So some would like us to believe |
Election frenzy possesses the USA every four years because
they have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining
the nation’s destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to
go to the polls and choose one of the two leaders who have already been chosen
for us.
We should not be surprised that populist ideas are making a
comeback. Many believe Bernie Sanders role in the nomination contest is to sheep-dog
the disenchanted back into the Democratic Party fold. He will shepherd his
supporters towards Hillary Clinton’s after she defeats him with her massively
superior financial resources and corporate media approval. He will help legitimize
the plutocratic “two party system” – in which the Republicans and Democrats
function as “two wings of the same bird of prey.” Democratic Party activists will
try to sell their Wall Street-protecting nominee as the candidate for the 99
percent and Sanders will fuel this deadly illusion of the lesser evil. Those
genuine radicals will sadly experience a deepened sense of powerlessness that
will be engendered when Sanders is defeated, as he almost certainly will be.
The best thing and the worse thing that can be said of Sanders is that he meant
well.
As Howard Zinn said, “the really critical thing isn’t who is
sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in-– in the streets, in the
cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting,
who is occupying offices and demonstrating – those are the things that
determine what happens.”
Before and after those two minutes in a voting booth,
casting our ballots, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating,
agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the
neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly,
patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain
critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House. This election, like
others before, will suck up political energy that would be better expended
elsewhere; and, as usual, little, if any, good will come from of it. In order
to vote for Bernie as a presidential candidate, you have to join the Democratic
Party. But even that is not the real issue. The issue is many people will
volunteer for the Sanders campaign and dump thousands of hours of activist time
into the dead-end of the Democratic Party. Those activists could be doing
grass-roots movement work. Bernie's candidacy for the Democrats will not help
the movement, it will deliver those people to the Democrats. Mainly what
Bernie's campaign will do is to re-legitimize a Party that has lost all
legitimacy. Dumping the Democrats would prove his belief in principal over
party. To support Hillary, if she defeats him in the primaries, makes Sanders a
paper tiger.
There are very much two Bernie Sanders. One persona most
definitely can come across as sincere about concern for the poor and
disadvantaged, but make no mistake, his other side is a militarist who isn’t
about to challenge U.S. supremacy. The “military industrial complex” is
something Sanders likes to denounce yet he embraced the building of a wasteful
F-35 fighter jet base in his home state.
He supported the war in Kosovo against Serbia, the invasion
of Afghanistan, funding for the endless Iraq disaster as well as the losing and
misguided War on Terror. He voted in favor of Clinton’s 1996 Anti-Terrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act, which expanded the federal death penalty and acted
as the precursor to the Patriot Act.
As for Israel, Bernie Sanders has been would never halt the
$3 billion the U.S. government sends to the country every year. Last summer he
backed Israel’s murderous bombing of Gaza. He’s even questioned Palestine’s
right to resist. Several former members of Sander’s staff have also been
employed by AIPAC, including Israel apologists David Sirota and Joel Barkin.
Want to change in the U.S. policy in the Middle East? Bernie isn’t your man.
Sanders doesn’t oppose U.S. power, nor does his campaign do a single thing to
build independent politics in the country, perhaps the last chance to salvage
any democracy we may have left. In the end, Bernie Sanders will play the
lesser-evil card and plea for us all to hold our noses and vote for Hillary
Clinton, who guarantees a future of more war and economic inequality.
“The Vermont senator has given out more than $200,000
through his two PACs, Friends of Bernie and Progressive Voters of America. The
PVA, in turn, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to embattled red-state
Democrats like Mark Begich of Alaska, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, and Mary
Landrieu of Louisiana”
Mark Begich promotes expanded oil and natural gas drilling
on federal lands, starting with opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to
energy exploration. Begich voted multiple times against ending or reducing
federal tax subsidies to oil and gas companies, helping to convince Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid to drop such a move from the Nevadan’s budget
proposal, and in voting for development of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada
to Texas.
Kay Hagan as a North Carolina senator is just as protective
of her state’s capitalist interests as. In her case, it is the tobacco lobby.
When the European Union mandated that cigarette packages labeling consists of
at least 75 percent warnings that the contents were carcinogenic, she and other
politicians warned the European Union warning of dire consequences should the
Union adopt the regulations on cigarette packaging it was proposing. The
Senators said the proposed regulations would violate international trade rules
and adversely affect trade relations with the United States.
Mary Landrieu from Louisiana is a politician in thrall to
the power of oil companies. Senator Mary Landrieu calls on government to lift
EPA ban on BP. The ban imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency to
prevent BP from securing sensitive federal contracts even as the state sues the oil firm for the
environmental damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon disaster. His voting
record? When GW Bush was president Landrieu voted 74% in line with Bush
supporting tax cuts eleven times and also cuts to the Death Estate tax.
What Bernie Sanders means by “socialism” is something more
like capitalism with a human face. But this is not what socialism is about. The
Scandinavian model have indeed managed to achieve social welfare objectives,
but has never involved fundamental alterations of capitalism’s underlying
property relations. Neither would Sanders. Scandinavian reformists thought the
benign hand of the state would replace the merciless invisible hand of the
market but today the reformers have their hands full trying to retain what they
can from the gains of the past.
That’s why socialists won’t be jumping on his band-wagon
anytime soon. Nevertheless, it has been a terribly long time that an aspirant
for the presidency of the United States is talking about “socialism”, no matter
how vague his meaning of it is. If Sanders succeeds in getting the idea of
socialism back in peoples’ minds, he might even be sowing the seeds of thought
that will someday take hold in a more constructive way and that would be very
welcomed. The best thing about Bernie Sanders is that he talks about
“socialism” even if he really means something else by the word.
There can be no escape nor substantial relief for people
from the economic and political domination of the greedy vested interests of
which they are now the victims, except through the working people, organized as
a powerful political force challenging the oligarchy now in control. Without
such a party all political achievement of the workers is inadequate and
ineffective, and true social progress utterly impossible. The Socialist Party
is ready and willing to merge its political functions in a genuine independent
political party of socialist workers and will certainly continue to put forth
its best efforts to that end. For the time being, we raise high our unsullied
banner, and with principles inviolate and ideals undimmed, we stand as the
Socialist Party, appealing to the producing class to join us in building up the
party of their class — the party standing staunchly and uncompromisingly for
their aspirations. Nothing frightens the ruling class more than the prospect of
a truly independent revolutionary working-class movement.
“Conservative or
Bourgeois Socialism:
“A part of the
bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the
continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists,
philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working
class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of
cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every
imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into
complete systems. The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern
social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting
therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary
and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.
The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the
best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various
more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a
system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but
requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of
existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the
bourgeoisie.” - Communist Manifesto
Sounds like good ol’ Bernie to us.
It was a real independent
workers movement that Marx was trying to assist by helping it to clarify its
goals. He wasn’t trying to get reformers elected to be the head of state.
Let us go back a little into history and we see that the
origins of the Scandinavian welfare state model was in Otto Bismarck’s Prussia
- a Sickness Insurance Act, an Accident
Insurance Law followed, Old Age and Disability legislation and then came a code
of factory legislation, with a system of labour exchanges to promote
employment. Many of these measures were the first of their kind in the world.
Along with the nationalization of the railways this began to look like
socialism to many people. Shrewdly Bismarck understood the stick had to be
supplemented by the carrot. It was intended to ensure internal unity and class
peace while the state intensified an aggressive foreign policy of colonialism
and foreign-market penetration, thereby compensating the wealthy for its
social-welfare expenses. This policy was also going to drive a wedge between
the right wing and left wing of the Social-Democratic Party.
There is a shared premise in the debates regarding Bernie
Sanders’ presidential and they tend to assume that Sanders would be able to
meaningfully advance his politics if he were to become president. That is, they
presuppose the State is neutral and malleable and can be shaped and reshaped by
those who govern it. History illustrates a very different story, one in which
the political party and personal inclinations of presidents (let alone
candidates) are generally irrelevant to how they wield power. Presidents and
Prime Ministers have historically advanced the objective interests of the
nation-state, prioritizing its international power and the profitability of its
economy above all other considerations. It is irrelevant whether Sanders is sincere
or a phony, if elected president, he will in fact be sworn to do so. Selecting
who will rule without any ability to control the content of that rule, the
voter casts the ballot as an act of faith. Investing political and emotional
energy into nothing more than the good name of the system (election nights are
always exercises in flag-waving celebration of a system that lets us choose our
rulers), voters incorrectly argue that voting is better than doing nothing and
condemn those who abstain. Yet, the disillusioned are not to blame for forces
that they have no control over. And if the disillusioned do become interested in
challenging the abuses of everyday life, it will not be through voting but
through criticizing the system that voting acclaims. The opposite of hope is
not despair. It is power. Everyone gets all emotionally attached to some single
"savior" that going to fix the rotten system. There will be no
saviors, only WE in massive numbers can affect any real change in the
status-quo. Resistance in all forms brings about change. Real and enduring
change is hard work.
Using the words of Eugene Debs, "If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist
wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the
promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you
out."
Neither Sanders nor any other politician can lead us to the
alternative new society we fight for. We must build it for ourselves.
He talks the ‘socialist’ talk, but he has reliably aided and
abetted the Pentagon and the militarists in their theft of resources. Resources
that were and continue to be stolen from the poor. If Sanders is a socialist,
it is only in a very Orwellian sense. More likely, he is another Trojan Horse, mouthing
liberal platitudes, but in the end betraying working people.
The “independent” Sanders has enjoyed a special agreement
with the Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate. He votes with the Democrats
on all procedural matters in exchange for the committee seats and seniority
that would be available to him as a Democrat. (He can break this rule in some
exceptional cases if Democratic Senate Whip Dick Durbin agrees, but the request
is rarely made.) Sanders is free to vote as he wishes on policy matters, but he
has almost always voted with the Democrats on such matters.
Consistent with this party loyalty, Sanders refuses to
seriously or substantively criticize his “good friend” and Democratic
presidential primary “rival” Mrs. Clinton – a militantly corporatist and
militarist right-wing Democrat. Sanders has backed Obama’s numerous murderous
military actions around the world, from Libya, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan,
Yemen, and Iraq to China, Ukraine, and Russia. During the 1990s, the not-so
“independent” Congressman Sanders voted for and/or otherwise supported:
* Economic sanctions that killed more than a million Iraqi
civilians
* Every U.S. bombing of Iraq from 1992 on
* The sending of U.S. military units to Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia to threaten Iraq because “we cannot tolerate aggression”
Sanders has said repeatedly that he will not be a third-
party “spoiler” in the general election and thus will direct his primary
delegates and voters to line up behind Hillary.Inc. in 2016. In his
presidential campaign speeches, Sanders has been unwilling to mention the
corporatized Democratic Party as part of the nation’s oligarchy problem.
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