Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

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 11:00 pm

What does Sanders actually believe?

***

Rhetorically, at least, Sanders’ critique of the Global War on Terror resembles the Republican attacks on Obamacare: Promise to “repeal and replace” it without having the “replace” part figured out.

In fairness to Sanders, he has never pretended there are easy answers to complex foreign policy challenges. In a 1999 town hall, then-Congressman Sanders described the Kosovo crisis as “enormously complicated, enormously difficult.” In a 2015 primary debate with Hillary Clinton, he said Syria “is a complicated issue. I don't think anyone has a magical solution.” In 2016, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Sanders said pressuring Middle Eastern regimes to do more on counterterrorism, was “not easy.” This year, while speaking to a reporter for The New Yorker about foreign policy, he sounded positively daunted: “Look, this is very difficult stuff … 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.”

Voters may find this shocking bit of honesty for a presidential candidate either refreshing or unsettling. Perhaps more wannabe presidents should have the humility to acknowledge that they don’t know everything. But maybe that humility should be reflected in a realistic, detailed foreign policy agenda.

Sanders made that point himself in the 2016 primary, when he chided Hillary Clinton, and in effect, the Blob, about the decision to remove Moammar Gadhafi from power in Libya: “Regime change is easy; getting rid of dictators is easy,” he said. “But before you do that, you've got to think about what happens the day after.”

Back in April 1999, then-Congressman Sanders was on the House floor giving a three-minute speech about the military intervention taking place in what was then known as Yugoslavia. In the first 90 seconds, Sanders gave the familiar argument that military operations—like that one—without congressional authorization are unconstitutional. But for the second half of his remarks, he shifted his focus. Without expending a word to satisfy his own constitutional concerns, Sanders defended the NATO bombing as necessary on moral grounds to stop “ethnic cleansing,” the war’s euphemism for atrocities targeting ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

The Kosovo operation is a 20-year old episode, but it’s a rare example of Sanders openly, if not quite transparently, grappling with his conflicting principles—and presidents often have to do that. Sanders voted for a resolution, preferred by the Clinton administration, which “authorized” the operation without codifying that the authorization was legally required under the War Powers Act. (Sanders, and nearly all of his colleagues, voted against a formal declaration of war.) And when even that resolution failed in the House on a tie vote, Sanders did not insist the operation end on the basis of its constitutional illegitimacy. Five days later at a Montpelier, Vermont, town hall, he passionately supported the bombing.

Twenty years later, when it comes to defending NATO allies if attacked, the Blob will be happy to know Duss was unequivocal that Sanders would respond militarily: “Shared security is something Senator Sanders strongly believes in, and the principle of collective defense is at the core of NATO's founding treaty. It's important for friends and foes alike to have no doubt that the United States will honor this commitment."

Beyond that, Duss told me that cases of “genocide or of mass atrocities” would “weigh heavily” on the mind of Sanders as president. And he laid out the questions Sanders would pose: “Does this meet the level of an emergency, an imminent atrocity? Does it immediately impact the security of the people of the United States? And if it doesn’t, does that imminent atrocity, rise to the level of a global norm which we have interest in enforcing and upholding? And finally, and very important, what are the chances for creating a better outcome having taken this step of introducing U.S. military forces into the situation?”

These are all essential questions, and they are reassuring to Democratic foreign policy experts, even some progressive ones, who want Sanders to leave the door open for military force. Ploughshares Fund President Joseph Cirincione, an anti-nuclear weapons activist who informally advises Sanders, told me: “I think Senator Sanders would not hesitate to use military force to defend the country from attack, to defend our vital interests, to prevent atrocities like genocide. But he’s made clear that military force should be the very, very last option.”

For a small but noticeable anti-Bernie strain on the far left, that wiggle room for military strikes makes Sanders a hypocrite. For example, Ajamu Baraka, the last vice presidential nominee for the Green Party, said in an interview that Sanders’ openness to military action amounts to “saying one thing publicly but then appearing to have a different position that is reflected sometimes in his legislative decisions, and I think the Kosovo situation was a very important example of that.”

But most of the anti-interventionist left aren’t quibbling about the smattering of past disagreements with Sanders such as Kosovo. They are mostly enthralled at how Sanders’ campaign rhetoric is broadening the foreign policy debate. In particular, they are bowled over by how, earlier this year, Sanders used the War Powers Resolution to move a bipartisan bill through Congress demanding Trump end American military involvement in the Yemeni civil war, where the U.S. has supported Saudi Arabia’s intervention. Although the bill was vetoed, the fact that it got to Trump’s desk both legitimized the War Powers Resolution and bolstered Sanders’ case that he can get things done in Washington.

Most of the activists with whom I spoke put more emphasis on Yemen than Kosovo when gauging how a President Sanders would involve Congress in his foreign policy. Robert Naiman, policy director at Just Foreign Policy, raved over email: “Sanders was the first to introduce a privileged resolution invoking the War Powers Resolution to force a vote to end unconstitutional U.S. participation in the war and lead it to completion, passage by Congress. That never happened before in the whole history of the War Powers Resolution since 1973.”

But Sanders’ proud defense of his Kosovo stance to his antiwar allies should not be ignored. He thundered at the May 1999 Montpelier town hall: “What do you do to a war criminal who has led, for the first time in modern history, the organized rape as an agent of war, of tens of thousands of women? What do you do to a butcher who has lined up people and shot them? Do you say to them, ‘You have won Mr. Milosevic. We are not going to stand up to you. We are going home’?” Sanders once put the end of genocide ahead of a strict adherence to the War Powers Resolution, and his foreign policy adviser has now left the door open to him doing it again as president.

Before President Barack Obama’s 2011 intervention in Libya, another instance of the use of American force to try to stop genocide, Sanders initially indicated support for military action. Sanders co-sponsored a Senate resolution that urged “the United Nations Security Council to take such further action as may be necessary to protect civilians in Libya from attack, including the possible imposition of a no-fly zone over Libyan territory.” The Security Council did just that, setting in motion a multilateral military operation.

Nine days after hostilities began, however, Sanders wasn’t stoutly defending the Libyan operation, as he had with Kosovo. He was betraying squeamishness about how long the operation would last, telling Fox News: “Everybody understands Gadhafi is a thug and murderer. We want to see him go, but I think in the midst of two wars, I'm not quite sure we need a third war, and I hope the president tells us that our troops will be leaving there, that our military action in Libya will be ending very, very shortly.” After the death of Gadhafi and the subsequent destabilization of Libya, Sanders took a far dimmer view of the operation. He said four years later in a primary debate with Hillary Clinton, “Yes, we could get rid of Gadhafi, a terrible dictator, but that created a vacuum for ISIS.”

The common thread in Kosovo and Libya was Sanders’ impulse to stop genocide, mitigated by his strong desire to limit the duration of any hostilities. If you are mainly concerned about getting bogged down in quagmires, you will be comforted by Sanders’ discomfort with prolonged military action. However, those that are more comfortable with direct military action are unnerved that Sanders generally doesn’t talk about the nuances of his views on the campaign trail.

“If the anti-war rhetoric becomes too unequivocal, a leader may compromise their ability to rally popular support in the event that they judge intervention necessary,” said Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official in the Obama administration, in an email exchange. “If Bernie Sanders is serious about leaving himself leeway to act militarily where necessary, it would be useful to articulate that idea to his supporters in the context of the campaign.”

***

Nossel’s concern is indicative of the skepticism Sanders receives from many inside the Blob. While the left loves Sanders’ principles and his outsider posture, the Blob worries about his lack of details and experience in crisis situations. Mieke Eoyang, a former congressional staffer who once advised Congresswoman Pat Schroeder and Senator Ted Kennedy on defense issues, argues that Sanders was largely absent from serious legislating about foreign policy matters throughout the bulk of his congressional career.

Now vice president for the National Security Program at the centrist organization Third Way, Eoyang worries that, despite the occasional examples of supporting military force, Sanders possesses “a real reluctance to use American power.” “The president has to make choices about how to exercise American power,” she told me, “and there are serious negative consequences that flow from inaction as well as action. So you have to choose from a bunch of imperfect outcomes. And I have not seen Bernie, over the course of his career, being willing to select from imperfect outcomes.”

But Blob members are not solely fixated on what, and whether, Bernie would bomb. They also question his faith in people-to-people public diplomacy. “The devil is always in the detail,” warns Bishop Garrison, a former foreign policy adviser on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign who founded the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy, a “post-partisan” think tank. Asked what Sanders’ highly ambitious goal of building a “global progressive movement that speaks to the needs of working people” to counter “a growing worldwide movement toward authoritarianism, oligarchy and kleptocracy” means in practice, Duss said, “The goal here is to promote the idea that progressives at the civil society level need to be reaching out, and meeting, and working, and networking and coordinating with each other much more energetically than we have been doing up until now, because we see right-wing forces doing that.”

Duss went on: “Building a global community is not just about relationships between governments, but it’s about relationships between peoples. As president, he would have a foreign policy that worked to protect political space where civil society groups from different countries under different forms of government can build relationships.”

To Garrison, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom with two Bronze Stars, this seemingly heartwarming approach is fraught with danger. “One could argue you’re talking about interfering with the ongoing political efforts of a society, on a grand and global scale across different sovereign nations. That’s not diplomacy.” While Garrison was supportive of civil society groups that invest in “local populations,” he worried that Sanders’ vision “sounds like you’re going go in and start an uprising somewhere.”

Jonathan Katz, a former State Department official in the Obama administration who has been sounding the alarm about “democratic backsliding” within the NATO alliance, is more positive about the civil society push, and urged Sanders to show some specific figures for how much money he would “be willing to put into an effort to promote democracy” abroad. (Duss in turn said it has not been decided yet if a budget proposal, delineating how much money would be cut from the military and redirected elsewhere, would be released during the campaign.)

But Katz, now a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund, cautioned against a pro-democracy outreach strategy rooted in a left-versus-right framework of the kind that Sanders seems to envision. “More often than not,” Katz said, “in the cases of countries where you have democratic backsliding, it’s not because people on the right or the left don’t want democracy. It’s usually a leader that comes in—an oligarch, an authoritarian—that starts to use and manipulate the system for his or her own good, or to benefit a small group around them.” He added, “Bernie is narrowly pointing to progressives in terms of a global democracy fight. I like the idea of a global democracy fight. But it’s got to be inclusive … Otherwise, you’re pitting groups against each other, potentially.”

***

Duss may have given me a Blob-like response when asked about Sanders’ criteria for going to war, but I would not suggest he’s become a card-carrying member. When you talk to Duss, he’s far more likely to say “military violence” than “military power.” He told me Sanders’ counterterrorism strategy review would “take a much more aggressive look at how we are using military violence.” Such language doesn’t preclude the use of the military. But Duss, and more important, Sanders, routinely send the signal that they harbor an extreme distaste for the use of force.

Even so, Sanders has views about military intervention that are more complicated than his campaign rhetoric. And that may explain why he hasn’t delved into much detail about foreign policy. Once a candidate wades into the sea of international crises and hypothetical threats, eventually the possibility of military force arises. Any discussion of that risks making Sanders look more like a conventional commander in chief than a revolutionary one.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... ine-227193

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 11:10 pm

I rarely quote at length from pseudo-left web sites, but the following should be of interest. It's a letter to the International Socialist Organization's Socialist Worker as part of a discussion on whether to support Bernie Sanders's campaign. This radical, Jay Moore, crossed paths politically with Sanders many times in Vermont.
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A booster for U.S. imperialism

I HAVE lived and been an activist in Vermont for the past 30 years, during which time I closely followed Bernie Sanders' political career that has led him from Burlington mayor to U.S. congressman to U.S. senator to presidential candidate.

Over those years, I have had a number of direct encounters with him. I can tell you from my experience that Bernie is (1) a very rude human being (which makes it hard to understand how he has been a successful politician) and (2) has never been part of the social-change movements here in Vermont, and has often been at odds with us, particularly when it concerned wars and other international issues--most recently, the savage Israeli attack on Gaza.

My first experience with Bernie came shortly after he was elected mayor, and I moved to Burlington partly on that basis. It came while I was participating in a Central American solidarity action at a General Electric Gatling Gun factory in the early 1980s in support of peasants in El Salvador and Nicaragua against whom the machine guns mounted on helicopters were being used.

One would have expected, and I certainly did at the time, that Bernie--back then, much more of an "avowed socialist" than he is today--would have supported our civil disobedience protests to rid the "Peoples Republic of Burlington" from this odious human rights blot. Burlington had a sister city in Nicaragua.

But Bernie did not. Instead, I vividly remember Bernie standing arms-folded alongside the right-wing union officials from the factory and the Burlington Police Department as we were being arrested. He falsely insinuated that we were "anti-worker," and he refused to have any serious political dialogue with us activists. Bernie next made cozy with the cops and their union, who endorsed him in his future mayoral elections.

To my knowledge, Bernie has never spoken out against U.S. imperialism, calling it for what it is--namely, the foundation of upper-class profits and middle-class privileges in the belly of the beast. Down through the years as a politician, he has waffled at best on opposing U.S. wars against the developing world and other people who are deviating from what our rulers want. To his credit, Bernie did vote against the Iraq wars (though this was not a particularly courageous stand to take given how many other members of Congress did the same), but he has not consistently voted against the military funding legislation that made these wars possible.

Moreover, back in 1999, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Bill Clinton's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. At that time, I was a member of a group of angry and upset peace activists, including Dave Dellinger, who held a sit-in at Bernie's Burlington office and were arrested after Bernie refused to speak with us. At that same time, one of Bernie's Washington staff, the labor historian and activist Jeremy Brecher, wrote a stinging open letter explaining why he could not continue to work for and represent a politician who would take that kind of pro-war position.

In the last couple of years, a huge battle has taken place in Burlington and surrounding towns over the Pentagon's plan to station the new F-35 warplane boondoggle at the Burlington Airport. A large and diverse movement came together to oppose it, based on everything from the noise level for those who have to live under its takeoff to its contribution to militarism and global warming. Did Bernie stand with the people's movement? No, he has supported the F-35 to the hilt, standing instead with the area's military types.

Last fall, when members of Code Pink and Occupy confronted him about his failure to oppose Israel's attack on the Gaza civilian population, Bernie took an evasive liberal position, criticizing the Palestinians who were resisting as much or more than the Zionists. He then called the police on us.

Yes, I will freely admit that Bernie can talk a good talk about economic inequities and the need to redress them. He's definitely on the mark there. An Occupier can agree. While never much of an environmentalist, he has even added a bit about global warming to the end of his standard populist stump speech. (When I knew him as Burlington's mayor, he was all in favor of letting developers take over the public lands on Burlington waterfront--which fortunately was stopped due to actions by Green activists with whom he could never get along.) However, is that enough?

In my view, we need to be clear--especially if we are socialists--about the strong linkages between what capitalism does overseas and here at home, and we need to stand firmly in solidarity with all of those people who are opposing U.S. imperialism and call for no more military spending that is being used to kill and repress them. I will certainly not waste my vote on a politician who does not take that stand.

As importantly, we need to be building revolutionary movements to take power away from the ruling class, not campaigning for politicians who invariably let us down with their promises of reforms.

Jay Moore, Marshfield, Vermont

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The working class needs our own party not another force promoting illusions in one or another bourgeois politician.

As for Sanders his history shows that while he mouths progressive verbiage in the event he always stands with the forces of repression (the police) and the business establishment.

As another commenter states, socialists judge and evaluate an individual and party according to the class forces who support him and those he represents. Objective exposure of these tendencies is vital.

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"Bernie Sanders is this election’s Democratic sheepdog. The sheepdog is a card the Democratic party plays every presidential primary season 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, and the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party, either staying home or trying to build something outside the two party box.

1984 and 88 the sheepdog candidate was Jesse Jackson. In 92 it was California governor Jerry Brown. In 2000 and 2004 the designated sheepdog was Al Sharpton, and in 2008 it was Dennis Kucinich. This year it’s Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The function of the sheepdog candidate is to give left activists and voters a reason, however illusory, to believe there’s a place of influence for them inside the Democratic party, if and only if the eventual Democratic nominee can win in November."

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"And then imagine that someone exactly like Bernie Sanders was elected in 2008. Is there any question that thThis is just a variation on the “lesser of two evils” (or maybe “least of three evils”?) approach that has resulted in a consistent rightward shift in American politics for decades. We are expected to hope and hope that, as US politics careen down the one-way street toward more war, more austerity, more surveillance, etc. that electing a nominal socialist (read M. Jukovsky's post) to preside over a decaying bourgeois state would or could somehow divert the irreversible crisis of capitalism and make it more humane.

In the highly unlikely event that Sanders were elected, he’d toe the line or end up out of the picture--or six feet under--pretty quickly. A kinder and gentler (reformed) capitalism, especially in this historical epoch, is a bigger illusion than ever.e U.S. and the rest of the world be radically different from what it is today?"

One could just as well say "imagine if Barack Obama was elected in 2008." After all, his campaign was based on the fraud that he was some sort of outsider, than an African-American president would be kinder to the poor, etc.

And what has it led to? The most right-wing administration in US history, carrying out war and military provocations in every corner of the globe, gutting social spending, and going further than any president in history vis-a-vis the turn to police state forms of rule.

As for your mention of “purity,” the opposition to pseudosocialists like Sanders is based on decades of bitter—indeed tragic—experiences with social democrats, “socialists," “communists,” "leftists" and "radicals" who play the bourgeois electoral game. The “purity” slur is a rather tired diversion away from issues and instead onto supposed personal or psychological faults (we’re narrow-minded, rigid, dogmatic, blah blah blah).

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. In Russian, we have a bit rude, but good saying - had grandma balls she would be a granddad
1) EVERY USA pres had been a war criminal. Period. Dems and Reps scored about the same abroad. It has been Carter who started the nightmare in Afghanistan, Reagan and Bush-Jr just proceeded.
2) You could say that he is not a Dem. OK, maybe. But irrelevant. You see, the USA is an imperialist state, ruled NOT by prezes, but by those who hire this or that prez to be their lackey. No master would ever hire a lackey who is not suitable.
So, every person who could be the lest threat to the imperialist state of USA has less than 0 chance to be even seen as "serious candidate".
PS I like nice dreams too.

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"which is a farther journey: the road to socialism starting from Bernie Sanders, or the road to socialism starting from Hillary or Jeb, Ted or Scott?"

In one word - Neither.

The road will start not with any of USA "serious" candidates for the head lackey of USA imperialism. but with very different people and with very different events than so-called "elections"

About "the millions of people whose lives would be significantly *better* with a Bernie Sanders as president versus the rest of the candidates fielded by the Democratic-Republican duopoly?"

See Greece. Are the millions better off now with "leftist" rulers?

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Why in the world do you think that people's lives would be better? Sanders has caucused with the Democratic Party for years and is a Democratic candidate for president in the Democratic primary. You don't seem to want a lecture, but c'mon. The Democratic Party is a big business party of imperialist war, austerity, drone assassinations and the destruction of democratic rights. Why should workers expect anything different from Sanders? Are you so easily fooled by his occasional sunday afternoon speechifying?

========



Socialists base themselves on a scientific analysis of the class interests represented by political parties and leaders. Those who don't are liable to be caught up by the latest political fraud being peddled by the corporate elite.

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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 11:12 pm

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

When Bernie Sanders, the nominally independent “socialist” senator from Vermont, announced last month that he would seek the Democratic Party nomination, the World Socialist Web Site commented that this marked “a new stage in one of the longest-running political frauds in American history.” This characterization is completely born out by a review of Sanders' political biography, which spans over four decades.

Born in Brooklyn to middle-class Jewish parents in 1941, Sanders came of age in a solidly liberal milieu during the heyday of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. His older brother Larry helped campaign for Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson as a member of the Young Democrats in the 1950s, and it was he who Sanders says gave him his earliest political education.

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

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

The party, although tiny and politically amorphous, found a certain response in 1970s Vermont. The state was changing significantly, with an influx of new residents, most from New York City and other east coast metropolitan centers, attracted by the prospect escaping the tensions of the cities for life in a rural area only short distance away. Sanders was himself part of this “hippie invasion,” as some called it: shortly after graduating from the University of Chicago, he bought a summer home in Middlesex, a small town in Central Vermont, before leaving Brooklyn for Vermont entirely in the tumultuous year 1968. “I liked nature, I wanted to live in the country,” he later explained. “I had absolutely no intention of becoming involved in politics.”

The Liberty Union Party, like countless other middle-class organizations, had no coherent political program or perspective outside of a vague commitment to social reform, which it was pleased to call “socialism.” As the Boston Globe put it in 1976, “there were nearly as many opinions as there were [party members].” Its political “accomplishments,” aside from attracting enough votes to quality for major party status, consisted of symbolic fig leafs from local government, such as the holding of hearings on utility rate increases and placing items on the agenda of various town hall meetings asking the state to consider nationalizing the state's electric utilities.

In the end, the party collapsed in the mid-70s, a victim of the demise of the anti-war movement, which had a broad demoralizing effect on the middle class radical milieu. Sanders, speaking to the Globe shortly after leaving the party, expressed both the ennui and political narrowness of this outlook:

“'I have done as much as I can,' said Sanders, who volunteered that he is an admirer of Fidel Castro. 'My feeling is that I had remained we'd have gotten just as many votes. But if I can't see growth …' His voice trails off and he shrugs.'”

Sanders ran for public office again in 1981, this time as an independent, for mayor of Burlington, the largest city in Vermont with around 37,000 residents at the time. This time, he jettisoned his former association with the “socialist” politics of the Liberty Union Party in order to avoid antagonizing the city's business interests.

Although he continued to be routinely described in the press as an “avowed socialist,” he did not portray himself as such during the campaign, preferring instead the more amorphous term “radical,” and his opponent, Democratic incumbent Gordon Pacquette, declined to make an issue of it. “I've stayed away from calling myself a socialist because I did not want to spend half my life explaining that I did not believe in the Soviet Union or in concentration camps,” Sanders explained at the time.

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

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

Sanders also won praise for his auditing of the city's pension plan for the first time in three decades, and initiated a $100 million redevelopment project of the city's waterfront, opposed by tenants' organizations in the surrounding neighborhood, funded by a combination of federal grants and private investors.

At the same time as he was wooing Burlington business with his fiscal responsibility, enabling him to win three additional two year terms as mayor, Sanders shored up his credentials among petty bourgeois radicals with largely symbolic measures. He traveled to the Soviet Union and Cuba on good-will trips, invited members of the Irish Republican Army to City Hall, and spoke out in favor of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He pursued sister-city status for Burlington with a coastal town in Nicaragua and the Soviet city of Yaroslavl.

When Burlington business interests and radical posturing came into conflict, Sanders came down unhesitatingly on the side his bread was buttered on. One former supporter, in a recent letter to socialistworker.org, describes how Central American solidarity activists picketed the General Electric factory in Burlington that manufactured machineguns used in military helicopters against peasant guerrillas: “I vividly remember Bernie standing arms-folded alongside the right-wing union officials from the factory and the Burlington Police Department as we were being arrested. He falsely insinuated that we were ‘anti-worker,’ and he refused to have any serious political dialogue with us activists.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The decision by Sanders to seek the Democratic Party nomination for president is the culmination of a protracted process over four decades, during which Sanders, despite never formally belonging to the Democratic Party, never ventured beyond what passes for the party's “left” flank, using the term “socialist” only to suggest an illusory difference with his (infrequent) Democratic Party challengers.

His role in the campaign will be use his reputation as a politician of the “left” to disguise the ever more right-wing orientation of the Democratic Party: its abandonment of even a nominal commitment to social reform, its embrace of war, assassination, mass surveillance and an increasingly dictatorial role for the American imperialist state, both internationally and at home.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/0 ... d-m15.html

chlamor
Posts: 520
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Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Wed Nov 27, 2019 11:13 pm

At site of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech
Sanders declares his allegiance to US imperialism
By Tom Hall
26 September 2017
Last Thursday, Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a major foreign policy speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. Portrayed by his supporters in the left-liberal, pro-Democratic Party media as elaborating his “progressive” and “radical” foreign policy vision, it was, in fact, a clear declaration of support for US imperialism.

His choice of venue was significant. Sanders gave the speech at the same university where Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946, which announced the launching of the Cold War. Sanders made several fawning references to Churchill in the course of his remarks and presented Churchill’s Missouri speech as a progressive and democratic manifesto.

“In that speech,” Sanders said, “he defined his strategic concept as quote ‘nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands.’ To give security to these countless homes, he said, ‘they must be shielded from the two giant marauders, war and tyranny.’”

In fact, the speech given by Churchill, a hardened reactionary and defender of the British Empire, played a major role in the development of Cold War anti-communist ideology. Under the guise of opposing the spread of Soviet “tyranny,” the United States carried out innumerable crimes, from the near-genocidal wars in Korea and Vietnam to multiple regime-change operations (Guatemala, Iran, the Congo, Chile), in which the CIA replaced elected governments with savage military dictatorships.

Subversion and violence abroad were accompanied by political repression and intimidation at home in the form of the McCarthy-era crackdown on socialist and left-wing sentiment in the American working class and the persecution of socialist-minded intellectuals.

By choosing this venue and wrapping himself in the mantle of Churchill, Sanders sought to establish, for the benefit of the ruling class, his anti-communist credentials. This was underscored by his full-throated embrace of the McCarthyite anti-Russian campaign being spearheaded today by his colleagues in the Democratic Party. As in the 1940s,’50s and ’60s, the “liberal” Democratic Party establishment and its media allies such as the New York Times are seeking to whip up an anti-Russian hysteria for the dual purpose of preparing for war against nuclear-armed Russia and imposing political censorship within the US, particularly over the Internet, in the name of combating Russian-inspired “fake news.”

In Sanders’ overview of world politics, the chief source of the “rise in authoritarianism and right wing extremism—both domestic and foreign,” is the Russian government. Denouncing “inequality, corruption, oligarchy and authoritarianism,” Sanders pointed not to Washington, but to Moscow, declaring that “kleptocrats, like Putin in Russia, use divisiveness and abuse as a tool for enriching themselves and those loyal to them.”

Sanders endorsed the Democratic Party’s narrative, which lacks any foundation outside of the say-so of American spy agencies, of Russian government interference in the US election. “We saw this anti-democratic effort take place in the 2016 election right here in the United States,” he declared, “where we now know that the Russian government was engaged in a massive effort to undermine one of our greatest strengths: The integrity of our elections, and our faith in our own democracy.”

In this paean to the “integrity of our elections,” Sanders shelved his campaign rhetoric attacking the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” ruling, which effectively removed all restrictions on corporate buying of elections and politicians. He also neglected to mention the Democratic Party emails that exposed the party leadership’s machinations to sabotage his own primary challenge to Hillary Clinton.

The sole explicit reference Sanders made to Trump’s fascistic speech last Tuesday at the United Nations was a criticism of Trump’s failure to directly attack Russia for undermining “[t]he integrity of our elections and our faith in our own democracy.” He said nothing about Trump’s genocidal threat to “totally destroy” North Korea.

“[O]ur goal is to not only strengthen American democracy,” Sanders said, “but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win.” [Emphasis added]. Given that the US has for years sponsored "color revolutions" against pro-Moscow regimes in the former Soviet Union, this statement can be understood only as a veiled threat to work toward the overthrow of the Putin government.

Sanders promoted the US-orchestrated civil war in Syria, denouncing “Russian and Iranian support for Bashar al-Assad’s slaughter in Syria,” while criticizing the UN for being “too slow or unwilling to act.” At the same time, he bemoaned US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, saying it “empowers authoritarian leaders who insist that our support for those rights and values [which the United States is supposedly upholding in Syria] is not serious.” Precisely!

Sanders defended the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, which was obtained through punishing sanctions aimed at crippling that country’s economy, and called for similar punitive measures in North Korea. This demonstrates that Sanders, despite criticisms of Trump’s recklessness, has no differences with the administration’s strategic goal of bringing to heel or overthrowing the unstable regime in Pyongyang (a fact Sanders already demonstrated in an interview this April when he said Trump was “on the right track” in North Korea). Sanders merely proposes to do this through an economic blockade, which itself amounts to an act of war.

The Vermont senator sought to obscure the pro-war content of his speech with a heavy dose of “democratic” and “human rights” rhetoric. He made certain criticisms of the CIA-orchestrated coups in Iran and Chile and the Vietnam and Iraq wars. However, he treats these events not as imperialist crimes carried out in the interests of the American ruling elite, but as foreign policy “mistakes” that negatively impacted Washington’s global interests in the long term.

Thus, the Vietnam War was based on a “discredited domino theory” about the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. The war in Iraq was “based on a similarly mistaken analysis.”

Sanders’ speech exposes, once again, the fraud of his election campaign claim to be a “socialist.” In any event, the word “socialism” was conveniently absent from his Missouri speech. The term “democracy,” used primarily in reference to the promotion of “democracy” against nations and regimes targeted for destruction by the United States, was used 21 times.

Sanders is a longstanding supporter of American imperialism, a fact he has sought to conceal by avoiding discussion of foreign policy as much as possible. He endorsed the NATO war in the Balkans in the 1990s and voted for the Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution in 2001, which was used as the basis for the invasion of Afghanistan and has since been cited as the legal basis for military attacks, drone assassinations, torture and other crimes overseas, as well as the use of military commissions, indefinite detention without trial, mass domestic surveillance and other police state measures within the US.

In 2015, when asked whether counterterrorism under a Sanders administration would include Special Forces and drone strikes, Sanders replied, “Well, all of that and more.”

Sanders’ speech has been met with effusive praise from “left” Democratic Party-aligned media outlets. An article in the Nation written by John Nichols was headlined “Bernie Sanders Just Gave One of the Finest Speeches of His Career.” It called Sanders’ speech “genuinely internationalist” and a “necessary and valuable counter to Trump.”

The websites of pseudo-left satellites of the Democratic Party that have incessantly promoted Sanders as a genuine socialist (Socialist Worker, Jacobin, Socialist Alternative) have to date elected not to publish anything on his speech. Given their support for American imperialism under the fraudulent banner of “human rights,” their silence can only be taken as consent.

No doubt, the Missouri speech was seen by Sanders and his backers as preparation for his elevation into to the higher ranks of American capitalist politics, including a potential presidential run in 2020. He is being kept by the ruling class as an option, under conditions of growing disgust with and alienation from the Democratic Party and the entire two-party system among broad sections of working people and youth in the US.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/0 ... d-s26.html

chlamor
Posts: 520
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Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Wed Nov 27, 2019 11:38 pm

Sanders backs Obama “kill list,” troops to Syria
By a reporter
27 April 2016
Towards the end of a town hall meeting in Philadelphia broadcast last Monday night over MSNBC, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders declared his support for the Obama administration’s program of assassination by drone-fired missiles and its steady build-up of US troop strength in Syria and Iraq.

These statements underscore the unity across the bourgeois political spectrum, among all the presidential candidates of the Democratic and Republican parties, in favor of stepped-up military intervention in the Middle East, including the use of drones that have killed thousands of civilians.

The discussion was initiated by a 29-year-old Sanders supporter, not by MSNBC host Chris Hayes, the moderator of the town hall—a significant fact, since no journalist for the corporate-controlled media has pressed any of the candidates about drone missile assassinations or other lawless actions by the Obama administration.

The questioner, Miguel Garces, was clearly skeptical about Obama’s claim to legal authority to conduct indiscriminate air strikes against targets supposedly linked to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The exchange went as follows:

Question: Senator Sanders, you said that you think that the US air strikes are authorized under current law, but does that mean that the US military can lawfully strike ISIS-affiliated groups in any country around the world?

Sanders: No, it does not mean that. I hope, by the way, that we will have an authorization passed by the Congress, and I am prepared to support that authorization if it is tight enough so I am satisfied that we do not get into a never-ending perpetual war in the Middle East. That I will do everything I can to avoid. But the president, no president, has the ability willy-nilly to be dropping bombs or using drones any place he wants.

Hayes then intervened to press Sanders on whether he was actually expressing a disagreement with current US government policy in relation to air strikes and drone warfare:

Hayes: The current authorization which you cite in what Miguel just quoted, which is the authorization to use military force after 9/11—that has led to the kill list. This president—

literally, there is a kill list. There is a list of people that the US government wants to kill, and it goes about doing it. Would you keep the kill list as president of the United States?

Sanders: Look, terrorism is a very serious issue. There are people out there who want to kill Americans, who want to attack this country, and I think we have a lot of right to defend ourselves. I think as Miguel said, though, it has to be done in a constitutional, legal way.

Hayes: Do you think what’s being done now is constitutional and legal?

Sanders: In general, I do, yes.

After obtaining confirmation that Sanders supports Obama’s drone warfare as “constitutional and legal,” Hayes asked about Obama’s announcement Monday morning that the Pentagon would greatly increase the number of Special Forces deployed to Syria—an action that is illegal under international law, since the Syrian government has not given Washington permission to do so.

Sanders replied, “Here’s the bottom line. ISIS has got to be destroyed.” While emphasizing that he favored the use of Muslim Arab ground troops, rather than American troops, except as “advisers” and “trainers,” Sanders reiterated, “We have had some success in the last year or so putting ISIS on the defensive. We’ve got to continue that effort.”

Sanders made similar comments during an interview Sunday on the CNN program “State of the Union,” telling host Jake Tapper that he would support legislation providing a new authorization for the use of military force in Iraq and Syria, giving a new legal basis for the military operations that now involve more than 5,000 US troops in the two countries.

These statements do not represent a shift in the candidate’s positions on war and violence, but their open, public repetition underscores the political reality: Bernie Sanders is an imperialist politician, a defender of the global interests of the very “millionaires and billionaires” he claims to oppose.

The entire MSNBC exchange with Sanders can be viewed here, starting at 35 minutes and 20 seconds.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/0 ... l-a27.html

chlamor
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Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Wed Nov 27, 2019 11:47 pm

Sanders promised long ago to endorse "whomever the eventual Democrat nominee turns out to be"; which should have been a signal that he didn't think it would be himself.

Then he promised to "take it to the convention". His endorsement yesterday may have fulfilled his promise to Clinton (to endorse the nominee), although a BIG note must be made of the fact that officially, she is not the nominee as neither of them has enough pledged delegates, and that the convention has not yet taken place - which is where the nominee is actually named through the delegate vote. In any case, he fulfilled the promise to the DNC/Clinton machine, but not the one to the voters.

At one point during the primaries, he said Clinton was "not qualified to be president". He endorsed her nonetheless.

He promised to work to make the DNC platform more "progressive", then got pretty much nothing in the way of concessions, then proceeded to call the thing the "most progressive ever" despite all evidence to the contrary.

And now it comes out he not only won't "take it [the fight to be the nominee] to the convention", he is not even going to continue to press for the "progressive" ideals he wanted in the platform, as is his right to do at the convention.

------
"Party rules empower Sanders, who endorsed Hillary Clinton Tuesday, to try to force votes at the Philadelphia convention on proposed planks that failed to muster the necessary votes at a Platform Committee meeting last weekend in Orlando.

"But Sanders has decided against using the so-called minority report process, the senator’s top policy aid informed allies Tuesday. [...]"

=========

A number of Twitter hashtags are trending, accusing Sanders of selling out. He didn't actually sell out because that would've required him to possess integrity and the best of intentions in the first place. Sanders was never "in-it-to-win-it", this was all a staged sham from day one. The fix was in from when he publicly declared to George Stephanopoulos on ABC News last May that he wouldn't run as an Independent in the event of losing the nomination.

He's been friends with the Clinton's for years and has supported their various candidacies - and once again he's supported yet another Clinton candidacy. This time (with help from TYT) by running a fake opposition campaign that gave HRC the public illusion of having to work hard for the nomination, shielded her from a genuine leftist rival and shored up the Democrats left by bringing in voters who might otherwise have considered the Independents or rejected the entire political process altogether.

========

Patrick Martin wrote, "...Sanders began the retreat Thursday evening in an interview with Charlie Rose of CBS News."

bernie the b0mber (D -- Lockheed-Martin) has a long and thoroughly disgusting history of double-talk. His willingness to reverse his [cough] "principles" in service to political expediency is as long as it is vomit inducing. E.g.,

"...It would be hypocritical of me to run as a Democrat because of the things I have said about the party." -- bernie the b0mber, New York City, Socialist Scholars Conference, April 1990.

"...Why should we work within the Democratic Party if we don’t agree with anything the Democratic Party says?" -- bernie the b0mber, New York City, Socialist Scholars Conference, April 1990.

"...The Democratic and Republican parties are tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, they both adhere to an ideology of greed and vulgarity." -- bernie the b0mber, New York Times op-ed, January 1989

Any questions?

========

You approvingly say that Sanders is a genuine New Deal Democrat", sincere in his desire to "break up the big banks", etc. "Hell is paved with good intentions". Further, this is not 1932. No more "New Deals" are possible. To hold out that perspective is promoting a very harmful deception. We are in the age where those of the Sanders mold and even more "left" such as Syriza in Greece come forward to safeguard the rule of finance capital. Their "victory" in Greece was not a victory for the working class as you say a Sanders victory would be. Revolutionary socialists base themselves (as I said in another comment) on principle, telling the truth to the working class. The other perspective is opportunism and deception.

=======

" And a Sanders presidency would move the entire terms of the debate drastically to the left..."

That's what we heard about Obama from wishful-thinking delusional people, and we see how he turned out.

The US government is a corporatist financial Oligarchy (this site has written about that), so your Bernie will do what Obama has done: He will work for his corporate owners just like all these other corrupt D and R politicians do should he ever be allowed to sit in the oval office as president.

Bernie Sanders will be a continuation of the Obama regime and his despicable policies overall. So if you like the corrupt, neocon, imperialist, drone-addicted, corporatist Obama and his "To Kill List," you'll be pleased with BS (Bernie Sanders).

And should he be allowed to become president, I can hear it now from the Berniebots: "You have to give him time" and "This must be left over from Obama" as months and months pass and the Bush-Obama right-wing neocon agenda continues under BS. All the D-partisan blame will be put on those "nasty Republicans." Then all these Berniebot will realize they've been had once again just like 8 years ago with their messiah Obama when they fell for him. They don't learn from the past.

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

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Thu Nov 28, 2019 1:18 am

The Happy Story of Bernie Sanders & Iraq
Ving the Merciless

Feb 12, 2016

Bernie Sanders really, really, wants you to know that he voted against the 2003 Iraq War and Hillary Clinton voted for it. He’s mentioned in it every single debate. His ridiculously named website, feelthebern.org, has a whole page dedicated to it (see below).

The funny thing about that feelthebern page is how carefully it jumps from his opposition to the 1991 Gulf War to his opposition to the 2003 Iraq War. The US had Iraq policy in the 1990s. What were Bernie’s positions during those 12 years? He’d rather you not think about that. And you probably won’t, especially if you’re among the people he consistently does best with — voters 29 and under.

The thing about voters under 29 is that the first Presidential election they could vote in was 2008. The oldest members of that cohort were 15 or 16 when Hillary Clinton made that vote. For them, Iraq is synonymous with a humanitarian and foreign policy disaster that began in the Bush years and continues to this day. Senator Sanders knows this. And he knows that, outside of Vermont, voters didn’t really know who he was until last year. This lets him tell a fascinating story about a reliably left-wing anti-interventionist peacenik politician who foresaw disaster back in 2002. Telling that particular story, though, relies on a clever mix of 20/20 hindsight and the short memories of his core constituency.

Let’s tell another story — about diarrhea. For adults, it can be a messy inconvenience. Over a prolonged period, it is fatal for children as their bodies dehydrate and lose nutrients. Between the two Iraq wars that Bernie Sanders so bravely opposed, lots of Iraqi children died of malnutrition and dehydration. Lots. A conservative estimate put the number of dead children at 106,000 between 1991 and 1998. A 1995 study in The Lancet estimated it at 576,000. Iraq was prevented from importing water purification and sanitation equipment under the sanctions imposed by the UN and enforced by the US and its allies. Bernie Sanders supported those sanctions.

Sanctions starved Iraq of resources and supplies, and Saddam Hussein allocated what was left to reinforce his regime. Sanctions precipitated a humanitarian disaster of historic proportions. The bills that shaped US sanctions policy, the bills Sanders supported, all came up during that decade gap his site skips right over. It’s an uglier story. Tell that story, and the man campaigning as champion of the underdog looks a lot more like any other establishment politician supporting the status quo, no matter the cost.

And there was a cost to sanctions — and not just the Iraqi lives lost at the time. In May, 2000 The Lancet ran an editorial alongside a study showing that child mortality in much of Iraq was getting worse. The editorial concluded that UN sanctions bore significant responsibility for this tragedy and that “(t)he courageous policy…is to suspend (not abandon) sanctions lest upcoming generations of Iraqis, out of resentment, suffering, and isolation, grow up to be as aggressive as their current leader.” A quick bit of arithmetic should tell you when the many young Iraqis recruited by ISIS were born.

Back when Hillary Clinton was still defending her Iraq War vote she said she acted “in the context of weapons of mass destruction, grave threats to the United States, and clearly, Saddam Hussein had been a real problem for the international community for more than a decade.” This is the same context in which then-Representative Sanders supported every single bill supporting Iraq sanctions and regime change that came his way. Because he, like every other member of the political establishment, was far more concerned about Saddam’s WMD than he was about the Iraqi people. Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush — believed that Saddam was trying to restart WMD programs. He wasn’t.

Bernie didn’t have to be a reliable vote in favor of humanitarian disaster. Twelve of his colleagues voted against House Joint Resolution 75, which stated that Iraq was “a mounting threat to the United States” in 2001. Bernie supported the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which stated “that it should be the policy of the United States to ‘support efforts’ to remove Saddam Hussein from power.” This bill threw buckets of money at the Iraqi National Congress, a corrupt opposition movement which fed lousy intelligence to the US right up to the 2003 invasion. Thirty-eight of Bernie’s colleagues voted against the bill, and it was publicly opposed by the State Department and Gen. Anthony Zinni, commander of US forces in the Middle East. Had he voted against it, Bernie would’ve had good company.

It’s fair to say that on WMD, Representative Sanders had no way of independently knowing that Saddam had abandoned his weapons programs. That’s not the case for the sanctions. By the mid-1990s, serious people were arguing that sanctions were crushing Iraqi society, having dire effects on child mortality, and enriching Saddam’s inner circle. Quaker groups, pacifists and human rights activists mobilized against sanctions. These are Bernie’s people. Presidential candidate Sanders doesn’t like to talk about foreign policy. But as a mayor, Bernie used his position to work as a lefty foreign policy activist on disarmament, Nicaragua, and issues. Did he not read a paper or meet with activists for a decade?

Given his history, and his opposition to the 1991 Gulf War, you might find his votes odd. But that’s only if you believe the story of an outsider. A guy who speaks truth to power and rejects the conventional wisdom. That guy might have taken a stand against sanctions. But not the go-along to get-along guy that Bernie actually is. That’s the story of a politician who is a reliable vote for military interventions: in Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya. The story of a politician who made a deal with Democrats so that they wouldn’t run someone against him in his Senate campaign.

In the debate in Milwaukee Wednesday night, Bernie went after Hillary on regime change on Iraq: “I think an area in kind of a vague way…where Secretary Clinton and I disagree is the area of regime change.” Bernie voted for regime change in Iraq in the 1998 law. If you read the 2002 authorization for war in Iraq, the fourth paragraph cites that that law. The one Bernie voted for, along with all the other bills he supported in the 1990s that explicitly had as their goal regime change in Iraq.

It’s not just that. Go read House Concurrent Resolution 104 from April 2003. The one in which “the Congress expresses the unequivocal support and appreciation of the Nation– (1) to the President as Commander-in-Chief for his firm leadership and decisive action in the conduct of military operations in Iraq.” Bernie voted in favor of that, too. Eleven of his colleagues didn’t.

So why would Bernie bash Hillary over a policy he supported before, and he implicitly supported following (he also voted in favor of defense spending bills to support the war)? Of course, it helps that he ended up being right. It’s also one of the few instances where his vote wasn’t indistinguishable from Senator Clinton’s. But it’s also because his vote on the Iraq War is one of the few times where he wasn’t just another status-quo, by-the-book, conventionally thinking, go-along-to-get along, veteran politician with all of the accumulated baggage of his years in office. And that’s a story he’d very much like you to hear.

https://medium.com/@vingmerciless/the-h ... 7f071b10ec

chlamor
Posts: 520
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Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Thu Nov 28, 2019 1:26 am

The unfortunate truth about Bernie Sanders
A socialist in the Senate?
November 17, 2006

ASHLEY SMITH examines the record of Vermont's new senator Bernie Sanders--and finds that the supposed independent is anything but.

ON THE surface, the election in Vermont to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords was a classic battle between capitalists and workers.

In one corner loomed the Republican's forward Richard Tarrant, a multimillionaire and former CEO of the software company IDX. Nicknamed "Richie" Rich, he spent nearly $7 million of his own money to create the illusion of popular support, blanketing the state with obnoxiously large campaign signs.

In the other corner thundered Independent Bernard Sanders, known throughout Vermont as simply "Bernie." Sanders served four terms as mayor of "the People's Republic of Burlington" during the 1980s, and eight terms after that as Vermont's lone representative in the House of Representatives. He built a reputation for attacking corporate interests, supporting universal health care and defending union jobs.

What else to read
Will Miller dissects Sanders' record on war, in particular, around the 1999 NATO war over Kosovo, in "Bernie the Mad Bomber." For a more sympathetic but honest portrait of Sanders in his Burlington years, see Greg Guma, People's Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution.

But to read about a real socialist alternative, try Ray Ginger's The Bending Cross, a biography of Eugene V. Debs.


Sanders knocked out "Richie" Rich, winning the vote by a whopping 2-to-1 margin. Everyone--from the British newspaper, the Guardian, to Democracy Now's Amy Goodman--has heralded the election of the first socialist senator in U.S. history, an independent who will stand up to the two mainstream parties, oppose war, roll back corporate power and lead the fight for workers and the oppressed.

While it was fantastic to see Tarrant humiliated, Sanders' election to the Senate doesn't represent a radical departure from politics as usual. He may have a portrait of Eugene Debs hanging in his office, but his politics have little in common with that great American socialist.


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

IN THE 1980s, as Burlington's mayor, Sanders mounted a challenge to the Democrats and Republicans, maintaining a consistent anti-imperialist position in solidarity with the Nicaraguan Revolution and trying to implement pro-worker policies.
But that was long ago. Now Sanders is independent in name only--he in fact supports the Democratic Party.

As his long-time antagonist and now ally, Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, said on the NBC's Meet the Press, "He is basically a liberal Democrat, and he is a Democrat at that--he runs as an Independent because he doesn't like the structure and money that gets involved...The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time." Ironically, that's more often than most Democrats vote with the Democrats.

Sanders' voting record is also not so very left wing; one study found that 38 other congressional representatives had a more progressive voting record.

Sanders' relationship to the Democrats has been developing for many years. In 1992, he supported Bill Clinton as a "lesser evil," though he later abandoned this impolite phrase to unapologetically endorse Democrats for the White House ever since.

In the 2006 Senate election, he didn't even really run as an independent. The Democrats cut a deal with Sanders--they wouldn't run a candidate against him, in exchange for him supporting Democrats in other races.

The Democrats backed up their word by nominating Sanders in their primary, which he refused to accept to preserve his nominal independence. But Sanders did accept support from national Democrats like Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Barack Obama and Barbara Boxer. He also accepted a large donation from Hillary Clinton's Political Action Committee, HILLPAC, which featured him as one of its most important candidates.

Sanders in turn backed Democrats against third-party alternatives. In the election to fill his House seat, he and his supporters helped dissuade Progressive Party hopeful David Zuckerman from running, and went on to support the Democrat Peter Welch, who eventually won.

Sanders' endorsement of the Democrats no doubt helped him build his war chest of about $5 million, over 80 percent of which came from out of state.

To put an exclamation point on his all-but-declared membership in the Democratic Party, Sanders celebrated his election victory, contrary to his tradition of hosting a separate party, with the Democrats. He has promised to caucus with the Democrats in the Senate, and the media thus takes him for granted as part of the new majority in the Senate.

For veteran Sanders watchers, this capitulation to the corporate Democrats and their apparatchiks is nothing new. He has made it one of his missions to agitate against voting for Ralph Nader, the Green Party and, in some cases, Vermont's Progressive Party.

During the 2004 election, Sanders announced on Vermont Public Television, "Not only am I going to vote for John Kerry, I am going to run around this country and do everything I can to dissuade people from voting for Ralph Nader... I am going to do everything I can, while I have differences with John Kerry, to make sure that he is elected."

The political consequence of his capitulation to the Democrats has been a long list of unnecessary compromises and outright betrayals that will only mount in the Senate.

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

DESPITE HIS own claims, Sanders has not been an antiwar leader. Ever since he won election to the House, he has taken either equivocal positions on U.S. wars or outright supported them.
His hawkish positions--especially his decision to support Bill Clinton's 1999 Kosovo War--drove one of his key advisers, Jeremy Brecher, to resign from his staff. Brecher wrote in his resignation letter, "Is there a moral limit to the military violence you are willing to participate in or support?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outraged, Dan Dewalt, the organizer of the impeachment resolution campaign in Vermont, said, "We think we have quality politicians in Vermont. We're wrong. We have politics as usual in Vermont. Our so-called independent congressman, Bernie Sanders, can't get far enough away from impeachment."

This summer, Sanders voted for House Resolution 921, which gave full support to Israel's murderous war on Lebanon. He also voted for HR 4681 that imposed sanctions on the Palestinian Authority with the aim of removing the democratically elected Hamas government.

In response, longtime War Resisters League leader David McReynolds sent a public letter to Sanders, stating, "Because of your vote of support for the Israeli actions, I would hope any friends and contacts of mine would not send you funds, nor give you their votes."

Indeed, Sanders has consistently defended Israel through it worst crimes against Palestinians and Arabs. Unsurprisingly, some Sanders staffers have also worked with the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC)--including David Sirota, now a Democratic Party strategist, and Sanders' former communications director Joel Barkin.

Finally, in perhaps his worst betrayal yet, Sanders joined a host of liberal Democrats including Barbara Lee and John Conyers to vote for HR 282, the Iran Freedom Support Act--which bears a striking resemblance to the resolutions that set up the framework for the war on Iraq.

The act stipulates that the U.S. should impose sanctions on Iran to prevent it from developing weapons of mass destruction and distributing them to aid international terrorism. It also calls for the U.S. to support democratic change in the country, thereby establishing all necessary pretexts for a war on Iran. Democrat Dennis Kucinich voted against the act and denounced it as a "stepping stone to war."

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

SANDERS--LIKE many liberal Democrats--rightly calls attention to the plight of workers and the poor in Vermont and across the U.S., demanding reforms to address low wages, lack of health care and the absence of a social safety net.
He argues that much of this suffering is the result of U.S. free trade policy. But instead of agitating for internationalist solutions like cross-border unionization, as proposed by the global justice movement against neoliberalism, Sanders argues for protectionist policies and economic nationalism.

Sanders' support for the Democrats confounds his position. After all, it was the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton that passed NAFTA, established the WTO, cut the big deals with China and imposed some of the worst IMF structural adjustments programs on developing countries.

Ominously, Sanders' economic nationalism has led him to look for allies among Republican right-wingers like Lou Dobbs and Patrick Buchanan, who see China as a rival to U.S. power and are looking for political justification for a new Cold War.

In denouncing Permanent Normalized Trade Relations (PNTR) with China, Sanders wrote, "As the greatest democracy on Earth, we must ask why American companies are turning communist China into the new superpower of the 21st century? While Microsoft is 'saving a dollar,' it is helping undermine our economic and military security by gutting our manufacturing and technological infrastructure, and moving it lock, stock, and barrel to one of our major international rivals."

Sanders defends his alliances with protectionist Republicans. He told the Nation magazine, "In the sense that we are trying to develop left-right coalitions, we also trying to redefine American politics." Thus, he appeared on a China-bashing panel organized by the Teamsters' Jimmy Hoffa along with Patrick Buchanan in 2000 during a union-sponsored demonstration against PNTR for China.

One of his former staffers, David Sirota, recently wrote a glowing review of Lou Dobbs' book, War on the Middle Class. Dobbs mixes populist rhetoric about deteriorating living standards for workers with some of the worst anti-immigrant racism and China-bashing around. Yet Sirota writes, "It is undeniable that aside from Dobbs and a few politicians, America's political debate is devoid of economic populists. War on the Middle Class confronts this problem head on--and thanks to Dobbs' passion and charisma, it succeeds in sounding the alarm that cannot be ignored."

In cooperating with right-wing populists, Sanders reinforces American nationalism and its attendant racism toward immigrants. Such ideas are an impediment to workers forging solidarity against both American empire and the corporations' divide-and-conquer strategy to drive wages down inside the US and around the globe.

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

SANDERS CAN boast of a good voting record in defending the rights of the oppressed. He has consistently voted for the rights of women, gays and lesbians, and racial minorities.
However, he downplays all these questions in favor of a populist appeal on economic issues. As one Progressive Party activist told the Nation, "Sometimes, Bernie's biggest critics are on the left. Some social liberals quietly grumble that Sanders maintains too rigid a focus on economic issues."

On some pivotal issues, Sanders does worse than subordinate the demands of the oppressed--he joins in the attack.

For example, Sanders claims to oppose the death penalty, but he voted for Bill Clinton's Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which broadened the scope of the federal death penalty and attacks on civil liberties.

In 2004, Sanders was put to the test of whether he would stand up against state-sanctioned murder, and he failed. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft used Clinton's act to override Vermont law and force a federal death penalty trial for Donald Fell, who was eventually convicted and sentenced to die. Throughout this trial, Sanders remained on the sidelines.
Said Nancy Welch of Vermonters Against the Death Penalty,

"We repeatedly called on Congressman Sanders to join us in decrying the imposition of a death penalty trial on a state that had abolished capital punishment," said Nancy Welch of Vermonters Against the Death Penalty. "We asked him to participate in a press conference with other political, religious, and labor leaders, but he declined. Even when we directly asked him, on a public radio call-in program, if he would join us in saying Vermont should stay death penalty-free, Bernie wouldn't take a stand."

Meanwhile, on the issue of immigration, Sanders has joined the Democratic Party in its attacks on immigrant rights. While he voted against the reactionary bill sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner and passed by the House last year, he has supported other anti-immigrant bills.

He has consistently voted to restrict visas for skilled workers--like the L-1 Nonimmigrant Reform Act, which he himself cosponsored, arguing that it was wrong for corporations to import workers when they are laying off U.S. employees. He voted for the Goodlatte Amendment to eliminate the visa lottery that distributes 55,000 visas a year to foreign workers on a random basis.

Sanders voted for the Border Tunnel Protection Act that criminalizes digging tunnels under the border and anyone who uses them. And he voted for the Marshall Amendment to the 2007 Homeland Security bill that funds electronic verification of employment eligibility.

With Bush promising to work with the Democratic majority in Congress to pass anti-immigrant legislation, including more aggressive border enforcement as well as a new guest-worker program, Sanders will be pressed to line up with a lesser-evil attack on some of the most oppressed workers in the country.

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

LIKE AL Gore's attempt to rehabilitate himself through environmentalism, Sanders has begun to trumpet green issues, especially global warming. But while his voting record is good on this issue, Sanders has long antagonized environmental activists.
After getting elected mayor with the slogan "Burlington's Not for Sale," Sanders attempted to cut a deal with developers for hotel construction on the city's waterfront and other projects in its wetlands. Activists built a campaign with the slogan "Burlington's Still Not for Sale" that effectively halted the worst development plans.

Once in the House, Sanders made one of his worst environmental decisions. He worked with then-Texas Gov. George Bush to lead the charge for dumping nuclear waste from Vermont's Vernon reactor in Sierra Blanca, an impoverished town inhabited mainly by Chicanos on the border with Mexico.

Together, they worked to pass the Maine-Vermont-Texas nuclear waste compact, and then took advantage of Bill Clinton's decision to allow interstate transportation of low-level nuclear waste. Sierra Blanca, already a toxic waste dump, has thus been poisoned for generations.

However much Sanders may oppose the transportation and dumping of nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain for threatening the health of people in Las Vegas, he and the Toxic Texan, George Bush, established the precedent for this with their compact in the 1990s.

Sanders' positions on energy are also tinged with nationalism. He repeatedly calls for U.S. energy independence from the Middle East, even though most U.S. oil comes from other countries like Venezuela. Such demagogy plays into the widespread anti-Arab racism that surrounds oil politics.

Even with these faults, Sanders' overall record looks good, but his support for the Democrats compromises even his best positions. As Jeffrey St. Clair has documented in Been Brown So Long It Looks Green To Me, the Democrats are every much a part of the destruction of the environment as the Republicans.

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

AS IT was with Howard Dean, it is a bit hard for Vermont leftists to believe the national reaction to Bernie Sanders.
As Vermont's long-time political commentator Peter Freyne noted, "He will not leave a party behind him. So what will be his legacy? I don't see a next Bernie on the horizon. I don't see what comes after him. There's a lot wrapped up in one man, and I don't know where that gets you in the long run."

But, in truth, Sanders is leaving a party behind--the Democratic Party.

Whatever his betrayals, Sanders can still give an excellent speech about the evils of corporate power and the barbarity of class inequality, but he does so as a fellow traveler of the corporate Democrats, whom he supports even as they move further and further to the right.

Figures like Bernie Sanders could help workers form a party of their own to challenge the corporate duopoly, and build a more politically self-conscious working-class movement. Instead, like Jesse Jackson and other Democratic liberals, he is the progressive bait on this capitalist party's hook--to tempt people who would otherwise want a genuine alternative into supporting a party opposed to their demands and aspirations.

Anything we want from Sanders or the Democrats we will have to fight for. And if we want a genuine socialist alternative, we should follow the lead of Sanders' hero, Eugene Debs, who said, "The differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties involve no issue, no principle in which the working class have any interest."

Instead of capitulating to the corporate parties, Debs spent his life building the Socialist Party and the struggles of the working class and the oppressed for our own self-emancipation.

http://socialistworker.org/2006-2/610/6 ... anders.php

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

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Thu Nov 28, 2019 1:26 am

THE PROBLEM WITH BERNIE SANDERS
May 5, 2015
Ashley Smith writes from Vermont on Bernie Sanders' plan to run for president.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As liberal writer Paul Waldman wrote in the Washington Post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://socialistworker.org/2015/05/05/ ... ie-sanders

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

Re: Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week

Post by chlamor » Thu Nov 28, 2019 1:29 am

A VERMONT SOCIALIST’S GUIDE TO BERNIE SANDERS
June 11, 2015
Paul Fleckenstein, a longtime activist and socialist in Vermont, looks behind the image at the real record of the state's most popular politician--and now presidential candidate.

AS I stood among the 5,000 people in Burlington, Vermont's waterfront park while Bernie Sanders launched his Democratic presidential primary bid late last month, it was odd to hear the repeated claim that Sanders was responsible for rescuing this very parkland from rapacious developers while he was mayor of Burlington in the 1980s.

Actually, in 1985, Sanders partnered with developers to champion a seven-story hotel and 300 mostly upscale condominiums on the land we were standing on. The city was to get a cut of the profits through a tax increment financing (TIF) district.

Fortunately, activists mobilized an opposition to this giveaway of public land to the wealthy, and the plan was defeated in a citywide referendum. That's why there was a beautiful park to serve as the backdrop for Sanders to launch his campaign.

This story is emblematic of Sanders' political history. While he says many good things that socialists support and that attract support from workers, students and the left, his actual political practice is at odds with his image. Setting aside his self-identification as a "socialist," even his claim to be "independent" is dubious once you know about Sanders' accommodations with business and the wealthy and his ongoing collaboration with the Democratic Party.

Bernie Sanders launches his 2016 campaign in Burlington's lakefront park
Bernie Sanders launches his 2016 campaign in Burlington's lakefront park
In one of its articles on the Sanders campaign, two SocialistWorker.org contributors wrote:

[T]he question for us isn't mostly about the "purity" of Sanders' political positions. The crux of our objection is Sanders' decision to run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, and to promise in advance that he will endorse the mainstream Democrat who will all but certainly defeat him.

Such critiques of Sanders focus rightly on the role he will play--indeed, which he has promised, in his own words, to play--within the Democratic Party in the coming year: as the liberal "sheep dog...charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold," as Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report put it.

But at the same time, anyone who disagrees and thinks that radicals should get involved in the Sanders campaign--or even merely welcome it as an opportunity to build the left--should consider just how "impure" Sanders' record is. Here's what we in Vermont have learned about Bernie Sanders over the years.

Political Independence
Bernie Sanders' political career began as part of the left-wing and antiwar Liberty Union party in 1972, when he ran for U.S. Senate against Vermont's now-ranking Sen. Patrick Leahy.

But after the end of the Vietnam War and the retreat of the antiwar and other social movements of the 1960s, Sanders followed a rightward trajectory into a close relationship with the Democratic Party. He has supported one Democratic presidential candidate after another, starting with Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980. In 1984, he actively campaigned for Carter's former vice president Walter Mondale.

Sanders had quit Liberty Union by the late 1970s, and he won the mayoral election a few years later against a moribund Democratic establishment in Burlington. Sanders' independent campaign, facing off against rear-guard Democrats, was somewhat particular to Vermont politics. In other cities nationally, liberal Democrats carried out much the same agenda that became associated with Sanders in the 1980s.

Early on in his political career, Sanders challenged both parties of the billionaires. But the pull of the Democratic Party was strong. By the time of his 1990 election to Congress, Sanders was backed by Vermont's Democratic Party establishment. He had left any challenge to this capitalist party behind.

As former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, also an aspirant for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, said 10 years ago on the NBC's Meet the Press, "He is basically a liberal Democrat, and he is a Democrat at that--he runs as an Independent because he doesn't like the structure and money that gets involved...The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time."

Labor and Workers' Rights
Based on his unapologetic pro-union politics, Sanders receives considerable labor support in Vermont and nationally. Leading labor officials regularly share the platform with Sanders, who calls for union rights, fair contracts and pro-working class economic policies.

But what does the Sanders campaign offer a new generation of labor activists who want to rebuild a class struggle labor movement? His verbal support for workers is useful, but of secondary importance in rebuilding union power. Whether workers can turn the tide is dependent on their ability to organize on-the-job actions, including shutting down production through strikes, pickets and solidarity.

Last year, Burlington had an excellent example for all of labor: public transit bus drivers won their 18-day strike for safe working conditions, an end to predatory management and driver harassment and protection of full-time jobs.

Toward the end of the strike, Sanders reportedly made calls to management in support of the drivers' demands. But this was only after union members, working together with labor and community activists, organized a strong strike that won widespread public support, including bus riders inconvenienced by the walkout. The political leaders who supported the strike only did so because of the unity of the drivers and solidarity from other working people.

As SocialistWorker.org concluded after the strike: "Appealing to the politicians was last on the list of priorities for the drivers, as the least important, though possibly helpful, source of allies of the drivers."

But whatever credit Sanders deserves for his stance in the bus drivers' strike, it is overshadowed by his allegiance to and collusion with the Vermont Democratic Party as it has carried out attacks on public-sector workers.

Shamefully, Sanders was silent as his ally, Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, rammed through an austerity budget earlier this year that cuts programs for the most vulnerable, undermines environmental protections and eliminates of hundreds of union jobs through layoffs and early retirement. As the best-known and most popular political figure in Vermont politics, Sanders could have helped to organize a resistance to the cuts. Instead, he was silent.

Sanders is known nationally for opposing austerity policies and decrying declining wages and lack of good union jobs for U.S. workers. His proposals for a national jobs program and expansion of the social safety net are a stark contrast to mainstream Democrats.

But it must be said as well that Sanders' populism is also based on protectionist policies and economic nationalism that are the opposite of internationalism.

">Sanders voted for the Marshall Amendment to the 2007 Homeland Security bill, which funded electronic verification of employment eligibility. He has consistently voted to restrict visas for skilled workers to come into the U.S.--in 2003, he co-sponsored the L-1 Nonimmigrant Reform Act that would have barred corporations from hiring workers from abroad unless they certified that they had not displaced "a U.S. worker." In 2005, he voted for the Goodlatte Amendment to eliminate the visa lottery that distributes 55,000 visas a year to foreign workers on a random basis.

While the left should oppose guest-worker programs designed for U.S. corporations to hire low-wage labor without full legal rights and the capacity to unionize, it's a different matter to argue, on the basis of nationalism, to bar immigrant labor because this harms American workers. International investment knows no bounds, and if the labor movement is to fight effectively, it has to struggle on the basis of cross-border class solidarity, not support for policies that pit workers of different national origins against each other.

Sanders can't look to the Democrats for support for his protectionism. It was the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton that passed North American Free Trade Agreement, established the World Trade Organization and cut big trade deals with China. President Barack Obama is currently pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) economic agreement with empty promises about how it will benefit U.S. working people.

As a result, Sanders has at times turned to alliances with Republicans on trade and other economic issues. As Ashley Smith wrote for Socialist Worker in 2006:

Ominously, Sanders' economic nationalism has led him to look for allies among Republican right-wingers like Lou Dobbs and Patrick Buchanan, who see China as a rival to U.S. power and are looking for political justification for a new Cold War.

In denouncing Permanent Normalized Trade Relations (PNTR) with China, Sanders wrote, "As the greatest democracy on Earth, we must ask why American companies are turning communist China into the new superpower of the 21st century? While Microsoft is 'saving a dollar,' it is helping undermine our economic and military security by gutting our manufacturing and technological infrastructure, and moving it lock, stock, and barrel to one of our major international rivals."

Sanders defends his alliances with protectionist Republicans. He told the Nation magazine, "In the sense that we are trying to develop left-right coalitions, we also trying to redefine American politics." Thus, he appeared on a China-bashing panel organized by the Teamsters' Jimmy Hoffa along with Patrick Buchanan in 2000 during a union-sponsored demonstration against PNTR for China.

Like Sanders, the labor movement regularly blames free trade agreements for causing the bulk of job losses in the U.S. According to studies, however, trade policies account for only a portion of manufacturing job losses. More significant has been Corporate America's drive to increase productivity--making fewer workers work harder and produce more. Sanders' nationalist lens and support for protectionism diverts attention from the overwhelming cause of manufacturing job loses--the profits-first priorities of American big business.

Sanders' populism puts him more in alliance with a wing of U.S. capital that seeks advantages through trade and investment restrictions, not the international working class. This is not a socialist position, nor one that can help strengthen the labor movement by working to organize cross-border solidarity.

Racism and Police Violence
One of the naked contradictions of Sanders' political development lies in these two facts: In the 1960s, he was a civil rights activist who campaigned against police brutality, among other abuses. But in 1981, when he ran for mayor of Burlington, he won the support of the city's police union.

Sanders' political career has continued to lean in the direction of law and order. Once elected to Congress, he voted for the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act in 1994--one of the infamous Clinton crime bills that billions of dollars to states to beef up local police forces and prisons, and that expanded the federal death penalty to include 60 new offenses.

In response to the last year of protests against police terrorism, he has had little to say besides condemning the high rate of Black unemployment. He angered activists in Vermont when he commented on National Public Radio that anti-racist issues were "not my cup of tea"--and when he prefaced his comments on the Baltimore Rebellion by sympathizing with police for having "a very, very difficult job."

An article at Salon.com blamed Sanders' "socialist analysis" for emphasizing class issues over fighting racism. While Sanders' politics, indeed, have little to offer the Black Live Matter movement, his lackluster-at-best attitude to fighting racism is not the product of a "socialist analysis" by any stretch. Socialists support struggles against all oppressions in all their dimensions, social, economic and political. This is a central tenet of Marxism.

In the U.S., fighting racism and its enforcement though the New Jim Crow and police terror must be central to any movement for progressive change. Racism is the main ideological tool used by the U.S. ruling class to justify the neoliberal assault on social welfare programs, austerity and privatization in public education, and public-sector union-busting.

To socialists, the anti-racist struggle--including the fight to defund and disarm police--is crucial to building working-class unity, not only so we stop bigotry and hate, but to fight back against the billionaires and build for a socialist future.

As Sanders makes his way out of Vermont, Iowa, and New Hampshire and onto the national stage, he may follow Hillary Clinton's lead in acknowledging the problem of police violence and mass incarceration, but his politics around race and police violence, while acceptable to the Democratic Party establishment, is a dead end for the Black Lives Matter movement.

War and U.S. Empire
Some of the most poignant criticisms of Bernie Sanders have come from opponents of Israeli apartheid. Sanders continues his support for Israel even after the 2013 massacre in Gaza and despite the significant headway made by the international boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS) movement in exposing real nature of the Israeli state.

The question Sanders should have to answer is this: Why does solidarity with oppressed workers end at the U.S. border and not extend to, among many others, Palestinians living under the yoke of Israel's apartheid state?

Israel has more and more justified the ethnic cleansing and oppression of Palestinians as part of the global fight against terrorism--both benefitting from and contributing to the U.S. "war on terror" against Arabs and Muslims.

In the same way, Sanders has embraced the whole narrative that justifies the U.S. wars and occupations since 9/11 as a fight against Muslim extremists who represent a threat to the U.S. He began in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, voting to support George Bush's war on Afghanistan with the Authorization for the Use of Military Force.

At the kickoff rally for his Democratic Party presidential campaign, Sanders got the most applause when he repeated that he voted against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. This was also one of his most deceptive sound bites.

In 1990, when Sanders was running to be Vermont's sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives, he addressed a large crowd of antiwar protesters on the eve of the first Gulf War launched by George Bush Sr. While the Bush administration was pursuing its pro-war propaganda offensive to demonize Saddam Hussein, Washington's one-time ally, as a threat to invade the whole region, Sanders told a startled crowd that he deferred to the judgment of the Pentagon on this question.

As Vermont socialist, Veterans for Peace activist and former Sanders supporter Will Miller wrote, "Bernie became an imperialist to get elected in 1990."

After tacitly backing the mobilization for war, which made the invasion inevitable, Sanders voted "no" on the actual congressional resolution to launch the Gulf War. He then went on to support the following decade's military blockade and genocidal sanctions against Iraq, which the United Nations blames for killing more than 1 million Iraqis, including 500,000 children.

Sanders' record of support for U.S. wars and empire is broadly consistent. His House and Senate votes supported the NATO war in ex-Yugoslavia in 1999, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and war budgets to finance the occupation of Iraq. There have been some votes here and there to reign in the stupidity of U.S. or Israeli overreach--something that Sanders has in common with the likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But Sanders generally embraces a world order in which the U.S. military reigns supreme.

The U.S. government's $1 trillion annual war budgets undermine the possibility of initiating or expanding any of the social and jobs programs that Sanders regularly talks about in his speeches. Simply put, there will be no substantial progress on issues like social welfare, education, jobs and more without a fundamental challenge to the U.S. empire--something Sanders has resisted throughout his national political career.

Even in a local struggle where he could have made a decisive difference, Sanders unconditionally backed the basing of the the boondoggle F-35 bomber at Burlington's airport, despite the devastating effect this will have on surrounding working class communities.

The working class town of Winooski, that sits at the end of the runway, voted by referendum to join a lawsuit against the basing. Despite this and other examples of opposition, Sanders lined up with commercial real estate interests, the military-industrial complex and, of course, Vermont's leading Democrats to back the basing, protecting the state's lucrative pipeline to the Pentagon.

Sanders defenders falsely claim that senator backed the F-35 to protect Air National Guard jobs, but these were never on the line. In reality, Vermont's celebrated "independent" won't buck the state's ruling class when it comes to cutting off a source Pentagon funds, and he won't challenge the U.S. war machine that these bombers will be a part of.

Climate Change and the Environment
Since the 1990s, Sanders has consistently raised the threat of climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions. In speeches, he talks about the need to transition away from fossil-fuel production to renewable energy sources. Environmental activists look to Sanders as a champion--thus, 350.org's Bill McKibben gave a rousing speech at the Burlington kickoff rally.

But Sanders' championing of the environment seems to only apply on one side of the partisan divide. He relentlessly targets the billionaire Koch brothers, the Republicans and climate-change deniers--but barely mentions the equally culpable role of the Democratic Party.

As exposed by Wikileaks, one of Barack Obama's first significant actions on the issue of climate change as president was to work behind the scenes to undermine the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009--and this was quickly followed by his running political cover for BP after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

What is the benefit of having a president who, in contrast to his Republican predecessors, stresses the danger of climate change--but then works to obstruct international negotiations on limiting greenhouse gas emissions, while boasting about the record increase in U.S. oil and natural gas productionopening up drilling in the Arctic?

As much as any other crisis, climate change is the inevitable outcome of capitalism's drive for growth and profits. It would have been valuable for a socialist politician to say that--instead of focusing all his criticisms against Republicans and their billionaire supporters, while remaining silent about the Democrats.

This is another issue where Sanders says a lot of the right things, but his actions--and his silences--speak louder than his words.

The Necessity of Class Politics
Bernie Sanders' lengthy political career has followed the rightward arc of many radicals coming out of the 1960s.

Under the weight of the new left's retreat and the nearly four-decades-old ruling-class offensive, many of those inspired to struggle for social change have been pulled by the idea of "political realism" into the Democratic Party and the liberal infrastructure tied to it. The key idea is that progressive change will only come in cooperation with the business and political establishment that rules the U.S.

Sanders' political views are more in keeping with this tame liberalism. If his self-identification with "socialism" is valid at all, it is with what revolutionaries have called "socialism from above," disconnected from the class struggle that Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and Sanders' supposed hero Eugene Debs believed was indispensible for a fundamental challenge to the capitalist system and winning a socialist world.

Sanders' history shows what happens when you accept the restrictions and limitations that come with "political realism." The lesson of history is that radicals who attempt to change the system from the inside end up changed themselves. In Sanders' case, this has meant accommodating to U.S. empire and military budgets, silence at best on police violence and the Jim Crow system of mass incarceration, and collaboration with business interests and at least one of their wholly owned political parties.

What the struggles for social change need today is not a liberal outsider running a long-shot campaign in the Democratic presidential primaries, but a clear break from the Democrats on the basis of a left-wing political alternative. There is no shortcut through the party of the billionaires. In this election, like past ones, the place for radicals is building any independent challenges to the two parties of the status quo.

https://socialistworker.org/2015/06/11/ ... to-sanders

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