats’ front-runner.

I won’t bother to go into any great length on Sanders’ and Clinton’s hopelessly imperial, militarist, and American- exceptionalist comments in Las Vegas on U.S. foreign relations.. I don’t have time or space here to properly examine those horrible remarks, which were all-too predictably consistent with the debate’s sponsorship by Lockheed Martin and with its opening with the singing of the Star Spangled Banner by the leather pants-clad Sheryl Crowe. I will note, for what it’s worth, that Sanders described the U.S. invasion of Iraq (supported by War Hawk Hillary) as a strategic “blunder” but not as what it also and more significantly was: a pitiless petro-imperialist and arch-neoliberal crime that massacred a million Iraqis and maimed and displaced millions more. This is what passes in the reigning narrow spectrum of elite U.S. foreign policy debate as the sentiment of a “dove”: the notion that monumental and mass-murderous U.S.-imperial crimes like the U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Noam Chomsky) in the 1960s and 1970s and the invasion and occupation of Iraq were at worst strategic mistakes.

Did Bernie get in some decent, progressive jabs Vegas? Sure. It was neat that he scoffed when Hillary claimed (absurdly) that she would be tougher on Wall Street than he would. It was funny and correct when he said that “Wall Street regulates Congress, Congress doesn’t regulate Wall Street.” “Casino capitalism” is in fact a nightmare, of course, and it was entertaining to hear Sanders rail against it in the nation’s biggest casino town. If I were in the audience I would have applauded when Sanders said that climate change, not Russia, Iran, China (the ridiculous Jim Webb’s obsession) or even the (unmentionably U.S.-manufactured) Islamic State pose the single greatest threat to American national security.

Sanders received understandable and deserved applause when he denounced contemporary savage economic inequalities and advocated decent things like single-payer health insurance, genuinely progressive taxation, free college tuition, paid maternal and family leave, and big federal jobs programs. These are things that, as the corporate media never admits, a great majority of the United States’ invisibly progressive citizens have long supported. Along with the astonishing depth and degree of economic inequality in the U.S. today, that is why I have been unsurprised by the large crowds Sanders has drawn to his rallies and by the large number of small campaign donations he has received. Droves of progressive and liberal voters understand correctly that Sanders stands closest among all major party presidential candidates to actual if technically irrelevant public opinion on domestic social and economic policy.

Still, the larger reality beneath the harmony in Vegas was Sanders’ loyal service to Hillary and the Democratic Party’s Hitchensian mission (“the manipulation of populism by elitism”) and the accuracy of Bruce Dixon’s early description of the longtime de facto Democrat Bernie Sanders as a “sheepdog” for his closeted real party and thereby for the underlying capitalist empire that party serves in accord with its longstanding role as one of “two wings of the same bird of prey” (Upton Sinclair, 1904).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/20/bernie-and-hillary-the-sheepdog-and-the-she-wolf-in-vegas/

ernie Sanders Enlists in the Hillary Clinton Campaign

By Paul Street
Source: teleSUR English
May 8, 2015
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Posted in: Activism, Elections, Electoral Politics, Politics/Gov., US | Comments: 7
A shorter and earlier version of this essay appeared today on TeleSur English

Last February 19th, Vermont’s “socialist” U.S. Senator, the nominally independent Democrat Bernie Sanders, spoke to an enthusiastic crowd in a downtown Iowa City bookstore. He had come to explore his potential prospects in Iowa’s upcoming “first-in-the-nation” Democratic Party presidential caucus-primary campaign.
Sanders began by denouncing U.S. economic inequality and plutocracy and expressing concerns about anthropogenic global warming in terms that any serious, environmentally astute leftist could welcome. He decried the horrific facts that six Walmart heirs possess as much wealth between them as the bottom 42% of the U.S. population and that 95% of the nation’s income gains went to the top 1% during President Obama’s first term. Sanders cited and bemoaned terrible statistics on U.S. poverty. He condemned the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision for furthering the “corporate takeover of our democracy.” He deplored climate change and its deniers.

Deleting the Dollar Dems
I applauded politely along with everyone else after these statements. Then things went downhill. After complimenting Iowa City for helping elect a first Black president by supporting Barack Obama in the 2008 Iowa caucuses and suggesting that the nation’s drift toward the embrace of gay marriage meant that it was ready to overcome economic inequality, Sanders repeatedly attacked the dastardly right-wing pro-business Republicans. As far I could tell, he seemed to think that the GOP and its big money backers alone were responsible for the hot plutocratic mess in Washington.

Unlike his purported hero Eugene Debs, he had nothing to say against the other great capitalist party. It was left to a smirking graduate student to remind Sanders and his adoring Iowa City audience that the national corporate and financial oligarchy is a richly bipartisan affair in which dastardly pro-Big Business Democrats – including powerful people like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – are (to say the least) deeply complicit.

It struck me that here the “socialist” Sanders stood oddly to the right of the position taken in Iowa in 2007 by the former Democratic Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards. Edwards denounced “corporate Democrats as well as corporate Republicans” in his call for “an epic fight with concentrated wealth and power.” He clearly and correctly included Hillary and Obama in the “corporate Democrat” category and mocked Obama’s promise to “get things done” by “reaching across the table” to business elites as well as the Republican Party.

Surely, I thought, an old Brooklyn “socialist” like Sanders knew that much of the nation’s disproportionately Caucasian ruling class loved the empty, identity-politicized, and fake-progressive illusion of change that the deeply conservative Obama’s election represented.

“My Friend Hillary”
Another warning sign came when Sanders said that he “liked Hillary” and considered her “a good friend.” Why, I thought to myself, would a “socialist” and “independent” politician and “activist” be “good friends” in a supposedly adversarial political culture with a fabulously wealthy and notoriously mendacious arch-corporatist and militarist major party politico like Hillary Clinton, who:

* Forcefully backed George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

* Applauded her husband’s elimination of public family cash assistance for poor families through a vicious welfare “reform” (elimination) that has had disastrous consequence for the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

* Helped lead the development of the neoliberal “New Democrat” movement, which pushed the Democratic Party to abandon its last lingering commitments to labor unions, racial and social justice, and environmental protection.

* Voted (as a US Senator) for legislation advanced by Wall Street to make it more difficult for poor families to use bankruptcy laws to get out from under crushing debt.

* Said the following – in her role as the head of the Clinton administration’s failed corporatist health reform initiative – to a leading national physician and health care activist when he told her in 1993 that “Canadian-style” single-payer health insurance was supported by more than two-thirds of the U.S. populace and was certified by the Congressional Budget Office as the most cost-effective plan on offer: “tell me something interesting.” (Along with the big insurance companies that the Clintons deceptively railed against, the “co-presidents” Bill and Hillary Clinton decided from the start to exclude the popular health care alternative – single payer – from the national health care “discussion.” [Obama would do the same exact same thing in 2009])

* Called (in her role as Secretary of State) the richly corporatist, regressive, anti-worker, secretive, authoritarian, and eco-cidal Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “the gold standard in trade agreements” for “open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that has the rule of law and a level playing field.”

* “Operates,” in the words of New York Times reporter Carolyn Ryan, in “a world awash in money and connections and a very privileged place” – this while deceptively posing as a “populist” who is “in touch” with the concerns of everyday working Americans and is bothered that “the deck is stacked” in favor of the rich and powerful.

* Gives speeches to leading Wall Street firms (and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange) for more than $200,000 each – more than four times U.S. median household income – as part of her effort to build a preemptive “money machine” meant to block rivals from making serious primary and caucus challenges.

“It’s going to be like nothing you’ve seen,” a top Democratic donor gleefully recently told The Hill about “Hillary, Inc.’s” campaign finance war chest. “The numbers will be astounding.” The dollar “numbers” are driven by giant contributions from super-wealthy donors who have no interest – quite the opposite in fact – in seeing government serve the “everyday Americans” in whose name Mrs. Clinton is running. Black Agenda Report’s Executive Director Glen Ford provides some sobering context on what’s going on:

“The rich decided some time ago that Hillary Clinton would be the virtually unchallenged presidential candidate of the Democratic Party…the selection process that counts occurs in the boardrooms and mansions and private clubs and getaways of the rich. Hillary Clinton and her husband, Bill, have spent virtually their entire adult lives on the millionaires’ campaign circuit, the rich man’s primary. In the process of pleasing the rich, they have become rich, themselves….Hillary hopes to spend two and a half billion dollars of – mostly – rich people’s money in the 2016 campaign. Wealthy people will be just as generous with the Republican candidate. The outcome on Election Day is absolutely certain: the rich man’s candidate will definitely win, and the people will lose…”

“Populist Rhetoric is Good Politics”
Hillary’s big Wall Street backers recently told the leading insider political journal Politico how they understand that their candidate’s “populist” comments are politically unavoidable, unsurprising, and even advisable. The language is merely a pose Hillary has to take to get elected; it presents no serious threat to wealth and privilege. “Populist rhetoric, many [of these elites] say,” Politico reported, “is good politics – but doesn’t portend an assault on the rich.”

I almost wondered if any of the big Clinton donors interviewed by Politico had read the still left Christopher Hitchens’ book No One Left to Lie to: The Values of the Worst Family (Verso, 1999, 2000) – a study of the Clintons. The book’s first chapter, titled “Triangulation,” contained a memorable passage that summarized the “essence of American politics” as “the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful,” Hitchens noted:

“which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as most ‘in touch’ with popular concerns; can anticipate the tides and pulses of public opinion; can, in short, be the least apparently ‘elitist.’ It is no great distance from Huey Long’s robust cry of ‘Every man a king’ to the insipid ‘inclusiveness’ of [Bill Clinton’s slogan] ‘Putting People First,’ but the smarter elite managers have learned in the interlude that solid, measurable pledges have to be distinguished by a reserve’ tag that earmarks them for the bankrollers and backers. They have also learned that it can be imprudent to promise voters too much.”

Later in the same chapter, Hitchens noted that “at all times,” the Clinton administration’s “retreat from egalitarian and even ‘progressive’ positions has been hedged by a bodyguard of political correctness.” Kind of like Sanders moving back fully into the corporatized Democratic Party while saying nice things about gay marriage and praising liberals for supporting a Black presidential candidate.

Why Hillary Welcomes Bernie
I thought back to Sanders’ talk in Iowa City last February and reflected on Politico’s report when Bernie announced last week his decision to run in the Iowa Democratic Party presidential caucus. It is not a worthy endeavor. Both of two dominant U.S. political organizations stand well to the right of the citizenry on numerous key issues. The Democratic Party has long been a full-fledged rich folks’ party, not to mention a party of war and empire. (Bill and Hillary Clinton helped see to that during the last quarter of the last century.) With its last positive links to its long New Deal interlude pretty much swept into the dustbin of history (thanks in part to the Clintons and other “New Democrats” since the 1970s), its leadership and funders will never allow a candidate who is sincerely committed (as I think Sanders is) to socially progressive domestic policy goals – much less one who has called himself a “socialist” – become its standard-bearer. It will nominate either Hillary Clinton or (in the odd event of her departure) some other fully corporatized Democrat in the summer of 2016.

All of which raises the question: why help these dismal dollar Democrats disguise their oligarchic essence? Why abet their attempt to seem to have had “a full and open debate” over the issues that concern ordinary Americans in the nation’s caucuses and primaries? Why help the Democrats seem more democratic and progressive than they really are? Why give succor to those who would wrap plutocracy in false rebels’ clothes? Why lend a hand to Hillary’s effort to manipulate populism in service to elitism”? Why help the Clinton machine deny that it is anything other than the pre-selected choice of what “the hidden primary of the ruling class” (Laurence Shoup, 2008)? Why help the dollar Dems put fake-populist lipstick on the nation’s plutocratic pig of a party and elections system?

But that, I suspect is the point. It’s not for nothing that, as the New York Times reported last Saturday, “Mrs. Clinton cheerily welcomed Mr. Sanders into the race.” Of course she did. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Sanders’ “good friend” Hillary Clinton is pleased to hear that Bernie is throwing his hat in the ring. The Clintons are very smart and calculating political actors. They know that the only real threat to de-rail Hillary (as Obama did in 2007 and 2008) on the road to the Democratic presidential nomination this time is (perhaps I should say “was”) U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), whose “populist thunder” Mrs. Clinton has been working to steal in a very systematic way in recent weeks. But with Warren appearing to mean it when she says she’s not up for a presidential run (not ready for fighting Hillary’s daunting money machine, perhaps) and with little else to contest her ascendancy on “the left” (Martin O’Malley and Jim Webb…seriously?), Hillary now faces a rather different political and public relations problem. She is in danger of enjoying an all-too obviously Wall Street-funded dynastic coronation as the Democratic nominee. She probably sees it as useful to face a progressive challenge from a progressive candidate like Sanders who could never receive the funding or corporate media approval required to make a serious bid for the nomination. That way her pre-selected nomination can look less transparently plutocratic and more like a passably “democratic” outcome of “a real debate.” Ashley Smith puts things very well in a trenchant analysis on SocialistWorker.org:

“Hillary Clinton certainly doesn’t regard Sanders as a threat. She knows that the election business follows the golden rule: Whoever has more gold, wins. Clinton is expected to amass a war chest of more than $1 billion, mostly from Wall Street and Corporate America, to pay for advertising, an army of paid staff and Astroturf support. This will overwhelm Sanders’ fundraising goal of $50 million and his underdeveloped volunteer infrastructure….In fact, Clinton regards Sanders as an asset to her campaign. He will bring enthusiasm and attention to Democratic primaries that promised to be lackluster at best. He will also help her frame the election in populist terms that have widespread support. That benefits the Democrats and undermines the Republicans, who have little to say about inequality, except that they like it….No wonder Clinton celebrated Sander’s entry into the race.”

Bernie Will Not “Push Hillary to the Left”
I am hearing hopeful statements from Iowa progressives who claim that Sanders will “help pull Hillary to the left.” That’s a very naïve thing to believe. Hillary Clinton is a dedicated corporatist and hawkish imperialist (last summer she praised her “friend” Henry Kissinger for his supposed grand commitment to democracy) who will never go left beyond the Machiavellian requirements of campaign oratory (what her Wall Street backers call “good politics”). At the same time, as the liberal commentator Paul Woldman noted in the Washington Post last week, “Sanders isn’t going to pull her to the left because she was already moving that way” – at the level of rhetoric, that is. The specter of Elizabeth Warren and an angry, progressive-majority populace already did the job.

At the same time, we should note that Sanders shows no interest in attempting to pull Hillary or anyone else leftward on the problem of the U.S. military Empire, which accounts for 57% of federal discretionary spending and nearly half the world’s military spending while functioning as a massive system of corporate welfare for leading high-tech U.S. corporations like Boeing and Raytheon. As TeleSur English commentator and U.S. military veteran Vinny Emmanuelle recently noted, “whether we’re talking about Bernie Sanders or Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, any serious discussion of the US Empire is still off the table.” Sanders agrees with other “liberals like…Obama” that “the US Empire is essential, yet should operate differently. In some ways, they view the Pentagon the same way Donald Rumsfeld did: as an entity to be reformed, modernized and streamlined” (But Sanders is not sufficiently committed to “defense” reform to reject the Pentagon’s decision to base a fleet of highly wasteful F-35 fighter jets in Vermont – a move Sanders endorsed in the name of jobs.)

Sheep Dog
One Iowa left-liberal recently wrote me to say the following: “The third party approach has proven to be futile. Why condemn Sanders for trying something different?” Something different? Forget that Sanders essentially abandoned his (Eugene) Debsian third party roots and became a de facto Democrat (despite his nominal “independent” status) once he entered the U.S. Congress in 1991. As the veteran campaign manager, Black Left political commentator, and Georgia Green Party co-chair Bruce Dixon explained during a conference on independent Left electoral action in Chicago last weekend, Bernie is getting ready to play an old “sheep dog” role. It’s nothing new: progressives understandably stray from the dismal dollar Democrats (the Clintons being perhaps the ultimate historical example of such) from one election cycle to the next thanks to the party’s underlying captivity to the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire. In the primaries the Democrats send out some “sheep dogs” to corral such folks back into the fold. The “sheep dogs” lose in the primaries and then give their voters and resources over to the officially nominated major party corporate candidate. Think Dennis Kucinich and Obama in 2008, Jesse Jackson and Mondale in the 1980s.

Anyone who doubts that Sanders will hand over his voters, delegates, and money to Hillary once he’s through in the primaries hasn’t been paying attention. “No matter what I do,” Sanders said last January, “I will not be a spoiler. I will not play that role in helping to elect some right-wing Republican as president of the United States.”

Wasted Energy, Deepened Futility
Leftists should consider two additional forms of harm that could be inflicted on the progressive cause by Sanders’ “run for the White House.” First, candidate-centered campaigns tend to soak up most of the political energies of their participants. There’s not much left for efforts to build and expand movements for deeper systemic change beneath and beyond the great “quadrennial electoral extravaganzas” that are staged “as yet another method of marginalizing the population” (Noam Chomsky, October 2004). This is especially true for the absurdly lengthy presidential race, which begins in Iowa (and New Hampshire) eighteen months prior to the actual election date.

Second, there’s the deepened sense of popular powerlessness likely to be engendered when Sanders is defeated. The fact that Sanders will be the only candidate to run seriously on behalf of populist, social-democratic domestic policies that most U.S. citizens support but will be badly creamed threatens to help the “mainstream” (corporate) U.S. media and politics culture obscure the fact that most of those citizens are actually left-leaning progressives in their policy preferences. It may further the deadly illusion that those social-democratic policies lack popular support (“we just don’t have the numbers”) and thereby deepen progressive activists’ sense of futility and isolation.

Blowing Off Vermont and Single Payer
If Bernie really wanted to impact policy on behalf of working people through electoral action, he had a much better option than enlisting as a populism-manipulating sheep dog for his “good friend” Hillary Clinton in the national presidential electoral racket. As Ashley Smith explains, he could have made a likely successful bid to win single-payer health insurance for the people of Vermont by running as the Progressive Party candidate for governor of that state:

“He could have set a very different example, with a far greater chance of success, if he ran for governor in Vermont against the Democratic Party’s incumbent Peter Shumlin, who has betrayed promises to implement a single-payer health care system, create green, union jobs and much more…Sanders is Vermont’s most popular politician. With the backing of the Progressive Party, he could have run for governor as an independent and easily defeated both the Democratic and Republican nominees, and never faced the accusation of being a spoiler that is inevitably thrown at any third-party challenger. A victory for a truly independent campaign by Sanders would have been even bigger than Kshama Sawant’s election to the Seattle City Council as an open socialist. In so doing, Sanders could have built momentum for a national third party alternative to represent workers and the oppressed.”

Eugene Debs would not be pleased by Bernie’s choice.

Postscript: Sanders declared his candidacy on April 30, 2015. Wouldn’t a genuine socialist have waited just one more day to announce on May First, May Day – the day of the international working class dating back at least to the workers’ Left-led Eight Hour struggle in Chicago 1886?

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/bernie-sanders-enlists-in-the-hillary-clinton-campaign/

Is Bernie Sanders Dangerous to Socialism?

http://www.truth-out.org/images/images_2015_10/2015_1028bernie.jpg

Wednesday, 28 October 2015 00:00
By Emma Caterine, Truthout | Op-Ed
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), delivers an address on how to spur the American economy at Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C, 9 February, 2015. (Photo: Brookings Institution)
Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivers an address on how to spur the US economy at Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, February 9, 2015. (Photo: Brookings Institution)

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"... the mistakes that are made by a truly revolutionary workers' movement are, historically speaking, immeasurably more fruitful and more valuable than the infallibility of the best possible 'Central Committee.'" - Rosa Luxemburg, democratic socialist, Rosa Luxemburg Reader (p. 265, p. 444).

On October 18, 2015, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders decided that Iowa City would be where he declared what "democratic socialism" means to him. A bit shy of a 13-point program, Sanders did cite some helpful examples of what he considers socialist institutions: Social Security, Medicare and the police. Interestingly, the last time I heard these institutions in the United States referred to as socialist was when they were being attacked by libertarians like Ron Paul and Ross Perot. Apparently the populist independent-turned-Democrat from Vermont and the unrepentant capitalists share the viewpoint that government institutions are inherently socialist.

I could laugh off the reactionary ravings of the right wing. But my heart sank when I saw Sanders' statements. Empirically and historically incorrect, they endanger any hope for building socialism in the United States through a doublespeak of calling liberal institutions socialist.

It may seem nitpicky to the unfamiliar, but Sanders' politics are actually what is commonly referred to as social democracy. Social democrats believe that the purpose of the state is to intervene in, but not take over, the capitalist economy in order to promote social justice. The countries that Sanders loves to idolize - the Nordic nations - are often called social democracies. While less broad and generous than the Nordic welfare programs, the United States' Social Security and Medicare programs can also be called social democratic programs.

In fact, echoing the "Obama is a socialist" sentiments of the modern Tea Party, opponents of Social Security in the late 1930s claimed that it was socialism. But it is very much not. Socialism is ownership by workers of the means of production, or worker control of the economy. The different types of socialism are different proposals of how to accomplish these aims, from the "transitional programs" of Trotskyists to the autonomous collectives of syndicalists.

Social Security, on the other hand, is intervention into the capitalist economy. Rather than building workers' power, Social Security gives them "social insurance" based on the very same unequal metrics - wages that created the need for the intervention. It is like a consolation prize for losing capitalism! President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal brought on a "golden age of capitalism," and is still referenced as such by the capitalist apologists of today.

In a time when resistance by people of color against racist police is held as the modern example of "people power," even some liberals must have been thrown by Bernie Sanders' classification of police as socialist. But the New York City Police Department is described as at the "cutting edge" of policing, and "pioneering" new ways to be more sensitive to "the community." Surely this "progressive" police department would demonstrate the "socialism" Sanders says is exemplified by police. But rather than the workers democratically controlling how policing operates, the NYPD is run by a strict hierarchy. There are 13 tiers, from the new officers making $41,975 per year to NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton's $205,180. While the department receives $4.8 billion per year from the government, it is talked about like a global franchise. The assertion that the police are a socialist institution is even more preposterous when historically they have functioned to protect the property of the wealthy and prevent leftist uprisings by groups like the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords and the American Indian Movement.

Bernie Sanders' statements are inaccurate, but is he dangerous to socialists? Unfortunately, social democrats like Sanders have demonstrated in the past that at crucial moments, they will side with the right wing over actual socialists.

It was December 30, 1918, in Berlin, and Rosa Luxemburg had enough. "Red Rosa" had long been a firebrand in German politics: organizing sex workers, fighting against capital punishment and war, successfully calling multiple general strikes and writing a book on Marxist economics that both compliments and builds on Marx's Capital. Supporting the kaiser in World War I and resisting the new workers' councils, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) of Germany had proven to be detrimental to the fight for socialism. The war had split the socialists of the country: the SDP believing in reforming capitalism, the Communist Party (which Luxemburg had formed after the war) wanting to replicate a more democratic version of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

"Our solution," Luxemburg declared in a speech, "offers the only means of saving human society from destruction." Luxemburg and her Communist Party of Germany threatened the Social Democratic Party with open defiance. So the SDP ordered the Freikorps, right-wingers known as a "precursor to Nazism," to suppress the rebellion. Luxemburg was captured, tortured and killed. Obviously we do not live in quite as turbulent times as Germany was in then, but the simultaneous rise of populism on both the left (represented by Sanders) and the right (represented by Donald Trump), with no challenge to capitalism itself, should at least concern American leftists.

The socialists of this country must cease pulling punches with Bernie Sanders, often held in the hope that his candidacy is an entryway to actual socialism. When we make such compromises, we underestimate how well Sanders can make his social democratic ideas a dead end in capitalism, rather than a path to socialism. We need transitional programs like Socialist Alternative's strategy in Seattle. That is pragmatism. There is nothing pragmatic about the dead end of social democracy. And there is nothing revolutionary about socialism in name only.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33407-is-bernie-sanders-dangerous-to-socialism

When we make such compromises, we underestimate how well Sanders can make his social democratic ideas a dead end in capitalism, rather than a path to socialism. We need transitional programs like Socialist Alternative's strategy in Seattle. That is pragmatism. There is nothing pragmatic about the dead end of social democracy. And there is nothing revolutionary about socialism in name only.

She says things that are (mostly) right and true, the underlined.

Then she mixes in things that are just dead-ins in themselves, the bolded.

This is a mishmash throughout the piece, yet she nails The Bern dead-on. He is no kind of socialist - the DS lost that claim a hundred years ago. Yet the other thing this piece points out is far, oh lord, how far the left has to travel in this benighted country. We have to march against the tide of this incrementalism that is expressed by this writer. Doing the "practical" has become, in "leftist" circles, the equivalent of doing nothing. "Employee-owned" operations are still "privately owned" operations.

I know that this piece is to show that there is a least some "progressive", "socialist" segments of the voting public who see The Bern for what he is. I just wonder what Emma Caterine will do on election day 2016. Lesser evilism peeps out from between her words...

I think this is a good idea...




Sanders unveils bill to ban oil, gas extraction on public lands, waters
by worker
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.,
Sanders Unveils Bill to Ban Oil, Gas Extraction on Public Lands, Waters
© AP Photo/ Ringo H.W. Chiu
02:12 05.11.2015(updated 02:30 05.11.2015)
US Senator Bernie Sanders claims that the US government must end oil and gas extraction on public land and waters in the United States.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The US government must end oil and gas extraction on public land and waters in the United States, US Senator Bernie Sanders said in a statement on Wednesday upon introducing new legislation aimed to achieve that goal.

"Worry less about your campaign contributions and worry more about your children and grandchildren," Sanders stated. "I’ve got four kids, and I’ve got seven beautiful grandchildren. We have a moral responsibility to leave our kids a planet that is healthy and inhabitable."

Sander’s Keep It in the Ground Act would ban corporations from conducting new fossil fuel projects on "all federal lands and waters." It would also prevent offshore drilling in the Arctic and the Atlantic as well as halt new leases and end "nonproducing leases" for offshore drilling in the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.

ead more: http://sputniknews.com/us/20151105/1029615308/sanders-ban-oil-gas-extraction.html#ixzz3qZpQreJS



However, it doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being passed into law. No doubt some morons will see it as 'speaking truth to power', which in these days means utter futility. This is crap electioneering, utterly disingenuous but ambrosia for the true believers.

I think this is a good idea...



However, it doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being passed into law. No doubt some morons will see it as 'speaking truth to power', which in these days means utter futility. This is crap electioneering, utterly disingenuous but ambrosia for the true believers.

It even has a pretty good slogan: "Keep it in the ground!" This is good politics for The Bern, but you are right, that's all it is. I can hear the progressives now: "You have to agree with him!" Humph...

It even has a pretty good slogan: "Keep it in the ground!" This is good politics for The Bern, but you are right, that's all it is. I can hear the progressives now: "You have to agree with him!" Humph...

Even as we speak Obama has ixnayed that damned pipeline, only it was the day after the company requested that the project be shelved. Another great non-blow for the environment.

Where can I buy some stock in cynicism, it's a bull market!

Even as we speak Obama has ixnayed that damned pipeline, only it was the day after the company requested that the project be shelved. Another great non-blow for the environment.

Where can I buy some stock in cynicism, it's a bull market!

Man, the Democrats are banking on cynicism - bottom-line, they got nothing else. The party is split between cold-eyed hucksters and teary old ladies with the vapors. Republicans ain't even got that. Justa bunch of recently hooded assholes trying to figure out if they can somehow vote for a black (not their word) who may or may not be Christian ("Hey, what the hell is a 7th day Adventist, anyway?")

Looking For Bernie, Part 3: Sanders '90
Posted by Aphra Behn at Thursday, July 16, 2015
[CN:Racism, sexism, gun violence, disablist language. This is part three in a four-part series analyzing Bernie Sanders' political history through an intersectional feminist lens, asking questions about the role privilege has played in that development. Previously in this series: Looking for Bernie, Part 1: Sanders '72 and Looking for Bernie, Part 2:Mr. Sanders Goes to Burlington.]

PART 3: SANDERS '90

As far back as 1972, Sanders had been told that he should be running for Congress, not for governor, because of his interest in national policy and foreign affairs. In 1988, he revisited that advice. Vermont's Senator Robert Stafford retired; Congressman Jim Jefford chose to run for his seat rather than for re-election to the House of Congress. Sanders decided to run. As he writes in his autobiography, Outsider in the House:

I began the race as a "spoiler." (Oh how I love that word, with its implications of the sacrosanct nature of the two-party system.) Would I take away enough votes from the Democrat to elect the Republican? But a funny thing happened on the way to Election Day. I wasn't the spoiler, after all. The Democrat was.
Sanders lost the race to Republican Peter Smith—but only by 3.5%. His Democratic opponent came in third—a distant third at that. It was a victory, of sorts, for Sanders, shaking up the Vermont party system and raising the previously preposterous idea that he might get into national office. He was no longer the 1970s radical running "educational" campaigns. He'd learned to make nice with business in Burlington, and to fashion his campaigns around voter concerns, rather than the other way around. He had become quite a skilled and canny politician, who could do deals when he needed to.
Congressional_Directory_Pic_Of_Sanders photo sanders105thcong1997 242x282 2_zpswnabcse7.jpg
[Representative Bernie Sanders in the 105th Congressional Pictorial Directory.]
In his autobiography, Sanders explains that he weighed a number of options for 1990, including a possible gubernatorial run, since Madeleine Kunin decided not to stand for a further term that year. He decided instead that he had a chance to unseat Smith, based on his good showing in 1988, and also because the Savings and Loan scandal was tarnishing the reputation of both parties in Congress. All that makes sense.

But I also think there may have been another factor involved: Sanders and the Vermont Democrats came to a truce. I don't know if it was explicit or implicit in 1990. But the facts are that the Democrats gave approximately zero support to Sanders' Democratic opponent in 1990. Upon his election, Sanders caucused with the Democrats. By 2005, Howard Dean was describing Sanders as basically a liberal Democrat, who voted with the Democratic Party "98% of the time." (Link goes to a YouTube clip of Dean saying this on Meet the Press. I've seen that percentage thrown around with no context; it seems to be just Howard Dean's offhand remark, not an actual figure based on statistical analysis.)

I doubt Sanders appreciated Dean's downplaying of his socialism, but Dean's remarks provide insight into how the Vermont Democratic Party came to view Sanders: he might be formally outside the party structure, but in practice things are different. One way or another, he hasn't had to worry about a strongly supported Democratic challenger for some time. In 1994, 1998, 2000 and 2002, no Democratic candidate opposed Sanders for Congress. Sanders ran in the Democratic primary in 2006, but declined the Democratic nomination in order to run as an Independent for Senate. The years when Democratic candidates did run, their lackluster performances suggest a distinct lack of support from the party. And the first candidate to feel that lack of support, unfortunately, was Dolores Sandoval, one of the most innovative and interesting political voices I heard during the course of this research.

In 1990, Dr. Dolores Sandoval was a university professor who had actively served on various statewide committees to women's issues, civil rights, and education. She was also the first African-American woman in Vermont to run for a statewide office. And if you can't figure out why that was significant, consider: at that time, only 25 black Americans sat in Congress. Only 63 black Americans had ever served in the House, and only 3 had served in the Senate. (Today there are 46 black members in the House and 2 in the Senate.) There were only 31 women in Congress in 1990; today there are 104. Only 5 African-American women had ever sat in Congress; in 1990, only one of them, Cardiss Collins, was currently serving. Today, there are 18 black women serving in Congress.

Sandoval was more than a mere statistic; she was an accomplished academic with genuinely fresh, and indeed, radical ideas (more on those later). I don't know what would have happened had she been elected, but a look at her LinkedIn profile suggests a pretty amazing CV. In addition to teaching in Africa, Middle East & Latin American Studies, she served in a variety of university administrative roles, held fellowships around the world, worked on land mines issues in Sierra Leone and around the world, worked on aid for Honduras, and pursued research on immigrants as well as founding the Da costa-Angelique Institute ("Canada's first black think tank") and Museum-Observatory of Immigration. Oh, and she's a playwright. And those are just some highlights.

My point is, Sandoval would not only have been a historic Congressional representative; she would have likely pursued many important progressive concerns with vigor, creativity, and thoughtfulness. Would that have made for a good politician? I can't say. But if you wanted to pick the outsider, the real fresh perspective in 1990, it would have been Sandoval, not Sanders.

We'll never know how that might have worked out. From the start, the Democratic Party was unsupportive. Thanks to a financial dispute between Sandoval and Peter Freyne, a local journalist who worked on her campaign for a time, there is a record of documents submitted to the FEC about her campaign and the 1990 election. And they make it clear that the state Democrats weren't planning any real opposition to Sanders. He might have run as an "Independent," but that doesn't mean he got equal opposition from both left and right.

As early as March, 1990, according to Sandoval, the Chair of the Vermont Democratic Party, Violet Coffin, was discouraging her from running because of the "strength of the Socialist candidate." In a March 29 letter to Coffin, Sandoval also protests the remarks of party executive director Craig Fuller, who had described the Democratic primary candidates as weak, which, as Sandoval wrote in her letter, "shut the gate after the first two male candidates emerged." Several democrats demanded that Fuller lose his position, but as an April1, 1990 story in the Burlington Free Press notes, he kept his job.

photo sanndoval19902 2_zpsmxbi3xxz.jpg
[News clippings from the FEC file regarding Peter Freyne's dispute with Dolores Sandoval. Public record.]
Later in the race, Madeleine Kunin and Senator Patrick Leahy claimed that their lack of support for Sandoval was a result of the opinions she expressed that summer about drugs and the Middle East. But the lack of support for Sandoval was clear to Vermonters as early as April. A column by Emerson Lynn in the St. Albans Messenger states:

Kunin has repeatedly stated that one of her priorities is to get other women to run for office. She says she wants to help them. But her support comes at a price: she has to think the woman can win.
Such thinking helps erode the strength of the two-party system. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy of decline... Obviously Kunin would drive a wedge into the Sanders campaign if she were to declare steadfast support for Sandoval. Any support Sandoval gets will come at the expense of Sanders. But what do Democrats get if Sanders wins? Is it truly a victory for Democrats to get Peter Smith out of office when Sanders beats up on Democrats as often as Republicans?

I'd be tying Occam's Paisley tie into a big Windsor if I didn't add the obvious: Sandoval was considered a "weak" candidate because of her race and gender, in part if not in whole. Would it be difficult for a black woman to get the votes of white Vermonters? Sure. Sandoval faced prejudices a white man, or a white woman, didn't have to face. But the only way to get more people of color elected into office is... to get more people of color elected. And that would take a lot of work and support than the Democrats were willing to give Sandoval in 1990, running against Sanders. As Sandoval wrote in a statement to the FEC:
Clearly, the records shows that the first time a Black candidate gained sufficient voter support to be recognized as the Democratic Party's candidate for the US House of Representatives all usual support efforts and recognition were withheld from her.
Okay, so what does all of this have to do with Bernie Sanders? Sandoval did not include charges of racism or sexism against him in her FEC counter-complaints about Freyne and the Vermont Dems. (She took plenty of jabs at him on the campaign trail, of course. An example: an April speech questioning Sanders' "patronizing attitude" about her chances, asking "Is that because he thinks this woman candidate is a pushover?")
And, it is very important to note that Sandoval today says good things about Sanders. "It's always been my impression he's been good on racial issues," she's reported to have said in a July 1, 2015 story in the Vermont alternative magazine Seven Days. Sandoval praises his 2002 Iraq War vote, calling the war "a racist endeavor." Whatever discrimination she experienced in 1990 from Vermont Democrats has not left her with bitterness towards Bernie Sanders, and I want to make that clear.

Sanders himself hasn't said much about that discrimination, only noting in his book that Sandoval "ran a weak campaign with very little party support." That's an understatement, to say the least! It's probably a good way to keep from calling his white Vermont Democratic allies racists, though. Sanders still has criticisms of the party system but he's no longer Sanders '72 when it comes to the Democrats. There's been a bit more than just a détente between Sanders and Vermont Dems. Rather, it's been closer to an entente cordiale. Sometimes quite cordiale, indeed.

And Sanders '90 left Sanders '72 behind in other ways as well, when he took a rightward drift on the topics of drugs, war, and guns.

Let's start with drugs. That summer, Sandoval called for their controlled decriminalization. In one of her most detailed comments on the issue, a July 15, 1990 commentary piece for the Sunday Rutland Herald and the Sunday Times Argus, she cited the violence bred by illegal markets and a frightening decline in civil liberties as good reasons to end the War on Drugs. While Sandoval says she does not personally condone drug use, she urged a controlled legalization in place of the current prohibition. Suggesting that drugs are actually made more enticing by their verboten status, she writes, "I believe that if we rid out society of the forbidden-fruit glamorization of drugs, we will be serving the best interests of our rebellious youth." She also decries the ineffective use of incarceration to fight addiction: "Quite simply, I believe drug addiction should lead to the clinic door, not the jailhouse door."

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Remember Sanders' 1972 letter that's been (falsely) hailed as supporting full marriage equality? It called for the decriminalization of laws relating to homosexuality, as well as those relating to drugs, among others. And in a campaign speech on October 1972 reported in the Bennington Banner, he explicitly called for the adoption of "the British system, in which heroin users are given the drug free from clinics, thereby reducing crime and other social problems resulting from the high cost of illegal drugs."

But Sanders 1990 is another story. Both Smith and Sanders expressed strong disagreement with Sandoval. A July column in the Burlington Free Press says "Sanders worries that legal drugs would become cheaper traps locking the impoverished in ghetto squalor." ("Ghetto squalor"? I really, really hope that's not a direct quote.) The Press goes on to gaslight Sandoval for calling out the racist stereotypes invoked by such a response, but the St. Albans Messenger was friendlier to her. In a July 10 column, Emerson Lynn writes that "contrary to what Sanders says, it is not a problem relegated to the poor alone." If Smith and Sanders didn't like Sandoval's ideas, Lynn argued they needed to come up with better answers.

All this might be a pretty small footnote; Sanders changed his mind, and expressed it in grating terms that invoke classist and racist stereotypes. Surprise! He's a politician. But drugs are another area where certain Sanders fans have misrepresented his record in order to paint him as an omniscient progressive messiah. Here is Vox magazine holding up his 1972 letter as some kind of proof that Bernie Sanders has always been right (meaning "left") on the drug war. No, no, and no. 2015 Sanders is actually much closer to 1990 Sanders, cautiously suggesting that we need to look at the medical decriminalization of marijuana before committing to a policy view. Sorry, Vox, but the Washington Post has a far more accurate headline: "On marijuana, Bernie Sanders is kind of a disappointing socialist ex-hippie."

Clipping_of_Sandoval_news_item photo sandoval1990vsleahy-1 2_zpsztidlbpb.jpg
[News clippings from the FEC file regarding Peter Freyne's dispute with Dolores Sandoval. Public record.]
July saw Sandoval make another bold policy suggestion: a call to radically alter US policy in the Middle East, in response to President Bush's decision to suspend talks with the PLO. As described in July 19 campaign material, she said the US should end all military aid to Israel until it came to the table with the Palestinians, and impose further sanctions should there be no negotiations for a peaceful resolution within 30 days. She calls out Sanders for condemning human rights abuses in Central America and in China, but for being "silent about human rights abuses and the threat of mass slaughter in the Middle East." In September, a Times-Argus story by Debbie Bookchin records her as opposing Bush's airlift to Saudi Arabia, which had come in response to the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. By contrast, "Smith supported the president's actions, and Sanders supports a limited deployment."

To be fair to Sanders, his record in Congress of opposing George H.W. Bush's Gulf War certainly paints him as more of a peace-seeker than a war-monger. And talking about Israel is difficult for plenty of people on the left, but it can be especially complicated for Jewish politicians in the U.S. (I'm not going to link to any of it, because fuck that, but suffice to say, the dankest anti-Semitic corners of the Internet have plenty of hateful shit to say about Bernie Sanders and Israel. And those hatemongers can go to straight to hell, preferably by overnight express.)

So I don't know that Sandoval's ideas were necessarily ideas that all progressives could have gotten behind, or would support today. But it must be said that Sandoval, not Sanders, had the radical idea about Middle East policy in 1990. Sanders would continue to go on to have a pragmatic and selective view of military deployment and defense spending, but more about that later. Because I want to round out 1990 considering Sanders, Smith, and guns.

Peter Smith, who had squeaked out a win against Sanders in 1988, was a fairly liberal Republican. In a July 29 piece in the Chicago Tribune, George E. Curry put it like this:

Smith's vote has been increasingly liberal in his two years in Congress. He has scored high with voters for his position on fiscal issues and has a better rating than Sanders on education issues.
He shares Sanders' criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the savings and loan crisis. But Smith also has supported some gun-control legislation, which has angered the NRA.

In his autiobiography, Sanders describes Smith's problems with the NRA:
A few months after taking office, Smith suddenly announced that he would vote for the ban on assault weapons [ed.—that he had opposed in 1988] The NRA and other elements in Vermont's sportsmen community were furious at his about-face. They felt betrayed and worked hard to defeat him. While the NRA has never endorsed me or given me a nickel, their efforts against Smith in 1988 [sic—1990] clearly helped my candidacy. (I should add here that in 1992, '94, and 96, the NRA strongly opposed me.)
To be clear: in 1990, Sanders ran to the right of Smith on gun control. And Smith lost. In a 1991 story for the Vermont Times, Kevin J. Kelly asked why Sanders, along with Vermont's other two Congressmen, opposed the Brady Bill. He reported that:
...Sanders' announced opposition to the Brady proposal seems especially incongruous. The independent socialist has said that, among his House colleagues, he feels politically closest to the members of the Congressional Black Congress. And only one of Sanders' 25 black colleagues is pledged to vote against the Brady bill.
Sanders himself did not respond to a request for an interview on this issue.

I'll bet he didn't.
His spokesperson, Anthony Pollina, claimed that Sanders was representing "all Vermonters," including many who were hunting enthusiasts. I am quite sure that's true. But the rest of his response, as relayed by Pollina, is straight up bullshit:

Sanders believes many politicians will use the Brady bill as a "smokescreen," Pollina suggested. Bernie would rather work with Congress to develop a package of legislation that deals with the root causes of crime, such as economic injustice and the lack of job opportunities in many urban communities, the aide explained. Simply voting for the Brady bill and not addressing poverty as a cause of violence could be seen as "dishonest," Pollina said.
So, the root cause of gun-related crime is a lack of jobs in "urban" communities. I see what you're doing there, and I'm not impressed, Bernie.
Suffice to say, when a legislator from largely white, rural state starts going on about "urban crime" as an excuse for not embracing gun control measures, it sounds like lazily using a pretty racist stereotype to me. As if gun violence wasn't a problem in rural areas, or amongst employed people. But mostly, I'm baffled that it's apparently impossible to both enact gun control and pursue better jobs policies at the same time. What? (Next investigative exploration: Does Bernie Sanders have a walking-and-chewing-gum problem? I kid, I kid.)

It's also noteworthy that in the same article, Peter Smith charges that the NRA played more than a passive role in helping to elect Sanders; he claims that they actively urged Vermonters to vote for Sanders in radio and TV spots. That contradicts Sanders' memories in his autobiography. Without access to more archival evidence, I can't say who was right. And Smith, of course, would have had reasons to misremember. But perhaps Sanders might also be misremembering exactly how the election went down.

Peter Smith 1988 photo Peter_Plympton_SmithCOngress_zpsqdoll5or.jpg
[Congressman Peter Smith from the 101st Congress Congressional Pictorial Directory. Via Wikipedia.]
And while it's true that the NRA has subsequently turned against Bernie Sanders, repeatedly, let's recall that they're the fringe of gun control opponents these days. No-one has ever accused Bernie Sanders of being a Tea Party type, as far as I know. But anyone claiming that Sanders is the only "progressive" choice needs to remember that even if the NRA doesn't love him, his stance on guns is still a social justice problem, and it puts him to the right of many Democrats.

So what does his overall record in Congress look like on guns? Well, the Slate headline "Bernie Sanders, Gun Nut" isn't really fair. (It's hard to be a "gun nut" when you don't own a gun, which Sanders doesn't.) And votes are only one part of a politician's stance on anything. Having said that, what do the votes actually say?

VoteSmart has a record of Sanders' key votes on gun control. Looking solely at this data, I'd say Sanders has about a dozen votes that most progressives would be on board with, a few that are a bit mixed (in part because the bills were obviously results of compromises), and 7 that most progressives would recoil in horror at. Sanders has been generally good in prohibiting the sale of assault weapons and limiting magazine capacities, and also has been good on restricting the carrying of concealed weapons across state lines. He has also voted for at least one major safety regulation (The Trigger Lock Amendment of 2006), and has resisted efforts to shrink the background check time. (That's important because if the FBI can't complete a background check in time, the default by federal law is to allow the purchaser to buy the gun.) Not included in these votes, but worth a mention, is Sanders' consistent support for VAWA.

On the mixed side of things, he's voted for minimum sentences for federal crimes carried out with a gun; many progressives have problems with mandatory sentencing laws. Others might agree with the intent of reducing gun use. I think most progressives would agree with Sanders' 2009 Health Care Bill Amendment vote, which touches on guns only briefly in that gun ownership can't be used to affect healthcare coverage. Maybe the most mixed bill, 2006's Washington DC Voting Act, gives Washington representation in Congress—good!—but horribly guts its gun laws—terrible.

As for the bad, it is quite bad. Sanders voted against the Brady Bill twice, as well as against background checks for gun show purchases. (He later supported a bill to close that loophole, however.) He supported a law that limited Indigenous Health Bill funds from being used for any "anti-gun" purpose whatsoever, such as gun buy-backs or any program that would certain funds from being used to reduce gun ownership. He voted to allow loaded guns in National Parks, which is a terrible idea. (Unfortunately, that terrible idea is now law.) And Sanders voted twice to protect firearms manufacturers from legal liability for gun violence.

That last has been in the news lately. Two parents who lost their child in the Aurora massacre lost their lawsuit and have been ordered to pay damages, thanks to the bill Sanders supported. And Sanders did some pretty shitty 'splaining when a gun control activist challenged him to defend those votes:

"With all due respect, you also cast the vote to allow gun manufacturers to never be sued," Laszlo interjected.
"Right I did, OK?" Sanders fired back, adding later, "Why would I have voted that way? Because if somebody has a gun and somebody steals that gun and they shoot somebody with it, do you really think it makes sense to blame the manufacturer of that weapon? If somebody sells you a baseball bat and somebody hits you over the head with it, you're not going to sue the baseball bat manufacturer."

And you know, that would be an extremely relevant point! If, that is, someone could use a baseball bat to kill 12 people and wound 70 more in a mere matter of minutes.
Unfortunately, Sanders had more 'splainy things to say:

"I come from a state that has virtually no gun control and it turns out one of the safest states in the country... I understand that guns in my state are different than guns in Chicago or Los Angeles," Sanders said. "People in urban America have got to appreciate that the overwhelming majority of people who hunt know about guns and respect guns, and are law-abiding people, that's the truth. And people in rural America have got to understand that in an urban area, guns mean something very, very different."
Ouch. I don't think people in "urban America" need to be lectured about their understanding. And the law-abiding rural states versus criminal cities? It's true Vermont has a low rate of gun violence (though guns are still a problem, according to domestic violence advocates). Gun violence is complicated. And the top five states for gun deaths are very rural: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana. As for "law-abiding" gun owners, I guess the police would be the most law-abiding of all? Ah, whoops.
The language of gun violence is brimming with racist stereotypes, and anyone who talks seriously on the topic needs to be aware of that. It can't be de-racinated just because one wants it to be. But, as described by his old friend Richard Sugarman, Sanders seems determined to ignore the racial aspects of gun-talk. He's intractable in his views:

"He doesn't have a gun," says his close friend Richard Sugarman, a religion professor at the University of Vermont, when I asked how Sanders—a University of Chicago graduate from Brooklyn—became a Second Amendment guy. "He doesn't really care about guns. But he cares that other people care about guns. He thinks there's an elitism in the antigun movement."
An "elitism"? Sure. The Congressional Black Congress is very elitist. People who want students to be safe in their classrooms are very elitist. But protecting the rights of white men is definitely not? Once again, Sanders' unacknowledged white male privilege is a real problem; he thinks he shouldn't even be questioned on guns:
Sanders' loquaciousness has its limits. When the conversation shifts away from bread-and-butter economic issues, his answers become curt. On the issue of gun violence, he is particularly tight-lipped. Indeed, he refused to grant an interview to Seven Days on the subject for two and a half months after last December's deadly school shooting in Newtown, Conn.
...Asked whether he'd vote for an assault-weapons ban if it reached the Senate floor, he said, "We'll see. We'll see what other things it is part of."

Asked why he was on the fence about the assault-weapons ban, which he backed in 1994, Sanders interrupted midsentence, saying, "This is not one of my major issues. It's an issue out there. I've told you how I feel about it. If there's anything else you want to ask me about, I'm happy to answer. But that's about it."

Five minutes after the gun discussion had begun, Johnny One-Note wanted to get back to tax policy and economic disparity.

(If you have any doubt that white male privilege is relevant to Sanders' success, by the way, imagine the words that might be used to describe a woman of color who responded to questioning like that.)
In addition to his gun votes, of course, Sanders' time in Congress has left him with plenty of votes to be clearly proud of. You can read On the Issues coverage of Sanders, or GovTrack on Sanders, or Ballotopedia, among other analyses. He's tended to vote strongly in favor of abortion rights, preventing workplace discrimination, protecting the environment, expanding healthcare access, voting rights, stopping employment discrimination against women and men of color, economic stimuli, more equitable taxes, protecting public schools and Social security, among other things. But what does Sanders himself think are his most important votes? Well, one clue is the Sanders campaign website. At the bottom of the page, there's a timeline by decade about Bernie, and the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010 provide highlights. I can't think of a fairer way to estimate how he sees his own career (or at least, how he and his campaign want us to see it,) so take a look for yourself.

Since getting elected in 1990, Sanders has proved canny, very canny, at figuring how to be just as progressive as his Vermont electorate will let him be. He's learned to compromise, often in a rightward direction. Does that bode well for his presidential run? As usual, it depends on your perspective. (Spoiler: Sanders '72 would probably hate it.) Tomorrow, in "Looking For Bernie, Part 4: Turning Right Towards 2016," I'll again use an intersectional feminist lens for a closer look at some of the places he's compromised, re-prioritized, or just plain dodged the question when it comes to same-sex unions, immigration, and environmental racism.

http://www.shakesville.com/2015/07/looking-for-bernie-part-3-sanders-90.html

Defending Socialism: Foner and Sanders v. Eugene Debs
by PAUL STREET


Never underestimate the moral and intellectual corruption of the professoriat, including even some of its most accomplished left names. Look, for example, at the prolific, progressive, and esteemed United States historian and Columbia University Dewitt Clinton professor Eric Foner’s recent letter of advice to the nominally socialist Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The subject is how to respond the next time the media asks him what he means by the term “democratic socialism.”

Here, below, is Sanders’ most relevant statement on that score to date – the one that elicited Foner’s letter. It was made early in the Democratic presidential candidates’ first and CNN-choreographed debate in Las Vegas, Nevada three weeks ago:

CNN’s Anderson Cooper: “Senator Sanders. A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?”

Bernie Sanders: “Well, we’re gonna win because we’re gonna explain what democratic socialism is. And what democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of 1 percent in this country own own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. That it is wrong, today, in a rigged economy, that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top 1 percent. That when you look around the world, you see every other major country providing health care to all people as a right, except the United States. You see every other major country saying to moms that, when you have a baby, we’re not gonna separate you from your newborn baby, because we are going to have — we are gonna have medical and family paid leave, like every other country on Earth. Those are some of the principles that I believe in, and I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people.”

Forget for a moment the falsity of the notion that Sanders is actually trying to win the presidency (he isn’t) and the absurdity of thinking (or claiming to think that) that one can advance socialism from the margins of the hopelessly corporate- and finance-captive and imperial Democratic Party. However gallant Sanders’ denunciations of contemporary American hyper-inequality might be, the most remarkable thing about Sanders’ statement was its power-serving enfeeblement of the meaning of the phrases “socialism” and “democratic socialism.” By any meaningful historical gauge, democratic socialism is about collective property and popular self-governance with workers’ control and real participatory democracy. It’s about popular control of a nation’s leading economic and political institutions, a “radical reconstruction of society itself” (what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the real issue to be faced” near the end of his life). In Uncle Bernie’s diluted Wonder Bread branding, democratic socialism means a decent welfare state on the Scandinavian model.

Why Bernie Can’t Invoke Debs

But this is not the only problem with Sanders’ claim to represent the cause of democratic socialism. An equally serious difficulty concerns his steadfast, well-documented commitment to Washington’s richly bipartisan imperial-military system and project. As Chris Hedges explained last September:

“You cannot be a socialist and an imperialist. You cannot, as Bernie Sanders has done, support the Obama administration’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen and be a socialist. You cannot, as Sanders has done, vote for military appropriations bills, including every bill and resolution that empowers and sanctions Israel to carry out its slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people, and be a socialist. And you cannot laud, as Sanders has done, military contractors because they bring jobs to your state. Sanders may have the rhetoric of inequality down, but he is a full-fledged member of the Democratic Caucus, which kneels before the war industry and their lobbyists.”

A recent CounterPunch essay by Connor Lynch is titled “Why Bernie Sanders Should Invoke Eugene Debs.” As the historian Heather Cottin wrote me when someone posted this essay on my Facebook page, “He [Sanders] can’t. Debs opposed imperialism and World War I. He went to jail for it! …Bernie …is not a worker, he is a life-long socialist of the imperialist vote-for-imperialist-U.S.-wars persuasion. Bernie supports imperialism and WW III.” (The “WWIII” comment might seem like excessive hyperbole, but it isn’t: Sanders has offered his full support to the Obama administration’s maddeningly reckless provocation of the resurgent nuclear power Russia in Eastern Europe and Syria.)

Embrace of empire is not only a moral and ideological problem for Sanders. It also gravely contradicts and renders mute much of Sanders’ progressive domestic social agenda. “The costs of empire,” Noam Chomsky noted in 1969, “are in general distributed over the society as whole, while its profits revert to a few within…empire serves as a device for internal consolidation of power and privilege.” As Chomsky and others have shown many times, American military Keyensianism triumphed after World War II both to underpin a U.S. capitalist wealth and power abroad and to defeat and preempt social-democratic welfare Keynesianism at home. The first form of government spending reinforced business rule while the second did not, the power elite understood. In a purely practical and more immediate sense, moreover, Sanders’ Scandinavia-inspired social-democratic “homeland” program cannot be paid for without a giant rollback of the nation’s massive Pentagon system, recipient of more than half the nation’s federal discretionary spending.

“Embrace Our Own” Radicals

In his missive to Sanders, Foner (who is no dummy and certainly knows better) makes no effort to correct the Senator on the actual meaning of the terms socialism and democratic socialism. He gives Sanders a pass on the candidate’s “social chauvinism” (Lenin’s still useful term for socialists’ caught up in nationalist militarism and imperialism) and longstanding faux-independent collaboration (now open) with the corporate Democrats. (No surprise there: the professor’s letter appears, after all, in The Nation, the leading faux-independent Democratic Party organ). The only problem Foner has with Sanders’ diluted and hypocritical use of “socialism” and “democratic socialism” is that it was too internationalist – well, too Nordic – in inspiration:

“I urge you to reconsider how you respond to the inevitable questions about what you mean by democratic socialism and peaceful revolution. The next time, embrace our own American radical tradition. There’s nothing wrong with Denmark; we can learn a few things from them (and vice-versa). But most Americans don’t know or care much about Scandinavia. More importantly, your response inadvertently reinforces the idea that socialism is a foreign import. Instead, talk about our radical forebears here in the United States, for the most successful radicals have always spoken the language of American society and appealed to some of its deepest values.”

There’s something to be said for working with and through the American radical lineage. But Foner’s rendering of that tradition is disturbing. He mentions some very good names in the U.S. radical pantheon: Tom Paine, Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelley, the early 1890s Populists, and Sanders’ own supposed inspiration, Eugene Debs. Many are left out, of course, particularly those of more radical hue, like the Haymarket Martyrs (including the revolutionary socialist-anarchists Albert Parsons and Adolph Fischer), Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman, the radical syndicalist (Industrial Workers of the World – IWW) leaders Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, and Tom Mooney, IWW trubador Joe Hill, Free Speech Movement leader Mario Savio, the heroic Communists and Trotskyists who sparked the emergence of mass production unionism during the 1930s and 1940s, Malcolm X, Leonard Peltier and the American Indian Movement, Fred Hampton and the Black Panthers, the aforementioned anarchist-identifying linguist and anti-imperialist Noam Chomsky, and…I could go on.

But it is who and what Foner includes in the American radical hall of fame, not who he deletes, that is most distressing. “What,” Foner asks, “about the Progressive platform of 1912, for a party that nominated Theodore Roosevelt for president, which called, among other things, for strict limits on campaign contributions, universal health insurance, vigorous federal oversight of giant corporations and other measures that, over a century later, have yet to be realized?” As Foner certainly knows, the brazenly nationalistic, Social Darwinist, and military-imperialist Teddy Roosevelt was a fiercely authoritarian “corporate-liberal” enemy of radical-democratic politics generally and Debs’ Socialist Party in particular. Teddy’s project, shared with all of his opponents in the 1912 presidential election but one (Debs), was to complete what the brilliant historian Martin J. Sklar called “the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism”: a transition from proprietary and small-producer capitalism to concentrated corporate capitalism that kept the profits system intact without “undue interference” from the popular majority and grassroots populism and socialism. [1]

“The So-Called Progressive Convention” (1912)

Debs would surely be taken aback to see his name mentioned in the same breath as Teddy Roosevelt and the 1912 Bull Moose Progressive Party as part of a shared “American radical tradition.” Here is a selection from a campaign speech Debs gave in Fergus Falls, Minnesota on August 12, 1912:

“Friends and Fellow-Workers: …the cunning few have triumphed and now have the masses at their mercy. These few are closely allied in their economic mastery as they are also in their control of the political machinery. Their money and their mercenaries controlled the Republican convention at Chicago, wrote its platform and dictated its nominees, and the same is true of the Democratic convention at Baltimore. As for the so-called Progressive convention, it is sufficient to say that there is no attempt to conceal the fact that it was financed and controlled by three conspicuous representatives of the plutocracy which largely owns and rules the land…..The Republican, Democratic and Progressive conventions were composed in the main and controlled entirely by professional politicians in the service of the ruling class…The Socialist party is the only party in this campaign that stands against the present system and for the rule of the people; the only party that boldly avows itself the party of the working class and its purpose the overthrow of wage-slavery.”

“So long as the present system of capitalism prevails and the few are allowed to own the nation’s industries, the toiling masses will be struggling in the hell of poverty as they are today….Private ownership and competition have had their day. The Socialist party stands for social ownership and co-operation. The one is Capitalism; the other Socialism. The one industrial despotism, the other industrial democracy….The Republican, Democratic and Progressive parties all stand for private ownership and competition. The Socialist party alone stands for social ownership and co-operation.”

“The Republican, Democratic and Progressive parties believe in regulating the trusts; the Socialist party believes in owning them, so that all the people may get the benefit of them instead of a few being made plutocrats and the masses impoverished….… The workers who have made the world and who support the world, are preparing to take possession of the world. This is the meaning of Socialism and is what the Socialist party stands for in this campaign. We demand the machinery of production in the name of the workers and the control of society in the name of the people. We demand the abolition of capitalism and wage-slavery and the surrender of the capitalist class…. We demand complete control of industry by the workers; we demand all the wealth they produce for their own enjoyment, and we demand the earth for all the people” (emphasis added).

(Read the following endnote if you want to learn more about Eugene Debs’ red-hot socialist-internationalist disdain for Teddy Roosevelt:[2])

“To Rein in the Excesses of Capitalism”

Sanders’ purported hero Debs looks down no less unfavorably on Bernie’s (and Foner’s) milquetoast definition of democratic socialism and Sanders’ ongoing record of militarism than Barack Obama’s purported hero Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looks down on the current administration’s relentlessly fake-progressive service to the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of capital, empire, white supremacy, and eco-cide. Debs would be chagrinned by the following statement in Foner’s memo of esteem and guidance for Bernie Sanders:

“As to socialism, the term today refers not to a blueprint for a future society but to the need to rein in the excesses of capitalism, evident all around us, to empower ordinary people in a political system verging on plutocracy, and to develop policies that make opportunity real for the millions of Americans for whom it is not. This is what it meant in the days of Eugene V. Debs, the great labor leader and Socialist candidate for president …. Debs spoke the language of what he called ‘political equality and economic freedom.’ But equally important, as Debs emphasized, socialism is as much a moral idea as an economic one—the conviction that vast inequalities of wealth, power, and opportunity are simply wrong and that ordinary people, using political power, can produce far-reaching change. It was Debs’s moral fervor as much as his specific program that made him beloved by millions of Americans.”

Debs would certainly sense a false choice in this passage: socialism as “a blueprint for a future society” or a morally infused effort “to rein in the excesses of capitalism.” Socialism, for Debs, was an ongoing here-and-now struggle and movement (including grassroots efforts beyond electoral politics) to overthrow and transcend, not merely temper, capitalism. Moral passion, Debs knew very well, would not take the people very far without a specific socialist program and movement to move American and world workers and citizens beyond the deadly depredations of capital and empire.

By Foner’s and Sanders’ gloomily diluted definition of democratic socialism, the militant neoliberal corporatist and arch-imperialist sociopath Hillary Clinton absurdly qualifies as a democratic socialist. After all, candidate Clinton inveighs against New Gilded Age America’s extreme inequalities and plutocracy. She calls in passionate moral terms for greater equality and democracy in the U.S. “The deck is stacked” for the wealthy Few, she claims to bemoan, promising to even up the odds for ordinary working people. Listen to Hillary’s follow up to Cooper and Sanders’ exchange on democratic socialism in Las Vegas:

Hillary Clinton: “Well, let me just follow-up on that, Anderson, because when I think about capitalism, I think about all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families. And I don’t think we should confuse [socialism with] what we have to do every so often in America, which is save capitalism from itself. And I think what Senator Sanders is saying certainly makes sense in the terms of the inequality that we have. But we are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America. And it’s our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism so that it doesn’t run amok and doesn’t cause the kind of inequities we’re seeing in our economic system.”

Where is the Dewitt Clinton Professor’s letter of admiration and advice to Hillary Clinton? (That will come, no doubt, after Sanders is swept dutifully off the presidential contender stage). Note, dear reader, the same exact phrase italicized in my last two quoted passages, the first from Foner and the second from Hillary: “to rein in the excesses of capitalism.” Is the precise match of words accidental? I sincerely doubt it.

FDR’s Radical New Deal?

Speaking of politicians “sav[ing] capitalism from itself,” Foner told Bernie Sanders to mention another part of “America’s radical tradition”: “FDR’s New Deal.” The esteemed socialism-thinning professor naturally says nothing about how the clever ruling class politician Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) boasted that his New Deal rescued and preserved capitalism. In March of 1931, the great American philosopher John Dewey observed that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” Dewey prophesized that U.S. politics would stay that way as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by commend of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.” FDR’s New Deal kept that basic problem intact, something for which Franklin Roosevelt was quite proud.

As Lance Selfa notes in his excellent study The Democrats: a Critical History (Haymarket, 2008), “Roosevelt [told]…his business critics [that] ‘I am the best friend the profits system ever had.’ In campaign speeches in 1936, he proclaimed himself the ‘savior’ of ‘the system of private profit and free enterprise.’” That was a brag that might have impressed Dewitt Clinton (who nearly became U.S. President on the proto-state-capitalist Federalist Party ticket in 1812) but not Eugene Debs. Foner says nothing about how class-accommodationist New Deal reforms were forced on the capitalist elite to no small degree by working class rebellion organized largely by officially anonymous but often brilliant and heroic Marxist and other radical sparkplug activists – people who deserve mention in any serious homage to the American radical tradition.

Foner might want to take a look back at the first book published by his academic mentor Richard Hofstader. In his brilliant (for its time) mid-20th century study The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1949) – a curious anticipation of the New Left revisionist history that Hoftsader would later come to aristocratically oppose – Hofstader “examined,” in Howard Zinn’s words, “our important national leaders, from Jefferson and Jackson to Herbert Hoover and the two Roosevelts – Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Hofstadter concluded that [here Zinn quoted Hofstader] ‘the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise…They have accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man…That culture has been intensely nationalistic…’” [3] Hofstader dedicated a specific chapter to each Roosevelt, showing in both cases how their deep, underlying Big Business-friendly conservatism contradicted their progressive imagery and rhetoric. He certainly saw nothing radical in FDR or the New Deal.

The Freedom Budget

In the “American radical tradition” that he wants Sanders to invoke, Foner includes the Freedom Budget. It’s an understandable reference to an interesting and all-too forgotten progressive program. Rolled out by the old socialist, labor, and civil rights leader A. Phillip Randolph in 1967, the Freedom Budget was an ambitious plan to end poverty in America. But it was hardly a radical document, given its explicit refusal to call for cutbacks in the Pentagon budget or for any challenge to the overall distribution of wealth and income or any challenge to capital’s managerial prerogatives. The document’s failures on war and empire (quite telling in a time when the criminal U.S. War on Vietnam was deep-sixing the briefly declared and hardly fought “War on Poverty”) is especially noteworthy here in in light of Sanders’ support for the U.S. imperial project. Also worth noting is its commitment to rapid, high-volume economic growth, which the Freedom Budget’s authors saw as the real solution to poverty instead of the redistribution of wealth and income. By all serious indications today, economic growth on the capitalist “business for private profit” model championed by both of the reigning U.S. political parties has turned out to be an ecological death sentence for the human race and other living things.

Earth Time is Up

Which reminds me: where are the great Left environmentalists Barry Commoner, Rachel Carson, and Murray Boochkin in Foner’s American radical tradition? The environmental crisis that is unfolding before our very eyes is the leading reason we really don’t have time for professorial pussyfooting around with diluted and Democratic Party-captive fake-radicalism and once-every-four-years electoralism these days. Capitalism and its twin evil imperialism has brought us now to the literal edge of multiple and interrelated catastrophes, none more urgent and threatening than the ecological one. Debs’ actual goal – “the abolition of capitalism” and popular control of society’s leading institutions, not just an enhanced welfare state – is now an urgently required prerequisite for survival Anyone who thinks they are acting in accord with that reality by jumping aboard the latest seemingly endless quadrennial corporate-managed big money-big media-major party and candidate-centered electoral extravaganza – with its incredibly constricted and time-staggered definition of “that’s politics, the only politics that matters” – is wasting their time and energy and that of their fellow workers and citizens. We’re kind of running out of time for all this kind of milquetoast bullshit, to be perfectly candid. We’ve got some totally different and far more genuinely grass-roots and radical kind of organizing to do.

Notes

1 See Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916 (New York: Cambridge University, 1986), 333-364, for a learned discussion of where Theodore Roosevelt stood in the U.S. ruling class’s new anti-socialist corporate-liberal formation during the early 20th century. Sklar’s saddening late-life lurch right should not obscure the brilliance of his brilliant, Marxian work (dating from the late 1950s through the Reagan era) on the U.S. corporate reconstruction and corporate-liberal ideology, law, politics, and policy during the Progressive Age. In all fairness, it should be acknowledged that (thanks to his idiosyncratic conservative-socialist socialist ideas about “mixed systems” wherein capitalism contained socialism and vice versa), the Sklar who wrote The Corporate Reconstruction would side with Sanders and Foner in the argument posited in the present essay.

2 In a famous speech delivered in Canton, Ohio in 1918, Debs spoke with passionate scorn against Teddy Roosevelt’s transparently hypocritical beating of the drums of war against Germany in the name of “democracy.” Debs noted that Roosevelt and the German Kaiser were war-mongering and authoritarian upper-class comrades, both enemies of the working class and socialism: “You remember that, at the close of Theodore Roosevelt’s second term as President, he went over to Africa to make war on some of his ancestors. You remember that, at the close of his expedition, he visited the capitals of Europe; and that he was wined and dined, dignified and glorified by all the Kaisers and Czars and Emperors of the Old World. He visited Potsdam while the Kaiser was there; and, according to the accounts published in the American newspapers, he and the Kaiser were soon on the most familiar terms. They were hilariously intimate with each other, and slapped each other on the back. After Roosevelt had reviewed the Kaiser’s troops, according to the same accounts, he became enthusiastic over the Kaiser’s legions and said: ‘If I had that kind of an army, I could conquer the world.’ He knew the Kaiser then just as well as he knows him now. He knew that he was the Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin. And yet, he permitted himself to be entertained by that Beast of Berlin; had his feet under the mahogany of the Beast of Berlin; was cheek by jowl with the Beast of Berlin. And, while Roosevelt was being entertained royally by the German Kaiser, that same Kaiser was putting the leaders of the Socialist Party in jail for fighting the Kaiser and the Junkers of Germany. Roosevelt was the guest of honor in the white house of the Kaiser, while the Socialists were in the jails of the Kaiser for fighting the Kaiser. Who then was fighting for democracy? Roosevelt? Roosevelt, who was honored by the Kaiser, or the Socialists who were in jail by order of the Kaiser? ‘Birds of a feather flock together.’…When the newspapers reported that Kaiser Wilhelm and ax-President Theodore recognized each other at sight, were perfectly intimate with each other at the first touch, they made the admission that is fatal to the claim of Theodore Roosevelt, that he is the friend of the common people and the champion of democracy; they admitted that they were kith and kin; that they were very much alike; that their ideas and ideals were about the same. If Theodore Roosevelt is the great champion of democracy —the arch foe of autocracy , what business had he as the guest of honor of the Prussian Kaiser? And when he met the Kaiser, and did honor to the Kaiser, under the terms imputed to him, wasn’t it pretty strong proof that he himself was a Kaiser at heart? Now, after being the guest of Emperor Wilhelm, the Beast of Berlin, he comes back to this country, and wants you to send ten million men over there to kill the Kaiser; to murder his former friend and pal. Rather queer, isn’t it? And yet, he is the patriot, and we are the traitors. I challenge you to find a Socialist anywhere on the face of the earth who was ever the guest of the Beast of Berlin , except as an inmate of his prison—the elder Liebknecht and the younger Liebknecht, the heroic son of his immortal sire.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/06/defending-socialism-foner-and-sanders-v-eugene-debs/

Sanders: Clinton would be better than any republican
by worker
Bernie Sanders Speaks The Truth: Hillary Clinton Would Be Better Than Any Republican

By: Jason Easley
Sunday, November 8th, 2015, 6:14 pm


With one statement, Sen. Bernie Sanders explained why Democrats are more united than Republicans. On ABC’s This Week, Sanders said, “On her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day.”

Transcript via ABC’s This Week:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You’ve also started to express your differences with — with Hillary Clinton more and more.

But is it really right for you to tell “The Boston Globe,” quote, “I disagree with Hillary Clinton on virtually everything.”

Don’t your agreements far outweigh your disagreements?

SANDERS: Well, there’s — that’s — well, the answer is yes and no. Yes, we do agree on a number of issues. And, by the way, on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and president than the Republican candidate on his best day.

But having said that, we have very significant differences. And the key difference is I see a nation in which we have a grotesque level of income and wealth inequality. Almost all of the new income and wealth is going to the top 1 percent.

I see a political system which is corrupt, where super PACs are able to receive huge amounts of money from millionaires and billionaires.

I think if you look at my history and what I am saying in this campaign, we need a political revolution. We need to stand up to the top 1 percent. We need to transform American politics and the way we do economics.

But, by the way, George, if I may, we need to have a media more interested in the issues facing working class people and the middle class rather than political gossip.

So do I agree with Hillary Clinton on this or that issue?

Of course I do. But I think on issues, for example, like Wall Street, you know, I believe that these guys who drove our economy into the ground, destroyed so many lives, I think at the end of the day, what we have to do is re— reestablish Glass-Steagall. We have to break up these huge financial institutions. That is not Hillary Clinton’s position at all.

You know, I was there on the TPP from way back. That was — Hillary Clinton took a little while to get there.

There are some on the left who disagree with Sen. Sanders and believe that former Sec. Clinton is the devil. Of course, many of these people on the left also bashed President Obama and former President Bill Clinton after they were elected. For a segment of the left, there is a purity test, and the only candidates that they support are those who agree with them on every issue.

Sanders was speaking the truth. Hillary Clinton will be a better president by a wide margin than any of the Republican candidates. The fact that Democrats believe that their frontrunner would be a better president than anyone running in the other party explains why the they are united.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders disagree on policy issues, but they understand that the big picture goal is to keep the White House next November.

The debate on the Democratic side is about shaping the agenda that their candidate will run on next fall. In contrast, Republicans are stuck in an ideological quagmire. The Republican Party can’t figure out who it is much less rally around a single leader.

The shared goals of Democrats as expressed by Sen. Sanders is a key reason they ready to keep the White House in 2016.

***********************

Really? Are you really, really sure? I don't think so, despite the bluster don't think a Republican prez could be more warlike than Obama. And no, they would not be allowed to 'push the button' unless capitalism faces an immediate existential threat, which hardly exists today.

Really? Are you really, really sure? I don't think so, despite the bluster don't think a Republican prez could be more warlike than Obama. And no, they would not be allowed to 'push the button' unless capitalism faces an immediate existential threat, which hardly exists today.

It is just sickening when nominal "communists" say things and take positions as in this piece. The US government is not based on a parliamentary system, it is based on a unique system created to insure bourgeois control of government. Governments of the type Lenin was speaking of, where parties acquire seats in parliament based upon popular vote are governments where communists can participate, form coalitions favorable to working class interests and be thorns in the sides of any parties or governments whose aims are different - as KKE does in the Greek parliament.
But the US government is an impossibly rigged game, where no parties except the two bourgeois parties can even participate. To support one or the other capitalist party is to eviscerate any working class organization, any working class power. There is simply no way that these "communists" do not understand this. So there is something else going on. It isn't just sickening, it is deceit, betrayal, criminal - and I mean a crime against the class. Wonder what the penalty is for that?

Wonder what the penalty is for that?

See: Trotsky

Do you actually understand what ‘socialism’ is?


http://youtu.be/VQqRHNR6lOw

Herr Doktor Wolfe gets all post-modern for Bernie.There goes the last frayed shred of his credibility. After this ya gotta wonder if Wolfe knows.

http://houstoncommunistparty.com/do-you-actually-understand-what-socialism-is/

Herr Doktor Wolff gets all post-modern for Bernie.There goes the last frayed shred of his credibility. After this ya gotta wonder if Wolff knows.

Dead-on. Wolfe is a weasel - a water-carrying weasel. But, to be fair, almost any (if not all) academics have to carry the bourgeois water to some extent or other, it is the nature of higher education. That being said, there are many academics who can muster enough self respect to at least try and make a coherent statement regarding "socialism". Forget The Bern, he ain't one, and Herr Wolfe should have said so and left it at that. His audience, here, however, is the Houston Commies who luuuve them The Bern, so he was, I guess, sucking up at least a bit.

PREPARED REMARKS
Senator Bernie Sanders on Democratic Socialism in the United States
NOVEMBER 19, 2015
Twitter Facebook Email Link
In his inaugural remarks in January 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt looked out at the nation and this is what he saw.

He saw tens of millions of its citizens denied the basic necessities of life.

He saw millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hung over them day by day.

He saw millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children.

He saw millions lacking the means to buy the products they needed and by their poverty and lack of disposable income denying employment to many other millions.

He saw one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

And he acted. Against the ferocious opposition of the ruling class of his day, people he called economic royalists, Roosevelt implemented a series of programs that put millions of people back to work, took them out of poverty and restored their faith in government. He redefined the relationship of the federal government to the people of our country. He combatted cynicism, fear and despair. He reinvigorated democracy. He transformed the country.

And he did it all to save capitalism

And that is what we have to do today.

And, by the way, almost everything he proposed was called “socialist.” Social Security, which transformed life for the elderly in this country was “socialist.” The concept of the “minimum wage” was seen as a radical intrusion into the marketplace and was described as “socialist.” Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as “socialist.” Yet, these programs have become the fabric of our nation and the foundation of the middle class.

Thirty years later, in the 1960s, President Johnson passed Medicare and Medicaid to provide health care to millions of senior citizens and families with children, persons with disabilities and some of the most vulnerable people in this county. Once again these vitally important programs were derided by the right wing as socialist programs that were a threat to our American way of life.

That was then. Now is now.

So, looks like FDR's fix didn't takeover even medium run. Because the base cause was never addressed.

Today, in 2015, despite the Wall Street crash of 2008, which drove this country into the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the American people are clearly better off economically than we were in 1937.

But, here is a very hard truth that we must acknowledge and address. Despite a huge increase in technology and productivity, despite major growth in the U.S. and global economy, tens of millions of American families continue to lack the basic necessities of life, while millions more struggle every day to provide a minimal standard of living for their families. The reality is that for the last 40 years the great middle class of this country has been in decline and faith in our political system is now extremely low.

The rich get much richer. Almost everyone else gets poorer. Super PACs funded by billionaires buy elections. Ordinary people don’t vote. We have an economic and political crisis in this country and the same old, same old establishment politics and economics will not effectively address it.

If we are serious about transforming our country, if we are serious about rebuilding the middle class, if we are serious about reinvigorating our democracy, we need to develop a political movement which, once again, is prepared to take on and defeat a ruling class whose greed is destroying our nation. The billionaire class cannot have it all. Our government belongs to all of us, and not just the one percent.

If we were serious we would expropriate means of production. Without that they cannot be defeated and Bernie must know this.

We need to create a culture which, as Pope Francis reminds us, cannot just be based on the worship of money. We must not accept a nation in which billionaires compete as to the size of their super-yachts, while children in America go hungry and veterans sleep out on the streets.

Today, in America, we are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but few Americans know that because so much of the new income and wealth goes to the people on top. In fact, over the last 30 years, there has been a massive transfer of wealth – trillions of wealth – going from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent – a handful of people who have seen a doubling of the percentage of the wealth they own over that period.

Unbelievably, and grotesquely, the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

Yeah, and the next 9% got most of the rest, but Bernie ain't gonna piss them off.

Today, in America, millions of our people are working two or three jobs just to survive. In fact, Americans work longer hours than do the people of any industrialized country. Despite the incredibly hard work and long hours of the American middle class, 58 percent of all new income generated today is going to the top one percent.

Today, in America, as the middle class continues to disappear, median family income, is $4,100 less than it was in 1999. The median male worker made over $700 less than he did 42 years ago, after adjusting for inflation. Last year, the median female worker earned more than $1,000 less than she did in 2007.

Today, in America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, more than half of older workers have no retirement savings – zero – while millions of elderly and people with disabilities are trying to survive on $12,000 or $13,000 a year. From Vermont to California, older workers are scared to death. “How will I retire with dignity?,” they ask?

Today, in America, nearly 47 million Americans are living in poverty and over 20 percent of our children, including 36 percent of African American children, are living in poverty — the highest rate of childhood poverty of nearly any major country on earth.

Today, in America, 29 million Americans have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with outrageously high co-payments and deductibles. Further, with the United States paying the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, 1 out of 5 patients cannot afford to fill the prescriptions their doctors write.

So how did you vote on Obamacare, Bernie?A real socialist would have demanded universal health care.

Today, in America, youth unemployment and underemployment is over 35 percent. Meanwhile, we have more people in jail than any other country and countless lives are being destroyed as we spend $80 billion a year locking up fellow Americans.

The bottom line is that today in America we not only have massive wealth and income inequality, but a power structure which protects that inequality. A handful of super-wealthy campaign contributors have enormous influence over the political process, while their lobbyists determine much of what goes on in Congress.

In 1944, in his State of the Union speech, President Roosevelt outlined what he called a second Bill of Rights. This is one of the most important speeches ever made by a president but, unfortunately, it has not gotten the attention that it deserves.

In that remarkable speech this is what Roosevelt stated, and I quote: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men.” End of quote. In other words, real freedom must include economic security. That was Roosevelt’s vision 70 years ago. It is my vision today. It is a vision that we have not yet achieved. It is time that we did.

In that speech, Roosevelt described the economic rights that he believed every American was entitled to: The right to a decent job at decent pay, the right to adequate food, clothing, and time off from work, the right for every business, large and small, to function in an atmosphere free from unfair competition and domination by monopolies. The right of all Americans to have a decent home and decent health care.

What Roosevelt was stating in 1944, what Martin Luther King, Jr. stated in similar terms 20 years later and what I believe today, is that true freedom does not occur without economic security.

No Bernie, not 'economic security', that's weaseling, economic equality

People are not truly free when they are unable to feed their family. People are not truly free when they are unable to retire with dignity. People are not truly free when they are unemployed or underpaid or when they are exhausted by working long hours. People are not truly free when they have no health care.

So let me define for you, simply and straightforwardly, what democratic socialism means to me. It builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans. And it builds on what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1968 when he stated that; “This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.” It builds on the success of many other countries around the world that have done a far better job than we have in protecting the needs of their working families, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor.

Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.

Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt.

It is a system, for example, which during the 1990s allowed Wall Street to spend $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to get deregulated. Then, ten years later, after the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior of Wall Street led to their collapse, it is a system which provided trillions in government aid to bail them out. Wall Street used their wealth and power to get Congress to do their bidding for deregulation and then, when their greed caused their collapse, they used their wealth and power to get Congress to bail them out. Quite a system!

And, then, to add insult to injury, we were told that not only were the banks too big to fail, the bankers were too big to jail. Kids who get caught possessing marijuana get police records. Wall Street CEOs who help destroy the economy get raises in their salaries. This is what Martin Luther King, Jr. meant by socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.

In my view, it’s time we had democratic socialism for working families, not just Wall Street, billionaires and large corporations. It means that we should not be providing welfare for corporations, huge tax breaks for the very rich, or trade policies which boost corporate profits as workers lose their jobs. It means that we create a government that works for works for all of us, not just powerful special interests. It means that economic rights must be an essential part of what America stands for.

It means that health care should be a right of all people, not a privilege. This is not a radical idea. It exists in every other major country on earth. Not just Denmark, Sweden or Finland. It exists in Canada, France, Germany and Taiwan. That is why I believe in a Medicare-for-all single payer health care system. Yes. The Affordable Care Act, which I helped write and voted for, is a step forward for this country. But we must build on it and go further.

Utter bullshit, ACA was nothing but a gift to the corporations involved. And it is a done deal.

Medicare for all would not only guarantee health care for all people, not only save middle class families and our entire nation significant sums of money, it would radically improve the lives of all Americans and bring about significant improvements in our economy.

People who get sick will not have to worry about paying a deductible or making a co-payment. They could go to the doctor when they should, and not end up in the emergency room. Business owners will not have to spend enormous amounts of time worrying about how they are going to provide health care for their employees. Workers will not have to be trapped in jobs they do not like simply because their employers are offering them decent health insurance plans. Instead, they will be able to pursue the jobs and work they love, which could be an enormous boon for the economy. And by the way, moving to a Medicare for all program will end the disgrace of Americans paying, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.

Democratic socialism means that, in the year 2015, a college degree is equivalent to what a high school degree was 50 years ago – and that public education must allow every person in this country, who has the ability, the qualifications and the desire, the right to go to a public colleges or university tuition free. This is also not a radical idea. It exists today in many countries around the world. In fact, it used to exist in the United States.

Elitist crap for elitist voters. Don't need a BA/BS to do most things that need be done.

Democratic socialism means that our government does everything it can to create a full employment economy. It makes far more sense to put millions of people back to work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, than to have a real unemployment rate of almost 10%. It is far smarter to invest in jobs and educational opportunities for unemployed young people, than to lock them up and spend $80 billion a year through mass incarceration.

Pretending as though capitalism doesn't exist or else is pig ignorant as to how it works.

Democratic socialism means that if someone works forty hours a week, that person should not be living in poverty: that we must raise the minimum wage to a living wage – $15 an hour over the next few years. It means that we join the rest of the world and pass the very strong Paid Family and Medical Leave legislation now in Congress. How can it possibly be that the United States, today, is virtually the only nation on earth, large or small, which does not guarantee that a working class woman can stay home for a reasonable period of time with her new-born baby? How absurd is that?

Democratic socialism means that we have government policy which does not allow the greed and profiteering of the fossil fuel industry to destroy our environment and our planet, and that we have a moral responsibility to combat climate change and leave this planet healthy and inhabitable for our kids and grandchildren.

Democratic socialism means, that in a democratic, civilized society the wealthiest people and the largest corporations must pay their fair share of taxes. Yes. Innovation, entrepreneurship and business success should be rewarded. But greed for the sake of greed is not something that public policy should support. It is not acceptable that in a rigged economy in the last two years the wealthiest 15 Americans saw their wealth increase by $170 billion, more wealth than is owned by the bottom 130 million Americans. Let us not forget what Pope Francis has so elegantly stated; “We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.”

No, work should be rewarded. He concentrates upon the billionaires so as not to rile the millionaires.

It is not acceptable that major corporations stash their profits in the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax havens to avoid paying $100 billion in taxes each and every year. It is not acceptable that hedge fund managers pay a lower effective tax rate than nurses or truck drivers. It is not acceptable that billionaire families are able to leave virtually all of their wealth to their families without paying a reasonable estate tax. It is not acceptable that Wall Street speculators are able to gamble trillions of dollars in the derivatives market without paying a nickel in taxes on those transactions.

It's those 'bad actors' again.....never the system which generates them.

Democratic socialism, to me, does not just mean that we must create a nation of economic and social justice. It also means that we must create a vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person one vote. It is extremely sad that the United States, one of the oldest democracies on earth, has one of the lowest voter turnouts of any major country, and that millions of young and working class people have given up on our political system entirely. Every American should be embarrassed that in our last national election 63% of the American people, and 80% of young people, did not vote. Clearly, despite the efforts of many Republican governors to suppress the vote, we must make it easier for people to participate in the political process, not harder. It is not too much to demand that everyone 18 years of age is registered to vote – end of discussion.

Further, it is unacceptable that we have a corrupt campaign finance system which allows millionaires, billionaires and large corporations to contribute as much as they want to Super Pacs to elect candidates who will represent their special interests. We must overturn Citizens United and move to public funding of elections.

So the next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this:

I don’t believe government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and the working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.

I believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America instead of shipping jobs and profits overseas.

I believe that most Americans can pay lower taxes – if hedge fund managers who make billions manipulating the marketplace finally pay the taxes they should.

Pandering alert!

I don’t believe in special treatment for the top 1%, but I do believe in equal treatment for African-Americans who are right to proclaim the moral principle that Black Lives Matter.

I despise appeals to nativism and prejudice, and I do believe in immigration reform that gives Hispanics and others a pathway to citizenship and a better life.

I don’t believe in some foreign “ism”, but I believe deeply in American idealism.

I’m not running for president because it’s my turn, but because it’s the turn of all of us to live in a nation of hope and opportunity not for some, not for the few, but for all.

No one understood better than FDR the connection between American strength at home and our ability to defend America at home and across the world. That is why he proposed a second Bill of Rights in 1944, and said in that State of the Union:

“America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”

I’m not running to pursue reckless adventures abroad, but to rebuild America’s strength at home. I will never hesitate to defend this nation, but I will never send our sons and daughters to war under false pretense or pretenses or into dubious battles with no end in sight.

Ha, Afghanistan, Kosovo? Liar.

And when we discuss foreign policy, let me join the people of Paris in mourning their loss, and pray that those who have been wounded will enjoy a full recovery. Our hearts also go out to the families of the hundreds of Russians apparently killed by an ISIS bomb on their flight, and those who lost their lives to terrorist attacks in Lebanon and elsewhere.

To my mind, it is clear that the United States must pursue policies to destroy the brutal and barbaric ISIS regime, and to create conditions that prevent fanatical extremist ideologies from flourishing. But we cannot – and should not – do it alone.

Our response must begin with an understanding of past mistakes and missteps in our previous approaches to foreign policy. It begins with the acknowledgment that unilateral military action should be a last resort, not a first resort, and that ill-conceived military decisions, such as the invasion of Iraq, can wreak far-reaching devastation and destabilize entire regions for decades. It begins with the reflection that the failed policy decisions of the past – rushing to war, regime change in Iraq, or toppling Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, or Guatemalan President Árbenz in 1954, Brazilian President Goulart in 1964, Chilean President Allende in 1973. These are the sorts of policies do not work, do not make us safer, and must not be repeated.

After World War II, in response to the fear of Soviet aggression, European nations and the United States established the North Atlantic Treaty Organization – an organization based on shared interests and goals and the notion of a collective defense against a common enemy. It is my belief that we must expand on these ideals and solidify our commitments to work together to combat the global threat of terror.

We must create an organization like NATO to confront the security threats of the 21st century – an organization that emphasizes cooperation and collaboration to defeat the rise of violent extremism and importantly to address the root causes underlying these brutal acts. We must work with our NATO partners, and expand our coalition to include Russia and members of the Arab League.

But let’s be very clear. While the U.S. and other western nations have the strength of our militaries and political systems, the fight against ISIS is a struggle for the soul of Islam, and countering violent extremism and destroying ISIS must be done primarily by Muslim nations – with the strong support of their global partners.

These same sentiments have been echoed by those in the region. Jordan’s King Abdallah II said in a speech on Sunday that terrorism is the “greatest threat to our region” and that Muslims must lead the fight against it. He noted that confronting extremism is both a regional and international responsibility, and that it is incumbent on Muslim nations and communities to confront those who seek to hijack their societies and generations with intolerance and violent ideology.

And let me congratulate King Abdallah not only for his wise remarks, but also for the role that his small country is playing in attempting to address the horrific refugee crisis in the region.

likes him some despots too...

A new and strong coalition of Western powers, Muslim nations, and countries like Russia must come together in a strongly coordinated way to combat ISIS, to seal the borders that fighters are currently flowing across, to share counter-terrorism intelligence, to turn off the spigot of terrorist financing, and to end support for exporting radical ideologies.

What does all of this mean? Well, it means that, in many cases, we must ask more from those in the region. While Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, and Lebanon have accepted their responsibilities for taking in Syrian refugees, other countries in the region have done nothing or very little.

Equally important, and this is a point that must be made – countries in the region like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE – countries of enormous wealth and resources – have contributed far too little in the fight against ISIS. That must change. King Abdallah is absolutely right when he says that that the Muslim nations must lead the fight against ISIS, and that includes some of the most wealthy and powerful nations in the region, who, up to this point have done far too little.

Saudi Arabia has the 3rd largest defense budget in the world, yet instead of fighting ISIS they have focused more on a campaign to oust Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. Kuwait, a country whose ruling family was restored to power by U.S. troops after the first Gulf War, has been a well-known source of financing for ISIS and other violent extremists. It has been reported that Qatar will spend $200 billion on the 2022 World Cup, including the construction of an enormous number of facilities to host that event – $200 billion on hosting a soccer event, yet very little to fight against ISIS. Worse still, it has been widely reported that the government has not been vigilant in stemming the flow of terrorist financing, and that Qatari individuals and organizations funnel money to some of the most extreme terrorist groups, including al Nusra and ISIS.

All of this has got to change. Wealthy and powerful Muslim nations in the region can no longer sit on the sidelines and expect the United States to do their work for them. As we develop a strongly coordinated effort, we need a commitment from these countries that the fight against ISIS takes precedence over the religious and ideological differences that hamper the kind of cooperation that we desperately need.

As though they are independent....

Further, we all understand that Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator who has slaughtered many of his own people. I am pleased that we saw last weekend diplomats from all over world, known as the International Syria Support Group, set a timetable for a Syrian-led political transition with open and fair elections. These are the promising beginnings of a collective effort to end the bloodshed and to move to political transition.

Imperialist jive]

The diplomatic plan for Assad’s transition from power is a good step in a united front. But our priority must be to defeat ISIS. Nations all over the world, who share a common interest in protecting themselves against international terrorist, must make the destruction of ISIS the highest priority. Nations in the region must commit – that instead of turning a blind eye — they will commit their resources to preventing the free flow of terrorist finances and fighters to Syria and Iraq. We need a commitment that they will counter the violent rhetoric that fuels terrorism – rhetoric that often occurs within their very borders.

This is the model in which we must pursue solutions to the sorts of global threats we face.

While individual nations indeed have historic disputes – the U.S. and Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia – the time is now to put aside those differences to work towards a common purpose of destroying ISIS. Sadly, as we have seen recently, no country is immune from attacks by the violent organization or those whom they have radicalized.

Thus, we must work with our partners in Europe, the Gulf states, Africa, and Southeast Asia – all along the way asking the hard questions whether their actions are serving our unified purpose.

The bottom line is that ISIS must be destroyed, but it cannot be defeated by the United States alone. A new and effective coalition must be formed with the Muslim nations leading the effort on the ground, while the United States and other major forces provide the support they need.

https://berniesanders.com/democratic-socialism-in-the-united-states/

Bolded statements added

Sanders outlines pro-capitalist, pro-war positions in speech on “democratic socialism”
By Patrick Martin
20 November 2015

In a speech Thursday afternoon at Georgetown University, Senator Bernie Sanders made it clear that what he calls “democratic socialism” has nothing to do with either socialism or the defense of democratic
rights.

The candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination explicitly rejected any connection with socialism as a movement of the international working class to put an end to capitalism and establish a society based on collective ownership of the means of production.

He declared, “The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this: I don’t believe government should own the means of production... I believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America instead of shipping jobs and profits overseas.”

This is a statement that, whatever his reformist rhetoric, Sanders is committed to a policy of driving down the wages and benefits of US workers to boost the profits of companies operating within the country.
Nor did Sanders voice any defense of democratic rights against the enormous and expanding attacks by the military-intelligence apparatus of the US government. He said nothing about CIA torture, NSA spying, the revelations of Edward Snowden or the escalating violence of the US police against working people of all races.

On the contrary, Sanders entirely embraced the framework of the “war on terror” as pursued by the Bush and Obama administrations, devoting the last major section of his remarks to advocating all-out war against ISIS.

The main line of the speech was to portray socialism, not as a political program directed against capitalism, but as an misleading epithet thrown out by right-wing opponents of liberal reforms undertaken to save the profit system, such as those carried out by Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal during the Great Depression, and by the Johnson administration in the 1960s.

Social Security and the federal minimum wage were denounced as socialist, Sanders said, adding: “Unemployment insurance, abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining, strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as ‘socialist.’ Yet, these programs have become the fabric of our nation and the foundation of the middle class.”

Similarly, in the 1960s, when Medicare and Medicaid were created, “these vitally important programs were derided by the right wing as socialist programs that were a threat to our American way of life.”
Fifty years later, Sanders declared, the same label was being applied to efforts to improve the conditions of life for working people in the midst of the protracted economic crisis brought on by the 2008 Wall Street crash.

The first thing that must be said about Sanders’s claims is that what the Democratic candidate proposes today bears no resemblance to the policies enacted under the New Deal or in the 1960s. His program is far to the right of these programs, which were conceded by the ruling class in response to bitter social struggles.

That is why Sanders insists on the label “democratic socialism,” as well as sprinkling his speeches with calls for a “political revolution”: the rhetoric gives his policies a superficial radicalism which they entirely lack in substance. He proposes nothing more than somewhat higher taxes on the wealthy, to finance higher spending on health care and college education, and a modest increase in the minimum wage.
His “political revolution” boils down to bolstering the electoral prospects and political credibility of the Democratic Party, one of the two parties of the ruling class.

The second observation is that even this extremely modest program of reform is a fraud. If elected president, a Sanders administration would not fight for the interests of workers any more than Obama, who has presided over the greatest transfer of wealth in American history.

Sanders’s pretense to “socialism” is a fraud at an even more fundamental level. He combines his verbal paeans to “democratic socialism” with complete silence on the most important threat to the democratic rights of the American people: the enormous growth of the police-state apparatus in the United States, above all the power of the Pentagon and the associated intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA.
It was notable that in the foreign policy section of his speech, Sanders claimed to oppose regime-change operations like the 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, the 1964 overthrow of Joao Goulart in Brazil, and the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, but he never named the instruments of those counterrevolutionary coups, the Central Intelligence Agency and the US military brass.
To do so, of course, would both risk alerting the American people to the threat posed by CIA and Pentagon to democratic rights at home, and cut across his aspirations to become the commander-in-chief of those forces in January 2017. Instead, Sanders cited the CIA approvingly, in connection with its analysis of the crisis in Middle East, to support his own foreign policy prescriptions.

Sanders went out of his way to pander to backward conceptions of socialism as a nefarious import, alien to the United States. In the section of his speech disavowing any intention to advocate public ownership of the means of production, he went on to say, “I don’t believe in some foreign ‘ism’, but I believe deeply in American idealism.”

The actual content of this “idealism,” however, is nothing more than garden-variety support to American imperialism. Sanders declared, “The United States must pursue policies to destroy the brutal and barbaric ISIS regime, and to create conditions that prevent fanatical extremist ideologies from flourishing.”

He hailed the creation of NATO, the principal instrument of Cold War foreign policy (responsible for one of the most brutal right-wing coups of that period, the seizure of power by the colonels in Greece), and called for the creation of a new NATO-type organization to prosecute the struggle against what he called “the global threat of terror.”

With that language, Sanders embraces the same foreign policy framework as George W. Bush (the “global war on terror”) and Barack Obama. In the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders has positioned himself as the continuator of Obama’s foreign policy, as opposed to Hillary Clinton, who has sought to distinguish herself by advocating more aggressive measures in the Middle East.
The real content of Sanders’s foreign policy views was summed up in his hailing of Jordan’s King Abdullah as the model for Muslim countries carrying their share of the load in the war against ISIS. He saluted the King, “not only for his wise remarks, but also for the role that his small country is playing in attempting to address the horrific refugee crisis in the region.”

Abdullah is a brutal autocrat who represses all domestic opposition and is allied with Saudi Arabia and other despotic Persian Gulf regimes. That matters none to Sanders, who is anxious to encourage the Arab regimes to send their own ground troops into the Syrian slaughterhouse to do the dirty work of American imperialism.


http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/20/sand-n20.html

Play it again, Sam
by worker
By James Thompson



Response to: Bernie Sanders, socialism and the 2016 elections



"As Time Goes By"
music and words by Herman Hupfeld

[This day and age we're living in Gives cause for apprehension With speed and new invention And things like fourth dimension.
Yet we get a trifle weary With Mr. Einstein's theory. So we must get down to earth at times Relax relieve the tension

And no matter what the progress Or what may yet be proved The simple facts of life are such They cannot be removed.]

You must remember this A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh. The fundamental things apply As time goes by.

And when two lovers woo They still say, "I love you." On that you can rely No matter what the future brings As time goes by.

Moonlight and love songs Never out of date. Hearts full of passion Jealousy and hate. Woman needs man And man must have his mate That no one can deny.

It's still the same old story A fight for love and glory A case of do or die. The world will always welcome lovers As time goes by.

Oh yes, the world will always welcome lovers As time goes by.

© 1931 Warner Bros. Music Corporation, ASCAP

These words which were immortalized by Dooley Wilson in the film Casablanca live on loud and clear in the current political situation in the United States.



On November 11, 2015 former chairperson of the CPUSA, Sam Webb, offered his ideas about the current political situation. He unabashedly carries on his reactionary political ideology in his most recent writings http://peoplesworld.org/bernie-sanders-socialism-and-the-2016-elections/.



Sam Webb seems mired in a demented, anti-Communist, anti-Marxist view of the current political situation in the United States. He has done, is doing and will do great damage to the world political situation by failing to confront capitalism and its apologists.



He starts out by saying “I find it hard to buy the idea that one potential outcome of next year’s elections-the right wing gaining control of all three branches of government-is less significant than the opportunity of the left to debate its understanding of socialism.… To make such a claim isn’t ‘blasphemy’-it’s stupidity.”



Former Chairman Webb has repeatedly argued that the most important political objective in the United States is to defeat the right wing.



Although it is difficult to argue with this objective, Chairman Webb’s choice of tactics in the political struggle in the United States leaves something to be desired.



Former Chairman Webb has argued repeatedly for flexible Marxist tactics and has even invoked his perverted understanding of Marxist dialectics. He continues to “Play it again, Sam” even as people on the left in the US vote with their feet.



Former Chairman Webb’s myopic view that the Republicans are the only ones who embody the right wing in this country is easily refuted by reviewing the presidency of Barack Obama. Equating the defeat of the right wing with the defeat of the Republican Party is simplistic at best. This line of thinking represents a dangerous, inflexible view of the country and the world.



When Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, Chairman Webb hailed this is a magnificent victory for the working class and even characterized it as a “sea change” in the political struggle in this country. After the elections were over, Chairman Webb stubbornly maintained his and the CPUSA’s allegiance to the bourgeois politician, Pres. Barack Obama. He vigorously fought and routinely expelled anyone within the CPUSA who disagreed with this party line.



He refused to confront Pres. Barack Obama on any of his anti-working class policies. This tactic was a major failure in the class struggle in the United States. Chairman Webb seeks to continue this policy in his most recent article about Bernie Sanders.



Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a crucial meeting with A. Philip Randolph and it is widely reported that Pres. Roosevelt said to Mr. Randolph “I agree with you. Now you have to make me do it.” This led to the first March on Washington which was an important juncture in the civil rights struggle.



No pressure from the left on Pres. Obama has resulted in disastrous policies for the working class in the United States and for working people around the world. There has been virtually no opposition to the endless wars perpetrated by Pres. Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize Winner by people on the left or right.



As a result, the world is now on the brink of World War III. NATO countries are engaged in a full out assault and continuous provocation against their bourgeois rivals, Russia and China, in an effort to achieve global domination.



Chairman Webb ends his pathetic paper by stating “Everyone has to make up his or her mind on this issue, but my hope is that the left will sooner rather than later take its lead from Bernie.”



Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders has some very progressive campaign positions and appears to be the only progressive presidential candidate that has any reasonable chance of winning. He appears to be most closely aligned with the interests of the working class currently, but this is not a rational reason for people on the left to uncritically support his candidacy. Bernie Sanders is a bourgeois politician and should be viewed in this way before making any further political decisions.



For the former Chairman of the CPUSA to call for people on the left to take their lead from a bourgeois, Democratic Party candidate is indeed blasphemy and stupidity. We know very well what happened when people on the left took the lead from the first African-American bourgeois President of the United States. It led to endless wars, increased militarization both at home and abroad, increased incursions on the civil rights of the people of this country, a tremendous burgeoning of the right wing and their various sycophants, increased terrorism at home and abroad, increased anti-immigrant policies and actions, increased mass incarceration and a devolution of education and healthcare in the US today.



Indeed, Chairman Webb has blood on his hands for his spineless capitulation and class collaboration with the right wing in the Democratic Party in the United States.



Hopefully people on the left will see through his lies and prevarications and work to build a mass movement which will put pressure on whoever is elected President of the United States to do the right thing. Only a well organized and ideologically sound movement of the working class can “make the POTUS do it.”

**************
This outta my mailbox from Houston Party

So much for 'monolithic Communism'....Hmmm, meetings might get frisky. (TBF, would you be our 'fly on the wall'?) Straight shit on Sanders and a dope-slap for Webb, a twofer!

Bernie the Imperialist

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CPorGBgVAAAdayK.jpg

I look forward to the day when Brave Truth-Telling Independent Democratic Socialist (TM) Bernie Sanders enthusiastically signs on to Team Clinton. The shock, disillusionment,and attempts to "explain" by clueless petit-bourgeois liberals will be priceless.

"Work within the system, guys...we wouldn't want a Republican in the White House, now would we?"

You can't get there from here...

I look forward to the day when Brave Truth-Telling Independent Democratic Socialist (TM) Bernie Sanders enthusiastically signs on to Team Clinton. The shock, disillusionment,and attempts to "explain" by clueless petit-bourgeois liberals will be priceless.

"Work within the system, guys...we wouldn't want a Republican in the White House, now would we?"

You can't there from here...

Some folks that we know claim to understand that Bernie and lesser-evilism is a dead end yet still insist that supporting him raises the political dialogue....and this after the Kooch and to a lesser extent Edwards. We have seen the results of this tactic, it insulates capitalism from even the suggestion of revolution and causes despair and discouragement on the left.

I look forward to the day when Brave Truth-Telling Independent Democratic Socialist (TM) Bernie Sanders enthusiastically signs on to Team Clinton. The shock, disillusionment,and attempts to "explain" by clueless petit-bourgeois liberals will be priceless.

"Work within the system, guys...we wouldn't want a Republican in the White House, now would we?"

You can't get there from here...

I don't even know if those "progressives" even care anymore. They have staked-out a little territory called "cool left" and that's all that matters. They roll their eyes at Republicans and leftists alike - neither of those clods are "cool". The real thing is that the Bernie Brigade is all about the "privilege", all about the elitism, all about the style. Substance? Bah! Give me style!

I don't even know if those "progressives" even care anymore. They have staked-out a little territory called "cool left" and that's all that matters. They roll their eyes at Republicans and leftists alike - neither of those clods are "cool". The real thing is that the Bernie Brigade is all about the "privilege", all about the elitism, all about the style. Substance? Bah! Give me style!

My mistake, I was using 'progressive' the way it was meant 100 years ago. Dunno why I thought that would work.....

The bullshit from the burning crotch...


Bernie Is Right: The Military-Industrial Complex Is Alive and Well
For some, the Paris attacks were a windfall

BY Leonard C. Goodman

The Paris attacks occurred on a Friday. When the markets opened on Monday, “defense” industry stocks—Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Booz Allen Hamilton—soared in anticipation of the coming weapons sales and security contracts.
During the last Democratic debate, the presidential candidates pledged to make defeating ISIS a priority. But more significant was the question raised by Bernie Sanders about front-runner Hillary Clinton’s corporate donors “from Wall Street, from the military-industrial complex” and “what they’re gonna get” for their money.

more...

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18665/paris-attacks-show-the-military-industrial-complex-is-alive-and-well


He's against the MIC, yeah, you bet....


Bernie Sanders Doubles Down on F-35 Support Days After Runway Explosion
By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

03 June 14



Me: “You mentioned wasteful military spending. The other day ... I’m sure you’ve heard about the F-35 catching fire on the runway. The estimated lifetime expense of the F-35 is $1.2 trillion. When you talk about cutting wasteful military spending, does that include the F-35 program?”

Bernie Sanders: “No, and I’ll tell you why – it is essentially built. It is the airplane of the United States Air Force, Navy, and of NATO. It was a very controversial issue in Vermont. And my view was that given the fact that the F-35, which, by the way, has been incredibly wasteful, that’s a good question. But for better or worse, that is the plane of record right now, and it is not gonna be discarded. That’s the reality.”
hat was the exchange I had with US senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) at a town hall in Warner, New Hampshire, this past weekend (skip to the 45:30 mark of this video to hear my question). Sanders came to New Hampshire to gauge the local response to his economic justice-powered platform for a presumed 2016 presidential campaign. While his rabid defense of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and takedown of big money running politics was well-received, he contradicted his position of eliminating wasteful military spending while defending the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.

The Lockheed Martin F-35 is the epitome of Pentagon waste. The program has already cost taxpayers roughly half a trillion dollars, with $700 billion or more to come during the program’s lifetime. During an interview, Pierre Sprey, a co-designer of the F-16, went into great detail about how the F-35 was a lemon aircraft. Sprey explained that the fighter is an excessively heavy gas guzzler with small wings, a low bomb-carry capacity, low loiter time, is incapable of slow flight, is detectable to World War II-era low-frequency radar, and costs $200 million apiece. And just a little over a week ago, the F-35 caught fire on a runway at Eglin Air Force Base.

To his credit, Sanders acknowledged that the program was “wasteful” in his defense of it. The contention over the F-35 in his home state of Vermont is that the program is now responsible for jobs in his hometown of Burlington, where he served as mayor before running for Congress. Some front doors of homes in the Burlington area are adorned with green ribbons, signifying support for the F-35. Sanders, like his colleagues in 45 states around the country, doesn’t want to risk the wrath of voters angry about job losses related to F-35 manufacturing, assembly, and training if the program were to be cut. And that’s where Lockheed Martin’s political savvy comes into play.

War hawk John McCain (R-Az.) has called the F-35 program a “scandal and a tragedy” in the past. But when an F-35 squadron came to the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, McCain changed his tune to say the program was “moving in the right direction.” Lockheed Martin, which draws 82 percent of all revenue from taxpayers (Lockheed’s information systems department gets 95 percent of its money from taxpayers), knows that by spreading out manufacturing as widely as possible, the program is more likely to be funded by politicians beholden to voters who draw their livelihood from the F-35. Lockheed spent $15.3 million on lobbying politicians in 2012, a year in which the company made $47 billion in revenue. That’s a return on investment in the thousands of percentage points. Lockheed gets paid, and politicians get re-elected. That’s how Washington runs.

So, while Bernie Sanders is saying we should cut military spending to fund free college for everyone, his defense of the F-35 means that despite everything else, Sanders is still just a politician. Sooner or later, the F-35 will eventually be replaced by something even more expensive, while the F-35 joins the thousands of other unused fighter jets in the boneyard. But rather than lying to people and saying the program is already a done deal and that there’s nothing he can do, Sanders could stand by his principles and introduce an amendment in the next National Defense Authorization Act to strip the F-35 program of its funding. That remaining $700 billion could make college tuition-free for everyone for at least a decade.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/24583-bernie-sanders-doubles-down-on-f-35-support-days-after-runway-explosion

During the last Democratic debate, the presidential candidates pledged to make defeating ISIS a priority.

He kinda blew right pass this. So The Bern pledged to defeat IS, eh? How would he do that? With strong words and the Boy Scouts? If The Bern pledged to defeat IS, then he pledged to send a windfall to the MIC. Can't have it both ways, Bern.

But the F-35 is like a democratic socialist plane, doncha see. It won't have bullets and bombs and stuff, it'll have marshmallows and cotton candy and social security and things like that. Come on! The Bern is nowhere near as evil as all those others (not to include Hillary Clinton, 'cause The Bern has already pledged his support to her - and MIC)...

He kinda blew right pass this. So The Bern pledged to defeat IS, eh? How would he do that? With strong words and the Boy Scouts? If The Bern pledged to defeat IS, then he pledged to send a windfall to the MIC. Can't have it both ways, Bern.

As though Bernie doesn't know that IS is an arm(well, mebbe a sub-contractor) of imperial policy, him a senior senator & all. It kinda blows my mind that all these pols can stay on script, 'cept Trump of course, and his nutter shadow Carson. They can say anything but the media only reports that which fits the narrative. Which is mebbe how it works.

As though Bernie doesn't know that IS is an arm(well, mebbe a sub-contractor) of imperial policy, him a senior senator & all. It kinda blows my mind that all these pols can stay on script, 'cept Trump of course, and his nutter shadow Carson. They can say anything but the media only reports that which fits the narrative. Which is mebbe how it works.

Yeah, I no longer have any liberal "friends" (if I had any real ones before). Even some liberal members of my family kinda avoid me - I can take it. Oddly, the conservative folks Iknow, will talk all day to me about capitalism, IS, politics - you name it. Some even agree with me on (some) things. Maybe it's because I am no threat to anything the conservatives hold dear...yet.

From the mouth of twits...


Steven Salaita ‏@stevesalaita 4h4 hours ago
Tonight's #DemDebate will feature a feminist who has harmed millions of women and a socialist who wants to preserve capitalism.

399

Sanders calls for US DoD audit

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks at a rally, Monday, Aug. 10, 2015, at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena in Los Angeles
‘Immense Waste and Fraud’: Bernie Sanders Calls for US DoD Audit

At a rally on Monday evening in Storm Lake, Iowa, US presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders called for an audit of the Department of Defense for fraud and wasteful spending, as soldiers are forced to live off of food stamps.

The Democratic presidential candidate asserted that making the government more cost effective includes many other options besides cutting assistance for those in need, seeking to begin the process by examining the spending of government agencies.

“What it does mean is taking a hard look at an agency which receives $600 billion per year where there is an immense amount of waste and fraud,” Sanders said.

Sanders explained that on the day before the attacks of September 11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech which was overshadowed by the tragedy, declaring that there are trillions of dollars unaccounted for within the Department of Defense.

He explained that the agency receives some $600 billion annually, and that spending should be examined as an option for finding those areas to cut back spending without taking from American citizens.

The Vermont senator stated that the DOD is the only agency of government which cannot sustain an independent audit.

“You go to them and ask how many private contractors we have. Well, they really don’t know. It’s so complicated, a huge complicated system.”

Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., poses for a portrait before an interview, Wednesday May 20, 2015, in Washington.

He explained that there are some serious problems with what the US pays defense contractors, who can essentially charge the government whatever they want.

“And while we have massive cost overruns with defense contractors, we’ve got deployment after deployment for our soldiers, and we’ve got military families on food stamps. So maybe we want to change that.”

The Vermont senator also spoke of some 6,700 US service members who have died in military operations in Iraq and beyond, and over 500,000 returning home with post traumatic stress disorder or brain injuries. The candidate stated that he would not be so quick to rush the US military off to fight other people’s wars on the other side of the world.

Sanders received an enthusiastic and sustained standing ovation from the crowded room at the end of the event.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/us/20151231/1032524304/sanders-dod-audit.html#ixzz3vraLbdeM

You would think that the good communists at Houston would recognize that all Bernie is calling for here is more efficient imperialism. Sad.

You would think that the good communists at Houston would recognize that all Bernie is calling for here is more efficient imperialism. Sad.

This fits in nicely with the long Lenin piece you posted last month. There is a distinct difference between fighting for worker rights and advancement of workers living conditions and advocating for the improvement and advancement of capitalism. Protecting worker rights must go hand-in-hand with the struggle against bourgeois oppression, subjugation, and exploitation. You can't advocate for a bourgeois "renaissance" and remain an organ for working class struggle. This is the position of all Webbite groups, from New York to Houston. Sad is only part of what this is; betrayal and selling-out are also parts.

Does Bernie Sanders’ Imperialism Matter?
by SHAMUS COOKE



Critiquing Bernie Sanders from the left can be a lonely project. There is a “hope”-powered hysteria surrounding his campaign, and bursting the “hope” bubble can produce a fierce backlash. The Sanders “hope” explosion is so fierce because capitalism has become a hopeless place.

Hope can be positive by pushing people into political action, but it’s also exploited by the establishment as shiny bait. Obama, for example, fished for votes using “hope” and reeled in the presidency.

He then clubbed “hope” senseless by betraying his promises, continuing war and maintaining the domestic policies of the 1%. Hope was so thoroughly thrashed that a new messiah of hope was needed to cure the Obama-fortified hopelessness.

Bernie’s version of hope is deeper than Obama’s shallow PR electoral campaign, but under capitalism real “hope” isn’t a simple recipe, and Bernie is missing some key ingredients, most notably “anti-imperialism,” which is exemplified in Bernie’s reactionary foreign policy positions.

Imperialism can be loosely defined as the multitude of actions that maintain the U.S. global empire. Most Americans don’t realize the true political depth of imperialism — or don’t even know they live in the largest empire in world history, which adds urgency to the educating and organizing around this issue.

Some on the left would dismiss anti-imperialism as a “secondary” issue, accusing those who insist on its inclusion as “dogmatic” or “purist.” “Bernie is doing so many great things,” they insist, “that focusing on his weak points is counter-productive.”

It’s of course perfectly reasonable that many progressive/liberal and working class people would be attracted to Sanders’ platform. But socialists/revolutionaries must have a broader perspective. Imperialism is, in some ways, the beating heart of U.S. capitalism: a central power of the “billionaire class” that stops progress abroad while blocking progress at home.

The rabidly pro-imperialist section of the establishment is the most powerful and class-conscious section of the ruling class, with deep roots in the military industrial-complex. It also has deep, racist roots in the South, where military enlistees remain vastly over-represented, and where many military bases are named after pro-slavery civil war heroes. This is the most hideously reactionary section of the establishment, who’d be the first to support fascism domestically, since they’ve already supported it in various forms abroad.

The U.S. pro-imperialist establishment has helped to create a network of global military alliances that funnel weapons internationally, while cash flows globally into the hands of the 1% via free trade agreements crafted by the pro-imperialist establishment.

Without this imperialism the exports or markets of the largest U.S. corporations would suffer: including the big banks, big oil, big healthcare/insurance corporations, defense contractors (the arms industry), agro-corporations, tech firms, etc.

Bernie’s failure to confront this specific, crucial power of the “billionaire class” isn’t a “blind spot” of his politics, since imperialism is like a tank parked in your living room, too big to ignore. By consciously allying with this imperialist-section of the establishment, Sanders has exposed himself as a push over, whenever the imperialists decide its push comes to shove over war.

This imperialist pressure to “fall in line” extends beyond war. Sanders helped write and gave crucial political support to Obamacare, betraying his longstanding “dedication” to universal health care.

Sanders knew that Obamacare was not “a step in the right direction,” but a decision to spend all of Obama’s political capital on a scheme that strengthens the health care/pharmaceutical corporations that act as the biggest barrier to universal health care. If elected, President Sanders would abandon much of his campaign promises and “fall in line” as quickly and ingloriously as Obama did.

Sanders surely knows that foreign policy cannot be separated from domestic policy. They are two sides of the same coin that directly affect each other. What happens abroad affects what is possible domestically, and vice versa.

For example, the U.S. imperialist project — via “defense” spending —— drains the U.S. national budget (57% of discretionary spending), which could otherwise actually fund the things Bernie is proposing; universal health care and fully fund public schools, free college education, job creation, etc.

A Harvard study estimated that the full cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone will cost over $4 trillion, a number that is already increasing as the wars get indefinitely extended. This is a big reason why public schools are being shuttered and health insurance remains unaffordable or absent for tens of millions of people.

This kind of imperialist spending has effectively vetoed the job and social programs that people would enthusiastically vote for. This imperialist veto over domestic programs exemplifies how oppression abroad limits your freedoms at home. True freedom and economic security cannot be won in a bubble within an international economic system, especially within a U.S. imperialist system.

Imperialism also directly affects race relations in the United States. The U.S. establishment finds it acceptable to commit atrocities against people of color abroad because people of color at home live in dehumanized conditions and are treated as second-class citizens.

The imperialist actions abroad reinforce the oppression domestically, the most recent example being the Muslim people who are bombed overseas and then discriminated against at home. This racism is purposely exacerbated by politicians and the media, serving to reinforce the position of the establishment by dividing working class people in both affected nations.

The same dynamic is used in Africa, where the underlying racism against African Americans is projected abroad, aiding and abetting the regimes that committed the Rwandan and Congo genocide. These U.S.-supported atrocities are then blamed on the “inexplicably savage” behavior of African “tribalism”, a racist lie used to legitimize the racism, mass incarceration, job discrimination, and crushing poverty experienced by African Americans.

It’s no exaggeration to say that U.S. imperialism is the most politically reactionary force in the world, directly and deeply shaping governments and militaries/police across the world that then use these U.S.-made weapons against their own citizens.

For example, a recent article in Salon was named “35 Countries where the U.S. has supported Fascists, Drug Lords, and Terrorists.” The point is well made; U.S. imperialism artificially shoves governments across the globe far to the right, preventing these governments from becoming examples or allies for social movements within the United States.

The 700+ U.S. military bases across the globe directly affect the politics of every hosting nation, while U.S. imperialist political pressure is also applied via military alliances (NATO), arms sales, training military/police, supporting dictators, supporting military coups, proxy wars, direct military intervention, etc.

Supporting Bernie Sanders means ignoring — or minimizing — his imperialism, since political campaigns are won through cheerleading not criticism. And by ignoring Bernie’s foreign policy — because it might “hurt the campaign” — imperialism is reinforced through valuable political cover. The most powerful section of the U.S. establishment thus benefits.

Some Sanders supporters might respond; “at least his foreign policy is better than Hillary’s.” But Sanders himself has been unable to provide a real argument to support this claim during the ongoing debates.

When Sanders attempted to frame Hillary as “pro-regime change” in relation to the catastrophe she created in Libya, Hillary pointed out that Sanders voted “yes” to support that regime change. As the war machine rolled into Libya Sanders wasn’t a speed bump; he was a lubricant. Clinton and Sanders both have Libyan blood on their hands.

Sanders has Afghan blood on his hands too, having voted for the invasion of the now-endless Afghan war that triggered the beginning of the flurry of Middle East wars. And while Sanders brags about voting “no” for the 2003 Iraq war, his vote soon morphed into a “yes,” by his several votes for the ongoing funding of the war/occupation.

Sanders also voted “yes” for the U.S.-led NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, and supports the brutal Israeli military regime that uses U.S. weapons to slaughter Palestinians.

When it was announced that Obama was choosing sides and funneling guns to the Syrian rebels — thus exacerbating and artificially extending the conflict — Bernie was completely silent; a silence that helped destroy Syria and lead to the biggest refugee crisis since World War II.

Sanders is consistently on the wrong side of history; he’s also been a direct accomplice to a series of massive war crimes.

Sanders often uses weak rhetoric to mitigate his imperialism. On his campaign website he says that the U.S. needs a “strong national defense infrastructure” and a “strong defense system,” but adds the caveat that he’s “concerned” about the military budget, and wants “accountability” for the enormous amounts that are spent. Obama the candidate spoke more clearly about war and peace than Sanders does.

Highlighting Sanders imperialism is especially important because the left has been repeatedly duped by imperialist wars in recent years, to the point that imperialism is becoming increasingly ignored, and consequently strengthened.

Large sections of the left were silent about the destruction of Yugoslavia, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria. They were blissfully ignorant of the ongoing imperialist adventures throughout Africa, most spectacularly in Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia and the Congo. The worst dictators in Africa — for example in Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda — are “good friends” of the United States.

By not giving adequate focus to the U.S. foreign military adventures, valuable political cover is given to allow these wars to continue. The U.S. anti-war movement was mostly silent about Obama’s imperialism while two historically important countries of the Middle East — Libya and Syria — were obliterated.

By not educating and organizing against imperialism, it’s impossible to make alliances with forces fighting imperialism abroad. Creating international alliances has a long tradition among the left among unions, Black liberation, and the socialist/communist movements.

There have also been powerful connections that helped curb apartheid South Africa, strengthen the Venezuelan revolution and empower Palestinians against the apartheid Israeli government.

However, the people on the ground in the Middle East who preferred that the U.S. not destroy their nations, have had little solidarity with people in the United States. In fact, the United States in many of their eyes is the number one enemy, which in turn makes them think that terrorism against U.S. citizens is justified.

Ultimately, the nationalist demands of the Sanders’ campaign cannot be achieved while simultaneously allowing international imperialism to thrive. Imperialism is a bogeyman that haunts social progress, re-appearing in countless forms to keep resources flowing endlessly into wars abroad that stunt domestic spending and distract from working class demands. A new military “crisis” will always strive to take priority over domestic considerations.

It’s obligatory for the left to challenge imperialism by any means necessary, waging campaigns and raising demands to stop foreign aggression.

By lowering our voices in response to Bernie’s campaign, an opportunity is missed to amplify our voices in strategic interventions such as the successful Black Lives Matter actions at Sanders’ rallies. Silence on these issues always benefits imperialism at the expense of everybody else.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/05/does-bernie-sanders-imperialism-matter/

A letter to “Bernie Bots” and Sanders supporters
Posted on November 9, 2015 by bhermannview

400

Dear Bernie Bots and Sanders supporters,

As a self-defined independent radical who despises the Establishment and the elites who control this country, you might think that I’d support Bernie Sanders’s presidential candidacy and call for “political revolution.” But, you’d be wrong. Instead, I’ve refused to endorse Sanders on any conditions. Even if he becomes the Democratic presidential candidate, which is highly unlikely, I’m still not going to give him my support. Some Sanders supporters who may be reading this may think that this would imply that I support Hillary Clinton or some other candidate running in the Democratic primary, or even a Republican. That can’t be farther from the truth. I refuse to support the Democratic or Republican parties or any candidates within them. There could be some instance that I’d support a Democrat, especially if they come into office thanks to grassroots pressure through a social movement, but in general I refuse to get involved in the toxic game of partisan politics which defines “politics” for too many. I take the viewpoint of self-defined black nationalist Robert F. Williams who wrote in his famed book, Negroes with Guns that “as an individual, I’m not inclined toward “politics.” The only thing I care about is justice and liberation. I don’t belong to any political party.”


In order to explain my opposition to the current Bernie Sanders campaign I recommend previous articles I have written on this subject (‘The reality of professed progressive Bernie Sanders,’ Countering the avid “Berniemania” once again,’ ‘Bringing together criticism of Bernie Sanders,’ ‘Bernie Sanders and military budgets,’ ‘Beware of (Colonel) Sanders,’ and ‘What’s the matter (Colonel) Bernie Sanders…chicken?‘). But let me sum my reasons for opposition. For one, I feel that since the Sanders campaign did not come out of any social movement, like the Obama campaign or most campaigns for political office in the United States, that it will not lead to an increase in grassroots organizing which is sorely needed. Additionally, when Sanders loses, which seems to be an obvious prospect, then Sanders supporters will feel disillusioned and will pull back from political participation. This is not something anyone should want. If Sanders does win, then activists will have been pulled in to the Democratic Party, which weakens the cause of those who want to build alternatives to the two-party system, and it will chew up the causes of these activists and spit them out. That is also a result that no one should look forward to.

Beyond this, there are other reasons other than what Sanders said in the Democratic Presidential Debate, that I am critical of Sanders. Let me list them:

Support for the Department of Homeland Security in March of this year when it looked like it might not be funded.

Support for Israeli bombing of Gaza (esp. in 2014) and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Supports President Obama’s bombing of ISIS.

Supports a plan that makes Arab states, which are US proxies and receive loads of US weapons, such as Saudi Arabia the forefront “defeating” ISIS by military force

Claimed (and claims) that Iran is building a nuclear weapon when it isn’t.

Proposed few or little cuts to the military budget. Some Sanders supporters have said he would cut the military budget by 10% but I haven’t heard him ever say that. Even if he
did want to cut the military, he likely wouldn’t dismantle the war machine as a whole.

Supporting certain wars in Bosnia, Afghanistan war (he voted for it), and Iraq (2014-5) while opposing wars in other countries such as Iraq (1990, 2003). This inconsistency is disturbing. He also has opposed a proposed war in Syria (as long as one with Iran), yet he had voiced support for arming magical/non-existent Syrian “rebels” who are making the civil war in Syria even more violent.

While he voted against many military budgets, he voted for $4.185 trillion dollars at maximum, in military funding since the 1990s, taking the broadest measure which includes yes votes, voice votes and unanimous consent, and $2.77 trillion dollars in military funding since the 1990s, if that is minimized to only “yes” votes

Voted against the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, which regulated handguns.

Voted for the racist Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a Clinton-era crime bill, which expands the death penalty, puts in place a three-strikes rule for some with “three or more convictions for serious violent felonies or drug trafficking crimes,” and increases money for “border control” and deportation of immigrants.

Voted for the Iraq “Liberation” Act which supposedly called for the US to support the opposition in that country, but really dedicated the US to regime change in Iraq which meant Saddam Hussein would be overthrown with the help of US funds to undermine his regime.

Voted for the Commodity Futures “Modernization” Act which basically created an “unregulated market” in derivatives and swaps.

Voted for the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 expands the “intelligence” apparatus by creating the position of the Director of National Intelligence, and
the National Counterterrorism Center.

Voted for the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2015 which increases funding for the Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (anti-immigrant to the core), and the U.S. Secret Service.

Voted for the US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014 which declares that the US is a “major strategic partner” of Israel and that the US military will give weapons to Israel and that the US and Israel should have “cyber cooperation.”

The case of Sanders sort of stealing a quote from Hugo Chavez.

His support for a strong (and powerful) military while saying he opposes “bureaucracy” which doesn’t make sense because a strong military/strong “defense” system engenders additional bureaucracy by its nature.

Voted for an extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which is “harshly neoliberal.”

Voted for a 2005 law which shielded gun manufacturers from lawsuits by gun violence victims (as noted in the New York Times).

Sanders saying something that had an echo of a “dog whistle” in comparing gun use in Vermont to gun use in Chicago and Los Angeles.

He only objected to Netanyahu speaking to Congress this year because it interfered with President Obama’s ability to craft US foreign policy.

He is apparently “anti-interventionist” but he is willing to use military force even if he claims it would be a “last resort.”

Voted for the horrid Authorization for Military Force (AUMF) in 2001 which has been used to justify targeting killings in the form of drone strikes.

Voted for a resolution that authorized “the president of the United States to conduct military air operations and missile strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”

He supports withdrawing from Afghanistan but claims that US soldiers are “doing a tremendous job under very difficult circumstances” which acts like the US occupation of

Afghanistan has been going “well” and “fine” which ignores killings, sexual assault and acts of terror by the US military.

Supports a coup d’etat of the existing Chinese government.

Supporting sanctions against the Russian government.

He voiced support for capital bringing in the “cheapest possible labor.”

Sanders’s support for raised wages, even if implemented, which doesn’t change the fact that labor is still considered a commodity within the capitalist system.

Sanders called for restructuring of the debt in Puerto Rico but he did not challenge the status of Puerto Rico, or call for its independence.

Voted for a budget agreement in 2013 which included approval of the U.S.-Mexico Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement, an agreement that allows only the US to engage in exploitation of petroleum through drilling in a section of the Gulf of Mexico

Support of “humanitarian imperialism” by supporting the Bosnian war and mocking anti-imperialists in a 1999 speech while he was at it

Voted for six military construction funding bills.

Voted for the military intervention in Somalia.

Voted for sanctions on Iran and Libya twice.

Voted for three bills funding US proxies in Europe and elsewhere including Israel.

Voted for “defense spending” to fund US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq four times

Voted for the missile system in Europe.

Voted against closing Guantanamo bay in 2009.

Co-sponsored legislation in 2011 to “protect” U.S. citizens in Libya and possibly impose a no-fly-zone.

Voted for the bipartisan education reform bill this year (Every Child Achieves Act of 2015) which keeps in place much of the No Child Left Behind framework.

Supporting the neoliberal education program Race to the Top begun by the Obama administration.

In the 1990s, Sanders was ok with making the very small town of Sierra Blanca, Texas of a community a sacrifice zone for a nuclear dump!

He voted to extradite Assata Shakur from Cuba, to have her punished her on U.S soil

I would hope that Sanders supporters take this criticism and recognize it, rather than just dismissing it as some have done in response to my previous articles on Sanders, possibly by refusing to support Sanders because of this and engaging in grassroots organizing. However, even challenging Sanders on what I have pointed would a positive step, even though I don’t think that is enough.

That is all for now.

https://bhermannview.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/a-letter-to-bernie-bots-and-sanders-supporters/

I wrote this as a response to someone elsewhere. Figured I'd share it here.

On "hate":


Hate implies emotional attachment. I don't 'hate" any politician or bourgeois political party. They are doing exactly what they are supposed to - pretending to serve the interests of the "American people" (an ill-defined concept if there ever was one) while actually serving the class interests of the ruling class. Just as the "Founding Fathers" intended.

Sanders has taken the pretense to its logical conclusion; within the American political system, someone can call themselves a "socialist" however much they want without actually practicing socialism. Socialism is what socialism does. Furthermore, none of this changes the objective reality that the system itself is not merely "broken", but actively antagonistic to the working class - who, just for the historical record, have no country (and never really did for that matter). It's a cruel joke to suggest otherwise.

Which brings us back to Bernie Sanders, who strives to be another Great Man of American history who will "fix" a "broken" system. Just like FDR....except that FDR operated in entirely different historical, political, and social conditions. FDR would not have been so "great" a President without the Left - specifically, the threat of the radical Left to the system. It's too bad that by the 1940s, he and then his Democratic successor really aggressively purged the Left from American politics, society, and historical memory. I guess you couldn't take any chances with the Commies back the - certainly not if you were among the ruling elite of the American capitalist empire. Oh well!

Bernie and the Jets
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR


401

“Bernie and the Jets” by Nick Roney.

As Clintons are wont to do, Hillary laid a political trap and Bernie Sanders, in his Schlemiel-like way, stumbled right into it. In the wake of Jeremy Corbyn’s smashing victory as the new leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Hillary’s super-PAC, Correct the Record, tarred Sanders as a Corbyn-lite renegade who has cozied up to untouchable figures like Hugo Chavez.

About a decade ago, Sanders was part of a delegation that negotiated a sensible deal to bring low-cost heating oil from Venezuela to poor families in the northeastern United States. But instead of defending his honorable role in this ex parte negotiation, Sanders wilted. In a fundraising email to his legions of Sandernistas, Bernie fumed at being “linked to a dead Communist dictator.”

Of course, Hugo Chavez represented everything that Bernie Sanders claims to be but isn’t. Namely, an independent socialist, whose immense popularity in his own country led to his Bolivaran Party winning 18 straight hotly-contested elections since 1996, not to mention surviving several coup attempts backed by the CIA and the editorial board of the New York Times, plots that elicited not a squeak of dissent from Bernie the Red.

One might be tempted to cut the Vermont senator some slack on the matter. After all, Sanders seems to have given foreign policy in the post-911 era about as much attention as he has police violence in urban American. As the American military skids into Syria, one looks to Sanders (who else is there?) for new ideas, for a holistic political philosophy that links neoliberal economics to racism and imperial adventurism. Yet we see nothing of the kind. How does Sanders feel about the latest war we’ve backed our way into in the Middle East? Who can really say? No one is sure if Sanders himself really knows, and this not merely because Bernie so often seems to be speaking in tongues, without even the spiritual uplift a Pentecostal sermon provides.

Sanders’ core political ideas seem scrawled on parchment, as stale and faded as those of the American politician he most resembles, Hubert H. Humphrey. The country’s most acerbic political journalist, Robert Sherrill, called Humphrey the Drugstore Liberal. The Minnesota Democrat was an economic populist, perhaps even to the Left of Sanders, who remained insensate to the horrors of the American war machine. Like Sanders, Humphrey directed almost all of his economic rhetoric at the middle class *— what nearly everyone else in the world calls the bourgeoisie — a curious target demographic for an avowed socialist.

As the nation sank deeper into the blood of Vietnam, Humphrey’s sole consolation was to dole out economic palliatives while talking up the number of high-paying jobs generated by the arms manufacturers. Like Humphrey, Sanders is a military Keynesian who seems to believe that the never-ending War on Terror is one sure-fire route toward full-employment. In other words, he’s a Cold War Liberal lost in a post-Cold War world.

Still, Bernie clings to his death-dealing supersonic relics, most fervently to the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet. As Andrew Cockburn reported in Harper’s, Sanders and his Vermont colleague Patrick Leahy waged a fierce bureaucratic fight to bring the jet to the Burlington Air Base as the premier weapon of the Green Mountain Boys, the 158th Fighter Wing of the Vermont Air National Guard. At $191 million per aircraft, the F-35 represents a technological wish-fulfillment for the defense lobby. Larded with the latest high-tech thanatic gizmos, the porcine and unstable Stealth fighter will prowl cloud-free skies (too dainty to fly in rain) on an endless quest to confront an enemy that no longer exists, and perhaps never did. The only people who will be terrorized by Bernie’s fleet of F-35s when they finally arrive are the poor residents of South Burlington, whose homes will be perpetually quaking from the caterwauling squeal of the jet’s after-burning turbofan engine.

Award Bernie bonus points for consistency here. He is equally supportive of gun manufacturers, rejecting even the most timid restrictions on gun sales (the Brady Bill) and voting to shield weapons-makers from liability suits brought by victims of mass shootings. A few hours after the rampage at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, Bernie hypocritically tweeted out a statement of condolence for the victims which was notable only for the extreme banality of its sentiment.

Two days later, when U.S. airstrikes targeted a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 22 medical workers and patients, Sanders’s twitter-wire went tellingly mute. But what could Sanders say about this war crime in real time, an attack that infused a new meaning to the phrase ‘surgical strike’? The miserable 14-year-long war on Afghanistan is the battle Sanders said had to be waged, a war without regrets.

Alexander Cockburn used to say that one of the pre-conditions for being a “serious presidential contender” was the ability to confess publicly, often live on Meet the Press, that you were willing to launch nuclear weapons against (pick a country, any country will do….), even at the risk of incinerating life on Earth.

Of course, these days, you also have to pledge support for Obama’s drone killing program, as Bernie Sanders has faithfully done. Sanders told George Stephanopoulos in August that if he becomes the next joystick bombardier in the Oval Office, he won’t pull the plug on the drones but he will endeavor to kill fewer innocent people. Rarely has the moral hollowness of American liberalism been expressed more clearly.

Thank you, Comrade Bernie.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/13/bernie-and-the-jets/

Doublespeak:

Thank you for contacting me about the U.S. Air Force’s decision to base the F-35 Joint Strike Fighters in South Burlington. I appreciate the opportunity to respond to your concerns on this very important issue.

Let me begin by stating that I believe it speaks to the commendable record of the Vermont National Guard that the Air Force decided to base its newest generation of planes in South Burlington.

The Vermont Guard played a critical role responding to the September 11 attacks in New York, Tropical Storm Irene in Vermont, and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast. And, while I personally have deep concerns about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is no question that Vermont Guard members have served admirably and honorably – often at enormous personal cost – when called to active duty.

I do not want to see the role of the Vermont Air National Guard diminished or eliminated, and this decision ensures the mission of the Vermont Air Guard far into the future. It protects the jobs and educational opportunities for more than a thousand Vermonters while securing the Guard’s significant contribution to the local economy for years to come. Moreover, a failure to be chosen in the first F-35 basing round would have exposed the Burlington Air Guard Station to the Base Realignment and Closure process, and that is why the Vermont Guard leadership unequivocally believed the best way to ensure their mission was to get the F-35. I supported that position.

There are residents near the airport who are very legitimately concerned about noise, and I share that concern. Along with Senator Leahy and Congressman Welch, I have asked the Air Force to address noise concerns. We have also urged the Guard to work closely with its airport neighbors to reduce noise to the extent possible through operational measures such as limiting afterburner use, flying at less than full military power, modifying take-off and landing patterns, etc.

And, like many Vermonters I have serious concerns about the cost of this plane. Throughout my career, I have called for cutting military spending and rooting-out fraud, waste and corruption in the defense industry. At the very least, I believe Lockheed Martin must cover cost overages, rather than the U.S. taxpayer.

However, whether one likes the F-35 or not, the Air Force is moving forward with plans to replace the F-16 with the F-35. As long as the F-35 is deployed anywhere, I would rather protect the mission of the citizen soldiers of the Vermont Guard, and maintain 1100 jobs here in Vermont, rather than in South Carolina or Florida.

Thank you again for contacting me, and please feel free to stay in touch about this or any other subject of interest to you. For up-to-date information on what I am working on, please sign-up for my e-newsletter, the Bernie Buzz, at http://sanders.senate.gov/buzz/.

Sincerely,
BERNARD SANDERS
United States Senator

http://www.stopthef35.com/

Bernie the Quitter Fools Us Again

by Michael Colby, December 23, 2009

Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders spoke for months about his “historic” efforts to get a vote on a single-payer health care bill in the Senate. While we all knew the outcome was going to be a rather miserable failure, it was a tiny crumb being flicked to those of us who still believe in both real solutions to the health care crisis AND the possibilities of democracy.

Bernie was correct to intuit that this kind of vote is essential to keep a movement alive, offer some hope, and simply record the moment in history. The entire effort is about seeing where we stand, knowing how far we have to go, and putting both the general public and the electoral elite on notice that we know where we’re going.

Historically, similar “failed” measures were introduced to end slavery, to give women the right to vote, to provide equal rights to minorities and — yes — to end wrong-headed wars. An effective movement must know which side everyone is on, and such votes — albeit failures — provide that organizational and motivational insight.

Bernie had all of this in mind while he talked the talk in the months preceding the historic single-payer health care vote. Because Bernie knows his history, and he also knows — like the rest of us who utilize common sense know — that a single-payer health care system provides the only path to justice.

“The upcoming vote on my single-payer health care bill will be an historic moment in the halls of Congress,” Bernie declared recently on a national radio talk show. “While I know it will fail, it is essential to bring it forward, have the debate, and record the vote so that we can continue to build the movement and move toward single-payer as our ultimate goal.”

Well, Bernie had his moment earlier this week. And, as we all know now, he quit on us.

Specifically, Bernie pulled his single-payer initiative from consideration after the Republicans went grade school on us by demanding that the 700-page amendment be read in its entirety. It was estimated that the reading would take about 12 hours of the Senate’s time. After about three hours, Bernie came to the floor of the Senate and announced that he was withdrawing his single-payer initiative and, thus, killing the “historic” vote.

Why? Because, as Bernie explained, he didn’t want to hold up the business of the Senate. And what, exactly, was the next item on the Senate’s agenda? Yet another Defense Department appropriations bill. Hmm, sounds like a good reason to stall to me…

But the real reason, of coarse, is that Bernie was getting his arm twisted by the spineless Democratic leadership, a group of sheep who seem only interested in perfecting the not-so-fine art of losing.

When Bernie took the floor to announce his decision to pull his amendment he was “outraged,” and then spilled forth with some fine rhetoric about all the ills of our political system, the obstructive nature of the Republicans, and then some more outrage piled upon the outrage.

But it was Bernie’s — and only Bernie’s — decision to kill his initiative and, as a result, the “historic” moment that he had been promoting. So, sorry, if there was outrage to be had, it should have been spread evenly amongst the childish Republicans and Bernie-the-quitter.

Sadly, the whole affair could be chalked up to yet another example of the Democratic Party’s (yes, Bernie caucuses with the Dems) willingness to lead its followers to political slaughter. Obama’s done it with the Wall Street bailouts, his refusal to close Gitmo, his foot-dragging on Iraq, his surge in Afghanistan and his near-complete failure of leadership on the health care issue (to name a few). And the Democratically-controlled Congress has followed suit with its own bait and switch nonsense like the one perpetrated by Bernie: “Come, my followers, let’s make history. Oh, nevermind.”

They don’t want a movement. They want a nice, pliable butch of donors willing to get giddy during campaign season long enough to “hope” and vote for change. And if you dare to call their bluff, they’ll scream “Nader!” and/or “Palin!” until their own failures get lost in the rhetorical haze.

Shame on Bernie for so perfectly joining the quitters (once again). Because a real “independent” wouldn’t have so blatantly betrayed the moment of history he dangled in front of the single-payer movement. All for — what!? — saving a few hours of the Senate’s time? So they could rush to throw more money at the Pentagon? Good grief.

With apologies to “The Who,” we were, indeed, fooled again.

Damn.

http://theava.com/archives/2770

"Bernie Sanders is a fake. He calls himself a socialist, but he's said nothing about the corporate takeover of the Vermont economy; he proclaims to be an independent, but begs his way into the House Democratic Caucus; he proclaims to be an avid environmentalist, but votes to repeal the gas tax; and he talks about the need for an alternative to the two-party system, but refuses to endorse Ralph Nader's presidential bid because 'it might hurt Clinton.'"

Thus speaks a Vermonter, in the form of Mike Colby, who runs a fine group called Food & Water. As Colby puts it, "Bernie Sanders, along with the dynamic duds Ben & Jerry, are the linchpins of the great myth of Vermont's progressive politics. It's all an illusion. Progressive politics among the self-proclaimed 'Sandernistas' consists of two simple steps: Vote for Bernie and buy Ben & Jerry's stock. …

https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-18514997.html

Farmer's Market
By MICHAEL COLBY
Those moans you’re hearing from the hills of Vermont aren’t necessarily from the dwindling number of farmers trying to get their hay in. It’s more likely coming from the estimated 70 percent of Vermonters who’ve got money parked in a stock market that’s caught in a downward spiral.

Contrary to the image we like to portray as some kind of “socialist republic” (thanks, Bernie), the reality is that Vermonters are deeply in love with capitalism (thanks, Ben & Jerry). According to the Vermont Economy Newsletter, about 20 cents out of every dollar earned by Vermonters was derived from the stock market, a figure that has ranked us as high as third in the nation for our portfolio prowess.

The state’s heavy reliance on stock-market income allowed Vermont’s tax coffers to bloat into record budget surpluses during the dot-com market mania. In fact, the state had so much extra money, it created a “rainy day” fund of tens of millions of dollars.

Well, as Bob Dylan sings, the hard rain is falling — and the days of budget surpluses are long gone.

Ironically, Governor Howard Dean is using the state’s former fiscal health as a launching pad for his fledgling run for the presidency. But according to the state’s leading economists, it was not Dean’s fiscal policies that led to the state’s economic boom.

“Governor Dean is a very lucky man,” says economist Art Woolf, a professor at the University of Vermont and a director of Northern Economic Consulting. “But the truth is that governors have nothing to do with the economy and nothing to do with the market — and that’s where much of the surplus came from.”

The facts speak for themselves. In 1997, 62,500 Vermonters collectively reported about $767 million in capital gains from the stock market. By 2000, those figures had swelled to 80,000 Vermonters reporting $1.3 billion in stock-market revenues. And when the state takes 3 percent of it — presto! — you’ve got a rainy day fund.

http://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/farmers-market/Content?oid=2505518

Colby moved to Vermont seven years ago, in part because his wife wanted to attend graduate school at the University of Vermont, and in part because he wanted to return to the country. Not that he's been a particularly easy neighbor to get along with. He's battled with the iconic Ben & Jerry's over its use of milk from dairies that use pesticides. He's fought with the giant Cabot dairy, one of the state's major employers, as part of Food & Water's ongoing campaign against the use of rBGH. That latter effort earned him the enmity of Bernie Sanders, the state's popular socialist congressman. (A member of Sanders's staff said he would not comment on his relationship with Colby.)

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/98/02/12/irradiation.html

I'll give you one other little example which
shows how this thing works, which is rBGH, do you know what that
is? Ir's the hormone you put in dairy cows which makes them produce
a lot more milk. Now this is a social justice issue because: one, if you
start putting rBGH into cows you make them produce more milk,
which is lunacy; we already have a huge milk surplus in this country.
It also drives the small farmer to the wall, because the big companies
use it. rBGH is made by Monsanto, a huge chemical company. BGH
has grave health consequences because the cows get sick, they get mastitis.
You have to ram them full of antibiotics and what's in the milk is
something that can cause immune destruction in humans. So how to
battle it? First of all you find that Carol Tucker Foreman, who is one
of the great names in the consumer reform/public interest movement,
is a consultant from Monsanto. Secondly, you find that Michael
Colby, who runs an outfit called "Food and Water," based in Vermont,
(a public interest organization), gets money from pretty good ~
sources. He says, "Screw Washington! Washington's finished; you ;
can't beat the system in Washington. You have to do direct anti-corpo- !I
rate campaigns. You have to say to people, don't get your milk from ';
Land O'Lakes co-op until they agree not to have any rBGH milk." .5
He did this in the great state of Vermont, where he's based. Where g
there's Cabot Dairies. Cabot Dairies sort of says it's a co-op of thrifty •;;
Vermont dairy farmers; but it's actually a conglomerate based in New
York. The minute he started attacking them everybody in the state,
from the "progressive" Bernie Sanders to The Burlington Free Press, to
the organic food movement in Vermont, every single one of them
said, "This is an outrage to attack Cabot." Once you start rocking the
boat more than three inches in this country you're in big trouble.

http://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1268&context=disclosure

And again, this Sunday, I asked him about the Vermont State Senate voting overwhelmingly for a pro-impeachment resolution. And again, he sidestepped my repeated efforts to have him address the substance of the subject. See video here.

On Friday, Dave Lindorff noted:

In a joint statement issued in Washington, DC, Vermont’s Congressional delegation, Sen. Patrick Leahy, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Peter Welch, responded to the state senate resolution by saying that “before we talk about impeachment,” current investigations in the Congress need to be “allowed to run their course.”

Ignoring the fact that 39 towns in the state, including some it Vermont’s larger municipalities, have voted out impeachment resolutions, the three, all Democrats, go on to say, “In our view, the people of Vermont want us to focus our attention on such issues as ending the war in Iraq, protecting the needs of our veterans, raising the minimum wage, addressing the crisis of global warming and providing health care to all of our citizens.” … If ever there was a case of elected officials ignoring the clearly expressed will of their constituents, this is it.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/04/23/democrats-take-cover-from-impeachment/

A Socialist in the Senate?
by ASHLEY SMITH

ON THE surface, the election in Vermont to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords was a classic battle between capitalists and workers.

In one corner loomed the Republican’s forward Richard Tarrant, a multimillionaire and former CEO of the software company IDX. Nicknamed “Richie” Rich, he spent nearly $7 million of his own money to create the illusion of popular support, blanketing the state with obnoxiously large campaign signs.

In the other corner thundered Independent Bernard Sanders, known throughout Vermont as simply “Bernie.” Sanders served four terms as mayor of “the People’s Republic of Burlington” during the 1980s, and eight terms after that as Vermont’s lone representative in the House of Representatives. He built a reputation for attacking corporate interests, supporting universal health care and defending union jobs.
* * *

Sanders knocked out “Richie” Rich, winning the vote by a whopping 2-to-1 margin. Everyone–from the British newspaper, the Guardian, to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman–has heralded the election of the first socialist senator in U.S. history, an independent who will stand up to the two mainstream parties, oppose war, roll back corporate power and lead the fight for workers and the oppressed.

While it was fantastic to see Tarrant humiliated, Sanders’ election to the Senate doesn’t represent a radical departure from politics as usual. He may have a portrait of Eugene Debs hanging in his office, but his politics have little in common with that great American socialist.



* * *

IN THE 1980s, as Burlington’s mayor, Sanders mounted a challenge to the Democrats and Republicans, maintaining a consistent anti-imperialist position in solidarity with the Nicaraguan Revolution and trying to implement pro-worker policies.

But that was long ago. Now Sanders is independent in name only–he in fact supports the Democratic Party.

As his long-time antagonist and now ally, Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, said on the NBC’s Meet the Press, “He is basically a liberal Democrat, and he is a Democrat at that–he runs as an Independent because he doesn’t like the structure and money that gets involved…The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time.” Ironically, that’s more often than most Democrats vote with the Democrats.

Sanders’ voting record is also not so very left wing; one study found that 38 other congressional representatives had a more progressive voting record.

Sanders’ relationship to the Democrats has been developing for many years. In 1992, he supported Bill Clinton as a “lesser evil,” though he later abandoned this impolite phrase to unapologetically endorse Democrats for the White House ever since.

In the 2006 Senate election, he didn’t even really run as an independent. The Democrats cut a deal with Sanders–they wouldn’t run a candidate against him, in exchange for him supporting Democrats in other races.

The Democrats backed up their word by nominating Sanders in their primary, which he refused to accept to preserve his nominal independence. But Sanders did accept support from national Democrats like Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Barack Obama and Barbara Boxer. He also accepted a large donation from Hillary Clinton’s Political Action Committee, HILLPAC, which featured him as one of its most important candidates.

Sanders in turn backed Democrats against third-party alternatives. In the election to fill his House seat, he and his supporters helped dissuade Progressive Party hopeful David Zuckerman from running, and went on to support the Democrat Peter Welch, who eventually won.

Sanders’ endorsement of the Democrats no doubt helped him build his war chest of about $5 million, over 80 percent of which came from out of state.

To put an exclamation point on his all-but-declared membership in the Democratic Party, Sanders celebrated his election victory, contrary to his tradition of hosting a separate party, with the Democrats. He has promised to caucus with the Democrats in the Senate, and the media thus takes him for granted as part of the new majority in the Senate.

For veteran Sanders watchers, this capitulation to the corporate Democrats and their apparatchiks is nothing new. He has made it one of his missions to agitate against voting for Ralph Nader, the Green Party and, in some cases, Vermont’s Progressive Party.

During the 2004 election, Sanders announced on Vermont Public Television, “Not only am I going to vote for John Kerry, I am going to run around this country and do everything I can to dissuade people from voting for Ralph Nader… I am going to do everything I can, while I have differences with John Kerry, to make sure that he is elected.”

The political consequence of his capitulation to the Democrats has been a long list of unnecessary compromises and outright betrayals that will only mount in the Senate.



* * *

DESPITE HIS own claims, Sanders has not been an antiwar leader. Ever since he won election to the House, he has taken either equivocal positions on U.S. wars or outright supported them.

His hawkish positions–especially his decision to support Bill Clinton’s 1999 Kosovo War–drove one of his key advisers, Jeremy Brecher, to resign from his staff. Brecher wrote in his resignation letter, “Is there a moral limit to the military violence you are willing to participate in or support?”

So outraged were peace activists over Sanders’ support of the Kosovo War that they occupied his office in 1999. Sanders had them arrested.

Under the Bush regime, Sanders’ militarism has only grown worse. While he called for alternative approaches to the war on Afghanistan, he failed to join the sole Democrat, Barbara Lee, to vote against Congress’ resolution that gave George Bush a blank check to launch war on any country he deemed connected to the September 11 attacks.

Ever since, he has voted for appropriations bills to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, despite their horrific toll on the occupied peoples as well as U.S. soldiers.

Sanders has been critical of the war on Iraq, but he has supported pro-war measures–such as a March 21, 2003, resolution stating, “Congress expresses the unequivocal support and appreciation of the nation to the President as Commander-in-Chief for his firm leadership and decisive action in the conduct of military operations in Iraq as part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism.”

He also opposes immediate withdrawal from Iraq, despite the fact that a majority of residents in his home city of Burlington voted for such a position in a town meeting resolution in February 2005.

The day after his election to the Senate, Sanders declared, “I don’t think you can do a quote-unquote immediate withdrawal. I think the policy has got to be we will withdraw our troops as soon as possible, and by that, I mean that I believe we can have our troops out in the next year, and maybe a significant number of them before that. I don’t think you can snap your fingers and just bring all the troops home tomorrow. I just don’t think that’s practical.”

Even more shocking, Sanders scuttled any action on a wave of Bush impeachment resolutions that swept Vermont towns in 2006. Like House Majority Leader-to-be Nancy Pelosi, who has promised not to impeach Bush, Sanders argued that impeachment was impractical, and that activists should put energy into electing Democrats.

Outraged, Dan Dewalt, the organizer of the impeachment resolution campaign in Vermont, said, “We think we have quality politicians in Vermont. We’re wrong. We have politics as usual in Vermont. Our so-called independent congressman, Bernie Sanders, can’t get far enough away from impeachment.”

This summer, Sanders voted for House Resolution 921, which gave full support to Israel’s murderous war on Lebanon. He also voted for HR 4681 that imposed sanctions on the Palestinian Authority with the aim of removing the democratically elected Hamas government.

In response, longtime War Resisters League leader, David McReynolds sent a public letter to Sanders, stating, “Because of your vote of support for the Israeli actions, I would hope any friends and contacts of mine would not send you funds, nor give you their votes.”

Indeed, Sanders has consistently defended Israel through it worst crimes against Palestinians and Arabs. Unsurprisingly, some Sanders staffers have also worked with the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC)–including David Sirota, now a Democratic Party strategist, and Sanders’ former communications director Joel Barkin.

Finally, in perhaps his worst betrayal yet, Sanders joined a host of liberal Democrats including Barbara Lee and John Conyers to vote for HR 282, the Iran Freedom Support Act–which bears a striking resemblance to the resolutions that set up the framework for the war on Iraq.

The act stipulates that the U.S. should impose sanctions on Iran to prevent it from developing weapons of mass destruction and distributing them to aid international terrorism. It also calls for the U.S. to support democratic change in the country, thereby establishing all necessary pretexts for a war on Iran. Democrat Dennis Kucinich voted against the act and denounced it as a “stepping stone to war.”



* * *

SANDERS–like many liberal Democrats–rightly calls attention to the plight of workers and the poor in Vermont and across the U.S., demanding reforms to address low wages, lack of health care and the absence of a social safety net.

He argues that much of this suffering is the result of U.S. free trade policy. But instead of agitating for internationalist solutions like cross-border unionization, as proposed by the global justice movement against neoliberalism, Sanders argues for protectionist policies and economic nationalism.

Sanders’ support for the Democrats confounds his position. After all, it was the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton that passed NAFTA, established the WTO, cut the big deals with China and imposed some of the worst IMF structural adjustments programs on developing countries.

Ominously, Sanders’ economic nationalism has led him to look for allies among Republican right-wingers like Lou Dobbs and Patrick Buchanan, who see China as a rival to U.S. power and are looking for political justification for a new Cold War.

In denouncing Permanent Normalized Trade Relations (PNTR) with China, Sanders wrote, “As the greatest democracy on Earth, we must ask why American companies are turning communist China into the new superpower of the 21st century? While Microsoft is ‘saving a dollar,’ it is helping undermine our economic and military security by gutting our manufacturing and technological infrastructure, and moving it lock, stock, and barrel to one of our major international rivals.”

Sanders defends his alliances with protectionist Republicans. He told the Nation magazine, “In the sense that we are trying to develop left-right coalitions, we also trying to redefine American politics.” Thus, he appeared on a China-bashing panel organized by the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa along with Patrick Buchanan in 2000 during a union-sponsored demonstration against PNTR for China.

One of his former staffers, David Sirota, recently wrote a glowing review of Lou Dobbs’ book, War on the Middle Class. Dobbs mixes populist rhetoric about deteriorating living standards for workers with some of the worst anti-immigrant racism and China-bashing around. Yet Sirota writes, “It is undeniable that aside from Dobbs and a few politicians, America’s political debate is devoid of economic populists. War on the Middle Class confronts this problem head on–and thanks to Dobbs’ passion and charisma, it succeeds in sounding the alarm that cannot be ignored.”

In cooperating with right-wing populists, Sanders reinforces American nationalism and its attendant racism toward immigrants. Such ideas are an impediment to workers forging solidarity against both American empire and the corporations’ divide-and-conquer strategy to drive wages down inside the US and around the globe.

* * *

SANDERS CAN boast of a good voting record in defending the rights of the oppressed. He has consistently voted for the rights of women, gays and lesbians, and racial minorities.

However, he downplays all these questions in favor of a populist appeal on economic issues. As one Progressive Party activist told the Nation, “Sometimes, Bernie’s biggest critics are on the left. Some social liberals quietly grumble that Sanders maintains too rigid a focus on economic issues.”

On some pivotal issues, Sanders does worse than subordinate the demands of the oppressed–he joins in the attack.

For example, Sanders claims to oppose the death penalty, but he voted for Bill Clinton’s 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which broadened the scope of the federal death penalty and laid the foundation for Bush’s “war on terror” and attacks on civil liberties.

In 2004, Sanders was put to the test of whether he would stand up against state-sanctioned murder, and he failed. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft used Clinton’s act to override Vermont law and force a federal death penalty trial for Donald Fell, who was eventually convicted and sentenced to die. Throughout this trial, Sanders remained on the sidelines._Said Nancy Welch of Vermonters Against the Death Penalty,

“We repeatedly called on Congressman Sanders to join us in decrying the imposition of a death penalty trial on a state that had abolished capital punishment,” said Nancy Welch of Vermonters Against the Death Penalty. “We asked him to participate in a press conference with other political, religious, and labor leaders, but he declined. Even when we directly asked him, on a public radio call-in program, if he would join us in saying Vermont should stay death penalty-free, Bernie wouldn’t take a stand.”

Meanwhile, on the issue of immigration, Sanders has joined the Democratic Party in its attacks on immigrant rights. While he voted against the reactionary bill sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner and passed by the House last year, he has supported other anti-immigrant bills.

He has consistently voted to restrict visas for skilled workers–like the L-1 Nonimmigrant Reform Act, which he himself cosponsored, arguing that it was wrong for corporations to import workers when they are laying off U.S. employees. He voted for the Goodlatte Amendment to eliminate the visa lottery that distributes 55,000 visas a year to foreign workers on a random basis.

Sanders voted for the Border Tunnel Protection Act that criminalizes digging tunnels under the border, and anyone who uses them. And he voted for the Marshall Amendment to the 2007 Homeland Security bill that funds electronic verification of employment eligibility.

With Bush promising to work with the Democratic majority in Congress to pass anti-immigrant legislation, including more aggressive border enforcement as well as a new guest-worker program, Sanders will be pressed to line up with a lesser-evil attack on some of the most oppressed workers in the country.



* * *

LIKE AL Gore’s attempt to rehabilitate himself through environmentalism, Sanders has begun to trumpet green issues, especially global warming. But while his voting record is good on this issue, Sanders has long antagonized environmental activists.

After getting elected mayor with the slogan “Burlington’s Not for Sale,” Sanders attempted to cut a deal with developers for hotel construction on the city’s waterfront and other projects in its wetlands. Activists built a campaign with the slogan “Burlington’s Still Not for Sale” that effectively halted the worst development plans.

Once in the House, Sanders made one of his worst environmental decisions. He worked with then-Texas Gov. George Bush to lead the charge for dumping nuclear waste from Vermont’s Vernon reactor in Sierra Blanca, an impoverished town inhabited mainly by Chicanos on the border with Mexico.

Together, they worked to pass the Maine-Vermont-Texas nuclear waste compact, and then took advantage of Bill Clinton’s decision to allow interstate transportation of low-level nuclear waste. Sierra Blanca, already a toxic waste dump, has thus been poisoned for generations.

However much Sanders may oppose the transportation and dumping of nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain for threatening the health of people in Las Vegas, he and the Toxic Texan, George Bush, established the precedent for this with their compact in the 1990s.

Sanders’ positions on energy are also tinged with nationalism. He repeatedly calls for US energy independence from the Middle East, even though most U.S. oil comes from other countries like Venezuela. Such demagogy plays into the widespread anti-Arab racism that surrounds oil politics.

Even with these faults, Sanders’ overall record looks good, but his support for the Democrats compromises even his best positions. As Jeffrey St. Clair has documented in Been Brown So Long It Looks Green To Me, the Democrats are every much a part of the destruction of the environment as the Republicans.

* * *

AS IT was with Howard Dean, it is a bit hard for Vermont leftists to believe the national reaction to Bernie Sanders.

As Vermont’s long-time political commentator Peter Freyne noted, “He will not leave a party behind him. So what will be his legacy? I don’t see a next Bernie on the horizon. I don’t see what comes after him. There’s a lot wrapped up in one man, and I don’t know where that gets you in the long run.”

But, in truth, Sanders is leaving a party behind–the Democratic Party.

Whatever his betrayals, Sanders can still give an excellent speech about the evils of corporate power and the barbarity of class inequality, but he does so as a fellow traveler of the corporate Democrats, who he supports even as they move further and further to the right.

Figures like Bernie Sanders could help workers form a party of their own to challenge the corporate duopoly, and build a more politically self-conscious working-class movement. Instead, like Jesse Jackson and other Democratic liberals, he is the progressive bait on this capitalist party’s hook–to tempt people who would otherwise want a genuine alternative into supporting a party opposed to their demands and aspirations.

Anything we want from Sanders or the Democrats we will have to fight for. And if we want a genuine socialist alternative, we should follow the lead of Sanders’ hero, Eugene Debs, who said, “The differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties involve no issue, no principle in which the working class have any interest.”

Instead of capitulating to the corporate parties, Debs spent his life building the Socialist Party and the struggles of the working class and the oppressed for our own self-emancipation.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/11/15/a-socialist-in-the-senate/

And what of the amendments supported by members of the Progressive Democratic Caucus, the supporters of single-payer (SP): John Conyers, Anthony Weiner, Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders and Jan Schakowsky?

At every critical moment these politicians with vertebrae composed of Jello compromised, backed down and conceded. Their allegiance to the Democratic Party and to President Obama trumped everything. There was nothing they were not willing to compromise away, no constituency that couldn’t be thrown under the bus for the sake of passing a bill; most appallingly women and abortion rights. With the exception of Dennis Kucinich and Eric Massa, they all voted for the house bill that contained the Stupak Amendment. At a small protest in front of Jan Schakowsky’s home after the vote, she came out and told protesters she voted in favor of the Stupak Amendment because she knew it would be taken out of the Senate bill. She promised us it would be. As Schak strolled back into her opulent residence she protested, “I didn’t throw women under the bus.”

The progressive Democrats sold out on single-payer early on when they backed the public option. This created enormous confusion: How could they advocate for both single-payer and the public option when the two are diametrically opposed? It didn’t take long before they all shilled almost exclusively for the public option. Schakowsky spoke at numerous HCAN meetings and rallies, never at single-payer events. Weiner was regularly interviewed by the press and focused the discussion on the public option, not single-payer.

John Conyers, the lead sponsor of the single-payer bill H.R. 676, immediately endorsed the principles of Health Care for America Now (HCAN), an organization opposed to single-payer. When confronted by single-payer supporters at a Health Care Now! national conference, Conyers couldn’t explain the contradiction. Joel Segal, one of his staffers, became enraged and attempted to shut down the discussion. Soon after, Mr. Conyers became irrelevant to the movement for single-payer and a colossal embarrassment to it. It’s tragic, really. Conyers completely abandoned his magnificent legislation, H.R. 676: the only legislation that could transform health care from a commodity to an entitlement for all and solve the crisis. Instead of fighting for that legislation, he was holding briefings with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee to discuss “Why the public option must be included to have true health reform.”

It was easy to champion single-payer when the Republicans were in power and health care reform wasn’t on the national agenda, but the minute it was, with the Democrats in control of Congress and the Whitehouse, Conyers collapsed like a house of cards. Every now and again he howled about something. In one article he declared, “I’m tired of saving Obama’s can” but it never occurred to the doddering old fool to stop.

The Weiner Amendment was sheer duplicity. Single-payer supporters worked overtime and got arrested holding Nancy Pelosi to her promise of a vote on the amendment. The vote was scheduled but the day before, Conyers and Kucinich called off support for the vote and Weiner withdrew the amendment. But that was okay with the always-waffling Weiner. He explained: “I have decided not to offer a single payer alternative to the health reform bill at this time. Given how fluid the negotiations are on the final push to get comprehensive health care reform that covers millions of Americans and contains costs through a public option, I became concerned that my amendment might undermine that important goal.” Now we know: The most important goal for Weiner was securing a political future in the Democratic Party.

Conyers and Kucinich tried to spin their skullduggery this way: “Many progressives in Congress, ourselves included, feel that calling for a vote tomorrow for single-payer would be tantamount to driving the movement over a cliff… We are now asking you to join us in suggesting to congressional leaders that this is not the right time to call the roll on a stand-alone single payer bill. That time will come.” Their assertions were preposterous and false – our movement wouldn’t go “over a cliff” if there was a vote, just the opposite. They claimed there wasn’t enough national support for SP, but that wasn’t true, either. Poll after poll show a majority support a government-run health care system, doctors do, too! Moreover, there would have been more grassroots activism and protest if Conyers and Kucinich had clearly, consistently and unapologetically led a political fight to get SP “on the table.” They did nothing to make H.R. 676 a central part of the health care debate and instead, spent their political capital working for the doomed public option. The time was never better to have a vote on single-payer – we had nothing to lose but the vote. For progressive Democrats there will never be a “right time” to have a vote on single-payer in the United States.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/12/23/beware-the-progressive-democrat/

The Obama administration promptly rushed to cover its left flank by announcing it’s planning to impose cuts in executive pay at seven companies with substantial bailout funds. The U.S. senate’s parlor populist, Bernie Sanders, dutifully proclaimed that the Obama administration deserve praise for “taking an important step forward in trying to control the obscene compensation packages of the top executives on Wall Street.”

Note the meek qualifier, “trying.” The truth of the matter is that the Obama team has managed the tricky shot of giving more bailout money to the banks than the cumulative dispensations of all previous U.S. governments, while at the same time NOT giving any significant debt relief to ruined homeowners, a huge slice of whom is poor, black and Hispanic. Obama is not seeking to reform the financial system, and it would be beyond miraculous if he did, since the contrivers of the present mess – Lawrence Summers, et al – were given a welcoming clap on the back by the new president, as he stepped into the White House and told them to get on with the job. This amazing bailout for the existing corrupt system – as if Lenin had used the October revolution to restore the Romanovs – has been engineered without significant opposition from organized labor or the left-ßliberal end of Obama’s own party.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/10/23/all-the-populism-money-can-buy/

Bernie Sanders poses as an opponent of Wall Street in New York speech
By Tom Hall
6 January 2016

Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders expanded on his campaign pledge to break up the major Wall Street financial institutions during his first year in office in a speech on financial regulation delivered Tuesday in New York City.

Sanders’ speech was meant for two audiences simultaneously. For those who are attracted to his campaign by its focus on social inequality, its purpose was to bolster the Vermont senator’s credentials as an opponent of the criminal activities of Wall Street. For the financial elite and the corporate-controlled Democratic Party, the speech was meant to be the equivalent of a reassuring wink that, notwithstanding his populist rhetoric, Sanders could be counted on to defend the interests of American capitalism.

Sanders delivered his remarks to an invitation-only crowd at Town Hall in midtown Manhattan, a few miles from Wall Street. The select character of the audience stood in marked contrast to earlier campaign appearances at which Sanders addressed tens of thousands of people lured by his stated opposition to the “billionaire class” and social inequality and his talk of a “political revolution.”

In attendance at Monday’s speech, billed in advance as a major policy statement, were numerous Democratic Party establishment figures from the New York City area, including Ras J. Baraka, the mayor of nearby Newark, New Jersey. The event was emceed by New York State Senator James Sanders, who, during his time on New York’s City Council, supported the administration of the billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“To those on Wall Street who may be listening today, let me be very clear. Greed is not good,” Sanders admonished. The line, which was released in advance by the campaign, was repeated in friendly media headlines and served as the speech’s “catchphrase.”

The candidate went on to say that, within 100 days of taking office, he would direct his treasury secretary to draw up a list of major banks, shadow banks and insurance firms “who pose a catastrophic risk to the United States economy without a taxpayer bailout.” These corporations would be broken up by the end of the year.

Sanders listed a number of other regulatory proposals, including reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act, a law separating investment and commercial banking that was repealed during the Clinton administration. He pledged to transform the major credit rating agencies into nonprofit institutions, cap credit card interest rates at 15 percent, and impose a tax on Wall Street speculation to fund tuition for public colleges and universities.

As always, Sanders failed to explain how the party he seeks to head, one of the two main parties of American big business, could or would carry out any significant reform of Wall Street. He did not address the critical role the Democratic Party has played, including under the Obama administration, in the explosive growth of social inequality and the deregulation of corporate America in general and Wall Street in particular.

President Obama, under whose administration the richest 1 percent has captured 95 percent of all income gains, was mentioned only once, when Sanders singled him out for praise for “improving this economy.” The presidential aspirant offered only muted criticisms of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who has extensive ties to the financial industry, arguing that her proposals for Wall Street “reform” did not go far enough.

Sanders, who calls himself a “democratic socialist,” has made clear in the course of his campaign that he opposes any measures that would threaten the fundamental economic interests of the financial elite and the capitalist class as a whole. He does not challenge private ownership of the banks and corporations or the profit system itself, and does not advocate public ownership of the banks he claims to oppose. This makes his talk of taming Wall Street cynical bluster, as he is well aware that the massive wealth of those who control the levers of finance is the basis for their domination of the political system and the state.

In the course of his hour-long speech, Sanders made one passing and obscure remark that was meant to reassure those in the know that they had nothing to fear from his populist demagogy. He said that his proposal to break up the banks would be “authorized under Section 121 of the Dodd-Frank Act.”

This caveat confirms that his proposal is entirely unserious. The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly known as the Dodd-Frank Act, was enacted after the 2008 financial crisis in order to shield the major financial institutions, whose quasi-criminal speculative activity triggered the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, from any significant liability, while providing a public pretense of banking “reform.”

Under section 121 of the law, it is the Federal Reserve’s unelected Board of Governors, dominated by bankers, and not the president, that has the authority to break up companies worth more than $50 billion, and only if lesser measures are determined to be “inadequate to mitigate a threat to the financial stability of the United States.”

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the activities of the Federal Reserve have been aimed at defending and increasing the wealth of the super-rich and expanding the size and power of the biggest Wall Street banks. Its policies, including the printing of hundreds of billions of dollars under its “quantitative easing” program and keeping benchmark interest rates near zero, have directly contributed to record profits for American corporations. Sanders himself admitted as much when he accused the Federal Reserve of being “hijacked by the very bankers it is in charge of regulating” in the course of his speech.

(Sanders’ feigned indignation notwithstanding, the use of the word “hijacked” to describe the domination of the US central bank by bankers is an example of the puerile phrase-mongering that is typically used to dress up a conventional bourgeois politician as a “radical.”)

In any event, a Sanders administration, under the rules of appointment to the Fed, would have little influence on the composition of the current board. As one news outlet noted, the 14-year terms for all of the current members of the board, all Obama appointees, do not expire until 2020 or later, and the next president will not be able to replace Janet Yellen as chairwoman of the Fed until 2018, a full year after Sanders’ proposal would supposedly be implemented.

Even taken at face value, Sanders’ proposals are modest by historical standards. The break-up of major trusts was actually carried out at the turn of the 20th century by President Theodore Roosevelt, a pro-business politician and early supporter of American imperialism.

Last week, Sanders released a statement angrily denouncing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for claiming that Sanders supports increasing tax rates for the wealthy to 90 percent. Instead, Sanders reiterated, he merely advocates that the super-rich “pay their fair share” of taxes. During the Republican administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s, the top income tax bracket was 92 percent.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/01/06/sand-j06.html

Comments:

erry Lawrence • 6 days ago
The interesting thing about Sanders campaign is not what he would actually do if elected, which as the article states, is nothing, but rather that his fake "socialism" and anti-oligarchy rhetoric has generated so much support, among other things raising around $66 million in small contributions. That indicates a re-awakening interest in socialism in the US probably not seen since the 1930's "New Deal" days.

Whatever Sanders does or does not intend to do if elected, his campaign is rekindling a discussion about the nature of capitalism that is long overdue in the US. His rhetoric is well to the left of Obombers "Yes we can" meaningless platitudes, and reflects a deep seated dissatisfaction and desire for substantial change among the general population that could serve as the basis for building a real socialist party in the US for the first time since Eugene Debs and the IWW leaders were imprisoned a century ago during WW I.

Robert G. Valiant Terry Lawrence • 6 days ago
Sanders is the most post-modern of all the candidates. Rather than "rekindling a discussion about the nature of capitalism" as you suggest, I think he is merely capitalizing on the nascent discussion that already existed - bringing it into the fold of the neo-liberal establishment where it can be contained and neutralized.


Soruche Saajedi Terry Lawrence • 4 days ago
I agree with Robert, the potential for a third party and the discussion on the nature of capitalism already existed independent of Sanders. He will pull voters back into the Democrats that would otherwise have not voted or would have voted for Greens or some other candidate that has no chance of winning. The more important and potentially damaging issues is this, how many left-leaning, young voters will be demoralised and discredited if Bernie does an Obama and fails to deliver on his promises? With Bernie appropriating the term "Socialist" as part of his populism, who will dare utter that word after he inevitably fails? You can't do half measures if you are serious about social justice and equality, you cannot be everything to all people. Populism with no substance is going to kill off a small but growing leftist movement before it gets close to achieving its potential.

No, I can keep commenting and exposing the truth about Bernie Sanders' phony "revolution", thanks.

You've helped me immensely, by continuing to point out his cowardice in refusing to point out the obvious: That Obama knowingly nominates Wall Street protectors, and that
Sanders goes along for "political considerations" -- meaning his own power, instead of getting rid of these Wall Street protecting goons by at least asking for them to be sacked if not never confirmed in the first place.

Which is what anyone in a position with influence who wanted to start a real revolution would do, regardless of political considerations.


Me and the people who recommend my posts. You actually haven't alluded to any facts at all, except for the irrelevant to the argument that the Senate does things by unanimous consent sometimes, and that Sherrod Brown is a senator.

Other than that, I can't see any facts you've used in this exchange. Oh, there is the irrelevancy you posted about Sanders calling for the resignation of someone we weren't even talking about and that had nothing to do with the Wall Street case. Sorry, there is that.

Democrats talk about Republicans' collective responsibility all the time. You yourself alluded to collective responsibility for them earlier in this thread by referring to them collectively. To quote you:

You ostensibly--by which I mean falsely and duplicitously--want Sanders to join the Republicans every time they attack an Obama appointee.

Quit evading the question. Do you believe that collective responsibility ever applies for Democrats in Congress?

And as far as calling people fascists -- you're the one who has been dancing around the issue with why these plutocrats have been so assiduously protected by Democrats, including Sanders, who is a Democrat. It's fair to suppose you don't mind Wall Street fascists being protected, as long as Sanders does it.

My point here is a simple one. You took my statement that all of the Democrats have been involved in treating Obama's nasty Wall Street appointees with extreme deference as a "lie" that means that Sanders is innocent of the charge. That's a "Mommy, Billy does it too!" point, but no matter. He's not innocent of the charge just because ALL THE DEMOCRATS have been involved in treating Obama's Wall Street appointees with extraordinary deference.

They're collectively responsible for this, just as Republicans are collectively responsible (so Democrats point out correctly all the time) for obstruction in Congress.
That doesn't excuse Bernie. It just makes him a person who goes along to get along instead of his duty.

Shrug. You won't answer the direct question put to you multiple times, you just change the subject. It's a fair assumption that you don't hold the Democratic Party responsible for anything otherwise you'd have no problem answering the question. It's whining to complain about a straw man when you've had multiple opportunities to answer a straightforward question and won't.

So, why whine? Why not just answer the question? Do you believe that collective responsibility belongs only to the Republicans, or do you believe that collective responsibility also belongs to the Democrats?

If you refuse to answer, it's fair game to consider that you think that only the other party has collective responsibility.

Ok, so you don't believe the Democrats have any collective responsibility for anything. You're just fine with Wall Street crooks and their defenders running amok in the government, because no one is responsible for nuthin'.

You don't get change that way. This is why your "change of a generation" and "revolution" is a pile of garbage that is going nowhere. Because you don't believe in holding your elected officials responsible, only in worshipping and praising them and defending them as if they were religious figures.

What 'wingers do is of no account to this question. These people are documented crooks who have committed crimes or extreme ethical lapses in office.

Do you ever intend to answer the question -- are the Democrats collectively, including Bernie, responsible for this or no?

If he's making these confirmation votes in deference to a Democrat, and not calling for their resignation, what's the difference?

Independent in name only. And now, he's a Democrat. He's a registered Democrat. Therefore, a Democrat.

Instead of changing the subject, why don't you answer my question? Do you admit that you assign no collective responsibility to the Democratic Party, with which Bernie has caucused before he was a Democrat and now as an actual Democrat, for anything and that you have a double standard such as collectively -- along with Bernie -- excusing extreme deference to the President in the name of pro-Wall Street shills?


It was well known and advertised after the acts themselves. Did Sanders ever call for his resignation? Does Sanders take no responsibility whatsoever for his confirmation votes when the official eventually goes horribly awry?


Oh, "nastiness". I get it. No, I'm pointing out that you guys are engaging in a snow job on Sanders' record. Sanders wants to murder people -- he said so out of his own mouth. For the record, I attack Hillary with equal vigor, so you're in essence lying by omission.

The blood is really on your hands, because you won't call on Sanders to reverse himself on his drone strike policy. But you actually don't care about that, you only really care about getting Sanders elected, despite the fact that it IS the "same old same old".


Oh please. Do your research before you spout off again. You don't know what you are talking about. Lynch did everything she did to excuse HSBC before she was confirmed. She acted like a criminal accomplice and Sanders had every opportunity to know it. You could have read the one article link I gave you, but you didn't.

If you're going to proselytize, DO YOUR OWN GOD-D*MN RESEARCH FIRST. I'm sick to death of Sanders supporters not doing their research quibbling with clear chains of events and playing dumb!

Your "reasons" are NO reasons for not prosecuting individual wall street crooks. -- which is, by the way a very bad excuse that deserves to be mocked as well, but I don't have the time right now to dismantle it.

Yet Holder and Lynch gave these individuals a pass. EVERY SINGLE TIME. Even when those self same banksters were laundering drug money for TERRORISTS and Lynch KNEW they were engaging in ongoing criminal acts WHILE SHE WAS INVESTIGATING THEM.

Breuer was so discredited he had to resign the next day after the FrontLine interview.

These were people that could have been individually prosecuted and sent to prison.

Their excuse was, "it's too hard". Not because it would destabilize the banks. That was the excuse for not criminally prosecuting the institutions.

These are people who were first at Wall Street crook firms like Covington and Burling, who were deeply involved in protection of Wall Street crooks from the consequences of their crookedness. I don't blame them for that, they are slimy lawyers, and that's what these slimy lawyers do. It's their job. BUT NOT AT JUSTICE.

There is a little thing called PROSECUTORIAL DISCRETION. In every way aside from this defense, they acted as clear criminal accomplices.

This is the one thing that keeps Lynch and Holder from being investigated and prosecuted THEMSELVES. They were clearly in with the crooks.

One time Holder had Jaime Dimon to visit him in his personal offices while he was supposedly under investigation, an extreme ethical lapse that should have had him resigning.


No, it's not pointless. Sanders doesn't believe he needs credibility with the American people, only with his party, which is the Democratic Party. He thinks we'll take these garbage votes and just suck on them. Well, some will. Some will not. I will not.

This goes directly to credibility, sir. And this speaks to the point of why so called progressives are so unbelievable and garner so little political support. Because they never choose to do the right thing, only the so-called pragmatic thing in any given moment, without even thinking about longer term pragmatism.

Sometimes you have to do things just because it's the only right thing to do. Such as voting against criminals and their accomplices.

Sometimes you have to fight, and when so called progressives WILL NOT, they deserve every ounce of contempt and election losing they receive. There is a point. The point is, fight or lose.

It would have cost Sanders absolutely nothing to vote against these jackals. But he voted for them because of what -- currying favor with extreme right Democrats? Why didn't he choose to curry favor with US? And what should we take away from this. It seems to me that Sanders has every bit of contempt for liberals that Obama has, plus some.

And why shouldn't we believe that he'll curry favor with far right Democrats again whenever it suits him? Ignoring the American people and raining contempt on them just like Obama?


If Sanders believes that people needed to be arrested, then voting to confirm those people is inconsistent with that.

Yes, he should have voted against them - if that is "with the Republicans" in your non-nuanced answer, the so be it. They were not qualified to be in the DOJ, but Sanders voted for them, anyway.

I don't believe you. I don't believe him. Because he puts party above holding wall street crooks to account.

You just excused him for doing exactly that. Voting for these people despite knowing how toxic they were and are to justice.

They don't just need to be broken up, their officers and board members needed to have been arrested.

But Sanders along with his fellow Democrats helped make sure that wouldn't happen, with his confirmation votes for Holder and Lynch and Lanny Breuer, fine appraisers all.

And your arguments are similarly barren as disgraced Lanny Breuer. Arresting the lawbreakers would have had no effect whatsoever on those companies. But those people would be in prison, and an important bulwark against breaking the law - which is fear of prison - would have been restored.


Yet, your Sanders hero wishes to continue drone strikes.

Why should there be an uprising to back a total hypocrite?

Why? He doesn't have the personal courage to say that President Obama is committing war crimes with his drone strikes. Instead, he wishes to continue them.
Where is this courage? I have seen none of it.

There's still time. He can still call for the resignation of those people who have enabled Wall Street criminals -- the ones still in office, at least. That's what a "revolutionary" would do. If the Republicans do the same thing for their own partisan reasons, that is irrelevant.

Are the Democrats never collectively responsible for anything, including extremely deferential treatment of crooked Obama appointees? To you guys, the Republicans are collectively responsible for much. I'm just checking. I already know what the answer is.

So, your answer is no? None of these individuals I've named did he ever ask to resign? Or you just don't know of any?

And yes, I would. Voting to confirm these individuals despite knowing what they're up to is clear malfeasance in office. In a time of massive criminality in office, deference to the President over his ethically bereft nominees should go the way of the dodo.

Sherrod Brown is also a senator.

Your point being? He was also worthy of much criticism for not voting people out of committee, yet voting to confirm them. As much as Sanders is. Do you have some kind of point you're trying to make there?

Apparently Sanders didn't get the Warren memo, but you bring up an interesting point.

A lot of times the excuse for Sanders nominating these individuals despite their -- mostly -- clear prior evidence of criminality or ethical failures -- is that he didn't know about these individuals in advance.

This is mostly bunk, but in some cases -- like the IRS case with Commissioner Koskinen conjuring up rules that flout the law and destroying records illegally -- it's certainly possible he didn't know anything about how Koskinen would behave in advance of getting into office.

Therefore, I am looking for evidence that he ever called on any of these individuals to resign, after evidence of their malfeasance and/or criminality in office became abundantly clear.

Do you have any evidence that Sanders ever called on any of these individuals I've named, that he voted to confirm, to resign once their behavior in office was a matter of public record?



Then there is his vote to confirm one John Kostinen for head of the IRS:

If Commissioner Koskinen sticks to the position of allowing a section 501(c)(4) group to spend up to 49 percent of its total expenditures on campaign-related activities (or even 40 percent as some expect), he will simply lock in the status quo and continue the flow of huge, secret contributions into our elections.
and subsequent failure to call for his ouster over lying to Congress, destroying records, and supporting Citizens United with these rulings.


And he allowed a vote of unanimous consent for the confirmation of Mary Jo White, another individual about which Sherrod Brown had misgivings (enough so that Brown voted not to send her out of the Senate banking committee for a full confirmation vote):

Just this week, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), a respected government watchdog group, sent a letter to President Obama requesting that he ask Mary Jo White to step down as Chair of the SEC, and that he designate a new head of the agency.1

This follows closely on the heels of a scathing 13-page letter Senator Elizabeth Warren sent directly to White. Sen. Warren called out the SEC chair for refusing to move forward crucial rules, letting corporate criminal activity go unpunished and even lying to the senator about the status of pending regulatory matters.2


He also voted to confirm Mary Schapiro at the SEC, another individual who failed to crack down on Wall Street, a nominee which Sherrod Brown knew would be a problematic one (so, Bernie should also have):

The SEC failed to bring many charges against Wall Street executives under her leadership, a move that has been widely criticized.

Bernie isn't going to break up the big banks or bring back Glass Steagall. That is for Congress to do. And they will not. That makes this entire article a lie.

There is one and only one thing Bernie Sanders could do within the office of the President of the United States.

And that is to appoint regulators and officials who will arrest those banking individuals who commit crimes.

His record so far has been extremely deferential to nominees who are soft on Wall Street - basically literally crooks themselves nominated by the Obama administration such as
Holder and Lynch, but for their shields of prosecutorial discretion.Why should we believe him here?
If Sanders wants credibility, he should be asked and answer who he would nominate to regulate Wall Street at the IRS, SEC and JD. Even that, might not be believable, but it would be something.

Links:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/20/loretta-lynch-confirmation-attorney-general-hsbc-scandal

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/10/loretta-lynch-fumbled-hsbc-jail-attorney-general

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/lanny-breuer-financial-fraud-has-not-gone-unpunished/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fred-wertheimer/irs-appears-headed-toward_b_8223144.html

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mary-jo-white-confirmed-sec-089753

http://act.credoaction.com/sign/Mary_Jo_White/

http://freebeacon.com/politics/schapiro-to-end-controversial-tenure-at-sec/

https://www.questia.com/newspaper/1P2-36299044/a-tour-to-win-congress-over-obama-s-s-e-c-nominee

As Mayor, Bernie Sanders Was More Pragmatist Than Socialist
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYENOV. 25, 2015

BURLINGTON, Vt. — When Bernie Sanders, a self-declared socialist, served as mayor here in the 1980s, he often complained that the United States had its priorities wrong, that it should be diverting money from the military to domestic needs like housing and health care.

So when dozens of antiwar activists blocked the entrance to the local General Electric plant because it was manufacturing Gatling guns to fight the socialists in Central America, the protesters expected the mayor’s full support.

Instead, he lined up with union officials and watched as the police made arrests, saying later that in blocking the plant, the activists were keeping workers from their jobs.

It was a classic example of how Mr. Sanders governed — as a pragmatist. He tended to talk globally but act locally, in this case choosing the real and immediate socialist principle of protecting workers over blocking the making of weapons to fight leftists abroad. Although he often shouted about foreign affairs, Mr. Sanders was consumed with running the city.

Photo

Mr. Sanders after he was elected mayor of Burlington. As mayor, he added taxes on hotels, restaurants and bars, but businesses did not flee the city. Credit Rob Swanson
Now 74 and the junior senator from Vermont, Mr. Sanders sometimes cites his eight years as mayor as he seeks the Democratic nomination for president. His mayoralty was his only experience as a chief executive, and it showed him to be a leader guided more by practicality than ideology.

The mayor who was quick to condemn millionaires also imposed fiscal discipline here in this laid-back blue-collar university town of 38,000 residents. He used a budget surplus not to experiment with a socialist concept like redistributing wealth but to fix the city’s deteriorating streets. And he oversaw the revitalization of downtown, often working with big business.

Back then, the Democrats were considered the old guard, his adversaries; in many cases, Mr. Sanders aligned himself with Republicans to get things done.

“Even though he talks revolution, he’s an incrementalist,” said Richard Sugarman, a longtime friend and a professor of religion at the University of Vermont. “He knows that things will only be changed little by little, one by one. That’s why he’s been effective.”

Critics on the right said their socialist mayor gave the city a bad image, wasting time on foreign affairs, including trips to Nicaragua and the Soviet Union. At the same time, critics on the left said he compromised too much with business interests and did not go far enough in pursuing socialist ideals. Over the span of his mayoralty, the number of families living in poverty grew — to 798 in 1990 from 563 in 1980, an increase of 42 percent.

Still, he was re-elected three times, each with an increasing share of the vote. Under his watch, Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, cropped up on lists of the best places to live. U.S. News and World Report named him one of the nation’s 20 top mayors in 1987, crediting him with preserving affordable housing, holding the line on property taxes and making a serious push for home rule in a state where cities had little autonomy.

“He learned how to use the levers of local government to improve people’s lives,” said Peter Dreier, a professor of politics and public policy at Occidental College who studied Burlington during Mr. Sanders’s mayoralty.

This was not necessarily what many had expected.

The arrival in the mayor’s office in 1981 of a self-described socialist, who hung a portrait of Eugene V. Debs on his wall, put Burlington on the political map — but as something of a joke. Garry Trudeau, creator of “Doonesbury,” called it “The People’s Republic of Burlington.” Two weeks after Mr. Sanders was elected, unseating the entrenched Democratic mayor by just 10 votes, François Mitterrand, a socialist, was elected president of France. This spawned the slogan “As Burlington goes, so goes France.”

But Mr. Sanders had more local concerns. Chief among them: the powerful board of aldermen, now called the City Council.

Of the 13 aldermen, 11 opposed him and blocked everything he tried to do. They were convinced that Mr. Sanders’s whisker-thin victory had been a fluke and were determined to stifle him. They fired his secretary. They refused to let him appoint his own cabinet. The city clerk opened his mail.

The voluble Mr. Sanders did not sit idly by. The Burlington Free Press described that first year as “one long shouting match.”

Photo
A supporter made a last-minute appeal for Mr. Sanders's re-election in Burlington in 1983. Credit Donna Light/Associated Press
He finally gained his footing in March 1982 when he mounted a campaign against some of the aldermen who faced re-election. He mobilized voters, a tactic that would become a Sanders hallmark. And on Election Day, most of the old guard Democrats were tossed out, bolstering his progressive coalition of “Sanderistas.”

“Bernie couldn’t manage his way out of a paper bag,” said Garrison Nelson, a political scientist at the University of Vermont. “But he brought on board an extremely talented group of people.”

Mr. Sanders, frugal by nature, set the tone. And together, they conducted the first audit of Burlington’s pension system in a quarter-century. They moved the city’s money into higher-yielding accounts. They raised fees for building permits and for utilities that dug up the city’s streets. And they ended the cronyism by which the city’s insurance contracts had been let, opening them to competitive bidding.

Taken together, these moves saved the city hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“Our slogan was we would ‘out-Republican the Republicans,’” said John Franco Jr., who was assistant city attorney in the Sanders administration. “The Republicans on the board liked that, and so on fiscal issues, they would side with us and we would have a governing coalition.”

For all of his socialist oratory — his first speech to the local chamber of commerce denounced Washington’s support for “fascist dictatorships” in Latin America — Mr. Sanders turned out to be good for business. Even though he imposed new taxes, on hotels, restaurants and bars, businesses did not flee.

Mr. Sanders also formed alliances of convenience, including one with Antonio Pomerleau, a wealthy developer whom Mr. Sanders had criticized during his first campaign for mayor. Mr. Pomerleau visited him after the election. “I said, ‘Congratulations, you’re the mayor, but it’s still my town,’” Mr. Pomerleau, now 98, recalled in an interview. He told him he was a Republican, but added, “If you come up with good ideas for Burlington, I’ll back you up.’”

Mr. Sanders came up with several that Mr. Pomerleau found agreeable, like raising the salaries of police officers. Mr. Sanders overlooked the mogul’s status as a 1 percenter, saying he was a self-made capitalist, not a corporate capitalist, and relied on his advice. They remain friends to this day.

If Mr. Sanders had a guiding political philosophy then, it might best be described as an amalgam of economic pragmatism, political savvy and a dash of his own brand of socialist theory. He defined that theory as “opening up the doors of government, paying a special attention to the needs of poor people and working people.”

This was the logic behind his support for the workers at the General Electric plant making Gatling guns, which opened him to criticism from activists on the left.

“It was a big disappointment that a fellow leftist did not support us,” said Jay Moore, a longtime Vermont political activist who was among those who had blocked the General Electric plant.

But in other instances he was a hard bargainer, and he became a practiced horse trader.

Photo

Waterfront Park in Burlington. Credit Jacob Hannah for The New York Times
When he wanted to create a Community and Economic Development Office — in part to seize power from the Planning Department, an obstructionist agency controlled by the old guard — he won Republican backing by promising to use it as an instrument of economic growth. But the office also allowed Mr. Sanders to pursue his own agenda of creating more affordable housing.

“The creation of CEDO was the beginning of creating a strong mayor,” said Michael Monte, who was assistant director and later director of the office. “It became the administration’s policy arm for a wide range of proposals.”

Among them was Mr. Sanders’s initiative to save the Northgate Apartments, a huge, run-down complex of 336 townhouse-style units near Lake Champlain. The Sanders administration created a nonprofit entity that bought the complex from its private owners, stopping the proposed conversion of Northgate into high-priced condos, which would have driven out its low-income tenants.

“The key was to make sure the city didn’t get gentrified,” said Mr. Nelson, the political scientist.

While many on the left applauded his efforts on housing, they were more critical of Mr. Sanders’s stance during the yearslong, convoluted battle over development of the city’s spectacular waterfront along Lake Champlain.

Mr. Sanders wanted to open up the lakefront, long marred by a decrepit rail yard, for public use. Eventually, that is what happened. But for a time he backed a private proposal to build a complex of high-end condos, hotel and commercial space that critics said would block views of the lake and limit public access.

More deal maker than ideologue, Mr. Sanders later worked for a compromise that scaled back the proposal and added public amenities like green space. He said the compromise, supported by most of the aldermen, was the best he could get and that the development would expand the city’s tax base, bringing millions of dollars into city coffers.

He then championed a $6 million bond issue to pay for the infrastructure and public amenities.

But environmentalists and others accused Mr. Sanders of selling out to business interests. The dispute led to a highly contentious campaign over the bond issue.

“We fought like hell,” recalled Sandy Baird, then part of the Green movement, now a professor at Burlington College. “We wanted that land open to the public.”

Mr. Sanders’s side lost. In December 1985, the bond issue garnered 54 percent of the vote but not the two-thirds majority necessary to pass; many working-class areas voted against it.

With the proposal dead, Mayor Sanders tacked again toward the pragmatic: The city and state revived a lawsuit to claim the waterfront for public use. After years of litigation, Vermont’s highest court ruled in their favor, clearing the way for the much-heralded public waterfront of today — free of large private high-end development along the shoreline.

Now, the waterfront is Burlington’s most valuable asset. Residents and tourists flock to its leafy open spaces, public docks, restaurants and bike path.

In May, it provided a picture-perfect backdrop for Mr. Sanders to announce that he was running for president.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/us/politics/as-mayor-bernie-sanders-was-more-pragmatic-than-socialist.html?_r=0

Bernie - Calling BS on BS


The season has come again for being told that I need to "get with it" and vote for someone. If I don’t vote I am letting the worse candidate win and condemning this country to more years of reactionary leadership. So it was that I heard this, long ago, in 2008. Hope and change were in the air – a new day was dawning after the years of George W. Bush. The bright light of Barack Obama was a spectre that had arrived to lead a charge for progressive values that would reverse the years of darkness of Bush. Well, I didn't vote. And the bright light of Obama was still elected. So went the idea that my absence in the polling booth would lead to the election of John McCain.
And yet the bright light of Obama turned into more than a bright light. Indeed, the brightness was a blinding clarification. A blinding clarification for the naïve that outsider status and contrived "progress" is mere words and show. But the change was real. He was not Clinton. Or Kerry. Or Edwards. Or...He was different. This time was different. As it was every time. And now again for the 2015 primaries and 2016 elections.

Sanders. Certainly the self-identified socialist is different. He ran as an independent and now is running against the Evil Queen Hillary in the Democratic primaries. He is not more of the same - but the change we need. He loves progressive values. He is the hope to return this country to the halcyon postwar days of the 1950s. Reclaim prosperity.

A post-war prosperity marked by racial discrimination and an economic bubble built off the military industrial complex of World War 2, the Cold War and markets newly opened to capitalism off the back of war. We had mouths to feed in demolished Europe and guns to sell to proxies in Africa and Korea and Vietnam and...

Yes, a postwar prosperity that was not built on the people, the workers, the minorities or anyone beyond capitalist elites. Marketed as a time of prosperity and Mom and apple pie by cutthroat salesman a la Don Draper of Mad Men fame, the prosperity reached the chosen "majority". A prosperity that claimed the lives of freedom across the world.
Before we write this off as bluster, Candidate Bernie pushes this idea of returning America to a better time before the "billionaire class" - mere millionaires are safe in his crusade - ruled society. Back to a time when the workers had power - nevermind the McCarthyism and later COINTELPRO tactics that attacked anything representing radical worker-driven change.
A campaign based on words and imagery of a better time that never was. The 50s when Blacks were made to sit in the back of a bus and could not drink at the same fountain as whites.

Of course Candidate Sanders will not speak of this and will speak with passion on the existential crisis of a middle class that is already extinct. How can one speak of an existential crisis of the woolly mammoth...or "the middle class"? A coded term of "ethnic white prosperity" is what hearkening back to a better time is. For that better time never existed for so many. But that is Bernie Sanders background - an ethnic white whose family "made it" and lived the dream..as others suffered. It is indifference and willful blindness - we made it so all can make it and if they don't they can be forgotten - that has blighted left progressive whites. Those who don't fit their demographic can be forgotten and the society can be forgotten that created their situation. And so it was that he can call for a return to a better time. A better time when he made it despite some tough times. It's tough but America lets prosperity happen - well, let it happen...in the better days...when others suffered.

Bernie Sanders is not a socialist in any form of the word. A liberal at best. A pro-war liberal who claims he is against the wars. A sham. But Bernie opposed the Iraq War his minions will say. In fact, he has done nothing to oppose war funding and has parroted a support the troops mantra that, while understandable within the duopolistic chokehold of US politics, simply unmasks him as a politician who is not outside the mold. I oppose the war but I support the troops and won't cut funding while they are in harms way. Simplistic and willfully duplicitous when it is the continuance of the funding - which buys the weapons and planes - that is exactly what places the troops in harms way and leads to their targeting. Bring them home now, end the war. But this is something that liberals such as Bernie Sanders cannot truly stomach. No funding is no war but he continues funding it which means there is no opposition to the war. Little surprise though that this faux-socialist hews to such a line. Like the Mensheviks of old, he speaks of progressive policies but is brazenly supporting reactionary war-nationalism policies. Like his fellow spineless liberals, he cannot oppose the machine that provides the muscle for a reactionary foreign policy - one based on death and destruction.


Death and destruction and reactionary rhetoric about foreign existential threats. If it sounds like the Israeli war state, perhaps it is because Candidate Bernie the Socialist is, again, like his fellow spineless liberals a product of a system that allies itself to settler-colonial Zionism and its current iteration of Netanyahu's massacres in Gaza...massacres that Bernie understood and refused to criticize. The socialist, the change agent. Dead Palestinian children...just expendable brown aid-suckers that are, at best, unfortunate breathing entities that happened to be in the way of Israeli Freedom Missiles. For Bernie, the children struck dead by a missile as they played soccer on a Gaza beach do not register.
Yet even if one can excuse his backing of Israel - after all, Bernie lived at a settler kibbutz before entering Vermont politics - one has to question what Socialist Bernie has thought when he fear-mongered on Russia and Iran and China and remained silent on Obama's threats to Latin America where socialism is developing and thriving and salivated at the opening of Cuba so Vermont businesses could profit. And when Bernie opposed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech before Congress it was because it was an affront to Dear Leader Obama and not a word was peeped regarding Netanyahu's crimes. For Bernie, dead brown people do not register.

But Bernie will create jobs and raise the minimum wage for the workers....with no plans. He has called for $5.5 billion to be spent on job creation for 1 million young adults. $5,500 per young adult. $5,500 will not suffice for a living wage so one can imagine this will be funneled into a fund to promote employment - a coded phrase that means government funds used to subsidize private corporations to hire young adults at low wages. Indeed, this is what the plan does (Link to Bill). The monies will be funneled into state-created programs that will give priority to jobs in emerging fields and public or non-profit sector jobs. Noticeably absent from the proposal which is being heavily touted in progressive circles - but perhaps not actually read - is an absence of stipulations as to what the guaranteed wages of these young unemployed disadvantaged youth - ages 16-24 - would be. The purpose of the act would be to provide "jobs" at unspecified wages either part-time or full-time. State committees that may include business representatives and labor officials will help state legislatures develop these programs. No stipulations are made for anything beyond the most basic legal rights of these youth and they will have records created by the business and submitted to the government that employs them at undetermined and unmandated wages as to their "work readiness". No mention is made as to what would happen to these records being kept on these youth workers. By no stretch of the imagination is this anything beyond a job creation/"work skills training" scheme that will serve the interests of whoever the state legislature decides will be awarded such grants. Is anyone under the impression that increasingly right-leaning state governments will create programs that are state-run and will require state expenditure outlays beyond the modest funds provided by the act? One sees the very simple option - have private corporations run these programs and allow them to receive federal funds through this act to employ cheap, exploitable and desperate unemployed youth who will be a guaranteed cheap labor force. Is this the progressive, "socialist" fix for youth unemployment?


But low wages will be no more under Bernie. The minimum wage will be raised. It will be a living wage. Right? For Bernie it will be $15 per hour "eventually". At a point when the cost of living will have already increased and the current $15 per hour "living wage" - which is a "dying wage" in many urban areas already - has already become dead in the rest of the country. For Bernie, capitalists and petty bourgeois owners take precedence over the existential need of the workers for an actual living wage today. Eventual is acceptable. For Bernie.


Is it this eventual increase in the minimum wage and a jobs policy dictated by ideas of mythical small business job creation - a traditionally Republican talking point - that will return this country to better days that never were? Is it this job policy that will end police brutality? Yes, Bernie peddles the idea that the solution to urban unrest is job creation. Capitalist-based job creation. Capitalist job creation is the solution to institutionalized capitalist racism. Ask Michael Brown if Darren Wilson asked him whether he had a job before he gunned him down. Black lives matter...but only at a three-fifths level to Bernie.


A small sample of Bernie. His website is a treasure trove of fear-mongering against foreign threats, halfway economic measures that would not even return the US to its glory days that never existed and platitudes about campaign reform that would return the US to the pre-Citizens United days when corporations and capitalist elites still ruled the elections and the process. Bernie has not even called for the mild suggestion of requiring presidential debates to include even one third party candidate. Perhaps since he refuses to run as an independent candidate if he loses the Democratic primary, a third party voice is meaningless in a national debate. And, wonder of wonders, if Socialist Bernie knocks off his liberal partner-in-deception, Hillary Clinton, he is not interested in facing a third party challenger who could easily expose the fact that Bernie is...well, that Bernie, is neither a socialist nor an independent notwithstanding his voting against Democrats 2% of the time during his service in Washington.
One could easily pile on Bernie Sanders and mention how he had protestors arrested at his office in Burlington when they opposed his support for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Or one could speak of his crude "women have rape fantasies" editorial from his college days. But that would be overkill beyond a passing mention.
Perhaps we cannot be too harsh about Bernie Sanders. People are products of their environment and Bernie Sanders was a kibbutz-living kid who became the mayor of a city of 37,000 people of which over 95% are white. Maybe one can't be too harsh on someone who counts as a close ally the richest man in Burlington, Vermont where he was mayor.
It's bigger than Bernie. The issue is the system itself. The issue is capitalism to which Bernie Sanders poses no threat but provides a soothing salve to the idea that capitalism is incompatible with justice. But again, illusion is rife in this country. Smoke and mirrors reign over objective reality. Bernie Sanders is not a socialist. Nor is he a rabble-rouser or a man of "the people".
I will not be threatened into voting against change. For Sanders does not provide change but rather token words with no concrete platform of change. Where Obama captured the imagination of minorities, Sanders captures white hipster-progressives and a coalition of aging intellectual types and battered yet hopeful white workers. Just as Obama turned his back on those who hoped, Sanders will do the same in the name of...pragmatism?
The future is not found in false "socialism" or muddled calls for a regression to a better past that did not exist. The future must be ours. The workers. The oppressed. Those who struggle. No more pandering. No more false hopes. No more concessions to capitalist domination of the economy and our minds.
We want real change.
We are the future.

Posted 6th June 2015 by KAHN1224

http://akahnnyc.blogspot.com/2015/06/bernie.html?m=1

"He will kill fewer people!"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CZMkW-JWwAEqghL.jpg

"He will kill fewer people!"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CZMkW-JWwAEqghL.jpg

Where'd you get this poster? I know about a dozen people I'd like to send this to.

A little birdie ....

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CZMkW-JWwAEqghL.jpg

The Limits of Acceptable Debate
by PAUL STREET


“Nothing Real Will Happen”

I happened, purely by accident (while looking for a basketball game), upon the fourth and final Democratic presidential debate in South Carolina last Sunday. I didn’t expect to stay with it, but I did. When I tuned in, Bernie Sanders was doing a decent job of helping the arch-neoliberal Hillary Clinton expose herself as a deeply deceptive Wall Street Democrat. That’s not a difficult task. Hillary’s bellowing endeavor to pose as a people’s progressive fighting to help working families over and against the wealthy few are transparently absurd. They are downright creepy in light of the millions in dollars in campaign contributions and speaking fees she has received from big corporations and financial firms – as Bernie did not shy away from pointing out.

Hillary’s furious defense of the tepid Dodd-Frank financial reform and the openly corporatist so-called Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) paled in populist potency before Sanders’ calls for the breaking up of “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions and for the introduction of single-payer, Medicare-for-All health insurance. Hillary’s claim to be “tougher” than Sanders on the nation’s reigning financial and insurance firms was shamelessly outrageous.

But that is all fairly standard for Mrs. Clinton. Nothing new there. What was novel in Hillary’s last debate stand against the social-democratic (not actually socialist) “Sanders surge” was the significant extent to which she wrapped her attacks on Sanders in the supposedly progressive flag of the neoliberal incumbent Barack Obama. She accused the Senator from Vermont of (basically) being mean to the president (who like Hillary has long enjoyed posturing as a “progressive who knows how to get things done”) for having the elementary decency to occasionally observe (such audacity!) that Obama has disappointed the Democratic Party’s base by recurrently accommodating the rich and powerful. The fact that His Hopeyness the Dollar O’bomber has done precisely that again and again (as predicted by a hardy cadre of non-bamboozled Leftists between 2004 and 2008) is beside the point. Hillary’s defense of Obama (who she and her husband privately loathe) was a tactical play to racial identity politics in South Carolina, home to the second Democratic primary, and other states with significant Black populations. The Clinton’s are relying heavily on Black votes to defeat Sanders.

It was neat of Martin (or is it Michael?) O’Malley to call Hillary out for using her association with Obama to “justify her cozy relationship with Wall Street” – and to remind viewers that she previously tried to use 9/11 for the same purpose.

The line of the night went to Sanders: “We have to deal with the fundamental issue of a handful of billionaires who control the economic and political life of this country. Nothing real will happen unless we have a political revolution when millions of Americans finally stand up” (APPLAUSE). That statement underestimates the problem of class inequality and corporate-financial dictatorship, which goes deeper and wider than “a handful of billionaires.” And we need a social revolution, not merely a political one. Still, I appreciate the Senator’s sincerely (I think) populist sentiment.

Perverted Priorities

Things became less enjoyable, however, when the focus shifted abroad and the debate turned into, well, a non-debate. While there were some interesting and substantive fireworks between the candidates on domestic policy (guns, banks, campaign finance, health insurance and the like), meaningful conflict and difference ground to a halt when the topic shifted to “national security,” “defense,” and foreign policy. And that, I am afraid, is largely because Bernie Sanders is (as numerous Left commentators have noted) pretty much fully on board with the American Empire Project.

Sanders foreshadowed the chilling imperial consensus between the Democratic candidates when he was asked (still during the domestic policy portion of the event) how he would pay for the social programs he advocates. While calling (reasonably) for progressive taxation, he said nothing about the need to take taxpayer dollars from the nation’s preposterously outsized “defense” (empire) budget, which:

* Accounts for half the world’s military expenditure

* Devours 54 percent of U.S. federal discretionary spending

* Maintains 1000 or so military bases across more than 100 “sovereign” nations

* Fuels mass violence that murders and maims millions

* Functions as a giant public subsidy to corporate America

* Advances a deadly, hyper-masculinized and sociopathic culture of bloodshed at home and abroad

Sanders did cite problems with U.S. “defense” (empire) budget “priorities” but only to say that Uncle Sam spends too much on obsolete Cold War weapons systems and not enough on methods and means of (unmentionable imperial) destruction appropriate for the so-called war on (of) terror. That was ironic in light of Sanders’ fervent support for the F-35 fighter jet (thanks to the jobs created by an F-35 base in Vermont, showing that Bernie’s much-lauded Keynesianism extends to the military variant). When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. denounced the nation’s “perverted priorities,” he called for a redistribution of public money from the war machine to programs of social uplift and healing, not for new directions of force projection within the Pentagon system.

Softball

Of course, much of the responsibility for the vapidity of the foreign policy component of the last Democratic “debate” lays also with the NBC News moderators. Functioning like caricatures of Noam Chomsky’s reflections on “the narrow parameters of acceptable debate” atop imperial culture, NBC’s functionaries served up one softball and nationalistic question after another. They floated up one softball question after another, nothing that might have compelled any of the candidates to confront the aggressive, provocative, blood-drenched, and imperialist record of the Obama administration. This bloodless and clueless framing left Sanders free to pin the rise of the Islamic State (IS) completely on George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, giving a free pass of Orwellian omission to the critical role that Obama and Hillary’s imperialism in Libya, Syria (above all), Iraq and across the Muslim world has played in the emergence of IS. And this time, Sanders didn’t even bother to remind voters and viewers that War Hark Hillary voted eagerly for Bush’s arch-criminal and mass-murderous occupation. Sanders did manage yet again to call for Saudi Arabia – the most reactionary government on Earth, currently engaged in a savage military assault on Yemen – to increase its military role in the Middle East. That’s a fascinating foreign policy position for a supposed “democratic socialist” to take.

Against the Charge of Perfectionism

This is typically the point at which a “progressive Democrat” or a “realistic” leftist accuses me of wanting a “perfect” presidential candidate. “Okay,” the line goes, “so Sanders is pretty progressive and decent on domestic policy but imperialist on foreign policy. Hey, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You can’t have everything, and remember – he’s running for president, to be the next commander in chief of the American Empire. Geez!”

There’s a three-fold response to this standard defense of Sanders against supposedly perfectionist Left criticism. First of all, as progressive as he may be, Sanders’ domestic social program is nowhere nearly as Left as what is required to put the nation and world on a decently just, equitable, and sustainable path. It leaves basic societal commanding heights decisions, ownership, investment, and managerial prerogatives in the hands of big business (chiefly financial) elites who are running the world into ever-accelerating social and ecological ruin. Only actual socialism (preferably democratic and necessarily eco-socialist) can liberate and indeed save us from those bourgeois masters. And more than merely not being a socialist (Sanders is a social democrat and hence a capitalist), a Sanders presidency (pretty hard to imagine under existing political circumstances, though not impossible) would very possibly damage to the socialism we need. As Gary Leech recently noted on Counterpunch:

“Sanders’ policy proposals represent a welcome and long overdue challenge to the right-wing neoliberal rhetoric and policy agenda that has dominated US politics since the Reagan years. But not only aren’t Sanders’ policies socialist, they actually pose a threat to socialism. If elected, Sanders’ policies would likely moderate the capitalist model both domestically and globally, but they would leave intact the fundamental global injustices inherent in the capitalist system. And when those capitalist policies implemented by a self-proclaimed socialist ultimately fail to address these global injustices in any meaningful way, it will be socialism that will be discredited” (emphasis added).

Indeed. Partial and merely political socialism-lite “revolutions” grease the path to counterrevolution.

Second, at the risk of re-stating the obvious, there’s the little and timeworn matter of “guns versus butter.” Sanders simply cannot pay for his progressive domestic policies without taking serious whacks at the Empire (“defense”) budget. He shows no signs of understanding this really critical point. None. His attachment to empire and the warfare state – intimately related to his attachment to capitalism (Leech reminds us that “from its birth capitalism has required an imperialist global structure”) – cancels out his dream of a Denmark-like welfare state in America.

Imagine a Functioning Democratic Society

Third, serious Left political action isn’t really about backing presidential candidates inside the two party system. Far more meaningful is the development of powerful rank and file social movements for both radical reform and revolutionary change beneath and beyond the quadrennial candidate-centered major party electoral extravaganzas that pass for “politics, the only politics that matters” in the U.S. If one wants to vote for a president, which takes about 10 minutes more or less once every for 4 years, why not dedicate that moment to punching a ballot hole for an actually Left candidate who wants (among other things) to fund a “Green New Deal” with money taken not only from plutocrats but also from the permanent and plutocracy-feeding/-protecting war machine that is the Pentagon system – someone like Jill Stein, who will be on the ballot in many states this November?

Anyway, the sooner the candidate madness fades the batter, as there are numerous grave issues and problems around which to organize serious Left movement action beneath and beyond quadrennial big money electoral spectacles. Here in Iowa (where I will not be surprised if Sanders wins the Caucus), we have some of the most polluted rivers and streams in the nation, the worst racial disparity in rates of incarceration, rampant wage theft, a new Drone War air base outside Des Moines, plans to build the eco-cidal Bakken Pipeline (to carry fracked oil and gas through 17 counties), and numerous other pressing issues that demand popular attention. For many months well in advance of the actual presidential election, thousands upon thousands of “progressive” Democrats have been obsessed with the seemingly endless election and candidate madness: Bernie, Bernie, Bernie, Bernie, Hillary, Hillary, Bernie, Bernie, Bernie, Hillary, Caucus, Caucus, Caucus, on and on and on and on and on and on and on some more. It almost seems to never stop. I am reminded of something Chomsky said to Occupy Boston in the fall of 2011:

“We’re coming up to the presidential election’s primary season. Suppose we had a functioning democratic society (laughter). Let’s just imagine that. What would a primary look like, say, in New Hampshire? … The people in a town would get together and discuss, talk about, and argue about what they want policy to be. Sort of like what’s happening here in the Occupy movement. They would formulate a conception of what the policy should be. Then if a candidate comes along and says, ‘I want to talk to you,’ the people in the town ought to say, ‘Well, you can come listen to us if you want…we’ll tell you what you want, and you can try to persuade us that you’ll do it; then, maybe we will vote for you”….

“What happens in our society? The candidate comes to town with his public relations agents and the rest of them. He gives some talks, and says, ‘Look how great I am. This is what I’m going to do for you.’ Anybody with a grey cell functioning doesn’t believe a word he or she says. And then maybe people for him, maybe they don’t. That’s very different from a democratic society.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/22/the-limits-of-acceptable-debate/

First, Sanders actually voted for both resolutions on Libya. Even Clinton called him out on this. He didn't even oppose them symbolically. *He voted for them.* He actively contributed to the destruction of one of the most advanced nations in Africa. I don't care if he cannot "directly order" anything. He could have made a case against the destruction of an entire country but he did not.

If Qaddafi was a thug and a dictator, and it's oh-so-obvious, why don't you fake leftists talk about your own politicians in these exact same terms? They are much bigger thugs, have caused much more harm and have murdered many more people than Qaddafi and Assad. I get really, really angry by this kind of stuff, because coming from a small country, I know how people can get smeared.

So your entire screed is just that - a screed. You fail to make a convincing case.

And of course I don't have the intention to convince you, not even close, because it's neither important nor possible. If you know about what happened in Libya and aren't sufficiently angry about it to consider all contributers war criminals unfit for political function, you are either lying to yourself or agree with the goals of imperialism, and in either case, you're just a well-oiled part of the power machine.


Well they sure as hell do not fit my "precious" expectations to be "perfect", but tell me, where were you where these oh-so-awesome democrats destroyed the imperfect Qaddafi government in Libya and turned it into the slightly more imperfect society it is now? Why didn't we see this kind of thinking, even though it was obvious that the militant fundamentalist Islamists your oh-so-realistic Democrats supported would be much worse than Qaddafi? Where is all this realism wrt Syria? Sanders was such a disgusting hypocrite in all these cases, btw, it's not even funny. He said he wanted Qaddafi gone because he's a murderous dictator ("a thug and a murderer" actually) - and did he even have a right for that, the pos? Sanders is the thug and the murderer, actually, along with everyone who even thought they had a right to force "regime change" anywhere in the world. He can speak out of both sides of his mouth and pretend to be liberal (while he lies about being a socialist - which will of course in the longer term can only discredit it even more) so idiot liberals like him but seriously wtf. If he at least called Obama and Bush and Clinton "murderous dictators" (all of them are worse than Qaddafi by orders of magnitude)...but he doesn't. Only Qaddafi and Assad. Because he has a right to that as a fcking American.

Sorry but I'm absolutely FURIOUS about this crap. You've ruined so many "imperfect" countries it's not even funny and now you are spouting BS about actual intelligent criticisms?

Of course at home, you don't want to let the "perfect be the enemy of the good", but you don't mind this professed quest for "perfection" when you have to ruin the most advanced societies in the Middle East.

Fcking disgusting hypocrite scum.

Fucking disgusting hypocrite scum!

I supplied the "u" and the exclamation point. Could not have said it better myself. Both Clintons are far, far worse than Qaddafi could have ever been. All Bushes and Obama are far, far worse than Qaddafi could ever have been. Qaddafi was actually working for the betterment of Africa, something no American can even comprehend, much less think about advancing. Obama, Hillary, Sanders, Bush, any and all Democrat and Republican politicians cannot even carry Qaddafi's shoes. It cannot even be debated.

“The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this: I don’t believe government should own the means of production... I believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America instead of shipping jobs and profits overseas.” --Bernie Sanders

How's supporting Obama working for you? Sanders supports Obama, the most right-wing president in US history.

When Sanders claims immigrants are taking American jobs, he is a bitter nationalist carrying water for the billionaires.

When Sanders supports US foreign policy in the Middle East and defends the bloated military budget, he is being militaristic.

When Sanders defends assassinations, and calls for the Saudi monarchy to invade more countries in the Middle East, he is being unequivocally right-wing.

As a final note, ISIS was armed and funded by the Obama administration, the Gulf Monarchies, and the Turkish government. Sanders call on the Gulf Monarchies to fight ISIS is a cynical lie used to defend the disastrous foreign policy pursued by Bush / Obama.

Growing support for Sanders highlights US political crisis
By Tom Eley
26 January 2016

New opinion polls show that Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who calls himself a democratic socialist, has moved ahead of Hillary Clinton in Iowa, the first primary state to vote in the 2016 Democratic presidential nominating process, and has widened his lead in the second, New Hampshire.

In Iowa, which holds its caucuses on February 1, a series of polls released over the past week have placed Sanders either in the lead or narrowly trailing Clinton, with his numbers improving and hers declining from previous surveys. In a New Hampshire poll by CBS News released Sunday, Sanders had opened a 19 percentage point lead among likely Democratic voters.

As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, Sanders is no socialist. As a nominal “independent,” he has worked closely with the Democratic Party, the oldest capitalist party in the United States, for his entire political career. His intervention into the presidential race, running as a Democrat while claiming to oppose social inequality and Wall Street, is calculated to channel growing social opposition and burgeoning anti-capitalist sentiment back behind the Democratic Party, in order to render the opposition politically harmless.
Sanders himself has sought to reassure the ruling elite with the argument that his campaign will revive flagging support for the Democratic Party. He has pledged to support the Democratic presidential candidate, whoever that turns out to be.

He opposes public ownership of the corporations and banks and the unification of workers across national boundaries. He lines up with the trade unions in opposing trade deals on the basis of economic nationalism and anti-Chinese chauvinism. The touchstone of his politics is his full support for the Obama administration’s imperialist wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. If elected, his promises of universal health care, a higher minimum wage and free college tuition would be quickly jettisoned in line with his support for American imperialism and its wars, which are inextricably bound up with the class war against the living standards and rights of workers and youth in the US.

Nonetheless, there is an objective significance to the growth of popular support for a candidate who inveighs against social inequality and calls himself a socialist in a country where anti-communism has for the better part of a century been a state religion in all but name. For decades, socialism has been politically quarantined in America. Socialist views have been excluded from political discourse in the corporate-controlled media. A battery of anti-democratic election laws make it virtually impossible for a socialist opponent of the two big business parties to obtain ballot status.

That under such conditions, Sanders has won a level of popular support that he, least of all, anticipated, reflects a broad shift to the left and political radicalization among working people and youth. Tens of millions in America are disgusted with the existing economic and political set-up and are looking for a radical alternative.

It is not an accident that the support for Sanders, which was not anticipated by the media and political establishment, coincides with the growth of working class militancy and protest, as seen in the opposition of autoworkers last year to the sellout contracts rammed through by the United Auto Workers union and the eruption this month of protests by residents of Flint, Michigan against lead poisoning of the water supply and teachers in Detroit against intolerable conditions in the schools.

Sanders’ continuing rise is all the more noteworthy given the near-blackout by the media of his campaign over the previous two months. After the Paris terror attacks of November 13 and the San Bernardino mass shooting on December 2, the US media was fixated on terrorism and national security, in addition to Donald Trump’s supposedly “anti-establishment” candidacy for the Republican nomination, to the virtual exclusion of any other concern. According to one survey of news programs aired on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and NBC from mid-November through mid-December, Trump was mentioned 690 times and Sanders only 20.

Media pundits wrote off the Sanders campaign on the grounds that the American people had lost interest in social inequality and the crimes of Wall Street and were focused only on the supposed threat of terrorist attack.

The growth of working class opposition that underlies the support for Sanders is the main factor in the crisis that has emerged, in different forms, in both parties in the current election campaign. It is a crisis that goes beyond one election—assuming the November election takes place—and threatens to tear apart the two-party system through which the American ruling class has monopolized political power for more than 150 years.

The lead editorial in the January 20 Wall Street Journal, “Taking Sanders Seriously,” voiced the alarm that is growing within the ruling class. The article exaggerates the scope of the measures being advanced by Sanders to rein in the banks and counter the growth of social inequality, but it makes clear than even Sanders’ modest reform proposals are anathema to the ruling elite.

“[I]t’s no longer impossible to imagine the 74-year-old socialist as the Democratic nominee,” the article warns. “Many Republicans claim to welcome a Sanders nomination on the assumption he’d be easy to beat. But don’t be so sure, at least not this year… the possibility of an extreme election outcome is no longer unthinkable.”

The editorial cites a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showing Sanders defeating Republican front-runner Donald Trump by 15 percentage points in a hypothetical match-up.

The Journal also expresses the concern that if Clinton’s campaign is scuttled—noting the possibility of an FBI indictment over her handling of official email while she was secretary of state—it “could be too late” for another Democrat to enter the race.

With the possibility of Sanders winning the Democratic nomination apparently growing, the media, beginning with a New York Times report on Saturday, has begun to fan speculation that former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg may run as a “third party” candidate. Bloomberg is reportedly conducting his own polling to determine the feasibility of a candidacy, which he would launch only in the event Sanders won the Democratic nomination, and is prepared to spend $1 billion of his own $37 billion dollar empire.

The Journal editorial raises the possibility of Bloomberg or a more conventional Republican entering the race as an independent, but warns that “Mr. Sanders might have an even better chance to win in a multicandidate race.” It raises as well the possibility of the Republican Party splitting in two.

The Clinton campaign is in deep crisis. The former First Lady, New York senator and secretary of state faces the prospect of losing both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Victories could propel Sanders to a strong showing in subsequent primaries in Nevada and South Carolina, and in 11 other states that hold primaries on “Super Tuesday,” March 2.

Until recently, Sanders did little to attack Clinton directly, but he has begun to point out that she received $600,000 in speaking fees from just one Wall Street financial house, Goldman Sachs, in one year. Clinton has responded by wrapping herself ever more thoroughly in the mantle of the Obama administration, touting its reactionary and discredited policies, including Obamacare.

In response to Sanders’ gains in Iowa, where the Clinton campaign had already spent millions of dollars and which had been considered a “lock,” her surrogates have in recent days both race-baited and red-baited Sanders.

In a column published in the Atlantic on January 19, author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates attacked Sanders for his opposition to reparations, a scheme that would pay some amount of money to all African-Americans for the historical crimes of slavery and segregation. Coates accused Sanders of failing to “fight against white supremacy,” and implied that he is indifferent to past injustices suffered by African-Americans. On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday morning, host Chuck Todd followed the lead, spending the better half of a six minute interview with Sanders implicitly suggesting that, due to his opposition to reparations, he is racist.

Elsewhere, Clinton ally David Brock attacked a new commercial for Sanders called “America,” which is set to the Simon and Garfunkel pop song of the same name, for not featuring enough blacks. “From this ad it seems black lives don't matter much to Bernie Sanders,” said Brock, who was formerly a right-wing journalist.

Other Clinton surrogates have in recent days invoked anti-communism. Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri said last week that Republicans “can’t wait to run an ad with a hammer and sickle” against Sanders in the general election campaign. Another Missouri Democrat, Governor Jay Nixon, who called out the National Guard to crush peaceful protests in Ferguson in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014, joined in. “Here in the heartland, we like our politicians in the mainstream, and he is not—he’s a socialist,” he said.

Sanders’ surge and Clinton’s present struggles, whatever the ultimate outcome, are symptomatic of a political system in a deep state of crisis. The American two-party set-up is breaking down under the weight of the crisis of capitalism and the initial stirrings of the working class.

The Sanders campaign is not a vehicle for the working class to carry out a struggle against endless war, austerity and attacks on democratic rights. It is a political diversion and trap. It is necessary for the deep-felt anger and opposition reflected in a distorted way in the Sanders campaign to find a genuinely progressive expression through the development of an independent political and revolutionary movement of the working class.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/01/26/dems-j26.html

Nonetheless, there is an objective significance to the growth of popular support for a candidate who inveighs against social inequality and calls himself a socialist in a country where anti-communism has for the better part of a century been a state religion in all but name. For decades, socialism has been politically quarantined in America. Socialist views have been excluded from political discourse in the corporate-controlled media. A battery of anti-democratic election laws make it virtually impossible for a socialist opponent of the two big business parties to obtain ballot status.

If we allow that this is true shouldn't we grant some portion of the Sander's following the same ideological latitude that we do the people of Donbas? Reluctantly I guess we should, but then what? Is there anything more here than a replay of OWS, with some of the same players?

If we allow that this is true shouldn't we grant some portion of the Sander's following the same ideological latitude that we do the people of Donbas? Reluctantly I guess we should, but then what? Is there anything more here than a replay of OWS, with some of the same players?

To the extent that we "know" or understand the political attitude of the peoples of Donbas? Well, being anti-Nazi is not the same as being socialist (I mean the real socialism, not the Bernie Brand). Fighting for your life against tanks and artillery is also different than wanting a bigger piece of the imperial pie.

Let's look at what we think we know about those feeling the Bern:

1) Bern supporters want something done about economic inequality in the US. What, exactly, do they want done? Well, here's where the murk comes in - and the feelings of OWS. The Berners do not want an end to private property (at least I haven't seen any call for that); they don't want any expropriation that I am aware of; what they seem to want is some kind of tax of some sort, on somebody, and use that money to do...something. Good!
2) Bern supporters want to reduce the military budget...somehow; but no loss of jobs; don't stop supporting "democracy" everywhere; and support all pour allies. Okay!
3) Bern supporters want good jobs at good pay. They want all of the progressive kinds of leave and stuff and upward mobility and no unions. Great!
4) Bern supporters want a return to the good old days, when America was great and white people were happy! Bern's the Man!

To the extent that we "know" or understand the political attitude of the peoples of Donbas? Well, being anti-Nazi is not the same as being socialist (I mean the real socialism, not the Bernie Brand). Fighting for your life against tanks and artillery is also different than wanting a bigger piece of the imperial pie.

Let's look at what we think we know about those feeling the Bern:

1) Bern supporters want something done about economic inequality in the US. What, exactly, do they want done? Well, here's where the murk comes in - and the feelings of OWS. The Berners do not want an end to private property (at least I haven't seen any call for that); they don't want any expropriation that I am aware of; what they seem to want is some kind of tax of some sort, on somebody, and use that money to do...something. Good!
2) Bern supporters want to reduce the military budget...somehow; but no loss of jobs; don't stop supporting "democracy" everywhere; and support all pour allies. Okay!
3) Bern supporters want good jobs at good pay. They want all of the progressive kinds of leave and stuff and upward mobility and no unions. Great!
4) Bern supporters want a return to the good old days, when America was great and white people were happy! Bern's the Man!

I think you're basically right, especially the 'activists', but I wonder if we're missing some. With Bernie running what is essentially a misinformation campaign (from our pov) how might we inform the young and clueless what socialism is really about, not capitalism lite? Bernie's a jerk and we shouldn't allow him to define socialism.

What I was referencing in Donbas has been the tendency for even the more 'political' of the leaders to indicate a preference for some sort of 'mixed' system, like social ownership of the primary means of production but allowing 'services' to be privately owned. ( I expect practice would dash that.)

I'm thinking how Anax handled this gaggle of disparate wanna-be rebels, nine years ago now. Self-styled anarchists, agrarians, clueless socialists and cranky old farts, whadda mess. Yet he was slow and cool, never backed off an inch but didn't call us out unless he had no choice or we were ready for it. It was quite a job, I still marvel at his patience. The thing is,ya had to want it, ya had to ask. And we had a place where that could be done without overwhelming distraction. Which I expect is why this place has kinda been 'cloistered', that we might sharpen our act. Dunno if that's working....I ramble.

WHAT SOCIALISM IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT, AND WHY BERNIE SANDERS IS NOT A SOCIALIST

worker | January 31, 2016 | 11:18 am | About the CPUSA, Analysis, Angela Davis, Bernie Sanders, class struggle, political struggle, socialism, USSR, WFTU



(A response to Sue Webb opinion in People’s World on January 4, 2016)

Dear Editor:

In Sue Webb’s opinion piece which appeared in the January 4, 2016 edition she implies that all that is needed in the USA is for us to change the word “capitalism” to “socialism” and everything will fall into place. Of course, this is pure fantasy, the words of a person who is satisfied with the capitalist system of greed and corporate control, what we used to refer to as the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. Ms. Webb is, indeed, bourgeois and her oversimplifications show that.

Her slanders of the USSR and socialism are particularly disturbing. She writes “[socialism] – has been tainted by much of what happened in the Soviet Union and some other countries. But there’s nothing in socialism that equates to dictatorship, political repression, bureaucracy, over-centralization and commandism, and so on. Those features of Soviet society arose out of particular circumstances and personalities. But they were not “socialist.”

Ms. Webb never objected the to the USSR when, in an act of great proletarian internationalism, the Soviet Union and the socialist community of nations led an international movement to save the life of Angela Y. Davis. Now that there is no more USSR thanks to the counter-revolutionary activities of Mikhail Gorbachev and those around him that promoted the concept of socialist “markets” and private enterprise, Ms. Webb all of a sudden finds fault with the socialism of the 20th Century, calling it dictatorial, politically repressive, bureaucratic, and over-centralized, with a command style structure. And what dare I ask, was the USSR when they supported the CPUSA and its fight against racism and its political anti-monopoly program? So soon she forgets! Ms. Webb never objected when the Soviet Union supported the Cuban economy and the development of Cuba. She never objected when the USSR supported the national liberation movements in Angola, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and the Congo. All during the existence of the Soviet Union, the world witnessed the greatest fighter for world peace and socialism. Real socialism. To deny that is the worst kind of right opportunism.

As her alternative to scientifically planned economic socialism, Ms. Webb describes how we in the USA have many publicly owned electric utilities. That’s nice. We also have private utilities Sempra Energy, Pacific Gas, and Electric (PG&E), and Edison International for example, that endanger our environment and public health, cause great disasters like the natural gas explosion in San Bruno, California, the natural gas leak in the Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the financial manipulation of energy prices by companies like Enron. What is the plan of the social-democrats to deal with these privately owned conglomerates in a socialist economy?

Ms. Webb says that Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist because he rejects the idea of a planned economy. Great! So we should continue living with the chaos we live in now, where material goods are produced not for the benefit of the people, but to continue the system of private profits and exploitation at any cost? She speaks like a typical believer in American exceptionalism. As long as we have markets for goods everything will be OK. She even says it would be OK to operate private businesses that continue to exploit workers, a kind of touchy, feeley, nice capitalism!

Gus Hall, the great American Communist leader, said many times that there is no “socialist model but that there are general concepts and economic laws of socialism that cannot be ignored. When they are cast aside as Sue Webb suggests we should, the result is counter-revolution and an increase in anti-worker activity. As long as there is a bourgeois class and that class holds the levers of power, it makes no difference who is President of the United States. We have two Americas. A capitalist America, and a working class America. The class war intensifies more every day. We will never have socialism unless and until the workers themselves take power and own the means of production and write their own ticket. They don’t need a Democratic Party messiah to do that. They need a real trade union federation like the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), another contribution to humanity from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.

So what is socialism? In any country, in any language, socialism is the intermediary step toward a communist society. Socialism is defined as follows: *“The social order which, through revolutionary action by the working class and its allies, replaces capitalism. It is “the first phase of Communist society, as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society” (Marx). It is the social order in which the exploitation of man by man has ended because the toiling masses own the means of production. In contrast with the higher phase of Communist society, where “each gives according to his need,” in Socialist society “each gives according to his ability, and receives according to the amount of work performed”.

Contrast this with Democratic Socialism, *which is the general term for reformist and opportunist parties in their “theory” and practice in the Labor Movement [in sharp contrast with class conscious, anti-imperialist trade unionism of the WFTU]. Social-Democracy’s history is marked by timidity, legalism, “respectability,” capitulation to the influence of the capitalists, and consistent betrayal, of the working class.

Time to ask yourselves, which side are you on?

http://houstoncommunistparty.com/what-socialism-is-and-what-it-is-not-and-why-bernie-sanders-is-not-a-socialist/

As long as there is a bourgeois class and that class holds the levers of power, it makes no difference who is President of the United States. We have two Americas. A capitalist America, and a working class America. The class war intensifies more every day. We will never have socialism unless and until the workers themselves take power and own the means of production and write their own ticket. They don’t need a Democratic Party messiah to do that. They need a real trade union federation like the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), another contribution to humanity from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.

Good stuff.


Time to ask yourselves, which side are you on?

Damned straight.

Bernie Sanders - Enjoy The Charade

I'll hand it to Bernie Sanders. Last June when I wrote a vitriolic warning regarding Bernie Sanders, I did not expect him to close the gap with his nemesis(?) Hillary in the manner that he is. Not that he was merely a flash in the pan who would fully sputter out, but perhaps a candidate who would hang around just enough to place second in a two-candidate race - apologies to Martin O'Malley and the gentleman from Rhode Island whose name nobody learned.

The #feeltheburn hashtag has mushroomed online and even the Clinton juggernaut is beginning to get jittery and rather tetchy regarding its current status within the primary race. Now it is more important than ever to revisit Bernie Sanders and ask who it is that is being held up as the savior of the country, the counterweight to the lite or not-so-lite fascism of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and the neoliberal corporate-marinated Clinton Dynasty.

For those who know my leanings, and for those who can assume what will follow based on this article’s title, feel free to stop reading as you choose. It’s unlikely I will change anyone to shift their vote from Sanders to sitting home and sipping tea while watching this quadrennial exercise in “civic responsibility” play out among those so inclined to register what team they support at the ballot station.

We need to start with the reality. Bernie Sanders is not independent. It has been many years since Bernie Sanders was actually an independent politician in more than name only. It is correct that he has caucused with the Democrats and had not officially joined the morass of the Democratic Party tent until his recent plunge into the primary. Like his claim to be a socialist (which, as a socialist, I can say he is not), the claim that is made of independence falls short as well. Bernie Sanders has long ago staked his claims with the Democratic Party and his entry into the primary race should not be seen as an outsider crashing the party but rather the natural progression from a radical outsider in Vermont’s left-populist Liberal Union Party to little more than a semi-affiliated appendage of the Democratic Party.

When Bernie Sanders transitioned will be a question for historians to determine but it happened and there is no turning back now.

For Sanders supporters, of which there are many at this point, he is, however, the outsider who will bring decency back to the Democrats – a bastion of opposition to Hillary Clinton. For how can we hope and change the world if we would support Hillary Clinton? According to Bernie Sanders back in September (at the least), he would not consider an independent run for the presidency and will support whoever the eventual Democratic nominee is – which would be himself, or, obviously, Hillary Clinton. (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bernie-sanders-on-why-he-wont-run-as-in-independent/).

This is a rather aborted “political revolution” that Sanders calls for if the very forces he delivers campaign jeremiads against – the “billionaire class” and “Wall Street” and “the banks” – are the very ones who have bought and paid for the candidate that Sanders will support in the event of his primary loss. What revolution is based on the foundation of “Defeat the enemy but support them when they defeat us”? Bernie Sanders fashionably uses the terms “revolution” and “socialist” before practically smashing any relevance these terms have ever held. For Sanders is not a socialist nor pushing “political revolution”. As BlackAgenda Report has continuously noted, he is merely “sheepdogging” left-progressive votes for the Democratic Party. He is not an independent nor beyond the accepted limits of a neoliberal Democratic Party, employing language that registers at “John Edwards” on the progressive-populism scale.

But, some will say, Bernie Sanders is pure and is independent. His ties to the Democratic Party is merely for the purpose of being able to push his populism on a larger scale. While I agree that this is not an utterly baseless claim, one must again be called to the fact that he has repeatedly voted exactly as Democrats have and will support Hillary, who he likes (http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/242321-sanders-i-like-hillary-clinton) in the event of an eventual primary loss. It is hard to claim with a straight face or a modicum of intellectual honesty, that Sanders is truly independent of the Democratic Party. For what independent politician declares his support for a Wall Street-funded oligarch which Bernie Sanders’ fans admit that she is.

Is there not a degree of feeling cheated on amongst Sanders’ fans when their candidate - who they campaign for online and spend evenings attending rallies for – will support the person that they themselves fulminate against in support of Sanders? Or perhaps is his eventual support for Hillary simply pragmatism? If mere pragmatism, then how is Sanders independent and something other than yet another politician willing to sell out their supporters? And if this is true…does this not blow apart the whole reason to vote for him in the first place? Or is a slightly less unprincipled politician sufficient for the electorate?

Enjoy the charade.
Posted 21 hours ago by KAHN1224

http://akahnnyc.blogspot.com/2016/01/bernie-sanders-enjoy-charade.html

the turnout for Sanders shouldn't be automatically interpreted as any informed rejection of capitalism nor should it be automatically interpreted to mean that his supporters have any understanding of what "revolution" requires of us. Sanders has very carefully chosen his soundbites. He knows there's no cost to denouncing the billionaires, or to speak superficially about "the middle class" (while maintaining silence about the working class). He's not exploding any myths (lies that have come from the top) about the American 20th century. He's not thrown any light on the ascendance of American empire. Many of his supporters are responding to his campaign's focus-group-tested rhetoric which resonates with their declining living and working conditions and pessimism about the future. It's very telling that Sanders is maintaining silence about the drive to war against China and Russia (and Iran). That he doesn't draw attention to the criminal aggression by the US toward Syria, and Libya, and other areas in the Greater Middle East and Africa, or bother to connect this violence abroad with repression and inequality here in the US, is revealing. (That his supporters don't notice this omission, don't understand the significance of this missing criticism, reflects the cynical nature of the Brand Sanders project: Sanders is there to contain rebellion, and to further pacify, neutralize, and depoliticize poor people so that the ruling class can better oppress and super-exploit the 99%.)

Ordinary civilians gain no power by supporting the fake-left Sanders. Collectively, the working class' total power is diminished because instead of becoming more radicalized and more knowledgeable about how capitalism-imperialism works (for the 1%, at the expense of the 99%), the working class gets contained, neutralized. Its anger gets redirected, channeled to the ruling-class-controlled realm of electoral politics, where the "options" are narrowed and dictated by TPTB. It's no accident that Sanders' campaign is conspicuously de-emphasizing political education. You don't see Sanders recommending any radical literature. He's not opening anyone's eyes to how the system works and for whom. Nor is his campaign pointing out where the ruling class is vulnerable. Why isn't he calling for mutiny in the military? Why isn't his campaign clamoring for strikes and boycotts? For protests and disruptive demonstrations at the places where Empire needs compliance, obedience and "order"?

"I think that President Obama, Vice President Biden, and the Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate have done a fantastic job. We are in much better shape than we were seven years ago, although my Republican colleagues seem to have forgotten where we were seven years ago. That’s the fact, but, we still have a very long way to go.

Do I think President Obama is a progressive? Yes, I do. I disagree with him on a number of issues including the trade agreement. But, yes, I think he has done an excellent job."

- Bernie Sanders

Do I think President Obama is a progressive? Yes, I do. I disagree with him on a number of issues including the trade agreement. But, yes, I think he has done an excellent job."

Poor Bernie, he's so confused. It might be his age or the fact that he has been a sell-out his whole life - whichever. I agree, Obama is a progressive and he has done "an excellent job" for his capitalist bosses. Bernie thinks he is saying one thing when, in fact, he is saying the opposite. But that is par for the course for sheepdog...a confused sheepdog.

You may have noticed Sanders frequently professing his admiration for Hillary.

You may have noticed Sanders going out of his way to stress his Dem Party bona fides- "I am a Democrat", Bernie Sanders.

You may have noticed Sanders completely dodged the direct question on occupation of Afghanistan- literally changed the subject in one sentence. He has supported this Imperialist occupation.

You may have noticed Sanders repeating the "war on terror" lie and emphasizing US assistance in the form of military weaponry and special forces for the US assisted coalition in the "fight against ISIS." Where have we heard that before?

You may have noticed Sanders praising Obama- calling him a "progressive"- and lauding what Obama has done in the last 7 years. Among other things Obama has handed out billions to the billionaire class Sanders rails against. Is Sanders ignorant of this fact or is he being dishonest?

You may have noticed Sanders was belligerent on Iran and repeated the same lies we have been hearing for over a decade.

These were just a few things you may have noticed if you were half awake.

Freedom Rider: The Problem of Bernie Sanders and the “Left”
by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

Bernie Sander’s near-tie with Hillary Clinton in Iowa is fanning the fantasies of those who never cease to disbelieve in transforming the Democratic Party “from below.” What is certain, is that corporate evil-doers will still rule both wings of the duopoly at the end of the quadrennial game. “Revolutionaries don’t exult over Bernie Sanders vis a vis Hillary Clinton because they know that great change comes from mass action and not the ballot box.”

“The endless fear mongering about right wingers makes any Democrat look good by comparison despite their dubious history.”

The love that many self-described leftists have for Bernie Sanders seemingly defies logic and political sense. Or perhaps it should be said that the idol worship fits a long standing pattern that ought to die once and for all. Simply put, many people who call themselves leftists are nothing of the sort. They are merely Democrats who live in hope that their party will be a tiny bit liberalish but not actually make meaningful change. Devoid of any true political leanings they really just long for someone to love. Every four years they follow a candidate down the road to hell while declaring they are on the way to heaven.

A quick perusal of the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders policy statements shows little difference between the two. Sanders benefits from once having called himself a socialist and from not being Hillary Clinton. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is disliked by millions of people. The antipathy becomes evident when she runs for president and is visible in all of her dissembling glory.

There has been no real debate about the Democratic Party and its role as a willing part of the political duopoly tag team. Any discussion of alternatives raises the specter of “spoilers” who are blamed for Al Gore’s loss to George W. Bush in 2000. The endless fear mongering about right wingers makes any Democrat look good by comparison despite their dubious history. Discussions about lesser evil only leads to Democrats who market themselves better than Republicans do. They still bail out the banksters, keep black people in jail, commit mass murder and worldwide chaos with drones or sanctions or willing puppet regimes.

“They are merely Democrats who live in hope that their party will be a tiny bit liberalish but not actually make meaningful change.”

Sanders benefits from a protection racket with Vermont’s Democratic Party. He first called himself a socialist, now an independent, when in fact he works with the Democrats to prevent primary challengers and the growth of any third party. If he were truly a leftist the Democrats would have targeted him for defeat long ago. Instead he gets the seal of approval and the campaign cash needed to keep his senate seat.

Sanders talks good game that belies his record. As a presidential candidate he suddenly sponsored legislation to raise the federal minimum wage incrementally to $15 per hour over a five-year period. Republican control of both houses of Congress means that his timid plan is dead upon arrival. More importantly, when Democrats controlled the legislative branch completely in 2009 and 2010 they made no effort to do what they now say they want so badly. Senator Sanders did not deviate from his party’s plan for inaction.

Who is really on the left? Not anyone who clings to the Democrats after being cast aside again and again while still suffering from unrequited love. Leftists are opposed to imperialism in all its forms. They don’t change their minds because a Democrat is occupying, sanctioning and assassinating around the world instead of a Republican.

Leftists demand that the federal government spend however much is necessary to restore the people of Flint, Michigan to health and safety. Leftists are anti-zionist and anti-imperialist. They oppose all neo-liberal “free trade” deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership. They want killer police to go to jail but want to free the masses from it. They want to end gentrification and displacement and they don’t like the scam of charter school privatization of public education.

“If Sanders were truly a leftist the Democrats would have targeted him for defeat long ago.”

The sad reality is that most Americans do not want to deviate from the establishment narrative of a wise and beneficent system and progressives are no different. They don’t want to struggle for true change and thus be left out of the establishment whose approval they covet. They want the gigs and the acceptance that come with declaring that the country is just fine but might be better off with a little tinkering here and there.

Leftists ought to be revolutionaries. Perhaps that word is a tall order that many will shrink from claiming but the truth shouldn’t be unspoken because useless people will be uncomfortable. A revolutionary isn’t fooled by the quadrennial circus of the Democrats and Republicans. Revolutionaries aren’t browbeaten into lesser evilism. They say without hesitation that capitalism cannot be reformed and must be jettisoned altogether. They aren’t fooled by propaganda that legitimizes intervening in foreign countries. They want an empty prison system and community control of the police. Revolutionaries don’t exult over Bernie Sanders vis a vis Hillary Clinton because they know that great change comes from mass action and not the ballot box.

Leftists see through the Democratic Party’s corruption and don’t fear being spoilers. They know that the system needs to be spoiled and aren’t afraid to say so. The word Democrat is not synonymous with leftist. Sander fans are Democrats with all of the flaws of the party they still support. The people who yearn to find a good person in a corrupt system have some choices to make, but putting the Sanders lipstick on the Democratic pig should not be among them.

http://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie_sanders_and_the_left

Sanders is the pied piper leading the disaffected Dem Party voters back into the spiraling cesspool of the DC Establishment Two Party Political Kabuki.

Sanders role in this election is to restore the tarnished image of The Democrats who took quite a hit in 2008 and 2012 as the shallow do-nothing Obama supporters have become disenchanted with the Wall St. Errand Boy and War Criminal that they brought to power. Sanders is just another in a long line of Democratic Party soft imperialists who is placed in The Spectacle in order to return these disaffected Donkey Cultists back into the pen of bourgeoisie politics and specifically into the Dem Party veal pen.

If Sanders were an actual Populist or a Socialist he would run as one and he would vote as one. He does neither. This is all very easy to understand. He is a Democrat- votes with them 96% of the time, caucuses with them and works against 3rd party candidates who challenge Democrats. And everyone knows the Democrats are one aspect of the Uni-Party mafioso that runs this shabby Empire. And within that rancid party Bernie Sanders rests his hat.

Sanders is a hood ornament whose candidacy serves to distract the shallow political consumer from the fact that it is the engine that makes the car run. That engine is the economic foundation upon which the superstructure of the government rests. That bad smell you get from this engine is called capitalism as it burns up everything in sight. Bernie, who is a Democrat, our latest 'hope for change", is in agreement with this rotten system only wishing to ameliorate it's worst transgressions which is not possible within the current system.

If Sanders were even halfway honest about all the "anti-billionaire" populist hot air he blows he wouldn't support billionaires would he? Not even a little bit right? Would he have supported Bill Clinton who through various and numerous pieces of legislation handed over billions to Wall St? Would he support the US Military Industrial Complex all the time which is one of the the pillars of profit for the billionaire class? Would he have supported Lynch and Holder? Would he have expressed admiration for one of the billionaire class' most reliable figureheads- Hillary Clinton? Would he work for Democrats on numerous occasions, a party that is owned by billionaires? Would he have supported ACA legislation that has spiked stocks in the health care industry which have gone directly into the pockets of the billionaire class? One could write a tome of hypocrisies on this fraud Bernie Sanders

However when Sanders puts his energy- and votes- into supporting the US Industrial Military Complex (which he has done and does religiously) he is doing exactly that. When he supports and ties his wagon to a party whose allegiances are with that billionaire class Sanders also lends support to that class. When he declares over and over he will support Hillary he is lending his support and legitimacy to one of the most powerful and reliable functionaries of that billionaire class.

If Sanders fan club were even halfway honest (or were inclined to use their critical thinking skills) about any of this they would see that all their support for Sanders is nothing more than outright support of the Democrats. It's as clear as day. And most of them are and have been for years 100% true to the Democratic Party and only use esoteric candidacies like Sanders, Kucinich et al in an attempt to disguise this fact

Every four years they follow a candidate down the road to hell while declaring they are on the way to heaven.

Poetically well put.


Sanders is a hood ornament whose candidacy serves to distract the shallow political consumer from the fact that it is the engine that makes the car run. That engine is the economic foundation upon which the superstructure of the government rests. That bad smell you get from this engine is called capitalism as it burns up everything in sight.

Also well put.


If Sanders fan club were even halfway honest (or were inclined to use their critical thinking skills) about any of this they would see that all their support for Sanders is nothing more than outright support of the Democrats. It's as clear as day. And most of them are and have been for years 100% true to the Democratic Party and only use esoteric candidacies like Sanders, Kucinich et al in an attempt to disguise this fact

And they cannot claim ignorance or unconsciousness to this "100% true to the Democratic Party" stand of theirs, because they actively "disguise this fact". They fight and become angry (as we have all seen), they lie and 'ban' and 'ignore' and 'block' anyone who attempts to show this fact of Democratic true belief - anyone who calls them on their liberal, imperialist bullshit. These "progressives" are afraid of the "right-wing"? They are the right-wing...

Bernie Out of the Closet: Sanders’ Longstanding Deal with the Democrats
February 7, 2016 | 5:36 pm
Submitted by Paul Street on Tue, 07/21/2015 – 18:36

http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/4604#.VrdiJH1rYe8.mailto

Bernie Sanders

by Paul Street

Bernie may call himself a socialist, but since his terms as mayor of Burlington VT in the 1980s, the state’s Democrats have never run anybody against him. In return “socialist” Bernie Sanders has supported every war and military intervention since the 1980s, just like every other good Democrat.

Bernie Out of the Closet: Sanders’ Longstanding Deal with the Democrats

by Paul Street

I am glad that the left intellectual and activist Chris Hedges does not support the Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. As Hedges explained in a recent interview on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Sanders’ candidacy lends undeserved credibility to the thoroughly corporatized Democratic Party. Sanders has pledged that he will support the corporatist military hawk Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general presidential election. Sanders stirs up legitimate progressive energy and popular anger and then “funnels it back into a dead political system,” Hedges observes. Sanders fails to confront the American Empire and military state, and, Hedges adds, has unforgivably “abandoned the Palestinians and given carte blanche to Israel.”

I agree on all scores. Hedges’ reasoning is consistent with my own recent writings on interviews on the Sanders presidential sensation. I do, however, want to raise one quibble with Hedges on Sanders’ history – a difference that makes Hedges’ case against Sanders even stronger. “I don’t understand,” Hedges told Nader: “He [Sanders] fought the Democratic establishment in Vermont his entire career. Now he has sold out to it.”

Sanders’ 1990 Deal with the Dems

Sanders did not “f[i]ght the Democratic establishment in Vermont his entire career.” As the left University of Vermont philosopher Will Miller noted in a 1999 essay recounting left peace activists’ occupation of then U.S. Congressman Bernie Sanders’ Burlington, Vermont office to protest Sanders’ support of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and the ongoing U.S. War on Iraq, Sanders sold out to the corporate and war Democrats as early as 1990.

Between 1981 and 1988, it is true, Sanders “presented himself to the left outside of Vermont as the leader of the third party movement, vanquishing the two major parties in every Mayoral election.” But in 1988, Sanders got a lesson on the perils of third party politics when he ran for federal office. In the election for Vermont’s seat in the House of Representatives, the independent Sanders and Democrat Paul Poirer divided the majority vote and the contest went to a Republican. Sanders responded by drifting right and cutting a deal with the Vermont Democrats: the party would permit no serious candidate to run against him while he blocked serious third party formation in Vermont and adopted positions in line with the national corporate war Democrats. Miller’s up-close account merits lengthy quotation:

“Bernie – out of office for the first time in eight years – went to the Kennedy School at Harvard for six months and came back with a new relationship with the state’s Democrats. The Vermont Democratic Party leadership has allowed no authorized candidate to run against Bernie in 1990 (or since) and in return, Bernie has repeatedly blocked third party building. His closet party, the Democrats, are very worried about a left 3rd party forming in Vermont. In the last two elections, Sanders has prevented Progressives in his machine from running against Howard Dean, our conservative Democratic Governor who was ahead of Gingrich in the attack on welfare.”

“The unauthorized Democratic candidate in 1990, Delores Sandoval, an African American faculty member at the University of Vermont, was amazed that the official party treated her as a nonperson and Bernie kept outflanking her to her right. She opposed the Gulf build-up, Bernie supported it. She supported decriminalization of drug use and Bernie defended the war on drugs, and so on…”

“After being safely elected in November of 1990, Bernie continued to support the buildup while seeking membership in the Democratic Congressional Caucus – with the enthusiastic support of the Vermont Democratic Party leadership. But, the national Democratic Party blew him off, so he finally voted against the war and returned home – and as the war began – belatedly claimed to be the leader of the anti-war movement in Vermont.”

“Since 1991 the Democrats have given Bernie membership in their Congressional Caucus. Reciprocally, Bernie has become an ardent imperialist. Sanders endorsed Clinton in 1992 and 1996. In1992 he described Clinton as the ‘lesser of evils,’ (a justification he used to denounce when he was what the local press called an ‘avowed socialist’). By 1996 he gave Clinton an unqualified endorsement. He has been a consistent ‘Friend of Bill’s’ from since 1992. One student I know worked on the Clinton Campaign in 1996 and all across Vermont, Bernie was on the stage with the rest of the Vermont Democratic Party Leadership, while the unauthorized Democratic candidate for his Congressional seat was kept out in the audience.”

During the 1990s, the not-so “independent” Congressman Sanders voted for and/or otherwise supported:

* Economic sanctions that killed more than a million Iraqi civilians

* Every U.S. bombing of Iraq from 1992 on

* The sending of U.S. military units to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to threaten Iraq because “we cannot tolerate aggression”

* The objectively racist and mass-incarcerationist Federal Crime bill.

* Every US intervention since elected to Congress–Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Liberia, Zaire (Congo), Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.

Many of Sanders’ liberal fans might be surprised to learn that he voted for a National Rifle Association (NRA)-supported bill to restrict lawsuits against gun manufacturers and against the Brady Bill.

The “leftist” Congressman Sanders liked to send out mailings sends out mailings to veterans that supported the US having “the strongest military in the world” and praised soldiers as sacrificing “for the freedom of Americans.” Sanders repeatedly failed to invite antiwar veterans’ groups to his many veterans events in the state.

By Miller’s account, the “independent” and “leftist” Congressman Sanders’ political trajectory stood well to the right of Black House Democrats like Maxine Waters and Ron Dellums, “who movedcontinuously to their left during their Congressional careers.” Sanders, by contrast, “got where he is now by a lurch to the right. He promises working people, the aged, the poor, and the ‘vanishing middle class’ that he will defend them while he repeatedly blocks the building of the anti-capitalist political movement and party that might actual make such promises legitimate.” When a Vermont leftist questioned Representative Sanders in public about his failure to help build a left-progressive alternative to the capitalist party duopoly, Sanders said he was now too busy with his Congressional work to worry about such things.

“The Citizenry Moaned Audibly”

Miller’s essay appeared after he and fourteen other peace activists were arrested for “trespassing” in Sanders’ Burlington office. Seeking to control the public relations damage, Sanders hijacked a regularly scheduled town meeting in Burlington to advance his position on behalf of Bill Clinton’s criminal war on Serbia. By Miller’s observation:

“A general town meeting had already been scheduled for the following Monday, so he turned it to a ‘town meeting on Kosovo.’ Apparently, Bernie Sanders had forgotten what a Town Meeting is…Sanders as the self-appointed moderator/boss opened the evening with naked self-justification: ‘It is a very complex situation’… followed by the ritual of demonization of Milosevic – a technique he has perfected over the last eight years on Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Then he presented the false dilemma that the only alternative to bombing is doing nothing. Sanders said his situation was the same as that of Joschka Fischer’s of the Green Party, Germany’s Foreign Minister, who has outraged his Green Party membership by supporting the bombing his coalition government is carrying out as part of NATO. “

“Back in Vermont the assembled citizenry moaned audibly.”

After the 9/11 attacks, “Bomber Bernie” (as Burlington peace activists dubbed Sanders) voted for the initial 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists that has been cited as the legal justification for U.S. military interventions and endless U.S. “global war on terror” – including the invasion of Iraq (which Sanders opposed along with most Democrats in Congress in 2002 and 2003). He voted for a non-binding resolution expressing support for troops at the outset of the invasion of Iraq. In March 2006, he opposed efforts to bring articles of impeachment against the open arch-war criminal George W. Bush since “the Republicans control the House and the Senate.”

Senator Sanders as a de facto Dem

When Sanders decided to make a bid for an open U.S. Senate seat in 2005, his longstanding service to the corporate Democrats won him the critical endorsement of Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Schumer’s backing meant that no Democrat running against Sanders could receive financial help from the party. Sanders was also supported by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and Democratic National Committee Chair and Chairman and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who described Sanders as an “ally who votes with the Democrats ninety eight percent of the time.” Then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama campaigned for Sanders in Vermont.

As when he was in the U.S, House, Senatorial candidate Sanders made a curious deal with the Vermont Democratic Party: he agreed to be listed on their primary ballot but to decline the nomination should he win, which he did.

The “independent” Sanders has enjoyed a special agreement with the Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate. He votes with the Democrats on all procedural matters in exchange for the committee seats and seniority that would be available to him as a Democrat. (He can break this rule in some exceptional cases if Democratic Senate Whip Dick Durbin agrees, but the request is rarely made.) Sanders is free to vote as he wishes on policy matters, but he has almost always voted with the Democrats.

Consistent with this party loyalty, Sanders refuses to seriously or substantively criticize his “good friend” and Democratic presidential primary “rival” Mrs. Clinton – a militantly corporatist and militarist right-wing Democrat. Sanders has backed Obama’s numerous murderous military actions and provocations around the world, from Libya, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq to China, Ukraine, and Russia. Sanders has said repeatedly that he will not be a third- party “spoiler” in the general election and thus will direct his primary delegates and voters to line up behind Hillary, Inc. in 2016. In his presidential campaign speeches, Sanders has been unwilling to mention the corporatized Democratic Party as part of the nation’s oligarchy problem. Presidential candidate John Edwards fulminated consistently against “corporate Democrats as well as corporate Republicans” when he ran in the Iowa Caucus eight years ago. Sanders, by contrast, focuses almost completely on corporate Republicans.

“But he’s a socialist,” many leftists exult. I’ve heard a number of Sanders speeches since he announced his presidential candidacy. He does not call himself a socialist. He does not call for socialism. He does not criticize or even refer to capitalism or the profit system, the underlying political-economic regime that is wired for the endless upward distribution of wealth and power and the ruination of livable ecology. Sanders rails against “the billionaire class,” against economic inequality, against the Republicans, against FOX News, against theCitizens United decision, and especially against those terrible Koch brothers. He’s running as a strident populist Democrat. In that regard, he’s not really all that different from Dennis Kucinich in 2003-04, Jesse Jackson in the 1980s and even Edwards in 2007-08, all of whom struck strong populist chords in efforts to reach the Democratic Party’s “progressive base.”

Out of the Democrats’ Closet

None of this is a departure from Sanders’ earlier career since 1989. As the shaggy-haired Mayor of progressive Burlington during the Reagan years, Sanders may have been a Sandinista-supporting left politico willing to challenge the two party duopoly. But Bernie cleaned up his too-radical act after his 1988 defeat. He went to “liberal” Harvard’s imperialist Kennedy school and came back to work in tandem with the corporate and militaristic Democrats under the guise of an “independent” and third party political identity. He’s been on the not all-that-left wing of the dismal dollar Dems ever since.

It’s all very different than the story Sanders tells campus town progressives on the campaign trail. According to that narrative, he has joined with the Democrats only this year and because of his pragmatic calculation that third party candidates cannot succeed under the U.S. party and electoral system. In reality, however, the Democrats have been Sanders’ “closet party” (Miller) for the last fifteen years. He’s really just coming out of the closet now for the presidential race, in a Clinton-welcomed effort to help give the Democrats a much-needed fake-populist makeover for the 2016 elections. The great Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Debs (whose poster hangs in Sanders’ Senate office) would not be impressed.

http://houstoncommunistparty.com/bernie-out-of-the-closet-sanders-longstanding-deal-with-the-democrats/

Berned out, part 1

FEBRUARY 6, 2016 KARIFLACK

Over and over again I see leftists online repeating that the Sanders campaign is really opening up space for “radical/leftist/socialist [insert any other once useful term that media has sucked meaning out of] politics”, that this is momentum that needs to be seized upon to nudge more people in accepting redistributionist policies. It is abundantly clear that many others feel the same. The more careful observers who do their best to preserve memory recall the bashing the “far left conspiracist flakes” received over the summer that was yet another indicator of things to come. The presumed “holdouts” are going to be continually marginalized during the rest of the year for not joining in the chorus.


Naturally I have many complaints, and as the meaning of “complaint” has eroded as well this is transforming into blaming the so-called “far left” for holding back everyone who really wants change. Already I have been accused of not caring about those whose lives may be marginally improved with a Sanders presidency, as if the abstention of my vote or whatever support I can voice online is going to be the direct cause and not media owned by the ruling class that has framed the “national conversation” in the first place that the more hopeful or optimistic (in my opinion, more delusional as I will go on to discuss) believe “we” can shape. In this short post I will put these complaints and concerns in bullet point format, and then in a follow-up I will relate some of my personal experience during the runup to Obama’s selection. If there is anything that is shocking me, it’s the leftists who have, presumably, conscious memory of Obamamania not seeing the same factors at work in this cycle.

“We”, as far as I can tell, are minor “thought influencers” involved with machine democratic-party labor organizing whose vertical organization has a fascist history that was meant to stifle and violently suppress labor in the global south, particularly South America as US imperialism installed dictators and gave military aid and training to the forces of collaborating leaders. Through these channels, there is little chance that a national labor struggle will expand to the international struggle with the global proletariat as they are meant to contain american labor to a global hierarchy that benefits the ruling class.
The people I’ve observed the above named having influence on are those who believe that a “realistic ideology” is somehow pushing the democratic party further left. This is not much different than the successfully infiltrated CPUSA’s regularly scheduled call to “defeat the far right” in supporting already bought and paid for candidates (how else one would get there in the first place, I’m not sure) or those who have a track record of blood curdling imperialism. In recent years, leaders of the party have moved to drop Leninism from its even nominal approach and have declared marxism as a “soft science”. Some sources have estimated that by the 50s approximately 30% of “active members” were FBI informants.
That Sanders is opening up space for the laboring masses and not vice versa so that he even has a marketable brand is a complete inversion of material reality. The working class are well aware that on an immediate level their dollars buy less, they pay more rent and receive increasingly shoddier services, and that they have to settle for stultifying jobs to get by. False numbers we are told that signal a “recovery” still mean that the working class are living on food rationing with 1 in 7 needing food stamps to survive. Marx put into plain language the realities of capitalism, and it is totally possible to have these conversations with those who haven’t even read him to put our collective material reality into perspective — I’ve done this for years myself. What has gotten in the way is the spectacle of aestheticized politics mediated by the owners’ media, and redirecting that energy toward the Sanders campaign is not a divergence from the status quo, considering:
The Pentagon will see a 50% increase in its 2017 budget from 2016 numbers. The non sequitur that I often see in response to criticism of Sanders is something along the lines of “well we have to start somewhere”. This is not a start; this will obviously be a continuation of imperialism no matter who is selected. Despite his gruffness, reliance on “small campaign contributions”, and “relatable” unkempt hair, Sanders has a solid track record of hawkishness that is simply insane to ignore in the name of “redistribution”. Although many “critical” supporters claim that this momentum goes well beyond Sanders the individual, there is a massive problem with predictable responses from full-on supporters who have higher visibility at the slightest questioning about his support for war and misery. Anti-imperialism is clearly not a major focus among the supporters of the “movement” as they have repeatedly watered these concerns down to “foreign policy” matters. Those claiming to be on the side of the working class should have no desire to influence such policy; they should be seeking to destroy it.
To try to further conversations dictated by the spectacle without having material influence on them is not strategy. Serious people who work to develop a far-sighted view of struggle, tactics, and strategy should not be swayed with how the wind blows or where they are told their attention needs to be by the owners. Independent organization is needed, and this includes determining on an immediate level how to take back resources that impact communities as has been painfully put on display with Flint’s poisoning. This includes but is not limited to understanding geography, how energy is distributed, where food supplies come from, weaknesses in infrastructure, and how to win over sympathetic people with influence throughout the existing proletarian hierarchy to the side of the toiling and oppressed masses. The actions of Flint citizens are proof of this in real time, and they deserve much more credit in dedicated struggle than Sanders and his acquiescent supporters ever will.

http://n0p3.net/2016/02/06/berned-out-part-1/

Part II here: http://n0p3.net/2016/02/09/berned-out-part-2/ Good but nothing to do with Bernie.

FEBRUARY 9, 2016
Kill King Capital
by PAUL STREET


“If you’re going to shoot the king, don’t miss,” Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in The Prince (1505). “The injury that is to be done,” Machiavelli added, “ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote something similar in his journal in September of 1843: “Never strike a king unless you are sure you shall kill him.”

I first ran across a version of this sentiment many years ago (exactly where I do not recall) while I was researching some U.S. Black and labor history.[1] As I recall it was more class-specific, something along these lines: “if a peasant takes up arms against the king, he’d better well kill him.” The idea was that a high noble might be able to get away with challenging the king but a peasant certainly could not. If peasants and artisans were going to rebel, they’d better make a full revolution of it.

“No Desire to Get Rid of the Profit Motive”

Nowadays I think the aphorism applies to capital and the capitalist class. Take Bernie Sanders. He has called himself a “democratic socialist” and campaigns against “the billionaire class,” drawing large and approving crowds. He has taken more than a few at least rhetorical shots at the king, which in the U.S. is big capitalist and corporate-financial power – what Edward S. Herman and David Peterson have called the “the unelected dictatorship of money.”

In reality, however, Sanders, for all his sloganeering about “revolution,” has not remotely proposed that we figure out how to kill the king of capitalism. Sanders is at most a social democratically inclined New Deal liberal. His vision for America is one in which commanding heights economic decisions and ownership remain firmly in private, profit-taking hands while the government intervenes to a limited extent with the purpose of partially regulating some business activities and distributing income and wealth and social benefits in a more egalitarian and humane – less neoliberal – way. And as Bill Blum recently argued:

“Social democrats and democratic socialists [like Bernie Sanders] have no desire to get rid of the profit motive. Last November, Sanders gave a speech at Georgetown University in Washington about his positive view of democratic socialism, including its place in the policies of presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. In defining what democratic socialism means to him, Sanders said: ‘I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production.’”

“I personally could live with the neighborhood grocery store remaining in private hands, but larger institutions are always a threat; the larger and richer they are the more tempting and easier it is for them to put profit ahead of the public’s welfare, and to purchase politicians. The question of socialism is inseparable from the question of public ownership of the means of production. The question thus facing ‘socialists’ like Sanders is this: When all your idealistic visions for a more humane, more just, more equitable, and more rational society run head-first into the stone wall of the profit motive … which of the two gives way?” (William Blum, “Is Bernie Sanders a Socialist?”)

Answer: the profit motive. The “private sector” (I use quote markets because Big Business draws heavily on public subsidy and protection while wreaking monumental and multi-dimensional havoc on public experience) still rules under Bernie’s recommended “political revolution.” He can call himself a socialist but he says nothing about the need for a social revolution to expropriate the expropriators and remove the masters of wealth and property from the disastrous private ownership and control of economy, society, politics, and culture – from private/corporate ownership and control of the means of production, finance, distribution, and communication.

The vast global U.S. military Empire – intimately bound up with American capitalist class power at home and abroad – also continues under Sanders’ “revolution.” He doesn’t even take rhetorical shots at King Capital’s evil twin imperialism. Sanders is strikingly mute on the Pentagon system, no small silence given the devastatingly destructive impact of the nation’s giant military industrial complex on social and environmental well-being within and beyond the U.S. “homeland.”

“A Threat to Socialism”

The problem isn’t merely that Sanders isn’t actually a socialist. It is also that his social-democratic policies could actually pose a genuine danger to the socialism that we all desperately need (more on that below) if they were actually enacted – a rather fantastic possibility under the currently existing balance of class forces in U.S. politics and policy. As Gary Leech recently noted on CounterPunch:

“There is little doubt that the social democratic policies advocated by Sanders will redistribute some wealth to benefit poorer Americans…. the Keynesian policies that he is advocating are by far the most progressive that have been put forth by a serious presidential contender for many decades. Furthermore, his campaign has pulled the word ‘socialism’ out of the garbage can, dusted it off and initiated a healthy debate about both capitalism and socialism in the United States…Sanders’ policy proposals represent a welcome and long overdue challenge to the right-wing neoliberal rhetoric and policy agenda that has dominated US politics since the Reagan years. But not only aren’t Sanders’ policies socialist, they actually pose a threat to socialism. If elected, Sanders’ policies would likely moderate the capitalist model both domestically and globally, but they would leave intact the fundamental global injustices inherent in the capitalist system. And when those capitalist policies implemented by a self-proclaimed socialist ultimately fail to address these global injustices in any meaningful way, it will be socialism that will be discredited.” (G. Leech, “Why America’s Next President Will Not be a Socialist,” CounterPunch, January 25, 2016)

Partial, socialism-lite “revolutions” grease the path to counterrevolution via capitalist politicians’ and capitalist media’s smearing of “socialism” when social democrats are stuck with societal and policy messes imposed by private ownership of the means of production, investment, distribution, communication and more.

Pink Tide vs. Blood Red-Green

Look at Venezuela. Last year, Bernie referred idiotically to the figurehead of that nation’s outwardly socialist Bolivarian Revolution, Hugo Chavez, as a “dead communist dictator.” In reality, Chavez’s “pink-tide” revolution was social democratic, more anti-neoliberal than anti-capitalist. It was also of course largely “extractivist,” dependent on the environmentally disastrous extraction, sale, and burning of oil – and on high global oil prices (recently in free fall, causing huge problems for the Venezuelan political revolution) – to fund its noble anti-poverty efforts. The U.S.-allied pro-business right there has been predictably able to exploit extractivist social democracy’s inherent inability to deal effectively with grave difficulties rooted in national and global capitalism.

I’m not saying that the Bolivarian Revolution necessarily could have killed the king – capitalism – in Venezuela. Capitalism and its great destructive agent and protector the U.S. Empire are global forces that make socialism or even social democracy, much less environmental sustainability, difficult indeed in any one country or region. My point is simply that his is what happens when you shoot in the king’s direction but don’t or can’t take him out.

The socialist revolution lives on with a vital green, environmentally sustainable, permaculturalist dimension in Cuba, where King Capital and the Yankee Empire were pushed and kept out with a blood-red revolution sustained with some help from the geopolitics of the Cold War. (A refurbished U.S. Cuba policy under the stealth imperialist Barack Obama seeks new ways to bring the king back to the island nation in new ways). The Cuban permaculturalist Roberto Pérez told Leech last year that Cuba laid the basis for an environmentally sustainable society “when the [Cuban] revolution gained sovereignty over the resources of the country, especially the land and the minerals…You cannot think about sustainability,” Perez explains, “if your resources are in the hands of a foreign country or in private hands. Even without knowing, we were creating the basis for sustainability” (G.Leech, “Redefining Socialism in Cuba, CounterPunch, September 18, 2015).

This is a critical point. As the New York City-based Marxist writer Louis Proyect noted last May, “capitalism and capitalist politics have to be superseded if humanity and nature are to survive. Once we can eliminate the profit motive, the door is open to rational use of natural resources for the first time in human history. How we make use of such resources will naturally be informed by our understanding that reason governs the outcome and not quarterly earnings. The alternative,” Proyect reminds us, “to this is a descent into savagery, if not extinction” (L. Proyect, “The Life, Loves, Wars, and Foibles of Edward Abbey,” CounterPunch, May 15, 2015).

Taking the Risk Out of Democracy

Partial popular victories that do not prevent or overthrow the rise of King Capital can be worse than merely insufficient. Take “free speech” in the United States. The U.S. has long been heralded for the attainment of considerable free speech rights. The triumph is exaggerated: how many millions of Americans muzzle their beliefs because they fear losing jobs, promotions, and health care (strongly tied to employment in the U.S.?) And what is the free speech of ordinary citizens compared to the free speech of vast corporate media complexes and other great political and ideological forces funded by concentrated wealth? The bigger point here, however, is that the comparatively high level of free speech that has in fact enjoyed by many U.S. citizens over the decades has come with a big dark, authoritarian, and dialectical downside because it has been combined with the existence of a robust capitalism and a rich and powerful business class. It has encouraged the emergence in the United States of powerful private institutions, methods and tools of propaganda and thought control: “the manufacture of consent.”

The power-serving doctrinal mission and nature of dominant U.S. corporate mass (so-called mainstream) media – far more sophisticated, and potent than any media the Soviet Union created (propaganda organs the West never called “mainstream Russian media”) to control its populace– might seem ironic and even paradoxical in light of the United States’ relatively strong free speech and democratic traditions. In fact, as Alex Carey, Edward S. Herman, and Noam Chomsky noted many years ago, the former makes perfect sense in light of the latter. In nations where popular expression and dissent are routinely crushed with violent repression, elites have less incentive to shape popular perceptions in accord with elite interests. The population is controlled primarily through physical coercion. In societies where it is not generally considered legitimate to put down popular expression with the iron heel of armed force and where dissenting opinion is granted a significant measure of freedom of expression, elites are heavily and dangerously incentivized to seek to manufacture mass popular consent and idiocy. The danger is deepened by the United States’ status as the pioneer in the development of mass consumer capitalism, advertising, film, and television. Thanks to that history, corporate America has long stood in the global vanguard when it comes to developing the technologies, methods, art, and science of mass persuasion and thought control designed for what Carey chillingly called “Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.” America’s free speech tradition might seem to be an unqualified positive in the abstract but it is no such thing – indeed it becomes something of a maddening double-edged sword – under conditions of capitalist and related imperial power.

Me and What Army

I know this all sounds rather grandiose coming from a marginal Left author like myself. “Kill capitalism, you say? You and what army? Away with you, ridiculous serf!” It’s an almost understandable response. Serious left anti-capitalist organization is shockingly and tragically weak, marginal, and divided in the U.S, no small part of what a social-democratic capitalist like Bernie Sanders (who can get away with taking carefully calibrated rhetorical swipes at King Capital from his aristocratic perch as Senator for Life from Vermont) can get away with calling himself a socialist. That said, this is an intolerable situation for the common good and life on Earth. Instead of shrugging your shoulders and writing me off as another hopeless radical tilting at windmills, dear reader, you might want to start thinking about how to build the army you are right to note that I lack.

Capitalism, by all indications, is hard-wired to destroy decent life on Earth in the not so distant future. Humanity has perhaps 20 years, maybe less, to move off fossil fuels and onto renewable sources or it will ruin all prospects for a decent future. This is not merely the judgment of apocalyptic cranks and “catastrophist” worry warts. It is the consensus finding of a vast scientific literature on the environmental cataclysm that is certain to take hold in coming decades and centuries if Homo sapiens does not get off fossil fuels. For many years now, the preponderant majority of earth and climate scientists have been telling us that the planet we all share is being made progressively uninhabitable for human and other sentient beings (and living things) by capitalism’s relentlessly wasteful, growth- and profit-addicted burning of fossil fuels.

Can that transition occur and the climate and related environmental crisis be solved and a livable Earth saved under the competitive, chaotic, hierarchical, regressive, imperial, authoritarian, and growth-and accumulation-addicted capitalist system? Absolutely not. Not a chance. As Naomi Klein notes in her important book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Earth (2014), “The task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis – embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy.” (p.462) That alternative world view can never prevail – never, fellow workers and citizens – under the reign of the profits system, dedicated by its very nature to savage and relentless exploitation, inequality, competition, and the endless war of each against all. [2]

Pass-Fail

So, you can laugh me off if you want but it’s a mistake. We either figure how to kill King Capital and follow through with a radically reconstructed and ecologically sustainable post-capitalist society or we can forget about a decent future. It’s not about incremental change and letter grades, moving forward at three or four yards per down. Capital is driving humanity and other living things off the cliff. We are approaching an existential chasm: we either take the revolutionary leap or its game over. The need for an eco-socialist revolution is humanity’s pass-fail moment.

This isn’t about hysterical and neurotic “catastrophism.” It’s the definitely indicated diagnosis and treatment plan for a brilliant but gravely ill species.

Notes

1 I was trying to figure out how and why so many Black workers went from being outwardly company-loyal and paternalized “strike insurance” to being the best and most militant union members in Chicago’s meatpacking industry during the 1930s. One reason among many, I determined, was that the insidious racism of the employer class left them much little leeway between outward company loyalty and militant unionism. It was one way or the other and once they sided with a Left-led and anti-racist union [Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, later to be the United Packinghouse Workers of America], many of those workers really needed that union to win. For the results of this research see Paul Street, “The ‘Best Union Members’: Race, Class, Culture, and Black Worker Militancy in Chicago’s Meatpacking Industry, 1920-1940,” Journal of American Ethnic History (Fall 2000): 18-49.

2 Despite her book’s title, Klein hedges on this radical diagnosis and treatment plan. What does Klein mean, exactly, when she says “capitalism?” Here, as in her earlier bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, she grants the system freedom to modify itself away from “free market fundamentalism” in a fashion that might seem acceptable to squishy progressives and cautious liberals. Listen to the following passage from This Changes Everything: “What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far simpler than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets” (This Changes Everything, p.18, emphasis added). The third sentence in this passage is consistent with Klein’s radical statement about “the really inconvenient truth” (that the problem is capitalism). Not so the second sentence, which attaches the moderating description “deregulated” to the overall system supposedly in the docket. The problem recurs across This Changes Everything. As Sam Gindin has rightly noted, “Klein… leaves too much wiggle room for capitalism to escape a definitive condemnation. There is already great confusion and division among social activists over what ‘anti-capitalism’ means. For many if not most, it is not the capitalist system that is at issue but particular sub-categories of villains: big business, banks, foreign companies, multinationals…Klein is contradictory on this score. She seems clear enough in the analysis that pervades the book that it is capitalism, yet she repeatedly qualifies this position by decrying ‘the kind of capitalism we now have,’ ‘neoliberal’ capitalism, ‘deregulated’ capitalism, ‘unfettered’ capitalism, ‘predatory’ capitalism, ‘extractive’ capitalism, and so on. These adjectives undermine the powerful logic of Klein’s more convincing arguments elsewhere that the issue isn’t creating a better capitalism but confronting capitalism as a social system.” This is not a new difficulty in Klein’s writing. Her previous blockbuster The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) was directed primarily at neoliberalism, at (Milton) “Friedmanite capitalism” and at so-called disaster capitalism, not at capitalism itself, It exhibited no small nostalgia for the Keynesian “regulated” and “welfare” capitalism that reigned across much of the rich world in the post-World War II “Golden Age” – a capitalism that (among its many terrible consequences) pushed the world into environmental crisis by the last quarter of the last century. As Marxist commentator Doug Henwood noted in a critical review, “Using words like ‘Friedmanite’ and ‘neoliberalism’ is a way to avoid talking about capitalism in any systemic fashion.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/09/kill-king-capital/

Sanders and the left feint in capitalist politics
6 February 2016

Four days before the first presidential primary election, self-styled “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders holds a double-digit lead in New Hampshire over the presumed frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The first national poll taken in the wake of Sanders’s virtual tie with Clinton in the Iowa caucuses showed that the senator from Vermont had surged nationally, trailing Clinton by only a narrow margin, 44 percent to 42 percent. If confirmed in subsequent polling, this would signal a remarkable shift in political sentiment compared to three months ago, when Clinton led Sanders by 61 percent to 30 percent.

The growing support for Sanders signals a dramatic change in the political environment in the United States, and hence, the world. It is all the more remarkable in a country where socialist ideas have been suppressed and excluded from official political discourse for three-quarters of a century.

The past three decades, in particular, have seen an extraordinary lowering of political culture, even by the standards of American politics. The political environment has been utterly stagnant, dominated by a relentless glorification of wealth and the exclusion of anything that smacks of genuine opposition. Every State of the Union address, including President Obama’s last month, has carried the obligatory assurance of how good things are in America.

The corporate media have perfected the art of creating a synthetic public opinion that bears no relation to the real sentiments of the vast bulk of the population, and then using that supposed public consensus to justify the reactionary policies of the ruling class. The broad support for Sanders and the crisis of the supposedly unbeatable Clinton campaign, which have taken the entire political and media establishment by surprise, have exposed the fraudulent character of what has passed for public opinion.

Particularly noteworthy is the radicalization among young people, who sided with Sanders over Clinton in the Iowa caucuses by 84 percent to 14 percent. Sanders leads Clinton by similar margins among likely Democratic primary voters 30 and under in New Hampshire, according to the most recent polls.

As Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell grudgingly admitted in the Friday edition of the newspaper, the current generation of youth, to which she belongs, “love Sanders not despite his socialism, but because of it… Many of us also entered the job market just as unbridled capitalism appeared to blow up the world economy. Perhaps for this reason, millennials actually seem to prefer socialism to capitalism.”

The support for Sanders is inextricably linked to his professions of intransigent hostility to the financial aristocracy that dominates American society. In Thursday night’s debate in New Hampshire, Sanders declared again that “the business model of Wall Street is fraud,” while reiterating his criticisms of Clinton for accepting millions in campaign contributions and speaker’s fees from Goldman Sachs and other major financial institutions. The entire first hour of the debate was devoted to a discussion of the pernicious role of big business and whether the major banks should be broken up to prevent a recurrence of the 2008 Wall Street crash.

The rise of Sanders is a response to decades of war and reaction, culminating in the financial collapse of 2008, with its devastating impact on social conditions in the United States. As the consequences of the global crisis of capitalism have unfolded—the destruction of decent-paying jobs, the austerity policies of capitalist governments throughout the world, the buildup of the forces of a police state to suppress working class opposition, and the unending series of wars by American imperialism—tens of millions of workers and youth have begun to draw increasingly radical conclusions.

There are signs of panic setting in within the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party establishment as a whole. This is not because they view Sanders himself as a threat to capitalism or the political domination of the corporate-financial elite. The ruling class has a long experience with the “independent socialist” from Vermont. For decades, first in the House of Representatives and then in the Senate, he has caucused with the Democratic Party and supported every Democratic presidential candidate and every Democratic administration.

Always treated respectfully, he has been seen as a valuable political asset, providing a left cover for the Democratic Party and promoting the illusion that this right-wing capitalist party is somehow a progressive party of the people.

However, the popular credibility of the Democrats has been massively undermined by seven years of the Obama administration. In this situation, the grave danger confronting the American capitalist class is the emergence of a political movement outside the two-party system that challenges the domination of the super-rich over every aspect of US society. Bernie Sanders is not the herald of such a movement, but a false prophet who is neither genuinely socialist nor genuinely independent.

The Socialist Equality Party evaluates the significance of the Sanders campaign not by its campaign promises, or the illusions of those who now support him, but on the basis of a Marxist analysis of objective class relations and a historically grounded international perspective.

The rise of the Vermont “socialist” is not purely an American phenomenon, but the American expression of an international process. In country after country, under the impact of the global economic crisis of capitalism, the ruling class has brought forward “left” bourgeois parties to divert mass opposition into harmless channels. This is the role of figures like Jeremy Corbyn, the newly elected leader of the Labour Party in Britain, and Podemos in Spain, now maneuvering to form a coalition government with the discredited social democrats. In the most extreme cases, as in Greece, the “left” has been brought directly into power, in the form of the Syriza government, and charged with the responsibility of imposing capitalist austerity policies on the masses.

Leon Trotsky, the co-leader of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, explained how the ruling class manipulates the political system within the framework of bourgeois democracy. “The capitalist bourgeois calculates,” he wrote, “’At the right moment I will bring into existence opposition parties, which will disappear tomorrow, but which today accomplish their mission by affording the possibility of the lower middle class expressing their indignation without hurt therefrom for capitalism’” (Terrorism and Communism, p. 58).

If the American financial aristocracy thought Sanders represented a genuine threat to its interests, it would not be putting him on national television to deliver his jeremiads before a mass audience. The ruling elite has more than a century of experience in the use of such figures to manipulate mass sentiment and safeguard the profit system from challenges from below. These include third-party efforts like the Populist Party of the 1890s, the Progressive movement of the early 20th century, the Farmer-Labor Party of Robert La Follette in Wisconsin in the 1920s (and related groups in Minnesota and the Dakotas) and the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace in 1948. All these campaigns dissolved, sooner or later, back into the Democratic Party.

In the past half-century, the ruling elite has sought to avoid any significant “left” third-party efforts, using the Democratic Party itself as the principal vehicle for containing and dissipating mass popular opposition to the US ruling elite, whether over the Vietnam War, the violent attacks on labor struggles in the 1980s, or the endless wars in the Middle East and the staggering growth of social inequality. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972 were followed by Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, Howard Dean in 2004, and now Bernie Sanders.

Considered in this historical framework, what is remarkable about Sanders is how vacuous his supposed radicalism really is. He is far less radical in his domestic policy than the Populists, the anti-Wall Street presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan, and the Farmer-Laborites. In the crucial area of foreign policy, he is virtually indistinguishable from Obama and Hillary Clinton, even attacking them from the right on issues like trade with China. When asked directly last year about his attitude to US military intervention abroad, he declared he was for “drones, all that and more.”

If Sanders goes on to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency, he will betray the aspirations of his supporters flagrantly and with extraordinary speed. A thousand excuses will be brought forward to explain why the wars must continue abroad and nothing can be done to rein in Wall Street at home.

Sanders is not the representative of a working class movement. He is rather the temporary beneficiary of a rising tide of popular opposition that is passing through only its initial stages of social and class differentiation.

The Socialist Equality Party welcomes every sign of a leftward movement and radicalization among workers and youth. The objective conditions of capitalist crisis and imperialist war are the driving forces of a profound leftward shift in the consciousness of tens of millions. But there is nothing more contemptible than to patronize and adapt to the illusions that characterize the present, initial stage in the development of class consciousness and popular opposition. That is the specialty of the various pseudo-left appendages of the ruling class and the Democratic Party.

It is legitimate for genuine socialists to adopt a sympathetic and patient attitude to the growth of popular opposition, but it is politically impermissible to politically adapt to the movement’s prevailing level of understanding. It is necessary to expose the contradiction between Sanders’ social demagogy and his bourgeois program, without suggesting that he can be pushed to the left by popular pressure from below.

The task taken up by the Socialist Equality Party is to open up a new path for the movement of the working class and lay the foundations for a broadening and deepening of the radicalization, breaking irrevocably from the Democratic Party and all forms of bourgeois politics and establishing the political independence of the working class. This is the essential basis for transforming the growing opposition into a conscious political and revolutionary movement for international socialism. The prerequisite for this task is to tell the working class the truth.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/02/06/pers-f06.html

The political role of the Bernie Sanders campaign
11 February 2016

Tuesday’s landslide victory for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic New Hampshire primary has intensified the crisis of the Hillary Clinton campaign and raised the possibility of Sanders pulling ahead in the Democratic Party primary process as a whole.

The details of Tuesday’s vote provide more evidence of the widespread support for the Sanders campaign, particularly among younger and lower-income voters. According to exit polls, Sanders was backed by 83 percent of voters under 30, by 67 percent of those with no college degree, and by 72 percent of voters with incomes under $30,000 a year. A third of voters said that income inequality was the most important issue in the election, and these backed Sanders by 71 percent. The only demographics that went to Clinton were voters over the age of 65 (54 percent) and voters with incomes over $200,000 (53 percent).

One further statistic points to the essential political role of the Sanders campaign: Forty percent of voters in the Democratic primary identified themselves as “independent/undeclared” (that is, not registered as a Democrat), and these backed Sanders by 72 percent. The Vermont senator has repeatedly said the principal aim of his “political revolution” is to bring voters back into the fold of the Democratic Party.

The growing support for Sanders is an initial political reflection of deep tensions in the United States, which have been artificially suppressed for decades, as social inequality rose to levels not seen since before the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Particularly since the 2008 financial crash, the American ruling class has engaged in a restructuring of class relations that has seen trillions funneled to the banks while the vast majority of the population faced falling wages, attacks on health care and pensions, mass unemployment and rising indebtedness. Young people, who back Sanders by a wide margin, have known nothing but economic crisis, war and attacks on democratic rights. An eighteen-year-old new voter would have been four years old when the “war on terror” began and 11 at the onset of the global financial crisis.

The growth in support for Sanders is a delayed reaction to these objective conditions. In a country where socialist ideas have been suppressed for decades, it turns out that millions of people have essentially, if as yet vaguely defined, anti-capitalist views. The politics of identity, based on race, gender, sexual preference—the obsession of upper-middle class layers—has very little broader impact, as revealed in the failure of Clinton to win over women voters by trumpeting her bid to become the first female president (along with claims that Sanders backers are sexist).

However, to say that the support for Sanders is an expression of deep social anger is very different from saying that the Sanders campaign itself articulates and represents this anger. Sanders does not speak for the working class, but for a section of the ruling class and political establishment that views the growth of social opposition with fear and is seeking some way of containing it. The ruling class sees as the greatest danger the emergence of an independent movement of the working class that challenges its economic and political power. Sanders’ task is to block such a development by channeling popular opposition back behind the Democratic Party.

Anyone who is under the illusion that Sanders is not completely conscious of his assigned role should study his Tuesday night victory speech. Hailing an increase in voter turnout in the primary, Sanders declared, “That is what will happen all over this country. Let us never forget, Democrats and progressives win when voter turnout is high.” He added that it was necessary to “remember—and this is a message not just to our opponents, but to those who support me as well —that we need to come together in a few months and unite this party” behind whomever is nominated (emphasis added).

Sanders is seeking to “bring new people into the political process” to strengthen the credibility of the Democratic Party, which has suffered severely under Obama, the supposed “candidate of change.” In 2012, Obama became the first president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be reelected with fewer votes in his second election than in his first. This was due to a sharp fall in voter turnout, which the World Socialist Web Site noted at the time was an expression of “an electorate that is disillusioned and increasingly alienated from the entire two-party political system.”

In terms of his actual program, the most essential issue is not Sanders’ promises of a $15 minimum wage and free tuition at public colleges and universities—which President Sanders would quickly drop because they would cut into corporate profits—but his support for imperialist war. Throughout the campaign, Sanders has said very little about foreign policy, but what he has said is aimed at assuring the ruling class and the military that he poses no danger.

In Sanders’ speech Tuesday night, perhaps the loudest applause from the audience came when he referred to his vote against the Iraq war in 2003. However, this was followed immediately with the pledge that “we must, and will destroy ISIS”—that is, prosecute the war in Iraq and Syria.

These comments are made as the Obama administration, whose foreign policy Sanders has repeatedly defended, is preparing an enormous escalation of the war in Syria, aimed above all at the removal of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The conflict in Syria threatens to spark war with nuclear-armed Russia, the target of relentless threats by the US and the European powers, including a vast militarization of Eastern Europe.

Sanders opposes none of this. If he were called upon by the ruling class, he would use his “progressive” credentials to buttress support for war. Those “feeling the Bern” today would experience bombs tomorrow. Sanders would justify breaking his empty promises of social reform by pointing to the financial requirements of war.

The Vermont senator’s political affiliation is not a secondary question. He is fulfilling a task that has been assigned to political figures—functioning either within the Democratic Party or nominally outside of it—many times before. This has included the presidential campaigns of William Jennings Bryan in the early 20th century (as the “populist” candidate of the Democratic Party), Robert La Folette in the 1920s (for the Farmer-Labor Party, which later became a wing of the Democratic Party), and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former vice president Henry Wallace in 1948 (for the Progressive Party, backed by the Stalinist Communist Party). More modern examples include the likes of Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich within the Democratic Party, as well as the various Green Party campaigns directed at pressuring the Democratic Party from the outside.

Sanders aims not to create a “revolution,” as he asserts in his campaign speeches, but to prevent one. If he is elected, he will rapidly and brazenly repudiate all of his promises. His actions will mirror those of Syriza in Greece (elected on the basis of opposition to austerity in January 2015, now implementing an even more brutal austerity program dictated by the banks) and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK (the “left” Labour Party leader elected last year, who played the essential role in facilitating the Conservative government’s decision to take the country into war against Syria).

Organizations that argue that Sanders, under pressure, can be pushed to the left are themselves moving to the right, utilizing his campaign as another mechanism for integrating themselves into the capitalist state.

There are many signs that class tensions in the United States are beginning to erupt to the surface, from the militant opposition of autoworkers to last year’s sellout contracts, to the sickouts of teachers and students in Detroit and the mass anger over the poisoning of Flint, Michigan residents by lead-contaminated water. The conspiracies of the ruling class to expand war abroad will come into conflict with the deep antiwar sentiment that exists in the American working class.

However, a political path forward for the working class can be forged only through a struggle to establish its political independence on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program. This requires an uncompromising exposure of the politics of Sanders and all those who, in the name of “getting close to the masses,” adapt to him and cover up his role.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/02/11/pers-f11.html

The more support Sanders receives from workers and young people, the more "establishment" his rhetoric becomes. That was clear during his lengthy victory speech following the New Hampshire Primary. Not once was the word "socialist" or even "democratic socialist" uttered. Rather, Sanders made clear his role as promoting himself as the more viable candidate to return the Democratic Party to the White House. I felt that there was a growing uneasiness among those attending the rally, as Sanders made one empty promise after another. Masses of workers and youth are becoming politicized, radicalized, and that "train" is stopping at the Sanders Station. The pseudo-left apologists and promoters of illusions are there to welcome those who disembark, and to take their baggage. The revolutionary party must tirelessly expose their role and urge workers and young people to "stay on the train".

Bernie Sanders lines up with Middle East war drive
By Patrick Martin
16 November 2015

At the Democratic presidential debate held Saturday night in Des Moines, Iowa, self-proclaimed “socialist” Bernie Sanders stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Hillary Clinton in pledging support for US military action in Syria and Iraq, in the name of fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The debate began with a moment of silence for the victims of the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed at least 129 people, barely 24 hours before. The three candidates—Sanders, Clinton and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley—were then asked to declare their solidarity with French imperialism and their support for its anticipated military response to the atrocities in Paris.

Clinton seized the opportunity to pile up adjectives denouncing ISIS as a “barbaric, ruthless, violent, jihadist, terrorist group,” adding that “the 2016 election is not only about electing a president. It’s also about choosing our next commander in chief.”

Sanders then criticized Clinton’s vote in 2002 to give authorization to the Bush administration to wage war against Iraq, declaring, “I don’t think any sensible person would disagree that the invasion of Iraq led to the massive level of instability we are seeing right now.”

He went on to characterize the invasion of Iraq as “one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the modern history of United States.” This language is noteworthy because it does not characterize the unprovoked US aggression against Iraq as a crime, only as a mistake.

Sanders claims (at least rhetorically) to support prosecution of bankers for their role in the 2008 Wall Street crash, but he has never called for prosecution of US officials for their gross violations of international law in the invasion of Iraq. There is no mystery about the discrepancy: any war crimes prosecution could not be limited to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, but would have to include the congressional Democrats who backed the illegal war and the Obama administration officials who continued it once they took office in 2009. Sanders, moreover, has no fundamental differences with the imperialist policy pursued by the Obama White House.

In the course of nearly half an hour of discussion of foreign policy and the Middle East, Sanders repeatedly professed his agreement with the views expressed by Clinton and O’Malley: “I agree with much of what—the secretary and—and the governor have said” … “the secretary’s obviously right” … and his two rivals for the Democratic nomination made similar affirmations in response.

At one point, Sanders reiterated a particularly sinister and reactionary formulation that has cropped up frequently in his speeches: the demand that the Muslim Arab countries allied with American imperialism should supply the ground forces needed to conquer the territory now controlled by ISIS in eastern Syria and western Iraq.

He argued, “Here’s something that I believe we have to do is we put together an international coalition. And that is we have to understand that the Muslim nations in the region, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Jordan, all of these nations, they’re gonna just have to get their hands dirty, their boots on the ground. They are gonna have to take on ISIS.”
In other words, it is better that Arabs rather than Americans should die for the defense of the interests of American imperialism. Arab youth and workers listening to such a declaration would be justified in thinking that Senator Sanders wants the Arabs to kill each other for the benefit of Washington.

Sanders summed up his view of the crisis in the Middle East, which does not deviate from the imperialist consensus by so much as a millimeter. He denounced ISIS and Al Qaeda as “a danger to modern society,” adding, “this world with American leadership can and must come together to destroy them. We can do that.”

From beginning to end, Sanders accepts and defends the basic lie of American foreign policy, that the US military is waging a “war on terror” in the Middle East. In fact, ISIS and Al Qaeda are themselves the creation of American imperialism, the most reactionary and destructive force on the planet. Al Qaeda was created by the US intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s, ISIS by the US intervention in Iraq and Syria over the past dozen years.

These organizations are not merely byproducts of misbegotten military adventures, but were directly organized and utilized at critical junctures by Washington. It was the CIA that brought Saudi Islamists like Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan in the 1980s. It was the CIA that recruited similar forces to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and then attempt to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria, giving rise to ISIS in both countries.

Sanders concluded the discussion of the Middle East with the suggestion that the United States greatly increase its military spending on the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda. He said: “Let me pick up an issue that—a very important issue that we have not yet discussed. This nation is the most powerful military in the world. We’re spending over $600 billion a year on the military. And yet significantly less than 10 percent of that money is used to be fighting international terrorism.”

He continued, “I think we need major reform in the military making it more cost effective but also focusing on the real crisis that faces us. The Cold War is over and our focus has got to be on intelligence, increased manpower, fighting international terrorism.”

This is an argument for spending billions more on the NSA, the CIA, the Special Operations death squads of the Pentagon and drone warfare around the world.

In other words, this so-called “socialist” is nothing more than an imperialist in sheep’s clothing, advocating the build-up of precisely those instruments of the military-intelligence apparatus that are the most dangerous to the democratic rights of the American people, and have the bloodiest record of atrocities against the population of the world.

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/16/sand-n16.html

It was notable that during the foreign policy section of the debate, which was relatively brief, Sanders identified himself completely with Obama and pointed to Clinton’s differences with the White House on issues such as imposing a no-fly zone in Syria. Sanders made his most expansive comments of the campaign on the question of Ukraine and Russia, fully endorsing the policy of the Obama White House, which threatens an escalation to a direct military clash with Russia, the world’s second-largest nuclear power.

Sanders declared, “Russia’s aggressive actions in the Crimea and in Ukraine have brought about a situation where President Obama and NATO—correctly, I believe—are saying, you know what, we’re going to have to beef up our troop level in that part of the world to tell Putin that his aggressiveness is not going to go unmatched… We have to work with NATO to protect Eastern Europe against any kind of Russian aggression.”

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/02/13/dems-f13.html

He is part of the Democratic party, he promotes reactionary economic nationalism, he is a defender of American Imperialism and its wars. You say he is not a "sheepdog candidate" yet his falsely named nationalistic "political revolution" simply wants people to.... start voting and turning out for the Democratic party. This man is playing his role as conscious as any other enemy of the working class. FDR was a defender of American Imperialism too but the difference was America of that time could afford such social reforms based as it was on the industrial power of US capitalism. Such a thing happening today is out of the question, American Capitalism is not going to do a new, new deal instead it is doing war, austerity, inequality enriching the financial elite that rules the US. Also globalised production long ago pulled the rug out from national social reformism which today is totally bankrupt. Reformism today? Your joking. Capitalism cannot be reformed. Capitalism cannot be made "tolerable for workers" who are everywhere under attack from capitalism and its defenders! Open your eyes. America's retired workers are told to hurry up and die as American capitalism cannot "afford" to keep them alive. Working conditions, living standards, wages, jobs are under attack. The programs of reformism failed the working class from the 80s onward. The unions allowed themselves to become transformed into appendages of the employers and the state.

You tell us that Sanders supports Imperialism but will not "take orders" from Wall Street. Well those are just lies. If he gets into the White House that is exactly what he would do. The ruling elite needs a president that is utterly 100% beholden to their interests like Obama is. We were told that Tsipras would "fight hard" for Greek workers. He did no such thing. Corbyn in UK only achieved throwing his country in Syria. Do you think the US ruling elite would tolerate someone in office who does not carry through the capitalist program of war and austerity and is somehow vaguely devoted to "reforming the economy" in the workers interests?!

What you are missing is analysis let alone understanding of the objective conditions of American and world capitalism. The world is very different to the days of FDR when reformism could get away with making things "fairer" (so as to avert socialist revolution). In reality such a thing will never happen now or ever.

The elephant in the room
worker | February 12, 2016 | 10:17 pm | Analysis, political struggle
by James Thompson

The primary season for the presidential election is currently in full swing now. No one can deny it.

At this point, it becomes important to try to understand the complexities involved in the current electoral cycle. The bourgeois media, the bourgeois candidates and every other talking head in this bourgeois society in which we reside does everything they can to obfuscate the electoral process. Their motto seems to be “Keep them ignorant, barefoot and vulnerable” to everything we throw at them.

This article will be an attempt to clarify the situation so that working people can make an educated choice.

After listening to many of the debates, both Democratic Party and Republican party, it becomes clear that all candidates are united in supporting the bourgeoisie, who ultimately bankroll the election campaigns. Not a single Democratic Party candidate or Republican Party candidate opposes imperialism in any way.

Lenin characterized Imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. As an update, we should recognize that Fascism/Nazism is the highest form of Imperialism.

Imperialism is the ignored Elephant in the Room.

All of the US Candidates for president advocate “American exceptionalism” which is a code word for US superiority. This right wing, fascistic, ideology has provided the momentum for the interventionistic tactics of the US government around the world. Millions of working people have been slaughtered as a result of this contemporary adaptation of the British notion of the “divine right of kings.” Students of history know full well that when one society claims superiority, they condemn their working people to ruination. Working people never claim superiority. The bourgeoisie always claim superiority.

The bourgeoisie know that if they can establish their superiority, they can justify their egregious theft of the wealth produced by the proletariat. Donald Trump is one of the best examples of this worldview. He proclaims “Make America great again!” Does anyone see a major difference between this and “Deutschland Über Alles!”

Students of history know well the consequences of such a worldview. No one can question the catastrophe which befell the Roman empire or the 1000 year Reich.

Although there is not much difference between the major candidates for the office of President of the United States (POTUS), some differences are noteworthy.

Although this is oversimplified, this is one model for viewing the current candidates for POTUS.

All candidates, both Democratic Party and Republican Party are full-blown imperialists. They advocate the superiority of the USA. They suggest that the US military should dominate the globe without regard for the consequences that the US military personnel should suffer to say nothing for the slaughter of foreign nationals.

The US military has exerted its domination expressed as slaughter of civilians in countries too numerous to elaborate but include: India, Greece, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Iran, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and all of Latin America. You get the picture.

Back to the candidates for POTUS.

Bernie Sanders advocates catching up with the European working class in terms of benefits. He endorses the crazy, paranoid, norm of military provocation abroad.

Hillary Clinton advocates that catching up with the European working class is too good for working Americans. She does not seem to want to agitate her bourgeois benefactors. In the middle of the electoral campaign, she does not want to ruffle the feathers of the bourgeoisie. She does not want to seem to place in jeopardy her donations from the ultra-wealthy. At the same time, she exemplifies the meaning of mendacity. She paints herself as a realist when in fact she is a trusted drum girl for the bourgeoisie. She advocates “All power to the bourgeoisie!”

The Republican candidates all are avid imperialists/fascists. They proclaim American superiority without blushing. They advocate war without brains. They advocate no regulation for the bourgeoisie and simultaneously want to trash education, healthcare and any other social network benefits for working people and their families. Their motto is “You’re fired!”

Voters in the US have a clear choice in the current electoral cycle. They can choose the “United States of Anger” and vote for Bernie Sanders. They can choose the “United States of Apathy” and vote for Hillary Clinton. They can choose the “United States of Arrogance” and vote for any of the Republican candidates.

It appears likely that given the degenerate political candidates, working people will choose the “United States of Anarchy.” This bodes well for Hillary Clinton.

Eventually, working people will seize the reins of political power from the bourgeoisie and establish a worker’s democracy. No one knows if this will happen in our lifetime.

http://houstoncommunistparty.com/the-elephant-in-the-room/

Go to the comments section to enter CrazyLand:

Bernie Sanders’ Phantom Movement

Posted on Feb 14, 2016

By Chris Hedges


Bernie Sanders, who has attracted numerous young, white, college-educated supporters in his bid for the presidency, says he is creating a movement and promises a political revolution. This rhetoric is an updated version of the “change” promised by the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama and by Jesse Jackson’s earlier National Rainbow Coalition. Such Democratic electoral campaigns, at best, raise political consciousness. But they do not become movements or engender revolutions. They exist as long as election campaigns endure and then they vanish. Sanders’ campaign will be no different.

No movement or political revolution will ever be built within the confines of the Democratic Party. And the repeated failure of the American left to grasp the duplicitous game being played by the political elites has effectively neutered it as a political force. History, after all, should count for something.

The Democrats, like the Republicans, have no interest in genuine reform. They are wedded to corporate power. They are about appearance, not substance. They speak in the language of democracy, even liberal reform and populism, but doggedly block campaign finance reform and promote an array of policies, including new trade agreements, that disempower workers. They rig the elections, not only with money but also with so-called superdelegates—more than 700 delegates who are unbound among a total of more than 4,700 at the Democratic convention. Sanders may have received 60 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, but he came away with fewer of the state’s delegates than Clinton. This is a harbinger of the campaign to come.

If Sanders is denied the nomination—the Clinton machine and the Democratic Party establishment, along with their corporate puppet masters, will use every dirty trick to ensure he loses—his so-called movement and political revolution will evaporate. His mobilized base, as was true with the Obama campaign, will be fossilized into donor and volunteer lists. The curtain will come down with a thunderclap until the next election carnival.

The Democratic Party is a full partner in the corporate state. Yet Sanders, while critical of Hillary Clinton’s exorbitant speaking fees from firms such as Goldman Sachs, refuses to call out the party and—as Robert Scheer pointed out in a column in October—the Clintons for their role as handmaidens of Wall Street. For Sanders, it is a lie of omission, which is still a lie. And it is a lie that makes the Vermont senator complicit in the con game being played on the American electorate by the Democratic Party establishment.

Do Sanders’ supporters believe they can wrest power from the Democratic establishment and transform the party? Do they think the forces where real power lies—the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, corporations, the security and surveillance state—can be toppled by a Sanders campaign? Do they think the Democratic Party will allow itself to be ruled by democratic procedures? Do they not accept that with the destruction of organized labor and anti-war, civil rights and progressive movements—a destruction often orchestrated by security organs such as the FBI—the party has lurched so far to the right that it has remade itself into the old Republican Party?

The elites use money, along with their control of the media, the courts and legislatures, their armies of lobbyists and “think tanks,” to invalidate the vote. We have undergone, as John Ralston Saul has written, a corporate coup d’état. There are no institutions left within civil society that can be accurately described as democratic. We do not live in a capitalist democracy. We live in what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls a system of “inverted totalitarianism.”

In Europe, America’s Democratic Party would be a far-right party. The Republican Party would be extremist. There is no liberal—much less left or progressive—organized political class in the United States. The growth of protofascists will be halted only when a movement on the left embraces an unequivocal militancy to defend the rights of workers and move toward the destruction of corporate power. As long as the left keeps surrendering to a Democratic Party that mouths liberal values while serving corporate interests, it will destroy itself and the values it claims to represent. It will stoke the justifiable rage of the underclass, especially the white underclass, and empower the most racist and retrograde political forces in the country. Fascism thrives not only on despair, betrayal and anger but a bankrupt liberalism.

The political system, as many Sanders supporters are about to discover, is immune to reform. The only effective resistance will be achieved through acts of sustained, mass civil disobedience. The Democrats, like the Republicans, have no intention of halting the assault on our civil liberties, the expansion of imperial wars, the coddling of Wall Street, the destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry and the impoverishment of workers. As long as the Democrats and the Republicans remain in power we are doomed.

The Democratic establishment’s response to any internal insurgency is to crush it, co-opt it and rewrite the rules to make a future insurgency impossible. This was true in 1948 with Henry Wallace and in 1972 with George McGovern—two politicians who, unlike Sanders, took on the war industry—and in the 1984 and 1988 insurgencies led by Jackson.

Corey Robin in Salon explained how the Clintons rose to power on this reactionary agenda. The Clintons, and the Democratic establishment, he wrote, repudiated the progressive agenda of the Jackson campaign and used coded language, especially regarding law and order, to appeal to the racism of white voters. The Clintons and the party mandarins ruthlessly disenfranchised those Jackson had mobilized.

Sanders’ supporters can expect a similar reception. That Hillary Clinton can run a campaign that defies her long and sordid political record is one of the miracles of modern mass propaganda and a testament to the effectiveness of our political theater.

Sanders said that if he does not receive the nomination he will support the party nominee; he will not be a “spoiler.” If that happens, Sanders will become an obstacle to change. He will recite the mantra of the “least worst.” He will become part of the Democratic establishment’s campaign to neutralize the left.

Sanders is, in all but title, a Democrat. He is a member of the Democratic caucus. He votes 98 percent of the time with the Democrats. He routinely backs appropriations for imperial wars, the corporate scam of Obamacare, wholesale surveillance and bloated defense budgets. He campaigned for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race and again in 1996—after Clinton had rammed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), vastly expanded the system of mass incarceration and destroyed welfare—and for John Kerry in 2004. He called on Ralph Nader in 2004 to abandon his presidential campaign. The Democrats recognize his value. They have long rewarded Sanders for his role as a sheepherder.

Kshama Sawant and I privately asked Sanders at a New York City event where we appeared with him the night before the 2014 climate march why he would not run for president as an independent. “I don’t want to end up like Ralph Nader,” he told us.

Sanders had a point. The Democratic power structure made a quid pro quo arrangement with Sanders. It does not run a serious candidate against him in Vermont for his U.S. Senate seat. Sanders, as part of this Faustian deal, serves one of the main impediments to building a viable third party in Vermont. If Sanders defies the Democratic Party he will be stripped of his seniority in the Senate. He will lose his committee chairmanships. The party machine will turn him, as it did Nader, into a pariah. It will push him outside the political establishment. Sanders probably saw his answer as a practical response to political reality. But it was also an admission of cowardice. Nader paid a heavy price for his courage and his honesty, but he was not a failure.

Sanders, I suspect, is acutely aware that the left is broken and disorganized. The two parties have created innumerable obstacles to third parties, from locking them out of the debates to challenging voter lists and keeping them off the ballot. The Green Party is internally crippled by endemic factionalism and dysfunction. It is dominated in many states by an older, white demographic that is trapped in the nostalgia of the 1960s and narcissistically self-referential.

I spoke three years ago to the sparsely attended state gathering of the Green Party in New Jersey. I felt as if I was a character in Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.” In the novel, Mayta, a naive idealist, endures the indignities of the tiny and irrelevant warring sects of the Peruvian left. He is reduced to meeting in a garage with seven self-described revolutionaries who make up the RWP(T)—the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Trotskyist)—a splinter group of the marginal Revolutionary Worker’s Party. “Stacked against the walls,” Llosa writes, “were piles of Workers Voice and handbills, manifestos and statements favoring strikes or denouncing them which they had never got around to handing out.”

I am all for a revolution, a word Sanders likes to throw around, but one that is truly socialist and destroys the corporate establishment, including the Democratic Party. I am for a revolution that demands the return of the rule of law, and not just for Wall Street, but those who wage pre-emptive war, order the assassination of U.S. citizens, allow the military to carry out domestic policing and then indefinitely hold citizens without due process, who empower the wholesale surveillance of the citizenry by the government. I am for a revolution that brings under strict civilian control the military, the security and surveillance apparatus including the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security and police and drastically reduces their budgets and power. I am for a revolution that abandons imperial expansion, especially in the Middle East, and makes it impossible to profit from war. I am for a revolution that nationalizes banks, the arms industry, energy companies and utilities, breaks up monopolies, destroys the fossil fuel industry, funds the arts and public broadcasting, provides full employment and free education including university education, forgives all student debt, blocks bank repossessions and foreclosures of homes, guarantees universal and free health care and provides a living wage to those unable to work, especially single parents, the disabled and the elderly. Half the country, after all, now lives in poverty. None of us live in freedom.

This will be a long and desperate struggle. It will require open confrontation. The billionaire class and corporate oligarchs cannot be tamed. They must be overthrown. They will be overthrown in the streets, not in a convention hall. Convention halls are where the left goes to die.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/bernie_sanders_phantom_movement_20160214