Revolution, and, Re-Thinking Bernie
I’ve been a big Sanders supporter, as much as I can be as a Canadian who can’t vote in the US. (Yikes… Canadians tampering in US elections! Call McCarthy!) But I’ve been re-thinking my take on Bernie.
When Bernie endorsed Hilary in 2016, after Hilary, the media, and the Democratic Party cheated him out of the nomination, I was deeply disappointed, as were many, many people.
Hilary, like Biden and Obama, represents the Goldman Sachs wing of the Democratic Party. That means, of course, the party elite, the establishment. Endorsing any of them means surrender to or complicity with the plutocrats on Wall Street – Bernie’s supposed arch enemies.
Endorsing Hilary, worse yet, is akin to endorsing Satan. Ok, maybe Satan’s ghoulish little sadist war-monger on permanent hire to Wall Street. Maybe that’s a tad inflammatory, but that’s pretty much how I feel, and not far off of how millions of Americans clearly feel.
(Yes, there are good reasons for, in general, avoiding rhetorical flourishes; but there are also times for galvanizing oratory, to rouse the people to action, and to move them from an all too common quiet despair. Now is such a time. But, to return for the moment to a more restrained tone, lest the sensibilities of the sycophants be too ruffled…)
So that was a bitter pill to swallow, to see Sanders support the multiple coup-backing Darling of Wall Street. Sanders supporters generally took the punch to the gut, made note, gave Bernie the benefit of the doubt, and moved on, while continuing to believe he represented the possibility of real hope and change – unlike that other guy.
But to hear Bernie already pulling punches, and calling Biden, “my friend Joe”, and saying he will back Biden – a right wing, war-mongering, self-confessed prostitute to big money – if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination – which he definitely won’t if he keeps playing with kid gloves….is a bit too much.
I view elections as a distraction, generally, though sometimes it is worth voting for a lesser evil, or maybe a rare, good candidate. But 2020 could be pivotal. Trump and his neoconservative cabal need to go. Biden and the neoliberal/CIA/Rockefeller/Wall Street banker cabal are equally fascist corporatists, and almost as in love with planet-killing big oil profits, while both camps are rabid imperialists on hire to the military industrial complex, and are sabre-rattling for war with either China or Russia, or both.
(Does anyone remember Dr. Strangelove? These neoliberal and neoconservative crazies cannot be anywhere near the nuclear button; which of course itself must soon be eliminated by mutual disarmament, if we are to survive.)
In short, Bernie needs to come out fighting now, and win – with serious redistribution of wealth and democratization of power, and serious checks on the bloated, murderous, bankrupting war machine – along with bold steps toward curbing carbon emissions and pollution more generally. If either Sanders or some other movement does not quickly generate major positive motion towards a better society, I am convinced we will see civil war in the United States again, and soon.
And of course, it has not gone unnoticed among the 99%, that, while the universal cry is always that there is no money for such things as fully funded universal public health care, pensions or education, student debt relief, affordable housing for all who need it, a Green New Deal infrastructure builing program, or a serious jobs program of any kind, there is never a shortage of money for war, or for the ever growing military industrial complex, or the new police state – and it was noticed that the Wall Street elite just arranged for another “emergency” four trillion dollars for themselves, which was agreed to instantly with full bipartisan approval by the political prostitute class, with only crumbs for the people.
This latest round of corporate looting and feeding frenzy will drive the people into Gandhian, MLK-Style non-violent revolution, if it is channelled well; or to dark demagogery, and long, bloody, protracted civil war, if it is not. Mark my words.
To the central point, the US, like most nations today, has been taken over by corporate oligarchs. It needs, therefore, a popular revolution to restore democracy and power to the people.
Bernie needs to stick with the fiery FDR-style democratic-left spirit which made him the most respected politician in the country, as Chomsky noted him to be. He needs to embody the characteristics of someone like Martin Luther King Jr. now – not Ned Flanders.
With or without Bernie, revolution is what is needed. I’d like to see Bernie on board. But it will take place with or without him. Better with, I would say; but it carries on in any case.
The time is now.
For a better world for all, and for a viable future of any kind at all, we must stand now.
JTR,
March 29, 2020
Writings of J. Todd Ring 
March 29, 2020 at 2:02 pm
Bernie and The Terror of Socialism, vs The Real Danger
A note to those on the right:
Universal public health care is considered a basic human right in Canada, the UK, Europe, and every civilized country. It aslo happens to cost less than the private profit-driven US system – a lot less.
So let’s not be too dogmatic. The market is good at some things, but not everything. Does anyone remember private fire stations? No? That’s because they didn’t work, so we abandonded them.
It’s the same for private, for profit health care systems: they don’t work, they’re cruel, mean-spirited, morally bankrupt and depraved, and they furthmore cost too much. They are corporate vampirism, and they are bankrupting both the people and the Treasury of the nation.
A Green New Deal is simply necessary in order to create real jobs, restart the economy, and keep us from destroying ourselves and the planet we live on – and can easily be paid for if we tax the richest 1% more fairly and equitably, instead of laying the bulk of the tax burden on small business, the middle class and the poor, which is economically foolish as well as morally reprehensible.
As to Sanders professed position as a democratic socialist, we should not let that froghten us. Virtually all of Europe is democratic socialist to one degree or another. They have elections, and civil liberties are more intact than they are in the new police state USA. They have mixed economies, part socialist, part market economy, and it works very well.
What you need to be worried about is not public libraries and fire departments, schools and health care, in a mixed economy as Sanders would encourage. What you need to worry about is fascism – and that is being brought in fast by the Wall Street oligarchy and their neoliberal and noeconservative prostitutes in high office.
Bernie is an FDR New Deal compromise kind of guy. Hold your nose and vote for him, because the alternative may well be civil war, or planetary death.
JTR,
March 29, 2020
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