As I've said before, " I don't got no dog in this fight". The
political playing field has always been the property of the
Establishment, and you have to be a member in order to play. While
Bernie Sanders espoused his support for many of the issues near and
dear to the Working Class, he was never a Working Class Socialist.
Still, Bernie might have turned a corner or two, like a poor man's
FDR, but if he goes down, which appears to be where he is headed, and
he tosses his support behind Joe Biden, then his value to the Working
Class is done.
Carl Jarvis, sitting in the bleachers looking at the two teams of the
Establishment, and wondering what it matters as to who wins.
On 3/25/20, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2020/03/24/the-demise-of-bernie-sanders/
The Demise of Bernie Sanders
Socialist Action / 21 hours ago
(Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
By JEFF MACKLER
Bernie Sanders, face to face on March 16 with his often-proclaimed
“friend” Joe Biden, could only assert that “Joe,” voted for the 2003
Iraq War. True! Sanders scored a debater’s point that a well-scripted
and lying Biden brushed off in a few words. Sanders left it at that.
Television debates are rarely meant for historical clarification of
events long past, even if the subject is genocidal war.
Following Biden’s “mistaken” vote, the U.S. imperialist war machine and
its deadly sanctions murdered 1.5 million Iraqis. That, too, Sanders
left unmentioned. Nor did he note that Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein
never had “weapons of mass destruction” that he was supposedly planning
to unleash against the U.S. This demonizing and manufactured pretext,
deployed with the entire corporate media in tow, was employed to launch
the most intensive bombing in world history.
That the U.S. continues to occupy Iraq today also went unmentioned.
Biden, and indeed all the Democrats’ primary contest contenders,
supported that war which they now proclaim was a “mistake!”
Forgive me, readers, but if I, or any serious antiwar activist had the
opportunity to stand on the world stage at that moment, I/we would have
thoroughly shed Biden’s political blood and pilloried both of
capitalism’s parties of war, death and destruction.
And the Vietnam War that Sanders’ Democratic Party “friends” now admit
was also a “mistake?” Sanders declined to comment, not even to make a
debater’s point. The nature of this “mistake” has never been seriously
examined. Silence largely prevails! In truth, it was the now undeniable
fact that after ten years of genocidal slaughter – replete with napalm
carpet bombing, poison gas, agent orange defoliation and indiscriminate
terror bombing of civilian populations – the U.S. government lost! That
was the mistake! After murdering four million Vietnamese and countless
tens of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians and Thais, the imperialist war
machine failed to impose U.S. rule. “We” were forced to withdraw! No
apologies for the genocide! The U.S. lost in Vietnam because the
courageous Vietnamese would not cease their national liberation
struggle, because the vast majority – 75 percent of the American people
– mobilized for a decade in unprecedented numbers to demand “U.S. Out
Now!” and because a demoralized U.S. military felt a greater kinship
with the Vietnamese people than they did with the racist warmakers at home.
Sanders’ list of items to score points against Biden included the
latter’s support for the infamous and racist mass-incarceration-oriented
1994 crime bill the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. The
well-coached Biden blithely dodged that debaters point as well while
Sanders declined to drive his point home with an accounting of the
literal millions of poor and oppressed people who have been herded into
the nation’s racist, increasingly for-profit and privatized
prison-industrial complex.
Sanders stands mute on Cuba and Nicaragua
But Sanders silence was not matched by his repeated reference to his
“longtime friend Joe,” to whom he repeatedly pledged his support should
Biden win the Democratic Party nomination, an increasing certainty at
that point in the primaries.
The March 16 televised debate spectacle included Bernie Sanders failure
to counter Joseph Biden’s accusations that Sanders supported the
“authoritarian governments” of Cuba and the Sandinistas of Nicaragua.
That the U.S. armed and financed the universally hated, corrupt,
Mafia-connected Fulgencio Batista dictatorship was not mentioned. That
revolutionary Cuba, under Fidel Castro, defeated and removed that
government and proceeded to conduct the largest land reform in the
modern era, nationalized capitalist property and used it for the common
good, that Cuba’s literacy campaign and free healthcare for all system
are the envy of the world’s people, were not mentioned by the
“democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders. Biden emerged unscathed because
Sanders accepted his “authoritarian” red-baiting without question. He
stood mute on national television while the imperialist warmaker and
Vice Presidential accomplice in Obama’s seven wars pilloried him for
refusing to denounce Cuba and Nicaragua. Sanders was lost for words when
Biden demanded that he renounce the revolutions that removed these
previous U.S. neo-colonies from imperialist domination.
That Nicaragua’s U.S.-backed Anastasio Somoza dictatorship murdered
80,000 Nicaraguans in its final months in 1979 went unmentioned by
Sanders. That the U.S. invaded Cuba in 1961, introduced dengue
hemorrhagic fever in 1981, and then swine flu that devastated Cuba’s pig
population, and then a plague that devastated Cuba’s banana crop, went
unmentioned.
Sanders’ claimed longtime friend “Joe,” Obama’s anti-school-bussing,
anti-abortion, warmongering VP, was let off the hook, except for
Sanders’ staccato single-phrase recitation of Biden’s “voting record,”
which the lying Biden denied and the corporate media dismissed as either
irrelevant or long ago superseded by Biden’s more “progressive” views
today. Why dwell in the past?
Democrats and corporate media close ranks
There was no Sanders rage against the iron-disciplined Democratic Party
machine that united to defeat him in 19 of the past 24 primary contests.
Gone in an instant were the likes of millionaire or billionaire racists
and warmongers Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg, Tom
Steyer and Elizabeth Warren. They had all been thrown into the
orchestrated charade to dilute and undermine Sanders’ potential, only to
pull the plug when the time was right to clear the way for a failing
Biden to emerge unimpeded on center stage.
No rage against the kept corporate media that red-baited Sanders at will
in virtually every media outlet across the country. Indeed, Biden, who
repeatedly lied about his record with impunity at every opportunity –
fully cognizant that he had Sanders beaten – extended the olive branch
to his bewildered friend “Bernie,” so they could unite against Donald
Trump.
Said Biden a few days after the debate, “Let me say, especially to the
young voters who have been inspired by Senator Sanders: I hear you. I
know what’s at stake. I know what we have to do. Our goal as a campaign
and my goal as a candidate for president is to unify this party and then
to unify the nation.”
CNN and the New York Times, if not the entire “liberal” media cabal,
similarly switched gears to congratulate “Bernie” for raising important
issues while Sanders repeatedly consoled himself with remarks to the
effect that the trend showed that he had “won the ideological debate”
while “losing the debate over electability.”
Sanders imminent withdrawal
The 1,991 delegates Sanders needs to win the Democrat’s nomination at
its summer convention are all but out of reach. Biden currently leads in
pledged delegates 1,132 to 817. Sanders’ fundraising efforts have all
but ceased. His aides daily proclaim that he is “assessing his options.”
Some Sanders’ advisers indicated that he intended to stay in the race to
affect the Democratic Party platform at the national convention and to
continue his “political revolution.” Sanders did this after losing to
Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary race. The Democratic Party’s
platform, adopted during its convention proceedings, is worth less than
the paper it is printed on. The real platform of the Democrats, and the
Republicans, is decided behind closed doors by the direct
representatives of the 0.1 percent, who daily hammer out ruling class
multi-trillion dollar budgets, trade agreements, corporate and bank
bailouts and imperialist war strategies. The hodgepodge of delegates who
are sequestered in small rooms during the Democrats’ conventions decide
nothing of substance.
Sanders’ chief campaign strategist, Faiz Shakir, stated that “Sanders is
focused on the government response to the coronavirus outbreak and
ensuring that we take care of working people and the most vulnerable.”
Ever playing the election time game of one-upping your opponent’s
proposals, Sanders is now calling for a $2,000 monthly payment to every
American until the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Needless to say,
Biden’s advisers will not be far behind Sanders’ paper proposals, none
of which will see the light of day.
Sanders is no socialist
Media red-baiting notwithstanding Bernie Sanders is not now and has
never been a socialist. During the 2015 primary contests and ever since
he has cast himself in the tradition of Democrat President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and his “New Deal” politics that had the effect of
saving a failing Depression-era U.S. capitalism rather than abolishing
it. Roosevelt’s social reforms were aimed at countering the deepening
radicalization of U.S. workers, half of whom were unemployed or barely
employed part time. FDR’s limited social measures notwithstanding, he
transformed U.S. industry into a war machine that had no rival on earth.
With an estimated 60 million dead by the war’s end in 1945 and the
infrastructure of U.S. allies and enemies alike in ruins, the intact
U.S. industrial behemoth emerged as the sole world superpower. Three
quarters of a century later, war production stands at the center of U.S.
capitalism’s “stability.”
In a 2015 speech, Sanders stated that his politics “builds on what
Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic
rights for all Americans.” In truth, the rights that workers won in the
1930s and beyond emerged from pitched battles with the boss class aimed
at the unionization of capitalism’s major industries (See: “Labor’s
Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936–55” by Art Preis,
Pathfinder Press 1972).
Sanders: “I don’t believe the government should own the means of
production”
Sanders’ 2015 speech continued, “So the next time you hear me attacked
as a socialist, remember this. I don’t believe the government should own
the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and
working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal.
I believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in
America instead of shipping jobs and profits overseas.” (For the full
Sanders speech, see:
https://www.vox.com/2015/11/19/9762028/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism).
Simply put, Sanders, in his own words is no socialist! There is no
socialism in the framework of a capitalist society where an elite
handful of multi-billionaires own and control more wealth than the
combined holding of the majority of the population. Sanders’ so-called
democratic socialism consists in his campaign pledge to tax the wealth
of the super-rich at the rate of one percent, and impose this tax only
on their wealth that exceeds $32 million! Sanders proclaims that under
his policy “a married couple with $32.5 million would pay a wealth tax
of just $5,000.” Pocket change for billionaires!! “There will always be
billionaires in this country,” Sanders promises the ruling class.
Sanders’ statement that “private companies that thrive and invest in
America” are welcome as opposed to those that “ship jobs and profits
overseas” is sheer demagoguery. Leaving aside that any self-respecting
capitalist enterprise that “thrives and grows” in the U.S. or anywhere
else in the world, does so at the expense of its always exploited
workers, no serious socialist advocates pitting foreign workers against
U.S. workers. We might add that even when U.S. corporations return their
production to the U.S. it is a qualitatively new production based on
state-of-the-art factories where robots replace human beings en masse
and wages remain at near-poverty levels.
That’s the nature of the system that Sanders in incapable of addressing.
The entire complex of today’s globalized capitalism, without exception,
and in the context of ever-sharper and intensified competition, is
compelled to operate with the cheapest labor force and raw materials
obtainable, the least government restrictions and the resulting highest
profit rates possible. Those capitalists that do otherwise are
effectively, if not brutally driven from the marketplace. These
irrefutable fundamentals of capitalist production everywhere are of no
concern to Sanders, for whom the class struggle is to be subordinated to
his dreamlike fantasies where he promises today’s trade unions that he
personally – not a fighting working class in alliance with the
oppressed! – will “double union membership.”
Sanders will tour nation for Biden
Sanders and his “political revolution” are now dead in the water. His
multi-trillion-dollar paper proposals did have the effect of inspiring a
radicalizing generation with bleak future prospects to question “the
system” and to search for solutions that appear to challenge the status
quo. His use of the term “socialism,” however much his politics have
nothing to do with its liberating, humane and majoritarian class
content, served to open the minds of millions to further investigation.
But like all “good Democrats,” Sanders will soon tour the nation on
behalf of a man whose policies he has long repudiated and whose
ingrained hatred of socialist revolution has been evidenced throughout
his career. Sanders proposed “solutions” were based on herding the
innocent, and the not so innocent groups on the left, into the graveyard
of the Democratic Party where the “left/progressive” and right/centrist
wings are indistinguishable regarding which class shall rule society.
All are dedicated to the imperialist system and its wars against working
people at home and abroad. It has never been otherwise.
Indeed, Sanders and his supporters, the AOC gang included, supported
every Democratic Party candidate in the 2018 mid-term elections! They
are pledged to do the same in 2020 when Biden will undoubtedly be
presented as the latest of capitalism’s “lesser evils.”
For serious fighters today there is a serious alternative. It lies in a
commitment to organize and mobilize working people independently and in
opposition to the parties and polices of capitalism. It lies in breaking
with the two-party duopoly and fighting to re-build and transform the
present labor movement into fighting organs of struggle on behalf of the
vast majority. Start today by joining a revolutionary socialist party
that seeks to sink deep roots in all the struggles of the oppressed and
exploited!
Join Socialist Action! Donate to Socialist Action’s Jeff Mackler for
president in 2020 national campaign.
socialistaction@xxxxxxx
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March 24, 2020 in Uncategorized.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson
