Bernie Sanders News 2019-2020

Posted on January 31, 2023 by mekorganic

Bernie Sanders News 2019-2020

Bernie Facts https://www.berniesandersfacts.com/?

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2020-05-31 Sanders health plan cosponsored by Harris, Warren, Booker, Gillibrand: better, cheaper than COBRA Four of Bernie Sanders’s former competitors in the Democratic presidential nomination race — Sens. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren — are among the cosponsors of his Health Care Emergency Guarantee Act, announced on May 15. Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Karen Bass are lead sponsors for this legislation in the House, joined by the entire “Squad” and many other cosponsors.

Here is how this simple and efficient plan would work: When people go to the hospital or doctor, they provide their insurance information. If they have insurance, their provider will bill Medicare for the out-of-pocket costs; if the individual is uninsured, the provider will bill Medicare for the entire cost of care. The patient will not be forced to pay any bills for their treatment. This proposal would prevent insurance companies from decreasing coverage and ban surprise billing, so patients don’t get unexpected charges later. It would also prevent price gouging by pharmaceutical companies by making sure the government pays the same lower price for prescription drugs as the Veterans Health Administration. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/5/31/1948112/-Sanders-health-plan-cosponsored-by-Harris-Warren-Booker-Gillibrand-better-cheaper-than-COBRA

2020-05-22 Sanders rips companies that laud frontline workers but won’t pay them more https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/5/22/1947049/-Friday-Night-Owls-Sanders-rips-companies-that-lauds-frontline-workers-but-won-t-pay-them-more

2020-05-20 Biden’s New Pressure From Progressives He’s moving in the right direction, but will he appoint the right people? The long-awaited joint policy task forces, agreed to as a condition of Bernie Sanders’s endorsement of Joe Biden, were at last appointed last week. But how will this process actually work and what difference will it make? The good news: There are some terrific Bernie people on the task forces, and some of the Biden appointees are impressive as well.

The task force process is one of several influencing Biden’s campaign and prospective presidency. Another factor is Elizabeth Warren, who is her own source of influence on public debate generally and on Biden personally. Several of the best policy proposals are Warren’s. The task forces are a welcome addition. They will help push Biden in a more progressive direction and will help keep the Bernie base on board.

Events are unmistakably pushing Biden to be a far more progressive candidate (and one hopes president) than he would have been without the Warren and Sanders campaigns and without the economic collapse produced by the pandemic.

But what will become of these task force proposals? My sources say that their destination is the Democratic platform. The platform is likely to be well to the left of its 2016 counterpart. The question is how much that matters.

Bottom line: The task forces are a welcome addition. They will help push Biden in a more progressive direction and will help keep the Bernie base on board. At the end of the day, however, they will be one of several tributaries into the turbulent river that is the Biden campaign. Even more than in most campaigns, ultimately what will matter most is personnel. https://prospect.org/politics/bidens-new-pressure-from-progressives/

2020-05-15 The reluctant outsider It is sad to some, infuriating to others. The slow devolution and flame out of the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign will go down in history as yet another article of indictment against the claim that capitalist parties can be reformed from within. This argument has been made time and again, only for it to resolve itself in the most odious and macabre fashion. Whether Henry Wallace, George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, or Bernie Sanders, progressives fail to change a party the historical role of which is to sideline progressivism. Progressives don’t change the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party changes progressives.

When it was all over, there Sanders stood, as he knew he would, bereft and bedraggled, owner of some worthless delegates that disingenuous blue MAGAs said he could wield like a cudgel at the convention. He then suspended his campaign and declared, “We must defeat Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in American history.”

Bernie was a faux socialist who couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge a single socialist country aside from Denmark and other neoliberal states with failing safety nets. He would never defy the party or accuse it of cheating. He would never break free and make a breathlessly quixotic run at the presidency, like Ralph Nader had. In fact, he wouldn’t do these things because he didn’t want to end up like Nader did, a DC pariah who’s name yet curdles the thin lips of bourgeois liberals. Though he was 78, and could have easily walked off after the election with the praise of millions of progressives warming his departure and penning his legacy, he desperately wanted to remain with the ‘in crowd’, which happened to include all those neoliberal friends he made in the Senate over the years.

Bernie refused to attack Joe Biden with any ferocity, merely attempted to get Biden to admit he wanted to cut Social Security. He did not attack him over the legacy of sexual harassment. He did not attack him over the legacy of a racist crime bill that exploded the carceral state and, as author Chris Hedges said, turned mass incarceration into the “civil rights issue of our time.” Nor did he go hard at the former vice president for any of the litany of charges to be culled from the Obama years, from the slyly achieved destruction of Libya, to the coup d’état in Ukraine, to the class war on minority homeowners and the transfer of a trillion dollars of black wealth from black hands to elite-controlled corporate bank accounts. Then Bernie endorsed Biden. He endorsed everything he claimed to condemn.

“Nobody goes into the Democratic Party and emerges further on the left. Every institutional pressure in the party moderates elected officials and reels them into the mainstream. The Democratic Party blocks most progressives from getting into office and the few that make it through are then dependent on the party for their power, privilege, and career. They have to befriend neoliberal committee chairs and party leaders for committee assignments, and to get their legislation heard.” http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/29926

2020-05-11 Bernie Sanders Says He Is ‘Unlikely’ to Run for Presidency Again he self-described democratic socialist added that “next time around” voters would probably see “another candidate carrying the progressive banner”. The senator told the Washington Post that presumptive-Democratic nominee Joe Biden on his worst day would be “1,000 times better than Trump on his best day”. He reaffirmed, however, that he and the former vice president “have very serious disagreements on policy”. It’s just hard for me to imagine how anybody can defend the current structure of our health care system”, he said in reference to Biden’s support for expanding the existing Obamacare system. https://sputniknews.com/us/202005111079275321-bernie-sanders-says-he-is-unlikely-to-run-for-presidency-again/

2020-05-01 The Defeat of Bernie Sanders and the Perfidy of the Democrats Sanders’ decision to withdraw from the race represents an anti-climactic end to his “political revolution.” His endorsement of Biden constitutes a betrayal of his many youthful, idealistic and passionate supporters. Sanders’ political treachery is not without precedent.

In 2016, after having been robbed of the nomination by Hilary Clinton and the DNC, Sanders capitulated to the party establishment and threw his support behind a politician he rightly attacked as a Wall Street shill during the primary campaign. Sanders’ nauseating subservience to the political establishment of the Democratic party should not have come as a surprise in 2020 given his prior endorsement of a war criminal and racketeer for president during the last election cycle.

Without a doubt the political and media establishment worked tirelessly to deny Sanders the nomination this time around by relentlessly attacking him as “unelectable,” “unaccomplished,” “disagreeable,” “unrealistic” and “too radical.” All of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination lined up against Sanders during the primary elections. Several withdrew from the race and endorsed Biden on the eve of the ‘Super Tuesday’ contests. The attack was well coordinated by the DNC. The Democratic party and its puppet politicians are firmly committed to neoliberal economics on behalf of their corporate masters and have absolutely no use for the ‘New Deal’ reforms that were championed by Sanders.

The attack on Sanders was also well orchestrated by the corporate media judging by the tenor of the interviews its journalistic propagandists conducted with the candidate, the questions its moderators asked him during presidential debates and the overall coverage of his campaign. As could be expected in the land of the free press, the media presented the policy choices advocated by Sanders as being idealistic, unaffordable and unachievable, in other words, as being the politically irrelevant ravings of an impotent politician.

2020-05-01 Here’s the fatal flaw in the left’s post-mortems of the Bernie Sanders campaign Most of the left’s analyses of Bernie Sanders second primary loss do not attempt to answer why his campaign failed to gain traction. They are premised on the notion that Sanders represented a generic candidate of the left, assume that the Democratic base was with him and his greatest challenge was overcoming a hostile Democratic establishment and take it as a given that any other leftist would have faced the exact same challenges.

But a presidential campaign is an amalgamation of thousands of decisions, great and small, which ultimately determine its success or failure. How a campaign is rolled out, whom a candidate chooses to act as surrogates, what overarching themes and specific messages they push, their policy agenda, their media strategy and their scheduling–all are choices specific to a campaign and there is no reason to assume that another candidate with a similar ideological perspective would replicate them. In fact, it’s more likely that another leftist would learn from Sanders’ two failed presidential campaigns and do some things differently.

Last April, Edward-Isaac Dovere reported for The Atlantic that Sanders’ strategy rested on holding onto his loyal base in a large and fractured Democratic field. At the time, Sanders’ aides believed that he “would easily win enough delegates to put him into contention at the convention,” reported Dovere. “They say they don’t need him to get more than 30 percent to make that happen.” This struck me as a pretty poor strategy at the time. Why assume that the field would remain divided deep into the primaries? In the end, taking it as a given that he would hold his entire 2016 base proved to be a serious error as a quarter of those voters went for Warren this time around, according to a poll conducted in January. Two major, perhaps fatal, strategic errors may be related to that theory of the campaign. https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/most-of-the-lefts-post-mortems-of-bernie-sanders-campaign-share-a-fatal-flaw/

2020-04-27 Here’s why the Bernie Sanders campaign strategy was fatally flawed In sum: the problem really was the Sanders campaign strategy. Leftists and leftism can win in the future, but it has to 1) stop alienating liberals who agree with them on policy; 2) stop treating campaigns as movements and start meeting voters where they are to win; 3) abandon the notion of winning the mythical leftist independent/non-voter, and focus on winning the voters who actually exist; 4) work to consolidate the establishment behind the leftist agenda, rather than attempt an aggressively hostile takeover that insults the notion of partisanship itself, thereby alienating voters who respect longtime party leaders and are loyal to its cultural institutions. Leftist policy can succeed and leftist candidates can win. But it will require a change in both theory and electoral practice.https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-why-the-bernie-sanders-campaign-strategy-was-fatally-flawed/

2020-04-22 Will America’s corruption end on a ventilator or in a mushroom cloud? Little by little, Americans are understanding just how badly our government has let us down by its belated and disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and how thousands more people are dying as a result. But there are two other crises we face that our government is totally unprepared for and incapable of dealing with: the climate crisis and the danger of nuclear war.

Of this year’s Democratic presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders is the only one who routinely votes against record military budgets, approving only 16% of military spending bills since 2013.

On this and many other issues, Sanders has dared to say what Americans know but no major party candidate would say before: that our neoliberal emperors sit stark naked on their thrones, tossing sacks of money to their friends as they rule over an obscene empire of corruption, inequality, war, poverty and racism.

In dogged defiance of American conventional wisdom, Sanders built a political movement based on real solutions to the structural problems of American society, directly challenging the powerful interests who control and profit from the corrupt status quo: the military-industrial complex; the prison-industrial complex; the medical-industrial complex; and the Wall Street financial complex at the heart of it all. http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/29715

2020-04-16 Why Bernie Sanders is absolutely right to back Joe Biden — as painful as it is Ironically, at this historic juncture, Biden—a longtime eager corporate tool—is now the only electoral implement available to progressives for preventing the re-election of Trump. At this point, there’s simply no other plausible way to prevent this monstrous president from winning a second term.

And so, in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Bernie spelled out a choice: “Do we be as active as we can in electing Joe Biden and doing everything we can to move Joe and his campaign in a more progressive direction? Or do we choose to sit it out and allow the most dangerous president in modern American history to get re-elected?”Bernie started this week by endorsing Biden in an awkward video duet with the presumptive nominee. Symbolically, if not intentionally, when the video went to full screen while Bernie spoke, one object was clearly visible behind him—a chessboard.

There are reasons to criticize some of Bernie’s recent tactical moves. (I wish he hadn’t suspended his campaign before the end of primary voting.) But, looking ahead, he’s being sensible about current political realities. https://www.alter n et.org/2020/04/why-bernie-sanders-is-absolutely-right-to-back-joe-biden-as-painful-as-it-is/

2020-04-14 Bernie-izing Biden Now that Sanders has endorsed Biden, here’s a realistic plan for moving America to the left. The Biden people are certainly cognizant of the need to unite the party by scrambling leftward on a number of key issues. Already, Biden has extended his pledge to make two-year public colleges tuition-free to four-year public colleges, too. He has about-faced on bankruptcy law, rejecting his own Scroogeian legislative creation in favor of Elizabeth Warren’s more human-friendly model. He has endorsed forgiving student debt to students who attended public colleges and universities who earn less than $125,000 a year. And he’s come out for reducing the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60.

Each of these shifts moved incrementally toward specific Sanders and Warren positions, of course, and each of these candidates’ camps has committed to setting up joint policy committees to see if they can hammer out additional midpoint positions, which still will wind up to the left of where Biden’s been coming from.

The coronavirus pandemic presents some immediate opportunities for Biden to support a more functional safety net. Sanders and Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) have introduced legislation that would commit the federal government to picking up all the health care expenses of uninsured virus patients. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has called for the federal government to emulate a number of European governments by paying for the salaries of workers who’d otherwise be furloughed or laid off, so that businesses won’t have to hire anew when the shutdown is lifted, and workers won’t have their purchasing power reduced and their lives thrown into more turmoil than is necessary. (Jayapal has written a similar bill.)

What progressives need to keep uppermost in mind, besides the necessity of electing Biden and a Democratic Congress, is that Biden’s positions, should he become president, are a starting point for public policy, not the end point. By ending Donald Trump’s presidency and Mitch McConnell’s tenure as majority leader, and by having a Democratic Senate scrap the filibuster, progressives can bring changes on improvable presidential policy proposals. https://prospect.org/politics/bernie-izing-biden/

2020-04-13 The Demise of Bernie Sanders 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. 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.

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 that “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!

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.

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.

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, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, 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. The same with the CIA’s thirty some odd documented assassination attempts against Fidel Castro!

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?

There was no Sanders rage against the iron-disciplined Democratic Party machine that united to defeat him. No rage against the kept corporate media that red-baited Sanders at will in virtually every media outlet across the country.

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. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/13/the-demise-of-bernie-sanders/

2020-04-10 Noam Chomsky: Bernie Sanders campaign didn’t fail — it energized millions and shifted US politics If Trump is reelected, it’s a indescribable disaster. It means that the policies of the past four years, which have been extremely destructive to the American population, to the world, will be continued and probably accelerated. What this is going to mean for health is bad enough. I just mentioned the Lancet figures. It will get worse. What this means for the environment or the threat of nuclear war, which no one is talking about but is extremely serious, is indescribable.

Suppose Biden is elected. I would anticipate it would be essentially a continuation of Obama — nothing very great, but at least not totally destructive, and opportunities for an organized public to change what is being done, to impose pressures.

It’s common to say now that the Sanders campaign failed. I think that’s a mistake. I think it was an extraordinary success, completely shifted the arena of debate and discussion. Issues that were unthinkable a couple years ago are now right in the middle of attention. The worst crime he committed, in the eyes of the establishment, is not the policy he’s proposing; it’s the fact that he was able to inspire popular movements, which had already been developing — Occupy, Black Lives Matter, many others — and turn them into an activist movement, which doesn’t just show up every couple years to push a leader and then go home, but applies constant pressure, constant activism and so on. That could affect a Biden administration. https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/noam-chomsky-bernie-sanders-campaign-didnt-fail-it-energized-millions-and-shifted-us-politics/

2020-04-10 Second Time as Farce: 4 Theses on the Defeat of Sanders The DSA’s strategy around the Sanders campaign has been an unmitigated failure that has only strengthened the Democratic Party. In this moment of crisis the need for a party of the working class that fights for socialism is more important than ever. https://www.leftvoice.org/second-time-as-farce-4-theses-on-the-defeat-of-sanders

2020-04-08 People’s Action: Thank You, Bernie Bernie Sanders’ ability to cut through the corporate haze that clouds our politics is unmatched by any presidential candidate in our lifetime. Even as corporate power crested in our culture, Sanders and the social movements fighting alongside him have kept alive a vision of a country in which we put people and the planet first. Millions of people have now rallied around that vision in which:

Health care is a human right, ensured by Medicare for All.

Housing is a human right, ensured by a Homes Guarantee.

Fossil fuels are kept in the ground and just transition to clean energy creates new opportunities for everyone in America.

Those who benefited the most from the systems of this country pay their fair share, and everyone is equally protected, empowered, and able to reach their full potential.

Most politicians follow instead of lead. Senator Sanders is an exception. He is not catching up to a movement to restructure the relationship between everyday people and big monied interests. He has been there the whole time. https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2020/04/08/peoples-action-thank-you-bernie

2020-04-04 Bernie Sanders calls for ‘boldest legislation in history’ to halt spiraling Covid-19 catastrophe According to the Vermont lawmaker’s office, Sanders wants the next bill to include six provisions that are aimed at helping working people in the U.S. weather the crisis:

Addressing the employment crisis by ensuring workers remain employed and paid as well as providing social services for everyone in the country, regardless of citizenship or immigration status

Guaranteeing a free at point of service Medicare for All single payer healthcaer system for everyone in the country

Immediately using the Defense Production Act to manufacture personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, and other needed healthcare equipment for frontline workers dealing with the pandemic

Providing food for everyone in the country for the duration of the crisis

$600 billion in aid to states and cities

An immediate suspension of collections of rent, mortgage payments, medical debt, and consumer debt for four months and a suspension of student loan payments through the duration of the pandemic

In a video posted to social media, Sanders said the pandemic presents an outright “emergency” for the nation’s most vulnerable populations and for all working people, and that drastic measures must be taken to protect people’s health and economic wellbeing: https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/bernie-sanders-calls-for-boldest-legislation-in-history-to-halt-spiraling-covid-19-catastrophe/

2020-04-03 Sanders Voted for the Latest Corporate Bailout: What This Reveals for Socialists The U.S. Congress recently passed a $2 trillion bailout package, the largest in U.S. history. Most of the money will go to the wealthiest individuals and corporations. Even though he originally spoke out against it, Bernie Sanders voted for the deal.

People also shouldn’t be surprised that the Democrats have acted to bail out the corporations; after all, the Obama administration did that in 2008 with the massive Wall Street bailout. The two parties of capitalism have joined forces once again.

Sure, the Democrats made a spectacle of opposing this most recent giveaway after Elizabeth Warren began publicly denouncing it. That halted the first draft of the bill and gave the Democrats some time to pretend they’re on the side of working-class people. But despite their posturing, the Democrats didn’t touch the corporate slush fund; they just added some minimal federal oversight to the bill — oversight Donald Trump has already said he intends to ignore. They weren’t opposed to the corporate bailout, just some of the small print.

Passage of this bill unmasks both parties once again. The Republicans and the Democrats represent the capitalists. They’re more than willing to leave behind the working class, even in the midst of a pandemic. They could have passed sweeping protections, canceled rent and student loan payments, frozen layoffs, created and fully funded universal health care, and given everyone a quarantine wage. But instead they spent $2 trillion mostly bailing out the rich.

And when it was finally time to vote, the bill passed the Senate unanimously and was opposed in the House by a lone libertarian Republican, Thomas Massie. Sanders and the Squad voted “yes.” For all of their protestations and rhetorical defense of working people, Sanders and the Squad folded. They didn’t call us all to protest, even if that meant doing so from our homes, via twitter or facebook. They didn’t organize working people to demand something different. Instead, they voted for a bill they claimed to disagree with profoundly. They voted to bail out the rich and screw the poor. They voted for one-time checks they themselves said weren’t enough. They voted for a corporate slush fund.

When all is said and done, Bernie Sanders, AOC, Tlaib, Omar, and every other progressive Democrat voted for a bill that they knew was insufficient and benefited the rich. https://www.leftvoice.org/sanders-votes-500-billion-corporate-bailout-what-this-reveals-for-socialists

2020-04-03 Medicare for All support surges to 9-month high in new poll after coronavirus exposes horrors of private insurance ‘How can it be that we spend 18% of our GDP on healthcare but still lack the beds, masks, ventilators, gowns, gloves, and test kits we need to adequately respond to this crisis?’ asked Sen. Bernie Sanders. The survey (pdf), released Wednesday, found that 55 percent of U.S. voters support Medicare for All, a nine-point jump since February. While support for Medicare for All is highest among Democratic voters at 75%, a majority of Independents—52%—also support the policy, along with 31% of Republicans. http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/29554

2020-04-02 ‘People Should Not Be Forced to Put Their Liveon the Line to Vote’ Bernie Sanders and Wisconsin Democrats want to delay the stats e’s April 7 primary to keep voters safe, But, so far, the elections still on. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/wisconsin-democratic-primary/

2020-03-30 ‘Seize It’: Progressives Urge Philadelphia City Govt. to Take Hahnemann Hospital After Owner Demands $1 Million a Month in Rent Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday joined a rising chorus of progressives demanding the city of Philadelphia seize the shuttered 500-bed Hahnemann hospital from its owner, investment banker Joel Freedman, and reopen the facility to handle the coming peak infections of the coronavirus in the city. “The city should reopen Hahnemann hospital immediately,” Sanders said in a tweet Monday at midday. Sanders, who supported efforts to stop the hospital’s closure in July 2019, including rallying with the facility’s supporters. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/30/seize-it-progressives-urge-philadelphia-city-govt-take-hahnemann-hospital-after

2020-03-26 ‘Absurd and wrong’: Watch Bernie Sanders deliver a fiery Senate floor speech admonishing GOP’s relentless efforts to ‘punish’ poor people In a fiery speech on the Senate floor Wednesday ahead of the chamber’s passage of a massive coronavirus stimulus bill, Sen. Bernie Sanders ripped his Republican colleagues for doing everything in their power to ensure that poor and vulnerable people receive less financial assistance than they desperately need in this moment of nationwide crisis. https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/absurd-and-wrong-watch-bernie-sanders-deliver-a-fiery-senate-floor-speech-admonishing-gops-relentless-efforts-to-punish-poor-people

2020-03-22 Bernie Sanders could still make an all-out case that only his social welfare philosophy can meet the crisis of coronavirus Sanders could prove this entire analysis wrong by seizing the greatest opportunity that has yet been gifted to him, even more than the Biden debate. Relegating the primaries to the fog of confusion where they belong, he could still make an all-out case that only his social welfare philosophy can meet the crisis of coronavirus and other similar breakdowns. He could throw the gauntlet to the elites, forget the last three months as a bad dream, and ask to meet them at the (virtual) convention with the result up in the air. He could mobilize his tens of millions of passionate adherents by making them think beyond the logistics of pure electoral politics. By not bowing down to party pressure to concede to Biden and endorse him soon, he could yet reshape the entire landscape of the general election, with his movement at the front and center of it. https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/bernie-sanders-could-still-make-an-all-out-case-that-only-his-social-welfare-philosophy-can-meet-the-crisis-of-coronavirus

2020-03-22 Bernie Sanders could still make an all-out case that only his social welfare philosophy can meet the crisis of coronavirus Sanders followers have wondered throughout the campaign about manifest strategic errors and ascribed them to the man’s essential gentleness, which is indisputable and without parallel in current American politics, but is not the real explanation. From the moment I tuned seriously into this campaign early in 2019, I felt that something was off. Sanders was playing too nice with the media. There was no attempt to differentiate himself from his main opponents, namely Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. He presumed himself the ideological front-runner. These errors of conception amplified themselves many times over as the campaign unfolded, reaching a crescendo in the last month and a half, from Iowa to last Tuesday’s primaries.

Many Sanders defenders have legitimately pondered throughout the campaign how he could possibly take on the omnipotent global oligarchy and achieve any of his policy proposals as president if he couldn’t take on the two-timing DNC elite with their sleazy scheming. If the party quickly coalesced around a single establishment candidate, where was the preemptive strategy to deal with it? Again, it wasn’t there because the party was never seen as the enemy, just the convenient platform upon which to mount a battle of ideas.

The conciliatory Sanders of 2020 vintage bought into the entire argument against his own electability when he went along, as a respected if somewhat begrudged elder statesman, with the Democratic party’s refusal to accept any of the political malfeasance that had given rise to Trump in the first place. Instead, he was making the unintentional case for Biden all along when he participated in Russiagate and impeachment, self-absolving paranoias catering to the fearful Democratic voter’s desire to return to the status quo ante. If you never take on Obama, how do you stop his lieutenant?

This explains the lost chance to take down Biden in their head-to-head debate last Sunday. It was the peak moment of disappointment for Sanders believers as the Senator passed up opportunity after opportunity to not only discredit Biden as a key instigator of the failed Affordable Care Act and the Wall Street bailout, both of which had newly converged in the population’s vulnerability to the coronavirus, but also absorbed repeated body blows aimed at the credibility of his own political revolution. Except for a 20-minute arousal when Sanders exposed Biden for lying about Social Security, the rest of the time he did not defend himself or his followers against vicious bullying, giving a powerful new leash of life to the establishment.

Sanders won’t mount a third party challenge this time around, just as he didn’t earlier. His 2016 campaign was more potent because that threat was always on the table. He’d said he wouldn’t do it, but nobody really knew what he would do. Conditions were ideal then, and there’s a good chance that he would have ended the two-party duopoly once and for all. This time around, his pledge of allegiance to the eventual nominee has given free license to party elites to undermine him by every conceivable means. There was no way that Bernie 2020 was going to win without that threat as a recurring subtext.

Sanders could prove this entire analysis wrong by seizing the greatest opportunity that has yet been gifted to him, even more than the Biden debate. Relegating the primaries to the fog of confusion where they belong, he could still make an all-out case that only his social welfare philosophy can meet the crisis of coronavirus and other similar breakdowns. He could throw the gauntlet to the elites, forget the last three months as a bad dream, and ask to meet them at the (virtual) convention with the result up in the air. He could mobilize his tens of millions of passionate adherents by making them think beyond the logistics of pure electoral politics. By not bowing down to party pressure to concede to Biden and endorse him soon, he could yet reshape the entire landscape of the general election, with his movement at the front and center of it. But we already know what he’s going to do, after a bit of teasing, don’t we? https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/bernie-sanders-could-still-make-an-all-out-case-that-only-his-social-welfare-philosophy-can-meet-the-crisis-of-coronavirus/

2020-03-18 Biden’s Moment, Bernie’s Dilemma The former veep is free to move leftward, while the Vermont senator has no way to campaign. That Biden has now opened an unsurmountable lead in delegates, that upcoming primaries may well be postponed until no one knows when, and that campaigning in public is impossible so long as COVID-19 stalks the land, all present Sanders with diminishing possibilities for continuing his campaign. In 1920, his hero (and mine), socialist Eugene Debs, ran for president—more accurately, was run for president—while in a federal prison in Atlanta for the crime of having opposed America’s entry into World War I. Nearly one million Americans cast their vote for Debs in a gesture of disgust with the government that locked him up, support for Debs’s beliefs, and respect for Debs himself. But as Sanders looks to the coming weeks, and probably months, he may be compelled to conclude that he can no more wage a campaign than Debs could 100 years ago.

Above all, however perverse this sounds, it’s the pandemic that gives Biden room to move left. The nation is about to go into a deep recession, and even most Republicans seem resigned to the necessity of a vast increase in public provision. This should be a time when Democrats not only back assistance to all Americans, but also go after corporations that took on debt solely to reward their shareholders, and now need the public to bail them out, as my colleague Alexander Sammon documents today in his piece on the airline industry. It shouldn’t be hard for Biden not just to recommend social distancing but also social responsibility in economic matters. He could call for an end to share buybacks and for putting employee representatives on corporate boards. (One way to do that would be to choose Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who’s introduced legislation mandating those reforms, as his running mate.) In short, this is a time when Biden shouldn’t find it hard to embrace more progressive policies. That, and reaching out not just to Sanders but to the Squad and the host of young social democratic activists who are the core of the new progressivism, should be a profitable way he can pass the lockdown weeks ahead of us. https://prospect.org/politics/biden-moment-bernie-dilemma/

2020-03-13 Sanders Says Coronavirus ‘A Red Flag for Current Dysfunctional and Wasteful Healthcare System’ “We are only as safe as the least insured person in America.” This crisis should be a moment in which people ask fundamental questions about the dysfunctionality of our current healthcare system,” the Vermont senator added. In addition to demanding a Medicare for All, single-payer healthcare system, Sanders called for the immediate expansion of unemployment benefits and paid sick leave to help workers and others affected by the coronavirus. The government’s response should “pay attention to the most vulnerable people in this country,” Sanders said, not just the wealthy and large corporations. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/13/sanders-says-coronavirus-red-flag-current-dysfunctional-and-wasteful-healthcare

2020-03-13 Joe Biden Isn’t the Safe Bet to Beat Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders Is.

Joe Biden is a weak candidate who is more likely to lose to Donald Trump than Bernie Sanders. The best chance we have at ousting Trump is voting for Sanders in the rest of the primaries. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/joe-biden-donald-trump-bernie-sanders-electability

2020-03-13 Sanders Says Coronavirus ‘A Red Flag for Current Dysfunctional and Wasteful Healthcare System’ Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered a speech on Friday addressing “the lessons the nation can learn” from the coronavirus outbreak, which has intensified progressive demands for Medicare for All, paid sick leave, and other policies that would provide health and economic security for all. Sanders, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, noted that America’s for-profit healthcare system has left tens of millions of people in the U.S. uninsured or underinsured in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, highlighting the need for a system that covers everyone as a right. https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/13/sanders-says-coronavirus-red-flag-current-dysfunctional-and-wasteful-healthcare

2020-03-13 Joe Biden Isn’t the Safe Bet to Beat Donald Trump. Bernie Sanders Is Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden have radically different policy platforms and political strategies, but for many voters, the most pressing concern is which of these two men has the best shot of beating Donald Trump in November.

Fundamentally, we worry that Biden is not running an inspiring campaign that can win. His message to struggling young people is “give me a break” — things aren’t so bad. His message to climate activists and immigration activists who challenge his positions is “go vote for someone else.” And his message to Wall Street is “nothing will fundamentally change.”

The only Democrat to win the presidency since Bill Clinton was Barack Obama. Obama ran significantly to Hillary Clinton’s left in the primary, inspiring a generation with his vague but uplifting message of “hope and change.” Moderate Democrats who didn’t run inspiring campaigns, such as Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, didn’t fare well.

Bernie Sanders, like Obama, has built a massive grassroots campaign with hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic, largely young, volunteers. This volunteer base will be critical when it comes time to register new voters, including young people, Latino voters, and working-class people who can swing elections in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (where, despite Biden’s primary victory, voters under fifty preferred Sanders by overwhelming margins). https://jacobin.com/2020/03/joe-biden-donald-trump-bernie-sanders-electability

2020-03-12 ‘In a dark time, the eye begins to see’: The 2020 Bernie campaign represents a fight that must continue No matter who wins the Democratic presidential nomination, many millions of people will refuse to unsee what has become all too clear. On the verge of spring 2020, we can see what we’re up against: A crowing media establishment, eager to relegate the Bernie Sanders campaign to the political margins.

A gloating Democratic Party establishment, glad to rally around Potemkin candidate Joe Biden and extol his carefully crafted façade. Overall, interlocking systems based on greed and corporate power instead of shared resources and genuine democracy.

On Tuesday night, there was no mistaking the smug joy of studio pundits and Democratic Party operatives on networks like AT&T-owned CNN and Comcast-owned MSNBC. Meanwhile, the New York Times rushed into print yet another all-out attack piece masquerading as a “news” article about Sanders. Dominant media have routinely slanted coverage to make Sanders look bad, often bypassing context and skewing facts. http://www.intrepidreport.com/archives/29364

2020-03-06 Bernie Sanders can win the Dem nomination if he pivots quickly–but can he do it? But changing the current trajectory of the race would require a quick change in strategy, and it’s not clear that Sanders is capable of executing the pivot that he needs to make to contend. He needs to shift, quickly, from attacking the Democratic establishment, the media and “millionaires and billionaires” in general to centering his campaign on the perfidy of one billionaire in particular, Donald Trump. Because that’s where most primary voters are.

The overarching story of the 2020 primaries is that most of the Democratic base prioritizes beating Trump over pretty much everything else. Biden is a weak candidate, famous for his gaffes and failure to respect women’s personal space, and with a long history in Washington that includes a number of past positions that are out-of-step with today’s party. But throughout much of this campaign season, Biden’s remained above the fray as the other candidates bashed each other, focusing on his central promises of beating Trump “like a drum” and offering a return to normalcy. He has consistently polled well on the question of “electability.”

To turn the ship around, Sanders needs to puncture Biden’s inevitability argument at the debate–and through his surrogates–while re-focusing his own attacks on Trump. The problem is that fighting with the establishment and the press not only energizes a good chunk of his base, it seems to energize him and his advisors as well. It’s a conundrum. https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/bernie-sanders-can-win-the-dem-nomination-if-he-pivots-quickly-but-can-he-do-it/

2020-03-06 Bernie Sanders Lost Minnesota Because He Fought For Racial Justice Bernie Sanders had a disappointing week, and this was especially true in Minnesota, where he won handily in 2016. How is it possible that Bernie, despite huge rises in Latino voters, and moderate rises in black voters, has not taken off in 2020?

I look around my pathetic racist state of Minnesota and I have to admit there can only be one explanation: Bernie is losing white voters because he is standing up for people of color. It wasn’t that long ago that Bernie would awkwardly brush off questions of race by looking at disparities in race solely through the lens of class.

Bernie’s obstacles, pointed to by progressives, are many, but they are the same in 2016 as in 2020: corrupt media, billionaire-funded campaign finances, establishment politicians and low voter turnout among young people. The one thing that has changed is Bernie himself.

Just as the Bernie phenomenon, in general, is a product of working people organizing, so too is his expanded focus on racial issues in 2020. Activists of color pressed Bernie, and to his credit, or maybe just to his political ambition, he listened. Bernie has come out more strongly against the military-industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the deportation machine.

Bernie’s record is far from perfect on race—whether that be war and peace, criminal justice or immigration. He should be held accountable for his past and future actions, which of course were establishment enough to get him this far.

But Bernie is radical in comparison to the striking racism of his opponents. Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Mike Bloomberg all built their careers largely on the criminalization, policing and incarceration of people of color. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/06/bernie-sanders-lost-minnesota-because-he-fought-for-racial-justice/

2020-03-03 Why the American Ruling Class Fears Bernie Sanders In reality the American ruling class, including the Democratic and Republican party establishments, and their media accomplices, fear of Sanders has nothing to do with Russia. They fear him because his campaign is based on a direct appeal to the interests of American workers, the vast majority of the American people, and is opposed to their interests.

First, they fear that as president Sanders would actually try to enact his capitalist reformist program, which would – to a very limited degree – cut across their interests and power. That program includes legislation to curtail the power of Wall Street and finance capital; reduce the power and wealth of the gigantic pharmaceutical and health industry through universal government medical insurance; and somewhat reduce the power of the military-intelligence system by reducing military expenditures and ending middle east wars.

Second, they fear him because they fear the American working class and he does not fear it; he considers it his political base. His entire campaign and politics is based not on identity politics predicated on which religions, ethnicity, gender, or race people belong to; it is based on the opposite premise of uniting the vast majority of Americans based on their common identity as workers their common interests as members of the working class.

Third, they fear him because as president it would be within the scope of his politics, or those of his supporters, to mobilize extra-congressional working class mass support for his limited program including mass demonstrations like a ‘march for social equality’ or a ‘march for universal health care’ or a ‘march against war’ in Washington.

This in turn might unleash social forces far beyond anything Sanders might intend, as his mission is to secure limited social reforms within capitalism. https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-american-ruling-class-fears-bernie-sanders/5705206

2020-03-01 Bernie Sanders and the Resurrected Russiagate Smear The 2019 report into “Russiagate” by Robert Mueller turned up no credible evidence to back up the narrative that the Russian state orchestrated a powerful and effective campaign to influence the presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The core narrative of “Russiagate” lacked solid evidence. Right from the beginning, astute commentators such as Emeritus Professor Stephen Cohen, an expert in Russian affairs for decades, pronounced the two central documents on which the whole Russiagate sage relied as “impotent”. If anything the real interference which inspired “Russiagate” had to do with the State of Israel attempting to fix a vote in the United Nations in regard to which the Israelis hoped that Russia would refrain from exercising its right of veto in a UN Resolution concerning the Palestinian issue. It speaks volumes that the mainstream media and the politicians of the world’s most powerful nation are fearful of speaking out about the power of the Israel Lobby in US domestic politics and foreign policy.

It is important to explain the motivation behind “Russiagate” and the actors who perpetrated the myth. “Russiagate” is simply the fruit of an alliance between the Democratic Party elite and members of the military-security establishment. The former wished to exact revenge on Trump for inflicting an unexpected defeat on their candidate, while the latter have a financial interest in prolonging a Cold War with Russia because peace or rapprochement would effectively mean the extraordinary levels of money spent by the United States on defence in terms of manufacturing weapons, maintaining bases around the globe and justifying its vast intelligence network would be rendered redundant.

The Russia smear is thus a political weapon directed at any politician who speaks out against American militarism, whether as pertaining to the manufactured Cold War against the Russian Federation or to the unchanging policy of instigating overt and covert wars of regime change. The Military Industry has its tentacles in politicians whose payoffs are enabled by laws which allow unlimited electoral spending. It also has a pervading influence on the mainstream media regardless of the ideological designation of “liberal” or “conservative”. Thus we see Democratic Party Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who tore up President Trump’s State of the Union address, rise up to applaud Trump’s expression of support for the US puppet Juan Guaido, the man being used by the US National Security State to overthrow the legitimate government of Venezuela.

It also explains the pro-war sentiments of supposed liberal media figures such as Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper, both of whom are emblematic of the sort of liberal political and media figures who subscribe to “Humanitarian Wars” which fulfill the war agenda of the Military Industry and its perennial allies associated with the neoconservative agenda and the Israel Lobby.

The “Russiagate” smear is a disinformation exercise geared to denigrate and to discredit politicians. It is not limited to effecting the derailment of political campaigns, it also serves as a tool to be used to control the policy of a successful candidate in terms of their conduct of relations with Russia. https://www.globalresearch.ca/bernie-sanders-resurrected-russiagate-smear/5705152

2020-02-27 Bernie Sanders and the Military Industrial Complex. Bernie 2.0 All that was to explain why I might even talk about the possibility of a President Bernie and whether he and his political base could stand up to the military industrial complex. I say “Bernie and his political base” because we all know that’s the measure of what he could accomplish. If his army of volunteers pack up and go home instead of staying organized, he won’t be able to accomplish the goals he declares in his stump speech.

In that stump speech, Bernie says over and over, “We are putting the prison industrial complex on notice! We are putting the military industrial complex on notice!” I can’t think of a viable candidate saying anything so bold since George McGovern promised to end the Vietnam War, and he was of course clobbered by Richard Nixon. Bernie has consistently voted against the war budget, also known by the misnomer “National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).” It’s difficult to assert that his commitment to redirecting military and industrial dollars to human needs isn’t sincere.

Corporate Democrats claim to fear a repeat of his defeat in 1972, but idealistic, anti-war (and draft eligible) students led McGovern’s campaign. Sanders’s base is among people who are suffering here at home, not overseas—people suffering because of ICE raids, home foreclosures, medical debt, college debt, child care costs, stagnant or declining wages, and environmental injustice like the water in Flint, the pipelines surrounding Plains Indians, and the sea levels threatening coastal populations in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida. That’s a much broader political base, especially after so many decades of austerity and war. Bernie’s fiery claims that we’re going to put the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex on notice are met with huge applause from the huge crowds who pack into his rallies. They seem to understand not only the injustice of mass incarceration and perpetual war but also its cost to American infrastructure and their own lives. https://www.globalresearch.ca/bernie-sanders-military-industrial-complex/5704887

2020-02-25 The “Liberal” Media’s Propaganda War on Bernie Sanders The first such narrative boils down to Red baiting. The Atlantic, recently gave space for the right-wing pundit David Frump to call Sanders a “Marxist of the old school of dialectical materialism”.

A second form of “liberal” anti-Sanders media and political bias is the constant narrative that Democratic primary voters must choose between a candidate like Sanders who embodies their values and policy preferences and a candidate who can beat Trump.

A third variant of anti-Sanders “liberal” media conduct is the constant claim that Medicare for All will destroy peoples’ existing health insurance and bankrupt the nation.

A fourth form of “liberal” Democratic bias against Sanders is the recurrent media suggestion of basic underlying similarity between Trump and Sanders, with the latter portrayed as the Democrats’ “own Donald Trump.” That description comes from Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who recently attacked “Sanders and his fleet of Bernie Bros who slash and burn, attack and smear other Democrats” in a column ripping on the “disaster” that is Sanders’ “Trump-like campaign .” https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/25/the-liberal-medias-propaganda-war-on-bernie-sanders/

2020-02-24 The Russiagate Racket targets Bernie Sanders’ surge With a familiar playbook of evidence-free, anonymously sourced red-baiting, the forces behind Russiagate try to stop Bernie Sanders’ primary success. Evidence-free claims of a Russian government effort to aid Bernie Sanders have been exploited by centrist Democrats alarmed by Sanders’ primary success. This should be no surprise. Sanders and his movement are a threat to the very same interests that have pushed Russiagate for more than three years — the failed neoliberal Democratic Party establishment and the national security state. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/24/the-russiagate-racket-targets-the-bernie-sanders-surge/

2020-02-19 Sanders Leads by Double Digits in Latest NBC/WSJ Poll as Biden Loses Momentum to Bloomberg https://sputniknews.com/us/202002191078347227-sanders-double-digits-latest-poll-biden-loses-bloomberg/

2020-02-18 The Escalating Class War Against Bernie Sanders More than ever, Bernie Sanders is public enemy number one for power elites that thrive on economic injustice. The Bernie 2020 campaign is a direct threat to the undemocratic leverage that extremely wealthy individuals and huge corporations constantly exert on the political process. No wonder we’re now seeing so much anti-Bernie rage from leading corporate Democrats — eagerly amplified by corporate media. In American politics, hell hath no fury like corporate power scorned. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/18/the-escalating-class-war-against-bernie-sanders/

2020-02-18 WSJ/NBC Poll shows Bernie Is Frontrunner with Big Lead and easily Beats Bloomberg 1 on 1. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/2/18/1920189/-WSJ-NBC-Poll-shows-Bernie-Is-Frontrunner-with-Big-Lead-and-easily-Beats-Bloomberg-1-on-1

2020-02-17 The New Rules of the Game But should Bernie Sanders manage to evade the snares, traps and minefields laid for him by the Democratic Party elites, should he miraculously become the party’s nominee, the game of least worst will radically change. All the terrifying demons that inhabit Trump will be instantly exorcised. But unlike in the biblical story of Jesus driving the demons into a herd of swine, they will be driven into the senator from Vermont. Trump will become the establishment’s reluctant least worse option. Sanders will become a leper. The Democratic and Republican party elites, joining forces as they did in the 1972 presidential election, will do to Sanders what they did to George McGovern, who lost in 49 of the 50 states. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-new-rules-of-the-game/

2020-02-17 Here’s why some Tea Party Republicans are voting for Bernie Sanders in South Carolina’s open primary: report https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/heres-why-some-tea-party-republicans-are-voting-for-bernie-sanders-in-south-carolinas-open-primary-report/

2020-02-16 What “That’s Not Realistic” Really Means: Bernie Sanders, Social Democracy, and Capitalist Apologetics The most obvious translation of “that’s not realistic” is this: we the people are powerless to change things. Of course, most of those who use the “unrealistic” fallacy conveniently have power and money, which has disillusioned them from imagining any possibilities for transformative changes, and blunted their ability to feel empathy for those less fortunate. It makes zero sense to call Sanders’ policies unrealistic when nearly all of Europe maintains core social democratic institutions with mass public approval.

The question of “how can we pay” for programs like Medicare for All, free college, debt relief, and a Green New Deal always comes up. This is hilarious, of course, because no one asks the elites to justify the annual 750 billion US military budget. Drastically cutting the military budget and redistributing the surplus is how you pay for these social programs.

Another accurate and blunter rendering of what the unrealistic/unelectable memes mean would be: “Don’t ask for too much. Know your place, peasants.” Notice how you don’t see poor people claiming that socialism or “democratic socialist” policies are unrealistic. I’m fairly certain slaves were told their freedom was unrealistic, the suffragettes were told their right to vote was unrealistic, JFK was told by many of the “smartest” people that a moon landing before 1970 was unrealistic. We can go on and on. https://countercurrents.org/2020/02/what-thats-not-realistic-really-means-bernie-sanders-social-democracy-and-capitalist-apologetics/

2020-02-15 Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump with His Progressive Vision for America. Primary Voters Know It. But as Biden’s case for his superior electability collapses, it makes sense that voters would take a second look at Sanders, who, in addition to polling well against Trump, aligns more closely with the Democratic Party base — particularly, according to some polls, black and Hispanic voters — on key policy issues like immigration and “Medicare for All.”

Are voters right to believe in Bernie? While polls can only tell us so much at this juncture, the latest one from Quinnipiac University surveying all registered voters shows him doing well in a head-to-head against Trump, beating him 51-43 percent; in the same poll, Biden bests Trump 50-43 and Bloomberg does so 51-42. Sanders, however, polls the best against Trump with independents — which makes sense, as he’s the longest-serving independent member of Congress in U.S. history.

And, he beat a Republican incumbent when he ran for the House in 1990, and won his 2006 Senate race by flipping a seat that had been occupied by Republicans for 144 years. Whether he could do the same at the national level when Americans’ votes have to be filtered through the insanity of the electoral college and all sorts of voter suppression is unclear, but at the very least, Sanders’ detractors have little evidence that he’s “not electable” in places that tend to prefer more conservative representation. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/15/bernie-sanders-can-beat-trump-his-progressive-vision-america-primary-voters-know-it

2020-02-15 Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump With His Liberal Vision for America. Primary Voters Know It. https://readersupportedne w s.org/opinion2/277-75/61360-focus-bernie-sanders-can-beat-trump-with-his-liberal-vision-for-america-primary-voters-know-it

2020-02-15 Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump with His Progressive Vision for America. Primary Voters Know It. Sanders’ supporters believe his decades-long record of fighting for social and economic justice and criticizing the corrupt political establishment will turn out people in the general election who don’t habitually vote — a group that skews young, poor and non-white.

And, while non-voters skew slightly more conservative than voting Democrats on social issues, they not only support single-payer healthcare at higher rates, but 51 percent also want “a Democrat who will fundamentally change America.” Does that sound like anyone you know?

To his energetic and activated base, Sanders is that rare candidate who combines bold, progressive ideas with an actual path to electoral victory. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/02/15/bernie-sanders-can-beat-trump-his-progressive-vision-america-primary-voters-know-it

2020-02-15 Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump With His Liberal Vision for America. Primary Voters Know It https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/61360-focus-bernie-sanders-can-beat-trump-with-his-liberal-vision-for-america-primary-voters-know-it

2020-02-15 Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump with His Progressive Vision for America Primary Voters Know It. Sanders’ supporters believe his decades-long record of fighting for social and economic justice and criticizing the corrupt political establishment will turn out people in the general election who don’t habitually vote — a group that skews young, poor and non-white.

2020-02-14 The Lessons of the Culinary Union Health Care Fight The Las Vegas-based Culinary Union (UNITE HERE Local 226) announced Thursday afternoon that they would not endorse a candidate in the Nevada Democratic presidential primary, days after escalating attacks on Bernie Sanders over his Medicare for All plan.

“We’re going to endorse our goals,” said Geoconda Argüello-Kline, the union’s secretary-treasurer, in a press conference Thursday. The goals include immigration reform (a majority of union members are Hispanic), living-wage jobs, and preserving the Culinary Health Plan, which the union and its members view as gold-standard coverage.

The non-endorsement ends days of rising tensions. Argüello-Kline said Wednesday that Sanders supporters “viciously attacked the Culinary Union and working families” in retaliation for their position. This sent every other candidate in the field rushing to the union’s side to condemn online harassment. Sanders on Thursday sought to lower the temperature, calling on his supporters “not to engage in bullying or ugly attacks.”

Culinary Union leadership ran into the problem outlined in prior Prospect reporting: there simply wasn’t a candidate for them to endorse. https://prospect.org/labor/lessons-culinary-union-health-care-fight-nevada/

2020-02-14 Bernie Sanders Faces a Media Rigged Against Him It’s a “gentleman’s” agreement between elite media and their establishment guests—a courtesy major news outlets bestow upon former officials who get to pontificate and editorialize about today’s events with no worry they’ll be identified by their jobs today.

On Wednesday night, CNN’s Don Lemon hosted ubiquitous Bernie Sanders-basher Jim Messina—solo, without an opposing view—to slam Sanders and his Medicare-for-All proposal. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/bernie-sanders-faces-a-media-rigged-against-him/

2020-02-14 Bernie Sanders makes a stunning showing in a new Texas poll — while Trump is ‘under-performing’ “The Trump trial ballots confirm what we’ve seen, that Trump is winning, but he clearly is under-performing, given the party profile in the state,” Daron Shaw, a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin who co-directed the poll, told the Tribune. “It is interesting when you put a flesh and blood Democrat up there, it drops that number, but here’s a Republican in a Republican state who’s not at 50%, which is a sign of weakness.”

Bernie Sanders: 24%

Joe Biden: 22%

Elizabeth Warren: 15%

Michael Bloomberg: 10%

Pete Buttigieg: 7%

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/bernie-sanders-makes-a-stunning-showing-in-a-new-texas-poll-while-trump-is-under-performing

2020-02-11 The Day One Agenda Polls Pretty Well As his position for the nomination improves, Bernie Sanders has signaled that he wants to use the powers of the presidency to advance his agenda. His team is working up a series of executive actions that Sanders could take immediately upon entering office. If this sounds familiar to Prospect readers, that’s because we outlined just such a strategy, called the Day One Agenda, last fall. Lurking in existing federal statutes are a host of robust policies that could make progress on all sorts of issues, from climate change to financial regulation to health care. Other candidates, like Amy Klobuchar, have proposed an expansive Day One Agenda as well.

We now have a real sense of the popularity of using the tools of the presidency to make change happen. The progressive think tank Data for Progress decided to poll the Day One Agenda, asking the public about 29 different executive actions that the next Democratic president could take. The results showed that 21 of the 29 actions were looked upon favorably, with plurality or majority support. In other words, voters want the next president to use the authority granted to them by Congress. https://prospect.org/day-one-agenda/executive-authority-polls-pretty-well/

2020-02-07 Media, Democratic Establishment Panics as Sanders Predicted to Sweep All 50 States Perhaps most notably, statistics and politics website Five Thirty Eight predicts that Sanders is the favorite to win in all 50 states, suggesting he will receive over 200 delegates in California alone – twice the total of any other candidate. This is all the more surprising as Five Thirty Eight’s Editor-in-Chief Nate Silver is a conservative, describing his politics as lying between Mitt Romney and Gary Johnson. The site also has a history of downplaying or underestimating Sanders’ chances.https://www.mintpressnews.com/democrats-panic-bernie-sanders-predicted-win-all-50-states/264716/

This is all the more surprising as Five Thirty Eight’s Editor-in-Chief Nate Silver is a conservative, describing his politics as lying between Mitt Romney and Gary Johnson. The site also has a history of downplaying or underestimating Sanders’ chances. https://www.mintpressnews.com/democrats-panic-bernie-sanders-predicted-win-all-50-states/264716/

2020-01-31 Bernie Sanders’s Evolution on Disability Policy Four years after saying little on disablility rights issues, Sanders has emerged with the most comprehensive plan in the field. https://prospect.org/politics/bernie-sanders-evolution-on-disability-policy/

2020-01-27 With Senator Bernie Sanders surging in the polls With Senator Bernie Sanders surging in the polls, DNC chair Tom Perez has put forward a cartoonishly neoliberal cast of foreign policy hacks and corporate lobbyists to sabotage his nomination. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/27/dnc-perez-regime-change-agents-israel-lobbyists-wall-street-rig-game-bernie/

2020-01-27 Environmental Voter Guide The Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund evaluated each candidate on four key environmental issue areas: saving wildlife, protecting public lands, ensuring environmental justice and ending the climate crisis.

Senator Bernie Sanders

Overall Grade = A

Wildlife = B+

Public Lands = A-

Environmental Justice = A

Climate = A+

Senator Sanders has demonstrated a strong environmental record throughout his career, including having proposed the strongest plan to address climate change and being an original cosponsor of the Green New Deal. He has also voted in Congress, over the years, to protect wildlife and public lands, and has consistently opposed legislation that exempted the border wall from complying with U.S. environmental laws. https://centeractionfund.org/environmental-report-card/

2020-01-27 To rig primary against Bernie, DNC chair Tom Perez nominates regime-change agents, Israel lobbyists, and Wall Street consultants Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez has nominated dozens of lobbyists, corporate consultants, think tank board members, and former officials linked to the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton to serve on the Democratic National Convention (DNC) nominating committee this July. Many of Perez’s nominees are vocal opponents of Senator Bernie Sanders and spoke out against his campaign when he challenged Hillary Clinton for the nomination in 2016. Just as it did in 2016, the DNC appears determined to sabotage a Sanders nomination https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/27/dnc-perez-regime-change-agents-israel-lobbyists-wall-street-rig-game-bernie/

2020-01-27 With Senator Bernie Sanders surging in the polls, DNC chair Tom Perez has put forward a cartoonishly neoliberal cast of foreign policy hacks and corporate lobbyists to sabotage his nomination. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/27/dnc-perez-regime-change-agents-israel-lobbyists-wall-street-rig-game-bernie/

2020-01-15 Bernie Sanders – Attacks by Corporate Media and Democrats

CNN, Clinton Democrats Sow Discord In Democratic Presidential Race Senator Bernie Sanders did everything he could to help Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton defeat President Donald Trump in 2016. In 1988, during a C-SPAN appearance, he said, “A woman could be elected President of the United States.” He even encouraged Senator Elizabeth Warren to run for president in 2015.

Yet, before, during, and after the last presidential debate before the Iowa Caucuses, CNN and Clinton Democrats sowed discord among Democratic voters by promoting a spurious story against Sanders—that he told Warren a woman could not win the election during a private meeting in December 2018.

Hours after CNN published their report (and before Warren put out her statement), the Washington Post added, “Two people with knowledge of the conversation at the 2018 dinner at Warren’s home told the Washington Post that Warren brought up the issue by asking Sanders whether he believed a woman could win. One of the people with knowledge of the conversation said Sanders did not say a woman couldn’t win but rather that Trump would use nefarious tactics against the Democratic nominee.”

The CNN moderator never asked Sanders, Warren, or the other candidates about the central issue reportedly discussed, which is what it would take to ensure Trump was not successful in wielding a woman’s identity against her to win re-election.

Although the debate exposed how the story was a cheap shot against Sanders because he shies away from identity politics, Jess McIntosh, the former director of communications outreach for Clinton’s presidential campaign, Karen Finney, the former senior spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and Joe Lockhart, the former press secretary for President Bill Clinton continued the smear attack.

Before the debate, Finney was on CNN’s “The Lead” with Jake Tapper. She revealed the prejudice driving her interest in this story put out against Sanders: It’s not just about what may or may not have been said in this conversation. Bernie came into this race with a bit of a legacy. The Bernie bros were known to have been horrible to women online. The Bernie bros, again, they’re pretty obnoxious, and they’re very sexist and misogynist.

Clinton Democrats, like Finney, are angry about democracy. They still resent that Clinton was effectively challenged by Sanders in the 2016 primary, and it brought attention to some of her weaknesses. Tapper corrected Finney. “No, no, that’s not true. I interviewed [Sanders], and I did ask him about the Bernie bros. And he said nobody should be saying things like that. Nobody should be doing things like that.”

The rest of Finney’s comments are littered with lies. Sanders made helping Clinton defeat Trump a priority and never engaged in any acts intended to undermine her. He discouraged his supporters from voting third party as a “protest vote” against her. He held 39 rallies in 13 states on behalf of her campaign, including 17 events in 11 states in the final week of the election.

Karen Dunn, who helped Clinton prepare for debates in 2016 pointed out that Bernie shushed her and said, you know, excuse me, I’m talking. CNN had Jill Filipovic contribute a piece that was provocatively headlined, “Why Bernie Sanders is wrong about women.” During the 2016 election, Filipovic fueled the mythology around “Bernie bros,” a trope that was primarily conceived by Robinson Meyer, an Atlantic staff writer. Meyer used the trope to smugly mock the enthusiasm of those turned on to the political process by Sanders. That developed into one of the most pernicious attacks of the election, particularly because it erased many of the women who supported the Sanders campaign.

On “Anderson Cooper 360,” Bakari Sellers, who was a surrogate for Clinton’s 2016 campaign, said Sanders had “some explaining to do.” Sellers has previously attacked Sanders, weaponizing his identity as a black man against Sanders in much the same way that he and other Clinton Democrats are weaponizing Warren’s identity.

CNN political correspondent Sara Murray said, “It does kind of seem like something you could see [Sanders] saying because he has had this gender problem historically. And that’s why, I think, if voters do believe it, if it sits with voters, that’s why it would sit with them, because they already could have had this belief that Bernie Sanders has a gender issue.”

A day after the CNN story was published, a Warren campaign staffer reportedly wrote, “Claiming you’re worried a woman can’t win/flagging that she’ll receive sexist attacks is something many, many people feel.”

However, for Clinton Democrats, who hold a grudge against Sanders and feel politically threatened by his surging campaign, they will keep manufacturing bad-faith stories. Such stories help them divide progressive voters and defend neoliberal candidates, like Joe Biden.

Clinton Democrats effectively sowed discord in this manner throughout the 2016 primary. It worked then, and they hope it will work during another election cycle. And CNN will gladly publish and air whatever sleaze they want to spread in order to boost ratings. https://shadowproof.com/2020/01/15/cnn-clinton-democrats-sow-discord-in-2020-democratic-primary/

2020-01-14 What a Bernie Sanders Presidency Would Look Like Though President Sanders could execute parts of this agenda on his own, much of it would require Congress. How could it pass, given Republican extremism and likely pushback from even a Democrat-controlled House and Senate? The question poses a serious problem for any program that meets our challenge. And it is one Sanders is uniquely positioned to solve.

Sanders understands that change at this scale will require mass movements to pressure Congress and every level of government — and to change their composition. Americans isolated and atomized by cutthroat capitalism must engage in massive collective action. His political program isn’t just about policy, then, but about the capacity of ordinary people to participate in democracy. https://jacobin.com/2020/01/bernie-sanders-presidency-political-revolution-election

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2019-10-29 Democratic pro-Israel group attacks Bernie Sanders Mark Mellman, the organization’s leader, said last week, “It’s deeply disturbing to find a candidate who claims to be ‘100 percent pro-Israel,’ opposed to BDS and a fighter against anti-Semitism surrounding himself with a number of surrogates and endorsers who hate Israel, support BDS and have repeatedly made anti-Semitic statements.” https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/democratic-pro-israel-group-attacks-bernie-sanders

2019-10-05 How To Get Bernie Sanders Elected President of the United States https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/how-to-get-bernie-sanders-elected-president-of-the-united-states

2019-10-05 Why Bernie Has To Win https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/why-bernie-has-to-win

2019-10-03 Keeping Our Eyes On The Ball It somewhat frightens me when I realize how many people watch and enjoy MSNBC, because it shows just how distracted people are getting from what are fairly obviously the most important issues in the world: climate catastrophe, the increasing power of the plutocracy, the threat of nuclear armageddon, the 2 million people in our prisons and the tens of thousands committing suicide each year. These are, to be sure, extremely depressing, and watching Trump is like watching an insane alternate universe version of The West Wing where everybody is pure evil and has a screw loose. Hard not to want to stay glued to that. I understand why MSNBC, as a profit-seeking company, has chosen to focus on this bullshit rather than all the depressing stuff no one wants to hear about.

This is, of course, why I love Bernie Sanders so much. He has a way of hyperfocusing on what matters: people’s medical bills, the need for a Green New Deal, the rebuilding of the labor movement. He has this very satisfying contempt for issues that do not directly affect the conditions of working people’s lives. Yes, impeach the president, but can we talk about Medicare For All? https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/keeping-our-eyes-on-the-ball

2019-07-18 The Worst Environmentalists in the World On Saturday, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) withdrew its support for a climate debate among Democratic primary candidates. The LCV, in Saturday’s statement about the climate debate, declared its decision to be “in line with its values.” That’s fair: choosing to soothe the feelings of the shameless fossil fuel profiteers on Wall Street over fighting for the survival of the 99 percent does seem congruent with at least some of the organization’s “values.”

What kind of environmental group would prioritize the delicate sensibilities of Mayor Pete’s wealthy backers over debate among our leaders about how life on earth will survive the coming century? Answer: one that is deeply dependent on wealthy backers and the goodwill of neoliberal politicians.

Financiers are well represented on the national LCV board. Its chair is Carol Browner of the centrist Center for American Progress. LCV’s VP of governmental affairs, Tiernan Sittenfeld, once gushed to John Podesta in an email that she would “love” to work in the Hillary Clinton administration. Most of their contributions go to moderate-to-conservative Democrats like Bill Nelson, Kyrsten Sinema, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke — the kind of people who have been mostly an obstacle to environmental progress.

Klein and Thies aren’t the only NYLCV board members lobbying for fossil fuel infrastructure projects opposed by more serious environmentalists. Christian DiPalermo is a longtime lobbyist for Spectra Energy (which is now called Enbridge), the company seeking to build the Algonquin Gas Transmission through New York State as part of Atlantic Bridge, a much-criticized pipeline system. The hardly radical Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) has called Atlantic Bridge a “serious threat“ to wildlife, wetlands, and the quality of drinking water for millions of New Yorkers.

Other NYLCV members have even more intimate ties to the fossil fuel industry. Michelle Hook is vice president of public affairs for Danskammer Energy, which owns a power plant in the Hudson Valley and has been trying to get a new natural gas facility approved in the area.

he political ties of the LCV are even more shocking than the corporate ones. You’d expect the board members of a corporate-friendly environmental group to be made up of those whom Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf has called “soft climate denialists” — e.g., centrist Democrats — rather than the hard climate denialists of the proudly anti-scientific GOP. But NYLCV’s board includes backers of Donald Trump, whose environmental record is probably the worst of any American president in history.

Ed Cox, chair of the board of directors of NYLCV’s education fund, just joined the Trump campaign. And the big honoree at the NYLCV’s spring gala last year – also one of their board members – was Andy Sabin, a billionaire Trump donor who supports fracking and opposes serious environmental regulation, believing the EPA is guilty of “overreach.” Sabin was also a donor to Ryan Zinke, Trump’s disgraced former interior secretary.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/07/league-of-conservation-voters-fossil-fuel-climate-change-corruption

2019-07-15 Bernie Sanders on The Rachel Maddow Show.
For those who have not seen it, here is the complete interview — including the portion MSNBC is not releasing to the internet. https://www.facebook.com/mark.vanlanduyt.129/videos/486358962121005/

2019-07-15 BERNIE SANDERS in Philly: “Human Life Is More Important Than Corporate Profits!” Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia treats under-served communities, but is now being shut down by vulture capitalists. Bernie was criticized for not attending the NetRoots convention happening two blocks away from the hospital. More important question is why Presidential candidates didn’t walk the two blocks to support keeping the hospital open. https://www.facebook.com/mark.vanlanduyt.129/videos/486412518782316/ ,

2019-04-04 Show Us the Money In 2016 Bernie rejected corporate PAC money. The move played well with working people concerned about corporate influence in politics, and many Democrats have found it politically prudent to follow suit, including Harris and Booker.

But this presidential cycle, it’s becoming clear that officially rejecting corporate PAC donations is not synonymous with holding industry elites at arms’ length. While the widespread adoption of the practice may lead to decreased influence of corporate PACs themselves in the Democratic Party, it also functions as a means of dissimulation, allowing pro-business Democrats to strike a progressive pose while quietly maintaining bonds with wealthy individual donors.

Clearly Harris, Booker, Gillibrand, Klobuchar, and Buttigieg’s rejection of corporate PAC money is not a solid gesture of allegiance to the working class in the fight against capitalist power. It’s a compromise they have to make in the face of a credible challenge from the left. That challenge is posed chiefly by Bernie Sanders, who both refuses corporate PAC money and refuses to solicit donations from industry magnates — and has fared all the better for it. To her credit, Elizabeth Warren has refused to make that compromise. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/04/2020-presidential-campaign-corporate-donors-fundraising

2019-02-28 Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez Legitimize Regime Change in Venezuela The hypocrisy of the anti-Maduro coalition’s supposed concern for human suffering could not be more transparent. Not only does the U.S. government support regimes far less democratic than Venezuela (e.g. Saudi Arabia), but the U.S. has its own hand in perpetuating the suffering of the Venezuelan people through the imposition of economic sanctions on Venezuelan oil, the country’s main export. Thus, the U.S. political elites are starving Venezuela of billions of dollars, while making a big show of financial aid amounting to only a fraction of lost oil revenue.

With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rise to prominence and Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential run kicking off, Venezuela provides an important test, both for them and their supporters on the socialist left.

As many have argued, the most basic position of socialists must be a complete rejections of U.S. imperialism’s attempt to destabilize and control sovereign nations – be it Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela or elsewhere. As we know from history, U.S. foreign policy has never been about helping the masses take their destiny in their own hands. Rather, the U.S. has helped topple innumerable democratic leftist governments, and has propped up innumerable right-wing dictatorships. Opposing U.S. meddling with the call “Hands off Venezuela!” is essential. Yet Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders have failed both tests. Neither of them have taken a clear stand against U.S. meddling, and neither advocate real socialism. https://www.leftvoice.org/bernie-sanders-ocasio-cortez-legitimize-regime-change-in-venezuela

2019-02-26 Bernie Sanders and the Military Industrial Complex Bernie says over and over, “We are putting the prison industrial complex on notice! We are putting the military industrial complex on notice!” I can’t think of a viable candidate saying anything so bold since George McGovern promised to end the Vietnam War, and he was of course clobbered by Richard Nixon. Corporate Democrats claim to fear a repeat of his defeat in 1972, but idealistic, anti-war (and draft eligible) students led McGovern’s campaign. Sanders’s base is among people who are suffering here at home, not overseas—people suffering because of ICE raids, home foreclosures, medical debt, college debt, child care costs, stagnant or declining wages, and environmental injustice like the water in Flint, the pipelines surrounding Plains Indians, and the sea levels threatening coastal populations in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida. That’s a much broader political base, especially after so many decades of austerity and war. Bernie’s fiery claims that we’re going to put the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex on notice are met with huge applause from the huge crowds who pack into his rallies. They seem to understand not only the injustice of mass incarceration and perpetual war but also its cost to American infrastructure and their own lives.

Bernie has consistently voted against the war budget, also known by the misnomer “National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).” It’s difficult to assert that his commitment to redirecting military-industrial dollars to human needs isn’t sincere.

However, if he keeps allowing himself to be pushed into defending himself against allegations that “the Russians” and Vladimir Putin are supporting his campaign, he will not be able to actualize his agenda even if elected. To institute Medicare4All, the Green New Deal, free public college, universal free child care, and all his other eminently reasonable programs, he will have to radically cut the grotesquely bloated US military budget. If Bernie is elected, but the war machine has him boxed him into a corner about demon Russians and Vladimir Putin, his agenda will go the way of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society domestic programs, which were drained by the cost of the Vietnam War. https://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-and-military-industrial-complex

2019-02-13 Freedom Rider: Black Voters Used to Destroy Bernie Sanders The last thing that Democratic Party leadership wants to see is another Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. It is probable that he would have won the 2016 nomination and the presidency itself if they hadn’t used a variety of means to rig the system against him. Now they are terrified of the prospect that a new campaign will expose and challenge their corrupt relationship with corporate interests once again. Sanders is popular and they are well aware of that fact. The voters want his signature Medicare for All plan, free college tuition, and an increased minimum wage. A candidate who runs on those platform positions will win the party nomination and election. But Democrats hope to win with nothing more than platitudes and anti-Trumpism, just as they did during the 2016 debacle.

The current weapon of choice is telling lies that will turn black voters against Sanders. The strategy is both shrewd and cynical. If Sanders doesn’t get black support in the early southern primaries, where Democrat almost always means black, he will be in a difficult position as the campaign moves to the rest of the country. The effort to stop Sanders is a rationale for choosing Kamala Harris as the machine favorite. But they are leaving no other stones unturned. Getting a black face as a Sanders rival is just one way to skin the cat. Telling lies about Sanders is another. His statements are carefully dissected and any words or phrases that might trigger black angst are amplified or even made up out of whole cloth.

This insidious plan has been in place for some time now. During an April 4, 2018 speech in Jackson, Mississippi Sanders referred to Barack Obama as “an extraordinary candidate, a brilliant guy.” His words of praise ordinarily would not have elicited much attention but the effort to get him is a serious one. The comments were spun and presented as an insult. This big lie was not the last. It was followed by a claim that Sanders dismissed the seriousness of the racist vote theft and suppression that cost Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum gubernatorial races in Georgia and Florida, respectively. The treatment of Sanders is getting worse. They are no longer content to take words out of context; they now tell outright lies. The Hill falsely reported that Sanders would deliver a State of the Union response at the same time that Stacey Abrams was delivering the official Democratic Party response. Abrams is second only to Kamala Harris in the Democrats’ plan to use black women as window dressing to cover up their inaction born of corruption.

Despite the Democrats’ machinations and collusion with corporate media, Sanders is the front runner for 2020. If black people don’t support him it should be because they have seriously considered his candidacy but choose to look elsewhere. If he doesn’t get black votes it should not be because of bald faced lies spread by the same people who raised more than $1 billion and still lost to Trump. But the ever rightward moving Democrats will not consider Sanders at all. And they are using their most reliable constituency to thwart him. Sanders hasn’t even declared his candidacy but one tool is already being used to his detriment and it makes a mockery of what is left of democracy in this country. https://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-black-voters-used-destroy-bernie-sanders

Specific Issues Index

from Creating Better World

About mekorganic

I have been a Peace and Social Justice Advocate most all of my adult life. In 2020 (7.4%) and 2022 (21%), I ran for U.S. Congress in CA under the Green Party. This Blog and website are meant to be a progressive educational site, an alternative to corporate media and the two dominate political parties. Your comments and participation are most appreciated. (Click photo) .............................................. Created and managed by Michael E. Kerr

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