Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by blindpig » Fri Mar 08, 2019 1:23 pm

Roger Waters, socialists say no to Bernie and AOC’s positions on Venezuela
Posted Mar 05, 2019 by Eds.
Topics: Fascism , Imperialism , State Repression , StrategyPlaces: United States , Venezuela
Originally published: MintPress News by Alexander Rubinstein (February 25, 2019) |
While Senator Sanders seems to support a supposedly “democratic” kind of regime change in Venezuela, journalist Ben Norton, who has spent the past two weeks in Venezuela amid the flailing coup attempt, says it is the opposition that is un-democratic. On Twitter, Norton accused the Venezuelan opposition of dropping “all pretense of wanting democracy and demand[ing] a coup and war.”

As socialists rally in the United States over their country’s backing of a right wing coup in Venezuela, the supposedly socialist members of Congress–Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)–are hitting talking points that worry critics like Roger Waters and activists in the streets alike.

The Pink Floyd bassist and composer took billionaire Sir Richard Branson to task last week as he organized a benefit concert for the Venezuelan opposition in neighboring Colombia, MintPress News reported. Now, Waters, who says that “socialism is a good thing” and in 2015 backed Sanders, is wondering if he’s “f-ing kidding” us. Sanders announced his candidacy for 2020 last week.

Waters’ expression of shock was made in reply to the Senator’s tweet on Saturday, which demanded that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro “allow humanitarian aid into the country.” Waters pulled no punches, questioning whether Sanders is really “the perfect stooge for the one percent.”

The Venezuelan government has rejected U.S. aid as a pretext for further intervention and an affront to their border sovereignty. Elliott Abrams, who was recently named United States Special Representative for Venezuela, was previously involved in a plot to send $27 million in weapons disguised as humanitarian aid to right wing contras. Meanwhile, an airliner with links to the CIA has flown weapons into the country and the agency responsible for delivering it, USAID, has a history of torturing leftists in South America.

Poignantly, Waters warned Sanders not to “collude” with the architects of the U.S.’s coup policies: neoconservative warmongers Elliott Abrams and John Bolton, and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a champion of the wealthy right wing pink wave emigre scene in Miami.

Roger Waters performs during his "Us + Them" tour stop at Staples Center on Tuesday, June 20, 2017, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)
Roger Waters, socialists say no to Bernie and AOC’s positions on Venezuela
Posted Mar 05, 2019 by Eds.
Topics: Fascism , Imperialism , State Repression , StrategyPlaces: United States , Venezuela
Originally published: MintPress News by Alexander Rubinstein (February 25, 2019) |
While Senator Sanders seems to support a supposedly “democratic” kind of regime change in Venezuela, journalist Ben Norton, who has spent the past two weeks in Venezuela amid the flailing coup attempt, says it is the opposition that is un-democratic. On Twitter, Norton accused the Venezuelan opposition of dropping “all pretense of wanting democracy and demand[ing] a coup and war.”

As socialists rally in the United States over their country’s backing of a right wing coup in Venezuela, the supposedly socialist members of Congress–Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)–are hitting talking points that worry critics like Roger Waters and activists in the streets alike.

The Pink Floyd bassist and composer took billionaire Sir Richard Branson to task last week as he organized a benefit concert for the Venezuelan opposition in neighboring Colombia, MintPress News reported. Now, Waters, who says that “socialism is a good thing” and in 2015 backed Sanders, is wondering if he’s “f-ing kidding” us. Sanders announced his candidacy for 2020 last week.

Waters’ expression of shock was made in reply to the Senator’s tweet on Saturday, which demanded that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro “allow humanitarian aid into the country.” Waters pulled no punches, questioning whether Sanders is really “the perfect stooge for the one percent.”

The Venezuelan government has rejected U.S. aid as a pretext for further intervention and an affront to their border sovereignty. Elliott Abrams, who was recently named United States Special Representative for Venezuela, was previously involved in a plot to send $27 million in weapons disguised as humanitarian aid to right wing contras. Meanwhile, an airliner with links to the CIA has flown weapons into the country and the agency responsible for delivering it, USAID, has a history of torturing leftists in South America.

Poignantly, Waters warned Sanders not to “collude” with the architects of the U.S.’s coup policies: neoconservative warmongers Elliott Abrams and John Bolton, and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a champion of the wealthy right wing pink wave emigre scene in Miami.


Bernie Sanders

@SenSanders
· Feb 23, 2019
The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters.


Roger Waters

@rogerwaters
Bernie, are you f-ing kidding me! if you buy the Trump, Bolton, Abrams, Rubio line, “humanitarian intervention” and collude in the destruction of Venezuela, you cannot be credible candidate for President of the USA. Or, maybe you can, maybe you’re the perfect stooge for the 1 %.

11.6K
5:27 PM - Feb 23, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
6,659 people are talking about this
Ben Becker an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, was protesting in New York City on Saturday against the coup as Sanders called on Maduro to comply with Washington’s demands. He told MintPress:

There were actions in hundreds of cities worldwide this past weekend, endorsed by a large spectrum of progressive and anti-war organizations. I attended a protest of many hundreds at the Trump building on Wall Street, which an important target given the role of U.S. corporations and banks in strangling Venezuela’s economy. They are salivating about the oil profits in particular they would gain from regime change, a goal that the Trump administration speaks openly about.

Sanders’ Foreign Policy Advisor Matt Duss took the attacks on the Maduro government further, tweeting a headline from the pages of the Daily Beast verbatim:

Socialists Should Take a Stand on Venezuela: No Trump, No Maduro, No War.

Roger Waters performs during his "Us + Them" tour stop at Staples Center on Tuesday, June 20, 2017, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)
Roger Waters, socialists say no to Bernie and AOC’s positions on Venezuela
Posted Mar 05, 2019 by Eds.
Topics: Fascism , Imperialism , State Repression , StrategyPlaces: United States , Venezuela
Originally published: MintPress News by Alexander Rubinstein (February 25, 2019) |
While Senator Sanders seems to support a supposedly “democratic” kind of regime change in Venezuela, journalist Ben Norton, who has spent the past two weeks in Venezuela amid the flailing coup attempt, says it is the opposition that is un-democratic. On Twitter, Norton accused the Venezuelan opposition of dropping “all pretense of wanting democracy and demand[ing] a coup and war.”

As socialists rally in the United States over their country’s backing of a right wing coup in Venezuela, the supposedly socialist members of Congress–Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)–are hitting talking points that worry critics like Roger Waters and activists in the streets alike.

The Pink Floyd bassist and composer took billionaire Sir Richard Branson to task last week as he organized a benefit concert for the Venezuelan opposition in neighboring Colombia, MintPress News reported. Now, Waters, who says that “socialism is a good thing” and in 2015 backed Sanders, is wondering if he’s “f-ing kidding” us. Sanders announced his candidacy for 2020 last week.

Waters’ expression of shock was made in reply to the Senator’s tweet on Saturday, which demanded that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro “allow humanitarian aid into the country.” Waters pulled no punches, questioning whether Sanders is really “the perfect stooge for the one percent.”

The Venezuelan government has rejected U.S. aid as a pretext for further intervention and an affront to their border sovereignty. Elliott Abrams, who was recently named United States Special Representative for Venezuela, was previously involved in a plot to send $27 million in weapons disguised as humanitarian aid to right wing contras. Meanwhile, an airliner with links to the CIA has flown weapons into the country and the agency responsible for delivering it, USAID, has a history of torturing leftists in South America.

Poignantly, Waters warned Sanders not to “collude” with the architects of the U.S.’s coup policies: neoconservative warmongers Elliott Abrams and John Bolton, and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a champion of the wealthy right wing pink wave emigre scene in Miami.


Bernie Sanders

@SenSanders
· Feb 23, 2019
The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters.


Roger Waters

@rogerwaters
Bernie, are you f-ing kidding me! if you buy the Trump, Bolton, Abrams, Rubio line, “humanitarian intervention” and collude in the destruction of Venezuela, you cannot be credible candidate for President of the USA. Or, maybe you can, maybe you’re the perfect stooge for the 1 %.

11.6K
5:27 PM - Feb 23, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
6,659 people are talking about this
Ben Becker an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, was protesting in New York City on Saturday against the coup as Sanders called on Maduro to comply with Washington’s demands. He told MintPress:

There were actions in hundreds of cities worldwide this past weekend, endorsed by a large spectrum of progressive and anti-war organizations. I attended a protest of many hundreds at the Trump building on Wall Street, which an important target given the role of U.S. corporations and banks in strangling Venezuela’s economy. They are salivating about the oil profits in particular they would gain from regime change, a goal that the Trump administration speaks openly about.

Sanders’ Foreign Policy Advisor Matt Duss took the attacks on the Maduro government further, tweeting a headline from the pages of the Daily Beast verbatim:

Socialists Should Take a Stand on Venezuela: No Trump, No Maduro, No War.


Bernie Sanders

@SenSanders
· Feb 23, 2019
The people of Venezuela are enduring a serious humanitarian crisis. The Maduro government must put the needs of its people first, allow humanitarian aid into the country, and refrain from violence against protesters.


Abby Martin

@AbbyMartin
you know better than to endorse a stunt led by war criminals who have snuck weapons in aid shipments in the past. This stance will not make democrats like you more and will only lose you support from socialists

5,873
3:40 PM - Feb 23, 2019
Twitter Ads info and privacy
1,359 people are talking about this
The article, written by journalist and notorious troller of Syria anti-interventionists Charlie Davis, distanced itself from the Trump-style regime change wherein Elliott Abrams, who is associated with “death squads,” is leading the charge.

But while Davis portrays Abrams as the “bad cop,” leftwing thought leaders like himself serve as the “good cops” of empire. Yes, Trump does not “give a half a goddam about democracy,” but he is also “not necessarily wrong,” Davis argues before rambling in denunciation of Maduro’s supposed authoritarianism.

Davis also painted Ecuador’s rightward drifting government, which has placed Julian Assange in de-facto solitary confinement and issued an arrest warrant against its socialist ex-president Rafael Correa, as a “social democracy.”

Despite all this, Duss promoted the shoutout Davis gave his boss, tweeted the passage:

In the U.S., this position has been echoed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who issued a statement stressing opposition to any foreign-imposed regime change in Venezuela—while noting Venezuelans should be provided the opportunity to change their regime on their own, if they so choose.

While Senator Sanders seems to support a supposedly “democratic” kind of regime change in Venezuela, journalist Ben Norton, who has spent the past two weeks in Venezuela amid the flailing coup attempt, says it is the opposition that is un-democratic. On Twitter, Norton accused the Venezuelan opposition of dropping “all pretense of wanting democracy and demand[ing] a coup and war.” He told MintPress:

The corporate media and the U.S. government it so obediently echoes frequently claims that Venezuela is a “dictatorship,” but my past few weeks here in Caracas have shown precisely the opposite: Venezuela remains an impressively democratic country—despite non-stop foreign intervention, internal sabotage and violence from the opposition, and threats of war from the U.S. and right-wing U.S.-allied governments in Latin America.

Becker argued a similar position, telling MintPress:

The opposition has an unelected ‘president’ who proclaimed himself such at a protest, and has now exiled himself to Colombia to beg foreign governments to invade. They pressued all opposition candidates to not run in the last elections and demanded international observers to not come and observe them. Meanwhile, the Chavista government has conducted 24 elections in the last 20 years.

Becker further laid into what he characterized as a cynical stunt to provoke regime change:

As both the UN and Red Cross affirmed, ‘humanitarian aid’ by definition has to be apolitical, neutral and requested by the receiving country. This wasn’t humanitarian aid—it was a stunt designed to provide the imagery for intervention. Venezuela accepted just this week ten times more actual aid from Russia, Cuba, China and the Pan American Health Organization. The Maduro government’s stance on this is completely logical: it won’t accept phony “aid” from the countries that are simultaneously stealing the government’s assets, sanctioning their industries and seizing their bank accounts—all of which makes it harder to import food and medicine.

He added that Sanders had received backlash from fellow Democrats merely for refusing to recognize Juan Guaido as President of Venezuela.

Sanders’ tactic for years has been to run to the right on foreign policy issues so as to protect his New Deal-style domestic program. He’s always distanced himself from actual socialist projects that have been targeted and demonized by the U.S. Empire to assure the corporate-owned media that his vision is closer to Denmark or Sweden. Now that Sanders is a main target of Trump’s anti-socialist rhetoric and that he’s a potential front-runner for the nomination, I expect we’ll see more of that from him.

The Anti-Maduro Millennial
During an Instagram Live, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attacked the Maduro government. “What people don’t understand is that this is really kind of an issue of authoritarianism versus democracy in many different ways,” she said. “This is really an issue of a failure of democracy.”

Because Instagram Live videos are automatically deleted after 24 hours, the clip in which Cortez spoke on Venezuela was brought to light by a right wing account which attacked her for live streaming herself cooking while giving “cooking lessons, dating tips and even interior design advice.”

Cortez said she wanted to “empower and center the people of Venezuela and the will of the public.”

“What I believe in above all else is a true democracy; is democracy as a form of government; democracy in the workplace; democracy in our economy,” Cortez said. But Norton has seen just that as he has “traveled through barrios interviewing average working-class Venezuelans.” He says he has been “blown away by the democratic and revolutionary spirit that still pervades the community, despite the economic difficulties that do indeed exist—in no small part because of years of crippling U.S. sanctions, economic warfare, and a de facto embargo, along with well-documented speculation and hoarding by capitalists inside the country.”

“The Chavista movement has encouraged democracy at many levels, from thriving communes and local councils to feminist organizations and the community-organized CLAP [Local Food Production and Provision Committees] food program,” Norton added.

“Instead of accepting all the propaganda against Venezuela,” Becker argues, “people who consider themselves democratic socialists should really study it for themselves.” He continued:

Venezuela’s socialists have held and won many elections and used the electoral process to carry out major wealth redistributions in favor of the poor and working class, with missions for housing, health care and education. But it provoked a massive backlash of course from the oligarchy, and the world’s major financial and corporate powers. The ‘billionaire class’ doesn’t just give up their power without a fight and has a lot of tools at their disposal—that’s true in Venezuela and the United States.

The initial tweets from her colleague Ilhan Omar were far clearer, based in a principled anti-war position and even provided context about the roots of Venezuela’s economic crisis. By contrast, Ocasio-Cortes is following the same strategy as Sen. Sanders, which falsely believes you can advance a progressive agenda (and your own career) at home by saying as little as possible about foreign policy and conceding to the rhetoric of anti-communism.

There are certain things that the U.S. ruling class can tolerate debate over in terms of domestic policy, but on the bottom line issue of the U.S. Empire, they all unite when it’s time to attack. The corporate-owned media makes sure no one gets out of line and you are cast out as a pariah.

Importantly, Cortez also slammed Elliott Abrams from the left, saying that he “pled guilty to crimes” in relation to the Iran-Contra scandal. She added that Abrams is a “legit criminal. Plead guilty.”

While the is no question that Abrams the other gangsters running U.S. regime change projects throughout the Cold War to today are not innocent, Cortez repeated a tired trope of criminal justice hawks: that people are “legit criminals” so long as they “plead guilty.” Studies show that 97 percent of federal defendants resolve their cases through plea bargaining.

“If anything, reporting here at the grassroots in Venezuela has further clarified to me how authoritarian my own country is: The United States, the world’s biggest incarceration nation, could stand to learn a lesson about democracy from Venezuelans,” Norton told MintPress News.

https://mronline.org/2019/03/05/roger-w ... venezuela/

Screen shots at link.
Norton does OK here but ya gotta watch 'em. He was 6 kinds a wrong about Syria Until the tide was in Syria's favor.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Mon Mar 25, 2019 12:59 pm

LIBERALISM'S HYPOCRISY: A CASE STUDY OF THE AMERICAN SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS

01.05.2018
USA
Alexander Azadgan
So you still believe Bernie Sanders (the 2016 presidential candidate) is an anti-establishment/anti-war politician?

1. He voted in favor of use of force (euphemism for bombing) 12 sovereign nations that never represented a threat to the U.S.:

1) Afghanistan.
2) Lebanon.
3) Libya.
4) Palestine.
5) Somalia
6) Syria.
7) Yemen.
8) Yugoslavia
9) Haiti
10) Liberia
11) Zaire (Congo)
12) Sudan

2. He has accepted campaign money from Defense contractor Raytheon, a defense contractor, he continues his undying support of the $1.5 trillion F-35 industry and said that predator drones "have done some very good things". Sanders has always voted in favor of awarding more corporate welfare for the military industrial complex - and even if he says he's against a particular war he ends up voting in favor of funding it.

3. He routinely backs appropriations for imperial wars, the corporate scam of Obamacare, wholesale surveillance and bloated defense budgets. He loves to bluster about corporate welfare and big banks but he voted for funding the Commodity Futures “Modernization” Act which deregulated commercial banks and created an “unregulated market in derivatives and swaps” which was the major contributor to the 2007 economic crisis.

4. Regardless of calling himself an "independent", Sanders is a member of the Democratic caucus and votes 98% of the time with the Democrats and votes in the exact same way as war criminal Hillary Clinton 93% of the time. Sanders 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.

5. The sheepdog is a card the Democratic Party plays when there’s no White House Democrat running for re-election. 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,.... 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. In 2004 he called on Ralph Nader to abandon his presidential campaign.

The Democratic Party has played this "sheep dog" card at least 7-8 times in the past utilizing collaborators such as Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, Jerry Brown in 1992, Al Sharpton in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, Dennis Kucinich in 2008 and in 2016 was Bernie Sanders' turn.

6. Regardless of calling himself a "socialist" he labeled the late Hugo Chávez, architect of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela responsible for lifting millions of lives out of poverty “a dead communist dictator.” Then he saddled up for a photo op with Evo Morales at the Vatican and also voted to extradite former Black Panther member, Assata Shakur.

7. He refers to ISIS' godfather and warmonger extraordinaire John McCain as "my friend and a very, very decent person."

8. He routinely parrots the DNC lines: "the Russians hacked our elections" despite there is no evidence of such hacking, but lowered his head and tucked tail when the DNC actually rigged the primary elections against him, proving he is more loyal to the Democratic (war) Party than to the millions of people who supported him and donated to his fraudulent campaign.

9. He expressed staunch support for the aid of violently right-wing separatist forces such as the self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army, whose members were trained as Mujahideen, during Clinton's 100-day bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo in 1999. He has an extensive record of supporting jihadist proxies for the overthrow of sovereign governments in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

10. He supported Bill Clinton's sanctions against Iraq, sanctions that prohibited medicines for infants and children...more than 500,000 innocents killed for no other reason than that they were Iraqi.

11. He said yes in a voice vote to the Clinton-era crime Bill, the Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which expanded the death penalty to cover 60 offenses. So he is obviously pro-death penalty.

12. In the 2016 elections, he betrayed millions of people that believed in him when after making the central point of his campaign the fight against Wall Street he instructed his followers to vote for Wall Street's candidate, war criminal/corporate criminal Hillary Clinton.

You cannot be committed to "fight Wall Street" and abruptly endorse the Wall Street candidate.

If you were to do this with a car transmission, you'd strip your gears - this is why why it baffles me when people speak of him in tones of reverence and awe.

https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/l ... ie-sanders

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Mon Mar 25, 2019 1:07 pm

Bernie, War & the Empire’s Pie
by CHRIS ERNESTO

As candidates prepare for Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate in Iowa, it will be interesting to see how Bernie Sanders continues the ruse of promoting himself as a peace candidate.

It will be even more interesting to see if Sanders supporters continue to give him a free pass on foreign policy issues simply because they align with his social and economic agenda.

Yeah, Bernie is pro-war

Based on his responses during the first debate and statements posted on his website, Sanders is clearly not the anti-war candidate he claims to be.

“I supported the war in Afghanistan. I supported President Clinton’s effort to deal with ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. I support air strikes in Syria and what the president is trying to do,” stated Sanders during the first debate.

“Yes, I happen to believe from the bottom of my heart that war should be the last resort, that we have got to exercise diplomacy. But yes, I am prepared to take this country into war if that is necessary,” said Sanders, jumping at the chance to make sure everyone knows that he is not opposed to war.

Fortunately for Sanders – who is hoping to court anti-war Democrats and Independents – he wasn’t asked if he supports the Saudi Arabian dictatorship’s invasion of Yemen ( he does).

Nor was he asked if he supports the coup government in Ukraine ( he does).

And he wasn’t asked about his position on Israel/Palestine (he typically votes for funding to Israel and supported their 2014 war on Gaza).

Maybe in Saturday’s second debate Sanders will be asked about his belligerent and misguided position on Russia . Just like other presidential candidates, Sanders demonizes Russia and says that although he’d prefer to deal with them diplomatically, “force should be the last option we use.” In other words, war with Russia is on the table for Bernie.

Champion of working class Americans (not working class Russians or Iranians)

Sanders supports economic sanctions on Russia as a means of dealing with Russian “aggression.” The irony of Sanders supporting economic sanctions that harm the working class of Russia is obviously lost on Sanders-backers in the U.S. who put him on a pedestal for being a champion of the American working class.

Sanders also believes that economic sanctions should be levied again on Iran if it doesn’t follow the rules of the recently agreed upon nuclear pact. Sanders must not care about the working class in Iran, given that poverty there rose from 22% to more than 40% during the first year and half of U.S. sanctions.

And although he doesn’t appear to be quite as hawkish on Iran as other candidates, Sanders still repeats the party line that “it is imperative that Iran not get a nuclear weapon,” without saying that the U.S. will first give up all of its nuclear weapons before telling another country what it can or can’t do.

‘Give me a piece of the Empire’s pie’

From an anti-war perspective, Sanders is bad on Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, Palestine, Russia and Iran. But since he’s not quite as bad as the other presidential candidates, many liberals are lining up to support him because of his positions on social and economic issues, and because he is one of the few people speaking out against Citizens United.

And, of course, people are really excited about Sanders because he has a track record of trying to redistribute wealth in America.

And that’s the bottom line for many liberals. As long as Bernie gives them a bigger piece of the American Empire’s pie they are fine with him being pro-war.

It would be easier to swallow the fact that so many liberals are cheering for a pro-war candidate if they would just be honest and say, “I know Sanders is a pro-war candidate, but he said he’s going to give me a piece of the Empire’s pie, so I’m going to vote for him.”

It would be even better if those same people stated that they would accept responsibility for supporting a pro-war candidate, namely that they would do everything in their power to stop a Sanders presidency from engaging in any war.

But those people won’t be honest – many of them won’t even admit that Sanders is a supporter of so many U.S. military ventures, even when faced with the facts – nor will they accept responsibility, simply because they are not truly opposed to war. If they were, there would be absolutely no circumstance in which they would support a presidential candidate who believes in dropping bombs on another country.

Imagine if Sanders said he believes that every now and then it was necessary to molest a child, or there were certain instances in which it was acceptable to racially discriminate.

Would the people who support Sanders today still support him? Of course not, and they shouldn’t. So does that mean child molestation and racial discrimination are worse than war to Sanders supporters?

(In fairness, there are liberals who support Sanders simply because he aligns with their social values, not because of what he could do for their pocketbook, which is relatively refreshing. But those people are giving domestic social issues more weight than Sanders’ pro-war positions. The rationalization being that all candidates are pro-war, and at least Sanders is better than the others on social issues.)

Use a different gold standard

It’s true that Bernie is probably better than George W. Bush, Barack Obama or any current presidential candidate on issues of foreign policy, but that’s not saying much. Will liberals ever demand a new gold standard from their candidates?

Many Sanders supporters point out that Hillary Clinton is more rah-rah military than Sanders, primarily because Sanders didn’t support the Iraq war. But Donald Trump didn’t support the Iraq war either, and Trump’s position on U.S. military action in Syria is better than Sanders’ position.

And it should be noted that even though Sanders opposed the Iraq war, he repeatedly voted to fund it. And even though he voted against the Gulf War, he instead called for sanctions on Iraq – the death toll attributed to those sanctions has been estimated at about 500,000 children under the age of five between 1990-2000. (Sanders’ website labels such sanctions as “diplomatic means”.)

Does Sanders have supporters in Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan?

Do you think people in Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan are comfortable with Sanders’ positions? Could a Sanders supporter look a 14 year-old from Afghanistan (who has lived under U.S. bombs every day of his or her life) in the eye and explain why they support Sanders – a man who voted to use force in Afghanistan?

Isn’t it time to look beyond our personal needs and wants and focus on others who are suffering and dying in the name of the American Empire?

‘We have to choose one, and Bernie is the best choice’

This way of thinking is one reason we have such narrow choices in each election. If voters in 2004 would have demanded more from John Kerry (who was, and still is, pro-war) when he was running against George W. Bush, the Democratic Party might have realized that unless they put an anti-war candidate on the ballot, their party couldn’t win an election. But the party doesn’t need to do that because so-called anti-war voters continue to vote for the “lesser of two evils.” And where has that gotten us?

Numerous people did the same thing in 2008 for the first Barack Obama election. Even though it was clear Obama was not an anti-war candidate (“I’m not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars,” Obama said in 2002), people believed he was better than John McCain. And even though Obama was a warmonger during his first term, many liberals voted for him again in 2012 because they were so afraid of what a Mitt Romney presidency would look live.

As it turns out, Obama has bombed more countries (7) than Bush bombed (4), so from a purely anti-war perspective, it might be better if a Republican becomes president again. And maybe with a Republican president many liberals would become “anti-war” again.

(It should be noted that there are some people who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 who are still active in the anti-war community. These people understand the importance of everyday actions relative to voting, and have accepted responsibility for their vote.)

What am I supposed to do?

Instead of unconditionally giving Sanders their support, people who claim to be opposed to U.S. foreign interventions should make it clear that they will not support Sanders unless he changes his foreign policy positions.

It may not work this election cycle, but liberals should have thought about that in 2004, 2008 and 2012 when they voted for a pro-war candidate.

And what are Sanders supporters going to do if he doesn’t win the nomination? Would they vote for Clinton in the general election simply because, in their mind, she is better than the Republican nominee on social and economic issues?

That’s fine if the answer is yes, but will those people then take responsibility for voting for a warmonger for president? Will those people be the ones leading anti-war demonstrations?

Maybe people should support and vote for someone that they believe in, regardless of whether or not they think that candidate has a chance to win. Writing in the name of Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill or Edward Snowden would send a message to the Democratic Party that acting like the Republican Party on foreign policy matters will no longer work.

A former Sanders staffer, Jeremy Brecher, resigned in 1999 due to Sanders supporting the U.S. war in Kosovo. In his resignation letter, Brecher wrote, “Is there a moral limit to the military violence you are willing to participate in or support? Where does that limit lie? And when that limit has been reached, what action will you take?”

That’s a good question for today’s Sanders supporters. How much military violence are you willing to vote for? What is your limit? And once that limit is reached, what will you do about it?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/13 ... pires-pie/

User avatar
blindpig
Posts: 10592
Joined: Fri Jul 14, 2017 5:44 pm
Location: Turtle Island
Contact:

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 17, 2019 2:21 pm

Bernie Sander's Foreign Policy Vision Is Incoherent And Dangerous

While Sanders positions himself as an anti-war candidate, so too did Trump. Sanders even echoes the Trump talking points: China and Russia are our enemies; Maduro won his presidency through election fraud; and Iran is a sponsor of terror.

by Alexander Rubinstein


April 16th, 2019


Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is now leading the pack of Democratic contenders for the 2020 presidential nomination. In the previous election cycle, Sanders served as an anti-establishment underdog, bucking Democratic orthodoxy with a strong progressive economic message. But this time the field is more crowded with like-minded candidates –“progressives” like Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris. It follows then that in order to distinguish himself, Sanders needs visionary solutions to problems outside of the economic realm. In the foreign policy arena, however, he is looking for inspiration on Israel-Palestine from tried-and-failed Democratic presidents of the past — namely, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — all while echoing Trump and Bush Jr. administration talking points.

Sanders has also brought one Robert Malley onto his foreign policy team. Malley served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council as “Special Assistant to President Obama & Senior Adviser to the President for the Counter-ISIL Campaign” from February 2014 to January 2017. Under his watch, the U.S led operations which saw the near-total destruction of the historic cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria.

Despite this, the New York Times opinion section has said Sanders “stands as one of the few candidates with a fully formed vision for American foreign policy,” while The Atlantic claims “It’s Foreign Policy That Distinguishes Bernie This Time.”

As journalist Mathew Yglesias — who is not necessarily known for his moral clarity but is indisputably one of the more knowledgeable wonks on Washington’s most boring inner workings — noted, “There are two main things the president actually does — executive branch appointments, which nobody is really talking about, and then foreign policy.”

Sanders has worked hard to lay out his 2020 foreign policy vision in April. It was the subject of an in-depth article in The New Yorker, and he also touched briefly on it in a Fox News town hall on Monday.

In the New Yorker piece, journalist Benjamin Wallace-Wells recounts his interview with Sanders and his foreign policy advisor, Matt Duss, a former “Policy Analyst” at the notoriously anti-Sanders Center for American Progress, which receives funding from the United Arab Emirates.

Right away, Wallace-Wells notes that “Sanders had scarcely talked about foreign affairs in his 2016 campaign.” This time seems different, however.

Still, Sanders hasn’t done all of his homework, and openly admits it. After getting into some of the nitty-gritty of international affairs and the historic role of U.S. foreign policy, Sanders concedes to Wallace-Wells:

Let me — I should have prefaced everything that I said by saying I most certainly do not believe that I have all the answers, or that this is easy stuff. I mean, you’re dealing with so much — my God.”

A bit later in the story, Sanders seems to blame the ignorance he just owned up to for much of the world’s woes: “You know, a lot of attitudes about foreign policy are based on lack of knowledge.”

A decent staff, except . . .
Earnestly, Wallace-Wells notes that Sanders’ full foreign policy team left him “surprised” by “how mainstream they seemed.”

Among them:

Joe Cirincione, the antinuclear advocate; …Robert Malley, who coördinated Middle East policy in Obama’s National Security Council and is now the president of the International Crisis Group; Suzanne DiMaggio, a specialist in negotiations with adversaries at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Vali Nasr, the dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced Studies at Johns Hopkins and a specialist in the Shia-Sunni divide.”

Joe Cirincione is a well-known and well-respected progressive figure devoted to denuclearization. Suzanne DiMaggio, for her part, has received praise from Timothy Shorrock — a leading progressive journalist focused on the defense industry and the Korean Peninsula. Her words have also been featured by 38 North, which is arguably the fairest outlet focusing on North Korea and is distinguished by its facts-first approach. She is, however, indisputably part of the establishment, as is respected enough by members of the U.S. Senate that her advice was sought after Trump agreed to an initial meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Like DiMaggio, Vali Nasr appears to be cut from the cloth of dovish foreign policy “experts.” He once wrote: “Without Iran’s military reach and the strength of its network of allies and clients in Iraq and Syria, ISIS would have quickly swept through Damascus, Baghdad, and Erbil.”

Malley is, in truth, the most objectionable of Sanders’ foreign policy team. As Wallace-Wells noted, Malley served as Obama’s Middle East coordinator.

He also worked as an advisor to Obama on the U.S. counter-ISIS campaign up until January 2017. That campaign, notably, included the destruction of Raqqa (80 percent destroyed) and Mosul (eight million tons of debris and 90 percent of the Western portion of the city destroyed.) Malley also spent six months as a Senior Fellow at the ultra-hawkish Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

And Malley also worked for about two and a half years under Clinton as his “Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs.” He has previously caught the attention of the venerable Palestinian journalist Ali Abunimah, who has tweeted:

Malley isn’t ‘pro-Palestinian.’ He’s a liberal Zionist who believes in and wants to bring about ‘two state’ segregation by soft means.

Peace process industrialists like Robert Malley can never recognize role of BDS or speak openly about [a] one-state solution.”


On Israel-Palestine, Sanders invoked former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as a source of inspiration for him.

As MintPress News has previously covered the policies of those presidents (in contrast with the positioning of President Donald Trump):

Unlike previous U.S. presidents, who have meddled in Israeli elections in order to support peace processes, Trump is doing the opposite by appeasing the settler movement… While Washington orthodoxy dictates strict adherence to a two-state solution, the idea has long stalled a real resolution to Israeli apartheid, as Israeli settlers continue to make bold land grabs. The far-right president, in bucking the trend of supporting peace processes so doomed, coupled with the far-right prime minister [Benjamin Netanyahu], now emboldened by his fifth premiership, are on a path to see the total disappearance of historical Palestine from the map.”

There is no doubt that Sanders’ presidency would make a real solution to Israeli apartheid less improbable than a second Trump term would. Nor is their any doubt that his foreign policy is markedly less hawkish than that of many in the Democratic field. But he is also flanked from the left by candidates like Tulsi Gabbard and Mike Gravel, and so it is worth examining his milquetoast antidotes with this context in mind.

Sanders’ “solutions”
Sanders — despite being almost 80 years old — is getting hip to the desires of young progressives in the foreign policy realm. As DiMaggio correctly points out:

The case for restraint seems to be gaining ground, particularly in its rejection of preventive wars and efforts to change the regimes of countries that do not directly threaten the United States.”

In other words, the “humanitarian intervention” canard is losing its selling power. Moreover, Sanders rightfully puts more blame on the U.S. for various foreign policy failures over the years. He says:

“How many people in the United States understand that we overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran to put in the Shah? Which then led to the Revolution. How many people in this country do you think know that? So we’re going to have to do a little bit of educating on that.”

But Iran’s revolution was 40 years ago — about half of Sanders’ lifetime. When it comes to Iran today, Sanders differs drastically from the aforementioned views of Nasr, which painted Iran as a force for anti-terrorism in the Middle East. Sanders explicitly rejected this conception of Iran, saying Tehran is “involved in terrorism, doing a lot of bad things.”

In the case of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, as well as the Israel-Palestine conflict, Sanders makes “both sides” arguments. On Saudi Arabia, he says “I don’t see why we’d be following the lead or seen as a very, very close ally of a despotic, un-democratic regime.”

Of course, Saudi Arabia is a theocratic petro-monarchy. Denouncing it as “un-democratic” is about the least imaginative criticism conceivable. To Sanders’ credit, however, he has been a leader in efforts to put an end to U.S. support for the Saudi war on Yemen.



Sanders went even further on Fox News, arguing that “Saudi Arabia should not be determining the military or foreign policy of this country.”

For a moment, imagine that Sanders had used that same phrasing regarding Israel, whose lobbyists hold far more sway over elected officials in the U.S.: he would be relentlessly condemned as anti-Semitic or a “self-loathing Jew” — at least, presumably, as he has never made criticism so harsh of the apartheid state and its America lobby. He did, however, say that Representative Ilhan Omar can do a “better job in speaking to the Jewish community,” but rejected the idea that she is an anti-Semite.

Regarding the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which Sanders seems to mischaracterize as religious instead of geopolitical, he said the U.S., under his watch, would not be “going to be spending trillions of dollars and losing American lives because of [their] long-standing hostilities.”

On Israel-Palestine, Sanders said the following:

While I am very critical of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s right-wing government, I am not impressed by what I am seeing from Palestinian leadership, as well.

It’s corrupt in many cases, and certainly not effective.”

It is true that Hamas has had problems with corruption, and the Palestinian Authority is far from effective. But Hamas was democratically elected to lead Gaza. In contrast, Netanyahu won his fifth premiership with help from his Likud Party, which hired a PR firm to place 1,200 hidden cameras in Arab polling places. The firm even boasted that, in those areas, the cameras and the uproar they caused “managed to lower the voter turnout to under 50 percent, the lowest in years!”

Sanders’ prescription for the Israel-Palestine conflict is to cut U.S. aid to Israel. But asked whether the aid would be “contingent” on “fuller political rights for Palestinians,” Sanders said he’s “not going to get into the specifics.”

Sanders has previously rejected the prospect of equal rights for Palestinians, saying in 2017 that “if that happens,” in the context of a one-state solution, “that would be the end of Israel.” In the same interview, Sanders said “I don’t support [the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement],” which seeks to economically pressure Israel and Israeli companies into ending apartheid and respecting Palestinian human rights.

In other words, the proper way to reproach Israeli apartheid is to stop giving Israel free handouts. Sanders himself noted that “$3.8 billion is a lot of money!” But sanctioning Israel for its human rights abuses is out of the question.

Let us use a quick metaphor to describe this approach: your child is throwing a fit in the supermarket, knocking over racks of goods and shoveling cereal boxes onto the ground. Instead of grounding them, you say “that’s it! We’re not going to the toy store.”

This approach is in line with his hardline economic angles on almost every issue. In the New Yorker article, Sanders said that the $6 trillion spent on the War on Terror since 2001 is “an unbelievable amount of money.” But the human cost of the War on Terror goes unmentioned.



“I’m not proposing anything particularly radical,” Sanders admitted. “And that is that the United States should have an even-handed approach both to Israel and the Palestinians.”

The Intercept | Sanders
The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan has also previously hailed Sanders’ “radical foreign policy.”

Perhaps even more troubling than Sanders’ views on Israel are his positions on Venezuela. He expressed worry at what he calls the “rise of a new authoritarian axis” — echoing the “Axis of evil” talking point elevated by George W. Bush.

Asked whether Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, was part of that axis, Sanders said:

Yeah. …

It is a failed regime. From all of the recent evidence, it appears that the election was fraudulent. And, despite his ideology, what we need to see is democracy established in Venezuela. That does not mean deciding that some politician is the new President, who never won any election.

The world community has got to be mindful of the humanitarian suffering and the hunger that’s going on in Venezuela right now. But, at the end of the day, I think what you want in one of the largest countries in Latin America is free and fair elections, and we want to do everything we can to establish democracy there.”

There is no evidence of electoral fraud in Venezuela. It is also worth noting that, while Sanders rejected the U.S.-backed coup leader Juan Guaidó, his inclusion of Venezuela in the “authoritarian axis” follows in the footsteps of the Trump administration’s own rebrand of the “axis of evil” — the “troika of tyranny.” While Sanders undoubtedly has ruled out the possibility of a military intervention in Venezuela should he become president, he says nothing of rolling back sanctions against Venezuela — or Iran, for that matter.

“I have reviewed sanctions across the world. Very few of them have really been a positive, helpful factor,” the UN special rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures recently told The Grayzone. “It’s like going into microsurgery using a kitchen knife. It’s a very blunt tool to achieve [regime change].”

While Sanders positions himself as an anti-war candidate, so too did Trump. And he echoes the Trump talking points: China and Russia are our enemies; Maduro won his presidency through election fraud; and Iran is a sponsor of terror.



In a rare mainstream media broadcasting of an anti-interventionist Syrian-American, a real estate agent named Tony asked Sanders in his town hall on Fox News on Monday whether he would “partake in any foreign affairs that don’t directly affect our national security,” adding, “I believe we need to stay out of Syria, Venezuela, and other countries.”

Sanders’ immediately touted his anti-Iraq war credentials before doing the same regarding his record on Yemen. But before long, he said, “clearly we are concerned about China and concerned about Russia.”

“Clearly we need a strong defense,” Sanders added.

Sanders has previously, and repeatedly, called for countries that have funded and armed the jihadist proxy war in Syria — Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, et al. — to “get their hands dirty, their boots on the ground” in Syria.



Imagine all the farmers
One anecdote from the New Yorker article lays bare the candidate’s half baked solutions to foreign policy as a chief executive:

He remembered, in a gauzy way, a program he had overseen as the mayor of Burlington, in which kids from his city traveled to the Soviet city of Yaroslavl, and Russian children traveled to Vermont.”

Sanders has sought to implement similar solutions even more recently, having proposed a failed amendment to dedicate 0.1 percent of the military budget “to support exchange programs to bring foreign teenagers to the U.S. and send American kids abroad.”

“To bring farmers from Turkey to farmers in Iowa. You know, just to get people to see each other as human beings. I think it could go a distance,” Sanders said.

Turkey? More like bologna. While a Soviet-U.S. exchange program, during the Cold War, is a solid program that could have, if nationally implemented, perhaps even altered the course of world history, the prospect of Turkish farmers going to Iowa or vice-versa seems purposefully meaningless. Turkey is, after all, a nuke-holding NATO ally.

Wallce-Wells, the New Yorker reporter, smartly noted that Sanders’ list of enemies — the “authoritarian axis” — was a lot better defined than his list of allies. And so, he “asked about where he thought his allies might come from.” The candidate deflected from offering a real strategy, however, arguing that climate change will help usher in a new era of global solidarity and peacebuilding.

Maybe I’m wrong on this, or maybe I’m seeing something that other people don’t see, but I look at climate change as a very, very serious threat — to the entire planet, to every country on earth.”

Sanders made the exact same deflection in his Fox News town hall. After bloviating about “concerns” with Russia and China, he placed climate change front and center of the “national security” debate.

This vision for a new era of international cooperation is lofty and utopian enough to make even John Lennon’s eyes roll in his grave.

Top photo | Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., steps off a Black Hawk helicopter at the Afghan National Police Academy Feb. 20, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Sanders was part of a congressional delegation visiting the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan supported training site, Feb. 20, 2011. Ernesto Hernandez Fonte | DVIDS

Alexander Rubinstein is a staff writer for MintPress News based in Washington, DC. He reports on police, prisons and protests in the United States and the United States’ policing of the world. He previously reported for RT and Sputnik News.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/here-is-w ... us/257480/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Wed Nov 13, 2019 2:19 am

Sanders and the Left
Where do we go from here?
By Lance Selfa
Issue #104: Features

The disastrous result of the 2016 presidential election overshadowed one of the only positive developments of the dispiriting campaign: the support a self-described socialist attracted in the Democratic primaries. For a brief moment, it seemed, the rhetoric of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, in challenging the coronation of Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, injected a semblance of reality and raised expectations in an otherwise dreary election season involving two deeply unpopular candidates.1

Now, following the Electoral College’s selection of Donald Trump as president, it becomes more important to assess the arc of the Sanders campaign. That’s because many of the more than 13 million who voted for him in the Democratic primaries—and millions more who have made him the most popular politician in the United States2—may look to him for cues on how to oppose the reactionary Trump regime.

Given how the miserable election ended up, it’s difficult to remember that Trump wasn’t the only candidate who turned out thousands to huge rallies. In fact,

when Sanders packed more than 10,000 people into an arena in Madison, Wisconsin in June 2015, it was the biggest rally for any candidate during the primary season. Thousands responded to his indictment of the “billionaire class” and eagerly sought to join up with his self-styled “political revolution.” Yet the Democratic Party establishment succeeded in pushing the Sanders campaign out of contention.

To the Democrat leadership, the Sanders campaign was supposed to perform a service of energizing the people that Clinton couldn’t. He’d have his chance on the public stage, and then would move into the wings in favor of Clinton. The revelations from hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails, released by WikiLeaks, demonstrated that the supposedly “neutral” DNC wired the process in favor of Clinton from the start. In fact, those revelations were so damning that they forced DNC chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign during the Democratic convention in July. By then, the deed was done, and Clinton was assured the nomination.

Moreover, the chatter between Clinton advisers revealed in the WikiLeaks email drops showed them planning right-wing smears against Sanders. One of her advisers even likened Democratic base supporters of Sanders’s signature call for a $15.00 an hour minimum wage to the “Red Army.”3 Finally, WikiLeaks demonstrated that all of the criticisms that Sanders leveled against Clinton during the primaries—that she was in the pocket of the Wall Street banks, that her Democratic primary opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline was opportunistic, and that party primaries were rigged against him, among others—were more correct than he even knew.4 The cynicism of the Democratic Party was starkly revealed in the WikiLeaks revelation that DNC leaders talked of “elevating” Trump—seen as “unpalatable to the majority” and therefore unelectable—months before he was chosen as the GOP candidate.5

And yet, by the time all of these revelations saw light—and long after they were useful as fodder in the Clinton-Sanders primary election contest—they disappeared from the national political conversation. Of course, the media obsession with “horserace” coverage of the Trump-Clinton contest partially explained this. But a more pertinent—and important—explanation was found in the fact that Sanders himself refused to make them an issue.

“The job of the progressive movement now is to look forward, not backward,” Sanders said in a statement to NBC News. “No matter what Secretary Clinton may have said years ago, behind closed doors, what’s important today is that millions of people stand up and demand that the Democratic Party implement the most progressive platform in the history of our country.”6

From “political revolution” to lesser evilism

During the Democratic primaries, Sanders gained support with segments of the “rising American electorate”7 for one main reason: he spoke directly to the realities of class inequality in the United States and raised the expectations of his supporters that something could be done about it. His appeals and policy positions fell under his call for a “political revolution.” This slogan was both savvy and telling. Savvy, in that it appealed to millions whom the political system had abandoned, and for whom the idea of a radical shakeup (or “revolution”) didn’t sound so bad. Telling, because the actual content of the Sanders political revolution amounted to reforming the Democratic Party, encouraging “progressives” to run for office as Democrats, and campaign finance reform to check the influence of “millionaires and billionaires” on the US electoral and government system.

Even though Sanders advocated a number of policy positions that are radical when compared to today’s neoliberalized and corrupted conventional wisdom, his campaign was actually quite conventional. It was, as were Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition campaigns of the 1980s before it, an electoral campaign waged inside one of the two main political parties of American capitalism. Campaign “insider” reports emerging near the end of the primary season noted that Sanders’s top command chose to spend much of its prodigious fundraising haul on expensive, old-school television ads rather than grassroots field organizing.8 If the Sanders campaign wasn’t willing (or able) to organize a “grassroots army” during its primary campaign, it’s unlikely that it will leave much of an infrastructure of activists behind.

Subsequent developments seemed to bear this out. When Sanders announced his continuing vehicle, Our Revolution, in August 2016, four key staffers quit in protest.9 They objected to Sanders’s choice of Jeff Weaver, his longtime campaign manager, as director of the organization. They also opposed its tax status. To them, this indicated that Our Revolution would be just another Democratic Party super PAC accepting unlimited and anonymous donations, and funneling them into Democratic Party electoral campaigns, rather than into grassroots organizing.

The announcement of Our Revolution followed a few weeks after Sanders rendered his greatest service to the Democratic Party. In the midst of its Philadelphia convention, when the first WikiLeaks revelations were exposing the DNC’s blatant favoritism toward Clinton, Sanders moved to quell a revolt of a minority of his pledged delegates on the convention floor. Some Sanders delegates chanted “no war” during a speech by former CIA director Leon Panetta, and a few hundred walked out of the convention. But Sanders stepped to his long-established role. Not only did he endorse Clinton, he actually moved to throw all of his delegates behind her nomination. This allowed Democratic leaders to tout unprecedented party unity, and saved Clinton the embarrassment of seeing how Sanders delegates really felt about her during the convention roll call vote. Sanders, having performed these “sheepdog” duties, received fulsome praise from Clintonite operatives who had, only a few months earlier, been calling Sanders and his supporters racist, sexist, “privileged” and the like.10

Television coverage of Sanders’s Clinton endorsement speech zoomed in on groups of young Sanders delegates shouting or weeping as Sanders threw his support behind someone who he had rightly criticized as one of the worst representatives of the corrupt bipartisan Washington establishment. And while one could sympathize with the sense of betrayal some young Sandernistas may have felt, Sanders and his closest advisers were hardly babes in the woods. They knew what they were getting into, and they knew what would be expected of them.

After the Democratic convention, Sanders served as a Clinton surrogate, one of whose main tasks was to dissuade his supporters from supporting the Green Party’s Jill Stein for president. “When we’re talking about president of the United States, in my own personal view, this is not the time for a protest vote,” Sanders told the Washington Post. “This is [the] time to elect Hillary Clinton and then work after the election to mobilize millions of people to make sure she can be the most progressive president she can be.”11

In the long history of “insurgent” campaigns inside the Democratic Party—Eugene McCarthy’s run against Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1968, Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” runs in the 1980s, or Dennis Kucinich’s antiwar campaigns in the George W. Bush years—the challenger may win “hearts and minds” of the most committed Democratic partisans. But, in the end, they become loyal soldiers in helping to herd their supporters behind the establishment choice.

As it was in the past, so it was in 2016. Only this time, the “insurgent” was a self-described socialist and (formerly) political independent who animated millions—only to deliver them over to the candidate social-democratic scholar Adolph Reed Jr. dubbed a “lying, neoliberal warmonger.”12 Tragically, Sanders not only campaigned for Clinton, but also he promoted her as the standard-bearer of his platform.

Far from helping to popularize “progressive” issues in the general election, Sanders’s work to elect Clinton helped her to marginalize any commitments to them. For most of the general election campaign, Clinton tailored her appeals to “moderate” Republicans repelled by Trump’s vulgarity and worried that Trump’s election would damage the country’s image overseas. Needless to say, a strategy of wooing suburban Republicans didn’t foreground issues of class and racial inequality in the United States. So Sanders tagged along to assure Democratic “base” voters that Clinton really was committed to implementing “the most progressive Democratic platform in history.” The disconnect between the issues that most voters care about and the imperatives of down-and-dirty electioneering came into sharp relief in October in Colorado. Sanders appeared at two rallies on successive days—one with liberal Senator Elizabeth Warren to boost Clinton—and then at a separate rally to support a state initiative for single-payer health care that was opposed by Clinton, Warren, and the Democratic state governor.

The debate on the left

If Sanders’s trajectory could have been predicted more than a year ago, the ISR was among a surprising few self-declared left wing or socialist publications in doing so. The ISR, like many others, recognized the potential of Sanders’s campaign to inject a discussion of “socialism” into mainstream political debate. We identified with the millions of people who gravitated to Sanders as an alternative to the neoliberal status quo. But unlike many others on the left, from Jacobin to Socialist Alternative, to many leftists around the world, we consistently upheld a policy of political action independent of the capitalist parties. For that reason, Sanders’s run inside the Democratic Party was a nonstarter whose end, as described above, was entirely predictable from other similar attempts in the past.

An independent Sanders campaign could have laid the basis for, in the words of a statement issued by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the “growth of a democratic socialist movement that emphasizes the interconnectedness of all of the struggles and the structural character of the reforms needed to make real and lasting change” outside the confines of Democratic Party.13 But given the entire set-up of the campaign, including Sanders’s agreement to join the Democratic Party and to follow its rules, that’s not what happened. The National Nurses United-sponsored People’s Summit, held in Chicago in June 2016, brought together the main institutional forces— like specific unions and community organizations—which backed Sanders, to discuss next steps. Despite a lot of rhetoric about “revolution,” the confab’s main political conclusions were to support (however reluctantly) Clinton against Trump, and to promote “down-ballot” Democratic races. Green Party candidate Jill Stein asked to speak to the conference, but she was turned down.14

Now that the apparatus of Sanders and his supporters is fully invested in promoting progressive Democrats, this provides a radical-sounding rationale to oppose independent political action in the here and now. In These Times writer Kate Aronoff, writing “The Left Deserves Better than Jill Stein,” made the case for lesser-evil support for the Democrats complete with references to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Stein may have stood for any number of radical positions, Aronoff notes, but “[h]er candidacy distracts from the slow and hardly glamorous work that organizers and progressive electoral challengers alike are doing to change the rules of the game, day in and day out. In fetishizing the party’s position as outsiders, Stein also feeds into a dangerously limited view of what the Left is now capable of achieving.”15 The Left can achieve all of this because the Sanders campaign and “movement leaders” “increasingly see the Democratic Party and electoral fights as winnable terrain.”

And yet, Sanders lost, and the Democratic Party’s establishment politician won. This should at least raise the question of whether the Democratic Party really is “winnable terrain” for the Left. As the trove from WikiLeaks showed, not only did the Democratic establishment have no intention of allowing Sanders and “democratic socialism” to beat Clinton, they also make clear the party’s commitment to the capitalist status quo. Emails between Clinton’s top advisers and, even, between them and some Clinton-supporting labor leaders, showed that a Clinton administration would have had no intention of following through on any pro-labor pledges. Meanwhile, the Democrats are happy to rake in millions of dollars from unions and millions of person-hours in GOTV operations.16

If anything, the 2016 Sanders campaign should underscore, yet again, that the Democratic Party is not simply a “ballot line” that the Left can take over and use for its own purposes.17 The Democrats are one of the two mainstream parties that act to package, sell, and implement pro-business policies at all levels of the state. Capitalists have also set up institutions to shape the party program. They fund think tanks that generate policy positions for candidates to advocate. They also possess an army of lobbyists that encircles politicians, dangling promises of cash support in elections if the politician turns their proposals into laws. In 2016, Corporate America demonstrated a near unanimous support for Clinton.

For many on the left and social movements who have, for years, eschewed independent political action for an orientation on the Democratic Party, the Sanders campaign didn’t pose a quandary. But several organizations and individuals with long track records of independent political action abandoned those longstanding commitments under the pressure of the Sanders campaign. Veteran socialist and New Politics editor Dan La Botz was perhaps the most surprising supporter of Sanders on the socialist left. A longtime supporter of independent political action and former Socialist Party candidate for US Senate, La Botz became a prominent advocate for Sanders even in international circles.18 In New Politics, La Botz wrote that while planning to remain a registered Green, he would “work with the Sanders campaign in the primary period, hoping—like other Sanders supporters—that out of this experience we can build a new, stronger, left in America.” He argued that the Sanders campaign—inside the Democratic Party— “could contribute to the launching of a new period of social movements and upheavals with a higher level of political consciousness and if it does that, it will be a great contribution.”19

Socialist Alternative, the organization that made recent history when its member Kshama Sawant won a city council seat in Seattle, tried to negotiate the unnegotiable: organizing support for Sanders, while not encouraging them to join the Democratic Party. Accomplishing that feat would have required something approaching magic, given that the point of Sanders’s campaign was to register voters to vote for him in the Democratic primaries. Then, the organization held out the prospect that Sanders would run as an independent, and even offered tactical advice to him about how do it without throwing the election to Trump. Socialist Alternative’s approach was completely incoherent—as numerous debates revealed—and the organization abandoned it when Sanders conceded. Socialist Alternative immediately transitioned its “Movement4Bernie” into supporting the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and pretended that it didn’t try for a period to build support for a Democratic candidate.20

Pedro Fuentes and Tiago Madeira, leaders of a revolutionary current associated with radical parties such as the Party of Socialism and Liberty in Brazil and Marea Socialista (Socialist Tide) in Venezuela, raised support for Sanders to a crucial test for the international left:

In our opinion, we must support Sanders. For us, the debate in the US, with its specific characteristics, is similar to what we face in the rest of the world. Will Trotskyists, without losing sight of our strategy, intervene in events and real political movements—however contradictory they are—to contend for influence? Or, owing to these contradictions, or because these developments can’t be fit into our “program,” will we stay on the sidelines so that we can criticize them when they fail? That’s what’s at stake in the debate about whether to support Sanders. It’s more than a tactical issue. It’s a discussion about what political orientation we take to new political processes that, of course, aren’t “Trotskyist” or even sympathetic to Trotskyism. We are talking about building new organizations, new parties—democratically and loyally built—and respecting their leaders, even if we disagree with them. Having open debates about what’s the best strategy. This is hardly “entrism” or whatever other strategy small groups of Trotskyists can come up with to justify being part of the campaign.

Not understanding this condemns a group to isolation and propagandism. It will never become a “vanguard” if it refuses to take part in what exists. Neither will anyone listen to that supposed vanguard if it isn’t alongside others in that process. In Greece, would it have been possible to build the Left Platform with half of the central committee and possibly the majority of militants, from outside of Syriza?21

What can we say about these claims from the vantage point of one of the most dismal presidential elections in the modern political era?

First, phrases like “working with the Sanders campaign” or “interven[ing] in events and real political movements” project the image of a grassroots campaign where ordinary people came together to debate political issues and a chart a way forward. This, of course, is as far from the reality of US elections as is the idea that the Democratic Party has anything in common with the movement that built the original, radical Syriza in Greece. Even Sanders’s vaunted fundraising machine was largely an online phenomenon managed by the Democratic Party-connected Act Blue.22 Whatever Sanders organization existed in each state in the run-up to the primaries shut down the day after the election. The idea that the Sanders campaign as the Sanders campaign offered a unique political space for socialist intervention was not true.

Second, the idea that the Sanders campaign would provide a focus, and perhaps inspiration, of ongoing social movements, was also not borne out. Movements such as Black Lives Matter or the Native struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline have a logic of their own that exist independently of the elections. Sanders helped to give voice to some of their demands, but these movements did not run through Sanders’s (and certainly not Clinton’s!) campaign. And given that Our Revolution and the People’s Summit are largely focused on electoral activity, it’s hard to see what role they would play in future social movements.

Thirdly, the idea that one could only talk to and engage politically with Bernie supporters from inside the campaign was not borne out by experience. The International Socialist Organization, for example, was able quite easily to build well-attended meetings, attend Bernie rallies with our propaganda, and connect with the important, if vague, support for socialist ideas without entering the campaign or endorsing Sanders.

Finally, the idea that the participating in the Sanders campaign was some sort of litmus test determining whether a political organization is isolated or in the thick of the struggle, is simply silly. The socialist left in the US is small and its active members are involved in all sorts of struggles and campaigns. It is from these types of activities that a US left will grow and gain influence. In Marxist understanding, elections may be the “lowest form of politics.” But in the United States, where most elections are contests between two capitalist machines whose relationship to grassroots concerns is tangential at best, the bar is even lower. If the Left was able to call on support of a radical political party that championed the social movements, that would be a tremendous step forward for us. But the Democratic Party isn’t “our” party. And truth be told, Our Revolution isn’t really “ours” either. So the Left still has the task in front of it of building an independent political vehicle. And accomplishing that will require a left that must strike out on its own—rejecting calls to “keep hope alive” in a new and improved progressive Democratic Party.

To be sure, some of the comrades quoted above drew more radical conclusions as the dreary 2016 campaign dragged on. La Botz, for example, reverted to his pre-Democratic Party primary position of support for Stein, citing the example of US abolitionists’ support for the long-shot Liberty Party as a “vote for freedom and for the future.”23 And seventy-four prominent DSA members and Sanders supporters issued a statement entitled “The Left is Under No Obligation to Support Hillary Clinton,” making the case against the logic of lesser-evilism.24 The DSA 74 statement rejects the strategy of “realigning” the Democratic Party, while not calling for “an immediate and total break from voting for or supporting any Democratic candidate.” Yet the statement ultimately sets its sights on building political alternatives to the Democrats. Experience, combined with comradely debate, will help radicals find their way out, as the statement says, “of accepting and working within a system they despise.”

Where do we go from here?

We know that for the space of a few months in 2015 and 2016, the Sanders campaign gave a vocabulary to the sense among millions of people—many of them young—that a rigged political system upholds an inherently unfair capitalist system. It helped to make “socialism” not only respectable, but popular in a way that hasn’t been true for some time. The Sanders campaign built on, but didn’t create itself, movements such as 2011’s Occupy and the Fight for 15. And it connected with support for a number of reform demands, like free college, health care for all, and ending big money in politics. Salar Mohandesi, writing in Viewpoint, hypothesizes that a significant segment of Sanders supporters can be said to constitute a coherent reformist “social democratic current” that will attempt to win its goals through multiple electoral and nonelectoral struggles. Whether members of this current can be won to revolutionary socialism, or what the ISR would call “socialism from below” is another question:

If my hypothesis is correct, the far left cannot expect to swiftly absorb the Bernie voters into its ranks. They are not drifting elements, unattached to any program, politically amorphous, and therefore completely open to new ideas; a solid core of Bernie people have constituted their own coherent social democratic current. They will likely develop their own organizations, promote their own leaders, and advance their own social democratic ideas, which will likely replace the vague anarchism that used to dominate much of the wider left in the United States. In this sense, their trajectory may be similar to what happened in Spain, when the newly politicized social forces of the 2011-12 struggles went on to construct their own form of unity, which took one form as Podemos, rather than joining the existing revolutionary left.25

Mohandesi may be too categorical (or optimistic) in declaring Bernie supporters a coherent “social democratic current.” His analysis leaves open many possible developments, from winning “down-ballot” Democratic races, to building up the Green Party, to involvement in social movements like Black Lives Matter. And even he notes that it’s “just as possible that at a certain point the social democrats will grow demoralized and the current will completely dissipate.”

What’s clear, however, is that among a younger generation “socialism” is not a dirty word, and Sanders’s campaign helped in that regard. But underlying that was this generation’s experience of growing up under the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. Whether the idea of socialism remains as the social democratic “socialism from above,” or whether thousands build organizations dedicated to “socialism from below,” depends on what socialists do today. Winning people to “socialism from below” means, among other things, winning them to the Marxist concept of socialism as “the self-emancipation of the working class,” to the primacy of struggle of the oppressed and exploited, and to political action independent of the capitalist parties. In that process, building social movements, building independent political parties, and supporting down-ballot Democrats are not co-equal strategies.

Movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter show that there is a growing group of young activists who are deciding for themselves what they will do in the face of these questions. They are looking not only for ideas to change the world, but also for organizations to embody that alternative. Socialists today need to think the same way: how we can build from the struggles of today the kind of political alternative to the current system that we need.

The Left’s challenge

We on the left are now faced with an absurd situation. The winning candidate, Trump—who won more than 2 million fewer votes than the loser Clinton—is set to launch an all-out offensive against women, immigrants, workers, unions, people of color, LGBTQ people, and just about every other broad constituency of the broad left in this country. And leading political figures, from President Obama to Clinton, are calling for the country to give Trump a chance. In November, even Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were making similar noises: wanting to work with Trump to make good on his promises to workers, while standing up to his bigotry. After denouncing Trump as an ignoramus, sexual predator, racist, and would-be dictator during the campaign, these politicians are approaching him as if he was some sort of statesman. This should illustrate once again that even the “best” Democrats can’t be trusted to lead any sort of effective opposition to the hard-right Trump agenda.

To confront that agenda, the Left will not need, in the first instance, a more clever or more grassroots electoral strategy. It will need mass class and social struggle to turn back Trump’s plans. A genuine mass party for the 99 percent can only emerge from those types of struggles, as the experience of the early-1900s Socialist Party or the 1930s Communist Party demonstrated.

The election result underscored the urgency and responsibility to build a radical left, as the Australian socialist Corey Oakley pointed out:

Fighting Trump means building a new left in the US that bases itself on opposition not just to the far right, but to the politics of the old establishment that gave his movement the oxygen it needed to flourish. Such a new movement is entirely possible—the campaign of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries proved there is an audience of millions for a politics that opposes the ruling elite while also standing in solidarity with immigrants, Muslims and others targeted by the faux radicalism of right wing populists like Trump.26

The electoral shock and the struggles to come will create an opening for thousands of people to draw radical conclusions about “what is to be done.” These fighters will be the constituent element of a new revolutionary left, a broad left, and the social and class struggle that can deliver on the aspirations that the Sanders campaign raised.

Eliza Collins, “Poll: Clinton, Trump Most Unfavorable Candidates Ever,” USA Today, August 31, 2016, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/polit....
Aaron Blake, “Bernie Sanders Just Might Be the Most Popular Politician in America,” Washington Post, September 19, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-....
Zaid Jilani, “Center for American Progress Advised Clinton Team Against $15 Minimum Wage, Leaked Emails Show,” The Intercept, October 10, 2016, https://theintercept.com/2016/10/10/cent....
Luke Savage, “Why Bernie was Right,” Jacobin, October 21, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/berni....
Michael Sainato, “WikiLeaks Reveals DNC Elevated Trump to Help Clinton,” Observer (London), October 10 2016, http://observer.com/2016/10/WikiLeaks-re....
Alex Seitz-Wald, “Sanders Calls on Progressives to Look Past WikiLeaks,” NBC News, October 12, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/card/sanders-call....
The term “Rising American electorate” has been used by various liberal organizations and writers to refer to unmarried women, people of color, and millennials, who, it is argued, can help turn elections if they can be convinced to register and vote in greater numbers.
On this, see the indispensable report by Jasper Craven, “Once an Organizational Army, Team Sanders Now a Skeleton Crew,” Vermont Digger, May 16, 2016, http://vtdigger.org/2016/05/16/once-an-o....
Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetti, “Bernie Sanders’ new group is already in turmoil,” Politico, August 23, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/be....
For example, see James Hohmann, “The Daily 202: Five Reasons Bernie Sanders Lost Last Night’s Democratic Debate,” Washington Post, March 7, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pow ... 22d730a5d/.
Chris Sánchez, “Don’t Vote for a Third Party Presidential Candidate in this Election,” Business Insider, September 17, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/bernie-sa....
Adolph Reed Jr., “Vote for the Lying Neoliberal Warmonger: It’s Important,” Common Dreams, August 18, 2016, http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/0....
The quote is from the DSA’s June 2016 statement, “Resistance Rising: Socialist Strategy in the Age of Political Revolution,” http://www.dsausa.org/resistance_rising_....
Tyler Zimmer, “What Did People Want at the People’s Summit?” Socialist Worker, June 23, 2016, https://socialistworker.org/2016/06/23/w....
Kate Aronoff, “The Left Deserves Better than Jill Stein,” In These Times, September 26, 2016, http://inthesetimes.com/features/lesser_....
Micah Uetricht, “They Don’t Care About Us,” Jacobin, October 28, 2016, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/hilla....
Although Benjamin Kunkel drew the opposite, and in my mind, wrong conclusion from the 2016 election: “If US radicals are to have anything to do with contests for national office under a system innocent of proportional representation, then occupying and redirecting the Democratic Party as far as possible looks more promising than launching a new party onto the margins of American politics.” In “Sweet ’16: Notes on the US Election,” Salvage, October 23, 2016, http://salvage.zone/in-print/sweet-16-no....
See, for example, La Botz’s interview on the left-wing Spanish program La Klau, http://especiales.publico.es/publico-tv/....
Dan La Botz, “Sanders for President: A Political Phenomenon that Challenges all Preconceptions,” New Politics, July 30, 2015, http://newpol.org/content/sanders-presid....
See “Debating the Role of Socialists in Election 2016,” Socialist Worker, May 25, 2016; and Left Forum 2016, “Debate: The Left and the Sanders Campaign,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWYmjuzLfag.
Pedro Fuentes and Tiago Madeira, “El avance de Bernie Sanders en las elecciones primarias del Partido Demócrata y la política de los revolucionarios,” Apporrea.org, August 21, 2015, http://www.aporrea.org/internacionales/a....
Shane Goldmacher, “Bernie’s Legacy: One of the Most Valuable Donor Lists Ever,” Politico, June 6, 2016.
Dan La Botz, “Who Would You Vote for in 1840? And Who Will You Vote for on Nov. 8?” New Politics, October 27, 2016, http://newpol.org/content/who-would-you-....
The statement is published in In These Times, November 4, 2016, http://inthesetimes.com/features/dsa_cli....
Salar Mohandesi, “What’s Left of Bernie’s Revolution?” Viewpoint, September 19, 2016, https://viewpointmag.com/2016/09/19/what....
Corey Oakley, “The World Needs a Radical Left—and Now,” Red Flag, November 20, 2016, https://redflag.org.au/node/5589.

https://isreview.org/issue/104/sanders-and-left

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Wed Nov 13, 2019 2:21 am

The Lies Social Democrats Tell: FDR, the New Deal, and Social Fascism

Zach Medeiros | Politics & Government | Commentary | June 18th, 2019

On June 12, Bernie Sanders gave a much-advertised speech about democratic socialism at George Washington University. Stuck in a distant second to perennial, burning-human-garbage-pile Joe Biden, eclipsed in media coverage by mildly charismatic mediocrities like Pete Buttigieg and even Elizabeth Warren, a charitable interpretation of this move could see it as a well-intentioned effort to assuage some very Amerikan fears about socialism, and perhaps gain some traction in the polls in the process. No doubt electoral opportunism played a role, because you don't get to stick around in the Senate for so long without learning how to play the game. While some may argue that Sanders was trying to make socialism more palatable for a US audience, I believe the speech represented something far more significant. Last week, Bernie Sanders ripped his mask off and with a heavy dose of historical revisionism showed his so-called socialism for what it truly is: social fascism.

Social fascism is a phrase that's unfamiliar to most people in the United States, who typically have better or more pressing things to do than study the internal debates of the Communist International in the 1930s. In imperialist countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and much of Europe, social democracy (a mixed capitalist economy with a more or less robust welfare state, originally designed to take the sting out of revolutionary socialist movements) takes the form of a "kinder, gentler" fascism, at least for citizens. You can look at how Europe and its children treat refugees to understand what social democracy means for non-citizens. The wealth and privileges of Western social democracy, of course, are impossible without the looting of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Third World diasporas within Western countries - in other words, imperialism. [1] Whereas socialists believe in class conflict and class struggle, social democrats/fascists believe in class collaboration. This is the dangerous notion that classes with completely, inherently contradictory interests (capitalists and workers) can unite and work towards a mutually-beneficial goal. As an ideology and practice, class collaboration produces and rationalizes such phenomena as millionaires and billionaires in supposed Communist parties, toothless unions led by labor aristocrats who like to golf with the boss on weekends, and the total suppression of worker's power in the name of national unity or the 99%. It is intellectual and material quicksand. As George Jackson wrote, "the only way we can destroy it [fascism] is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its ruling class." [2]

Just as social imperialism is nothing but the same old imperialist gore and exploitation hiding behind socialist trappings, social fascism is essentially fascism wearing a socialist mask. The social fascist is the one whose heart bleeds for the struggling worker while sending the cops or the troops to break up an unauthorized strike, or the modern-day Gestapo to deport workers who dared to cross colonial borders without permission. The social fascist is the one who calls not for an end to the mass robbery of the Third World, but a fairer distribution of the stolen goods. The social fascist is the one who preaches revolution and revolt, just so long as it ends right before the power of the capitalist class begins.

With that in mind, we can return to Bernie's speech. Parsing through the usual populist spiel, we get to the heart of his argument: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was a democratic socialist, and his New Deal programs, while incomplete, were outstanding examples of what democratic socialism is all about. In an age of resurgent right-wing extremism and oligarchic domination, Sanders argues that the solution is taking up the "unfinished business of the New Deal" and carrying it to completion. Anyone who peddles this line with a straight face is a damn fool, a liar, or both.

Actual socialists and revolutionaries like George Jackson pegged Roosevelt and his New Deal for what they were decades ago. Casting aside all of the glittering myths about that era and grinding them into dust, Jackson identified Roosevelt as a fascist, plain as day. Writing about the beginning of the Great Depression, Jackson said "under the threat of revolution, the ruling class, true to Marxian theory, became all the more co-optive and dangerous. FDR was born and bred in this ruling class of families. His role was to form the first fascist regime, to merge the economic, political, and labor elites. Governing elites/corporative state/fascism - his role was to limit competition, replace it with the dream of cooperation; to put laissez faire to rest, and initiate the acceptance of government intervention into economic affairs." [3] Roosevelt was not some great, noble champion of the common people. He and his advisers, along with the capitalists who backed them, were simply farsighted enough to see that an unprecedented capitalist crisis required an unprecedented capitalist solution: fascism. Like so many of their counterparts at the time, the Amerikan bourgeoise had to come up with a way to contain the upsurge in revolutionary consciousness without fundamentally undermining the capitalist system. The draw of fascism, which extolls class collaboration instead of class struggle, the violent repression of leftist alternatives and "dangerous" minorities, and a shower of crumbs to satisfy the restless masses, must have been obvious.

In his speech, Sanders claimed that "We [in the United States] rejected the ideology of Mussolini and Hitler - we instead embraced the bold and visionary leadership of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then the leader of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party." This is ahistorical nonsense. Roosevelt was an unabashed admirer of Benito Mussolini, the Founding Father of fascism. In June 1933, Roosevelt praised Mussolini in a letter to Breckenridge Long, the US Ambassador to Italy, writing that he was "much interested and deeply impressed by what [Mussolini] has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble." In another letter a few weeks later, Roosevelt told a friend who had also complimented Mussolini: "I don't mind telling you in confidence that I am keeping in fairly close touch with the admirable Italian gentleman." [4]

These were private letters not meant for public consumption, so one could hardly rationalize them as simple diplomatic flattery. They were also written over a decade after Mussolini seized power and abandoned all pretense of democratic rule, so Roosevelt could hardly claim naivete. After meeting with Roosevelt in 1934, the Italian general and fascist hero Italo Balbo reported to Mussolini that the president "manifested toward Your Excellency feelings of the highest esteem and liking because of the work of restoration performed in Italy…the President also spoke words of appreciation for the labor organization of our country and displayed in general a spirit of true understanding for Italy." [5] So much for FDR's rejection of fascist ideology! Like so much of the Amerikan bourgeoise, who published glowing tributes to Fascist Italy in outlets like Fortune magazine, Roosevelt looked at what Mussolini was doing not with horror, but with open glee and envy. Why wouldn't they? The Fascists had literally beaten the revolutionary sectors of the working class into submission, co-opted the rest of the population into the tight embrace of the new corporate state, and seemingly resolved the crises facing modern industrial capitalism. As far as Mussolini was concerned, the feelings were mutual.[6] It was only with the outbreak of World War II that Mussolini and Fascism had to become enemies in the eyes of the United States.

As telling as personal affinities can be, they are not sufficient for demonstrating the fascist nature of Roosevelt and the New Deal. To return to Jackson, we must see the New Deal as an essential part of Amerika's long walk into fascism. When we move past the "deceptively better working conditions and illusory wage increases," the softer hand directed towards (white) labor, we can see that the New Deal was hardly more than capitalist reformism.[7] To prevent a revolution and save capitalism from itself - indeed, to entrench capitalism even deeper than before - the ruling class had to reexamine the role of the state. Contrary to libertarian capitalist dogma, the state has always played an essential role in the establishment, defense, and spread of capitalism, but the chaos of the 1920s and 30s required a qualitative change. Monopoly capital and the state had to undergo a corporate-style merger. The military-industrial complex and massive consumers' market (boosted to incredible heights by the productive boom of World War II) satisfied the short-term economic interests of white labor, which cared little for social liberation. Their leaders were brought into the fold and provided with cushy perks. The radicals and revolutionaries were killed, jailed, exiled, or ostracized into irrelevance. [8] This is the part of the picture that Bernie Sanders doesn't paint.

As J. Sakai put it, "the victory [the Euro-Amerikan proletariat] gained was the firm positioning of the Euro-Amerikan working class in the settler ranks, reestablishing the rights of all Europeans here to share the privileges of the oppressor nation. This was the essence of the equality that they won. This bold move was in the settler tradition, sharing the Amerikan pie with more European reinforcements so that the Empire could be strengthened. This formula had partially broken down during the transition from the Amerika of the Frontier to the Industrial Amerika. It was the brilliant accomplishment of the New Deal to mend this break." [9] New Africans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other oppressed nations under the heel of the United States saw no such benefits. They were lynched, deported, massacred, impoverished, and brutalized during the New Deal years as surely as they were before and after. Social democracy for whites, fascism for everyone else: this is the legacy that Bernie Sanders eulogizes, the model that he asks us to "complete." This is not socialism. It's a damn lie.

Socialists, and anyone serious about building revolutionary change in Amerika, should not defraud or lie to the people. It is our responsibility to speak plainly, to own up to hard, unpleasant truths, and educate and be educated by the masses. That is the exact opposite of what Bernie Sanders is doing. Like his idol Roosevelt, Sanders isn't interested in dismantling capitalism. He wants to save it. He isn't interested in establishing a revolutionary socialist society and a worker's state. He would sooner die, and no doubt would vote to send in the troops to crush anyone who tried. He has no curiosity for decolonization, no appetite for anti-imperialism, not a shred of concern for the most basic principles of socialist internationalism.

Instead, he offers only a few adjustments to the machinery of death that is the United States. He wants to piss on your leg and tell you it's raining. Would some of these adjustments help some people, if by some miracle he could get half of them enacted? Undoubtedly. But at what cost? With more stolen wealth taken from the colonized world and colonized people? At the direction of a state-owned lock, stock, and barrel by the capitalists and imperialists? We no longer have the luxury of time to tinker with the machinery of death. Reformism is the shovel we'll dig our own grave with. Anyone who identifies as a socialist must understand that the task before us is not to "reclaim" Amerika, but replace it with something better: for the sake of oppressed and exploited people here, for the sake of oppressed and exploited people everywhere, and for the sake of all life on this planet.

Notes

[1] Black Red Guard, "Ideological Social Democracy Is Social Fascism: Yet Again." https://medium.com/@BlackRedGuard/ideol ... bc43cc4bff

[2] George Jackson, Blood in My Eye. 120.

[3] Ibid. 164.

[4] David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965. 190.

[5] David F. Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Jackson, 170-171.

[8] Ibid, 173-174.

[9] J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern.

http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/the-l ... ctjtzfYq7h

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Wed Nov 13, 2019 2:33 am

Bernie Sanders and the myth of Franklin Roosevelt
By Tom Hall
18 June 2019

Last Wednesday, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders gave a speech on “democratic socialism” at George Washington University. The main function of the speech was to define his supposed “socialism” as entirely in conformity with the politics of the Democratic Party—that is, a “socialism” devoid any opposition to capitalism and war.

Sanders’ speech comes within the context of a ruling class that is increasingly fearful of the growing popularity of socialism. Donald Trump has presented himself over the last several months as a bulwark against a “socialist takeover” in America. This theme has also been taken up by many in the Democratic Party, who insist that any reference to socialism in the party’s primaries is impermissible.

Sanders’ speech attempts to accomplish the same ends through different means. It exposes Sanders’ effort to combine populist and “socialist” rhetoric with a defense of American capitalism and the Democratic Party.

Three basic elements of Sanders’ speech demonstrate this political fraud. First is Sanders’ dishonest presentation of Franklin Roosevelt and the history of the Democratic Party.

In a speech billed as defining his conception of “democratic socialism,” Sanders explicitly places his own politics within the tradition of the Democratic Party, particularly the liberal New Deal reforms of President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

“Over eighty years ago Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped create a government that made transformative progress in protecting the needs of working families. Today, in the second decade of the 21st century, we must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion,” Sanders says. “This is the unfinished business of the Democratic Party and the vision we must accomplish.”

Sanders quotes the “Economic Bill of Rights” proposed by Roosevelt, but never seriously pursued, in his 1944 State of the Union speech. The centerpiece of Sanders’ speech is his call for a “21st Century Economic Bill of Rights” guaranteeing the right to a high-quality standard of living.

Sanders portrays Roosevelt as the leader of a popular revolt involving “organized labor, leaders in the African American community and progressives inside and outside the Party,” and which “led a transformation of the American government and the American economy.”

He declares, “Despite [the opposition of the rich], by rallying the American people, FDR and his progressive coalition created the New Deal, won four terms, and created an economy that worked for all and not just the few.”

Sanders’ glowing references to Roosevelt are designed to obscure the fact that the Democratic Party was, and is, a party of the ruling class. Roosevelt was not the political representative of popular struggles, much less a “democratic socialist,” but a particularly astute representative of the capitalist class, who understood that concessions had to be made in order to preserve the capitalist system, which was in a state of collapse and widely discredited, and avert the danger of socialist revolution.

The gains that were won during this period were not dispensed as gifts by any section of the political establishment, but were wrung from the ruling class through mass, semi-insurrectionary struggles of the working class, which Roosevelt and the Democratic Party sought to contain. Moreover, poverty and unemployment remained endemic throughout the United States even after the New Deal. The gap between rich and poor, while lower than before, remained massive. In the South, which remained mired in rural backwardness, African-Americans continued to face segregation and lynch mob terror.

The New Deal reforms also proved unable to lift the United States out of economic crisis. This came through World War Two and its destruction of much of the European and world economy, and at least 60 million lives. Under Roosevelt’s leadership, the United States entered World War II in December 1941.

Prior to and during the war, the “progressive” Roosevelt cracked down on democratic rights, jailing leaders of the Trotskyist movement, the most class conscious representatives of the working class, enforcing a ban on strikes with the assistance of the union bureaucracy and imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.

Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights,” proposed but never acted upon towards the end of the war, was a left feint that reflected his fear that if the end of the war brought with it a return to Depression-era conditions, American capitalism would face even more serious revolutionary convulsions than in the 1930s. Roosevelt dropped his vice president, Henry Wallace, from the 1944 presidential ticket, replacing him with Harry Truman—a concession to the right wing of the Democratic Party.

After the war, Roosevelt’s program of liberal reforms, now coupled with Cold War anticommunism, was continued only as long as it could be financed out of rising productivity made possible by the emergence of the United States as the world superpower. But the “Economic Bill of Rights,” even during the zenith of American capitalism, remained a dead letter. By the end of the 1960s, with the end of the postwar boom and the beginning of the long-term erosion of American hegemony, the Democrats abandoned these programs and moved sharply to the right.

But this is precisely the point at which Sanders’ historical excursion stops. This enables him to suppress the fact that the Democratic Party long ago repudiated these reforms and became a full partner with the Republicans in undermining and dismantling the very social programs whose further development Sanders presents as the “unfinished business” of the Democratic Party. In fact, as far the Democratic Party is concerned, the “unfinished business” is destroying every gain won by the working class in a century of struggle.

The second element of Sanders’ speech is the complete absence of any reference to foreign policy or war. Events outside of the United States are barely mentioned at all. This guilty silence, which Sanders has long maintained in speeches meant for a broader audience, is aimed at covering for Sanders’ support for imperialist war and American nationalism.

Sanders gives indirect signals to the ruling class of his support for war at points throughout his speech. When Sanders lists a series of “authoritarian rulers” throughout the world, he begins with Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China, a sign of support both for his party’s demands for confrontation with Russia and Trump’s trade war measures and military buildup against China.

Sanders manages to avoid even mentioning World War II in a speech supposedly centered on the political legacy of Franklin Roosevelt. He also favorably cites former presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, without referencing the fact that both were widely reviled as warmongers and mass murderers: Truman for his dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and for the Korean War, and Johnson for his massive escalation of the Vietnam War.

The reference to Johnson is particularly significant. Johnson’s Great Society programs foundered against the massive costs of the war in Vietnam, signaling the end of the whole period of liberal reform. By the late 1960s, the Democratic Party could no longer balance within itself social programs aimed at securing the support of the working class with the needs of American imperialism.

As Sanders well knows, having begun his political career as a student protester in the 1960s, this pushed a whole generation of students and working class youth to the left towards anti-capitalist and radical politics, among whom Johnson’s name became an epithet. A popular slogan during the protests against the Vietnam War was “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

By glossing over this and presenting Johnson in a favorable, even “democratic socialist,” light, Sanders is not only rehabilitating Johnson, he is promoting a more basic falsehood—that an imperialist and militaristic foreign policy is compatible with democracy and social equality at home, a lie that forms the center of Sanders’ own politics.

The third element of Sanders’ speech is that he does not explain how it is possible to guarantee a high standard of living for everyone without a frontal assault on the capitalist system, especially under conditions where the ruling class considers even a modest increase in the share of income going to workers impermissible. Sanders’ “socialism” is demagogic. He proposes a whole series of “rights” without any suggestion that they would require a fundamental change in social relations.

Moreover, the turn towards authoritarian forms of rule, a fact that Sanders himself is obliged to note, demonstrates that the levels of social inequality are no longer compatible with democratic rights. This is expressed not only in Trump, as Sanders implies, but also within the Democratic Party itself, which is engaged in palace coup methods in alliance with the CIA and FBI its internecine struggle against Trump.

If an “Economic Bill of Rights” was unachievable during the high point of American economic and political power, then it is all the more impossible today, when American capitalism is mired in terminal decline. There can be no doubt that Sanders, were he elected president, would jettison this proposal even more rapidly than Roosevelt.

Indeed, while Roosevelt was prepared to take on powerful elements within the political establishment in order to force through his program of reforms, Sanders has already demonstrated his political spinelessness. The defining moment of Sanders’ political career remains his groveling capitulation to Hillary Clinton in 2016 after an election campaign marred by corruption and fraud.

A genuine fight for the social rights of the working class, including the right to a job, a secure retirement, high quality health care and education, requires an uncompromising struggle of the working class against the capitalist system. This means the establishment of a workers' government, in the United States and internationally, to massively redistribute the wealth and transform the giant banks and corporations into publicly owned utilities, democratically controlled by the working class.

This requires a persistent struggle against the influence of all forms of bourgeois ideology within the working class, above all “left” variants such as that promoted by Sanders.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/0 ... d-j18.html

The fact that Sanders could praise Hillary Clinton--who, with her hubby as members of the DLC, drove the final nail into the remaining shreds of liberal reforms--shortly after it was revealed that she connived to rig votes against him shows how dishonest and unprincipled he is. And that was after months of railing against the "billionaire class." Then his nauseating tribute to John McCain should have disabused his followers of any remaining illusions in his socialist pretensions.

But Democrats have extremely (and intentionally) short memories.

========

What is Orwellian about Sanders is that he suggested FDR was “democratic socialist” while ignoring leaders of Socialist Party of America and millions of supporters who proved themselves by denouncing war and even going to prison as unconditionally anti-war political stand.

It reminds me of Luxemburg who said that she does not care about any touchy-feely socialist fantasies one may have if they cross red line of socialism namely unequivocally anti-war stand as there cannot be anything more anti-socialist than supporting workers of one country slaughtering workers of another country in a mad, psychotic orgy of working class fratricide.

Sander is no socialist, he long ago crossed this red line .

I may add a word about laughable coverage of this Sanders speech by Jacobin where author, pushing fallacy that Sanders defined himself as socialist in his own words while instead except for one quote word socialist was multiple times used by author as describing meaning of Sanders quotes that contained no word “socialism” in them in old style of pundit propaganda over-interpreting incoherent utterances and innuendos as radical policy candidate supposedly mean. Sanders still did not achieve level of BS interpreted as quasi revolutionary by paid pundits, Obama and Dems spin apparatus, were master performers.

=========

Bourgeois liberal democratic or autocratic political framework solely serves as political institution supporting socioeconomic system of capitalism based on exploitation of working class and hence itself cannot change capitalism.

The petty bourgeois liberals constitute a curious social layer as they effectively perform labor that is being alienated while instead of developing working class consciousness they develop false class consciousness aligning their interests with those of ruling class and hence this reformist rather than revolutionary strain of petty bourgeois politics that is allowed within acceptable capitalist politics.

Marx referred to this kind of false class consciousness writing about millions of state bureaucrats, security apparatus, small landlords and domestic workers working for British aristocracy falsely seeing their own interest with that of aristocracy.

Petty bourgeoise aligning their interests with ruling elite at best want to make better deal for themselves within capitalist system as they want to see capitalism “succeeds” for their own benefit.

This is what Trotsky emphasized when demanded working class revolutionary movement being divorced from bourgeois politics that leads to dead end and more of the same capitalism.

========

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Wed Nov 13, 2019 2:35 am

Does Bernie Sanders’ Imperialism Matter?
Par Shamus Cooke
Mondialisation.ca, 06 janvier 2016

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.

https://www.mondialisation.ca/does-bern ... er/5499541

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Wed Nov 27, 2019 10:56 pm

APRIL 12, 2019
No, Bernie’s Not Anti-War
by KOLLIBRI TERRE SONNENBLUME

“A number of lefties are softening their criticism and some are even announcing their support for Bernie Sanders. Yet: Those who have watched Sanders for years – e.g., anti-war activists from Vermont – know better than to trust Bernie “Chavez is [a] dead, communist dictator” Sanders. When push comes to shove, he will side with imperialist power – e.g., voting against the invasion of Iraq but voting to fund the occupation.”

–Phil Rockstroh (2/27/19)

“One keeps looking for the moral clarity of Gene McCarthy, Wayne Morse or Mike Gravel from Bernie Sanders on issues of war and peace. Yet what we are offered is mush and drivel. One might be tempted to blame it on his age. But like Reagan, he knows exactly what he is saying and why.”

–Jeffrey St. Clair (2/23/19)

The Democratic Party has an undeserved reputation for being anti-war. The last time the party ran an anti-war candidate for president was George McGovern in 1972. The 1980’s was the last decade when it was typical of candidates to pledge “defense” cuts or nuclear arms reductions. Dennis Kucinich has been the only exception to that rule this century. In fact, the most successful anti-war candidate of the last twenty years was a Republican: Ron Paul, who made a notable splash in both 2008 and 2012.

Though he is not a member of the political party that writer Paul Street regularly refers to as the “dismal, dollar-drenched Dems,” Vermont’s Senator Bernie Sanders is once more seeking its presidential nomination and has signed the requisite “loyalty oath.” Sanders is often considered anti-war, but this is wishful thinking. His decades-long record in office demonstrates otherwise.

It’s telling that Sanders has been more likely to cast a vote that could be deemed anti-war when a Republican is president. That betrays an allegiance more to partisanship than principle. Given this pattern, one can rightly wonder if he would have pushed his resolution against US support of Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen if Hillary had been elected. (Also note that the resolution would not end the US’s role even if Trump does not veto it, as he is expected to do.)

(Props: I must acknowledge that the biggest source for this piece was Counterpunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair’s 2016 book, “Bernie & the Sandernistas: Field Notes from a Failed Revolution,” which I quote frequently. Page numbers in brackets refer to that volume.)

IRAQ

Sanders’ vote against the Iraq war authorization in 2002, like Obama’s (and unlike Hillary’s) is held up as some real anti-war cred, but as St. Clair writes:

“More problematic for the Senator in Birkenstock’s is the little-known fact that Bernie Sanders himself voted twice in support of regime change in Iraq. In 1998 Sanders voted in favor of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which said: ‘It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.’

“Later that same year, Sanders also backed a resolution that stated: ‘Congress reaffirms that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.’ These measures gave congressional backing for the CIA’s covert plan to overthrow the Hussein regime in Baghdad, as well as the tightening of an economic sanctions regime that may have killed as many as 500,000 Iraqi children. The resolution also gave the green light to Operation Desert Fox, a four-day long bombing campaign striking 100 targets throughout Iraq. The operation featured more than 300 bombing sorties and 350 ground-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles, several targeting Saddam Hussein himself” [pp. 37-38].

St. Clair adds: “Recall that over the 8 years of Clinton Time, Iraq was bombed an average of once every four days.”

SERBIA

The Bosnian War was the largest armed conflict in Europe since the end of World War II and caused over 100,000 deaths. The involvement of the USA and NATO in the war was a matter of controversy. Certainly, there was an anti-war stance to take, but Bernie didn’t rise to the occasion. As St. Clair writes,

“[Sanders] voted in favor of the war on Serbia: once, twice… and on April 28, 1999, he did it again. This was the astounding 213-213 tie vote, which meant that the House of Representatives repudiated the war on Serbia launched by Clinton in violation of Article One of the US Constitution., which reserves war-making powers to Congress. So if the ‘socialist progressive’ ‘anti-war’ Sanders had voted in line with the anti-war sentiments he has forged a career upon, the result would have been a straight majority for the coalition of Republicans and radical Democrats” [p. 2].

GEORGE W.’S WARS

Sanders voted for the 2001 Authorization for Unilateral Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), which, in St. Clair’s words, “pretty much allowed Bush to wage war wherever he wanted” [p. 37].

Not at all an anti-war vote, and one that had – and continues to have – far-reaching consequences.

VENEZUELA

On few other subjects of foreign policy are people in the USA more misled – including most liberals, and including Bernie – than on Venezuela. Most people here seem to think it’s some kind of authoritarian regime (while ignoring that the US is, to use Jimmy Carter’s words, an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery”). Wrote St. Clair in 2015:

“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-like renegade who had 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. Chavez is an independent socialist whose immense popularity in his own country led to his Bolivarian 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” [p. 21].

Hugo Chávez was very popular in Venezuela for good reasons. As Gabriel Hetland wrote in “The Truth about Chávez,” Chávez’s policies “led to vast improvements in access to health care, education, housing, and pensions. Poverty in Venezuela was cut in half between 2003 and 2008, with extreme poverty falling by 72%. …By 2012 Venezuela was the most equitable country in Latin America.”

Bernie’s recent remarks about Venezuela were hardly a strong statement against US meddling. Rather, after mischaracterizing the nation’s governance, economy and actions towards dissent, all Bernie could tepidly condemn was “a long history of inappropriatelyintervening in Latin American countries” [my emphasis] as if there is way of “appropriately” intervening. No, this is not an anti-war sentiment.

Ajamu Baraka put it well when he said:

“There will be no peace as long as we allow the mythology to persist that the U.S. is a benevolent nation committed to human rights and democracy. This is [the] basis of arrogance that allows the U.S. to trample on international law & invade and destroy nations and peoples.”

The common fallacy Baraka describes here is one that Bernie seems to subscribe to, as well as many of his supporters. This idea has no place in an anti-war platform. As long as it is embraced or accepted, the true nature of the U.S. cannot be seen clearly, which is imperialism.

RUSSIA

The Cold War between the US and the USSR ended thirty years ago, but was revived against the Russian Federation by Hillary and the Democrats during the 2016 presidential race. This dangerous development has pushed the world closer to nuclear conflict, an unimaginably terrifying prospect. It has also resulted in a new McCarthyism that, with the enthusiastic help of big tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter, has led to the marginalization of leftist alternative media and activism online.

Sanders has been totally on board. He has consistently supported sanctions against Russia (notwithstanding one particular vote against them, which he cast because of the bill’s stance on Iran). He voted for the 2014 $1 billion package to support the anti-Russian, neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine, another provocative move. He has also professed confidence in the Russia/Trump/collusion conspiracy theories, the pursuit of which has only ratcheted up tensions more, and served to distract the populace from reasons to oppose Trump that are not at all difficult to prove.

THE F-35 FIGHTER JET

The F-35 fighter jet program is notoriously expensive and the plane itself infamously buggy. With a price tag of $1.5 trillion, and a development process that started in 2001, it is considered one of the single most profligate Pentagon projects ever (see Scientific American, the Atlantic and yes, Fox). Even war-monger John McCain called it an “incredible waste of the taxpayers’ dollars.” Yet Bernie has been a staunch supporter since the beginning. Says St. Clair says of the Senator’s enthusiasm:

“He’s a Cold War Liberal lost in a post-Cold War world. [He] 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” [p. 22].

Activist Carl Gibson put Bernie on the spot about this topic in person, and Bernie said: “for better or worse, that is the plane of record right now, and it is not gonna be discarded. That’s the reality.” But that wasn’t a good answer to Gibson, who wrote:

“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.”

CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS FROM “DEFENSE INDUSTRY”

According to opensecrets.org, in the 2016 race, Sanders took $366,458 from the Defense Industry, only 8% less than Trump and about 1/3 as much as Hillary accepted. Given that even peacenik Jill Stein is down for $26,395 in this category, one might wonder how it is defined, but that’s just too much to be called anti-war.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

“This is the bottom-line, if you support imperialist politicians, no matter what ‘freebies’ they are promising, you support murder. We cannot, or should not, have ‘nice things’ here in [this] country when we are bombing so many more. Something has to give, and it has to be imperialism.”

– Cindy Sheehan

First, there are ethical considerations. That is, the idea that war is intrinsically wrong on moral grounds, and that conflicts should be settled by other means that are non-violent (with exceptions for legitimate self-defense). Pacifism has been preached and practiced by religious and secular people alike during the entire history of the US. Certainly, it has been more or less popular during different periods – and seems to be suffering a nadir at the moment, at least as a visible and vocal cultural force – but it has never completely withered. Such people and organizations operate as a vital conscience for the nation. From this standpoint, Sanders is flatly unacceptable.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

–Eisenhower

Secondly, there is the financial reality that war-making is bleeding the US dry. Every dollar for bomb-building is money that cannot be spent on projects that actually keep people safe, housed, fed, healthy and productive for the common good. Think of the bridges falling down, the homeless on the streets, the children who need free school lunches, the prohibitive cost of “healthcare” and the amount of creativity and labor sucked up by industries that are destructive (resource extraction, defense, big ag), soul crushing (the service industry, advertising, tech) or unnecessary (the FIRE sector: finance, insurance and real estate). This is a profoundly sick society indeed. In his speech announcing his entry into the 2020 race, Sanders called for cuts to military spending that have been described as “deep” but have not been quantified so far. Given the contradictions in his record, Peace activists Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies rightly ask: “’Which Bernie would we see in the White House?’ Would it be the one who has the clarity and courage to vote ‘No’ on 84% of military spending bills in the Senate, or the one who supports military boondoggles like the F-35…?”

St. Clair, again:

“It is one of the great failures of the Sanders campaign that he didn’t try to puncture some of the comforting illusions about American foreign policy. As cruelly as we treat our own citizens, Americans like to believe, in fact must believe, that our country remains a force of light and goodness in the most troubled precincts of the world. We are reluctant warriors, heroes for humanity. Sanders had a rare chance to expose America’s savage imprint on the world to his followers. With more than 800 military bases sprawling across the globe, the American military machine keeps the unruly living under a constant state of nuclear terror, each transgression against the imperial order disciplined and punished by SEAL team assassins, cruise missiles and drone strikes out of the clear blue skies” [pp. 2-3].

Last, but not least, is the stark reality of the planet’s dire environmental condition. Pollution is poisoning virtually all living things and climate change is threatening the existence of a large percentage. This has been the legacy of agriculture and industrialization. To address this challenging situation, we need global cooperation. But such teamwork is impossible while the USA is such a bellicose bully. A tremendous amount of the world’s energy, resources and time go into fending off or paying off the USA and its resource-extracting corporate overlords. This current state of affairs must end and be replaced with a real camaraderie in spirit and in labor. (And by the way, the Pentagon is also the world’s largest institutional polluter.)

So, given the existential crisis that humanity is facing at this moment in history, to demand that the president of the USA be dedicated to a real anti-war platform is not a “purity test.” It is an entirely practical matter. Nothing less will do than a drastic reduction in “defense” spending and a complete turn-around of US foreign policy.

I’m not naive. I realize that no such candidate would be allowed to run on either major party ticket, and that third parties don’t have a chance. So, it is not into candidates or elections that we should put our efforts, but movements. An anti-war movement of sufficient size and energy could successfully guide the actions of whomever lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

So let us put our hopes not in heroes but ourselves.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/12 ... -anti-war/

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Wed Nov 27, 2019 10:57 pm

SEPTEMBER 30, 2011
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.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/30 ... e-sanders/

Post Reply