Meh, he still voted yes on enough key bills promoting war and the war machine for me to not want to vote for him. Look up his voting record since going to D.C..
Meh, he still voted yes on enough key bills promoting war and the war machine for me to not want to vote for him. Look up his voting record since going to D.C..
Because DC is now a bully pulpit. If you are a D/R or Caucus with a D/R, you can be bullied into voting party line. If you don't vote party line, you may find your campaign warchest a little light the next time you need to re-up for your $175k per year job that somehow magically makes you a millionaire in 2 or 3 years.
I don't think Bernie would have had to worry much about his war chest, it didn't come from establishment donors. But he would have probably not been chairing the Budget committee, for starters. iow, he would have been totally neutered.
I think he should have run as the Independent that he is. He may well have gotten somewhere playing hardball. Manchin does ok playing it.
If any one person caused Trump to win, it would be St. Bernie. In both 2016 and 2020. Of course there were a number of other factors, but he rolled over like an obedient lapdog to the scheming and essentially vote-rigging DNC that cheated him shamelessly out of the nomination both times.
Everyone but DNC-hypnotized fools detested Hillary but Bernie protected her and campaigned for her in 2016 after being screwed by her party, of which he's a loyal member and "independent" in name only. He always sides with party doctrine on every issue and only acts like an independent while campaigning for president.
It's empty, but very effective for him, bombast and populist rhetoric. The minute he's openly screwed by the party machinery (Obama at the controls now, as the Clintons had been previously, though they still exert enormous influence), he capitulates and excoriated his own loyal base for not getting on the Dem bandwagon. Which huge numbers of them refused to do, and instead voted for Trump. Because they're smart enough to know Biden and Clinton are the other two clones of Obama, or each are the twin of the other (triplets they are), and the working class has been royally fvcked by all three and they aren't taking it any more, no matter how Bernie the Cuck preaches that they must.
Bernie's a fraud, so he fits in perfectly with all the other DC con artists and frauds, liars and murderers running this crumbling empire. And I say this having voted for him in the primary, reluctantly, because I saw this shit coming, both times.
We will NEVER vote our way out of oligarchic, plutocratic, kleptocratic control. They're after Full Spectrum Dominance both domestically and internationally. Both parties want the same fundamental things, employing slightly different methods and rhetoric. Most voters don't want those things and many saw Trump as a departure from business as usual, which of course he wasn't. He was business as usual with a vengeance.
You can still fool some of the people all the time. The number of people Bernie can fool has dropped drastically.
You're right, except they all caused it together, the entire Dem party. But the point is, Sanders could have and probably would have beaten Trump. But the Dem leadership, all of it, preferred Trump winning to Sanders, because . . . socialism!
And BS isn't even a real socialist, but a lame social democrat, not even as far left as FDR, who wasn't a socialist either. Even the mild reforms BS campaigned on translated to socialism in the reactionary minds of Obama, the Clintons, Schumer, Pelosi and their ilk. They run the party, Bernie doesn't. He's just a pushover, as they've apparently trained him to be.
It's socialism to them because THEY GOT RICH via politics! Why would they want to share Chappaqua and Martha's Vineyard with hoi polloi?
Memoirs!
Global Foundations!
Netflix Documentaries!
Campaign Donations!
SNL Appearances!
Nobody gives you much for these things if you are a community organizer or Governor of Arkansas.
But... once you become Prexy, you are now primed to mint money. And the last thing anyone who prints money for themselves wants to do is share with the poor.
I saw that Obama is doing a podcast w/ Bruce Springsteen. If that isnтАЩt a middle finger to The BossтАЩ ostensible fanbase, I donтАЩt know what is.....
"This study has emphasized the impact Bruce SpringsteenтАЩs music has had on his diverse fan base though the divergent perspectives established in the video segments highlighted within the
documentary Springsteen & I...."
Here's a lively scholarly piece for your reading pleasure. It's the link at the bottom.
Springsteen has an international following. He is especially popular in Germany and Australia. Indeed, he is has an extensive following across Europe. Also, it's unclear whose "middle finger" is being proffered here. Obama's? Springsteen's? And by "ostensible fan base," I presume you're referring to an insubstanial group of doltish morons that counts you as a member?
Apparently, it's your middle finger being flicked at the Boss' fanbase, Obama, and the Boss himself. Mazel tov!
A Documentary Analysis of Springsteen's Fan Base - BOSS ...https://boss.mcgill.ca тА║ article тА║ view
I've never been a D or R and haven't voted for either of those parties since 1976, not for president or any other high office.
It's pure speculation whether Sanders would have beaten Trump but I think he would have. Hillary should have easily won but since she's who she is, it's no surprise she lost, even though she won the popular vote by 2.5 million, but our antiquated electoral college is there to make sure the popular vote doesn't mean much.
I've voted for the feckless and nearly nonexistent Green Party about 8 times, strictly as a protest. But I'm not voting anymore unless the real left organizes and can put forth someone who stands any chance at all. But since that can't happen, both corporate parties have invulnerable roadblocks, restrictions and sinister maneuvers to keep third parties totally impotent and invisible, and corporate media insures they stay that way, I doubt I'll ever bother voting again.
It's a rigged game top to bottom and the only way out of this hell is revolution. We can't vote out the plutocracy.
"....We will NEVER vote our way out of oligarchic, plutocratic, kleptocratic control. They're after Full Spectrum Dominance both domestically and internationally. Both parties want the same fundamental things, employing slightly different methods and rhetoric. Most voters don't want those things and many saw Trump as a departure from business as usual, which of course he wasn't. He was business as usual with a vengeance...."
This is probably true to a certain extent. Easy to say but challenging to prove. What we do know is that capitalism moves through time at increasingly greater velocity. To check this plutocratic-directed movement of big, organized capital will only come from a similarly organized effort by a majority of citizens who perceive they having nothing more to lose and everything to gain by any such effort.
Just how that effort would would take shape, politically and culturally, has yet to be revealed. And in our current political moment, what members of both U.S. political parties want primarily is to get re-elected, and access to the increasingly obscene mountains of money it requires to do so. A very real beginning, but certainly not a panacea by itself, would be to institute public financing for all federal elections, and ban private donations.
As for Trump, his core supporters were and remain primarily but not exclusively the vast numbers of the middle class who have been incrementally beaten down economically for more than 40 years from a variety of events, primarily globalization, the financialization of the economy as a whole, and the massive loss and migration of jobs overseas, this last dynamic precipitated in greater part by the first two. Technology has played a role in all of this, yes, but not to the extent to which it's often credited.
The current economic state of the U.S. is first and foremost the result of a long series of collaborative policy choices over the years, conceived and promulgated by both political parties, the three branches of the federal government, and the economic "elite." It is this last group who have disproportionally benefited by these policy choices---to the great detriment of the "middle class," or "working class," however one wishes to categorize this subset of the voting public. As a voting bloc, the economically aggrieved have mobilized their anger and fears into a formidable electoral force.
Exacerbating this economic decline, too, is a growing fear that they, overwhelmingly white and primarily rural, are being displaced in the national conversation by the growing number of minorities, and are losing their purchase on not just the nation's economic narrative, but also are being relegated to second class status in the nation's cultural narratives.
They feel abandoned and looked down on by those they perceive to be "cultural elite"---the "professional class," especially those in academia, the legacy media, and the entrenched political class, who they also perceive no longer feel their concerns or share their beliefs.
Finally, I disagree with your characterization of Bernie Sanders. That he got as far as he did electorally no longer seems like a political miracle it did at the time, but now appears as a harbinger of the future for American politics---as might Trump.
"As the former CIA analyst Martin Gurri writes [on Trump] in The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2018) ":
"....A candidate that innocent of qualifications and political direction can be elected only as a gesture of supreme repudiation, by the electorate, of the governing class. From start to finish, the 2016 presidential race can best be understood as the political assertion of an unhappy and highly mobilized public. In the end, Trump was chosen precisely because of, not despite, his apparent shortcomings. He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the publicтАЩs surly and mutinous moodтАж"
I once really liked Bernie, but quite honestly? He's a hypocrite at best, and phony at worst. His true colors shone brighter and brighter as he moved further and further into the forefront of American Media.
My statement was very general terms, and flows nicely all the way down politics to the local level. At the local level it might even be worse.
I think Bernie was a genuine guy who tried to do better in politics for most of his career, then found himself surprisingly in the center of an important political moment тАФ and he just didnтАЩt have the spine for it. I think Chris Hedges is right: Bernie just wasnтАЩt going to risk getting the Nader treatment, and he folded. He folded when he had a chance to make a real difference. Since the . . . I think heтАЩs kind of adrift.
"Bernie was a genuine guy who tried to do better in politics for most of his career, then found himself surprisingly in the center of an important political moment тАФ and he just didnтАЩt have the spine for it."
At his age, I don't know why one *wouldn't* become an epistemological suicide bomber -- e.g. the titular Warren Beatty character from BULWORTH. What did he really have to lose at this point? He sure disappointed and dispirited many young Americans by raising a flag and then knuckling under when the DNC said so.
That's the way politics works when the polity is (1) democratic and (2) non-communist. Some have more power than others -- one man, one vote is an illusion. Politicians in a capitalist democracy have to go along to get along, at least if they want to 'work within the system'. Now, there are alternatives -- but as the prophet Zimmerman said, 'If you live outside the law you must be honest' and that's a pretty heavy burden to bear for those who want to get ahead and succeed. It isn't liked.
Yeah, I know. So did Warren. I wouldn't want their dilemma - vote against the war machine, and you're voting against jobs for your state. I'm the anti-war voter, so i'm in a similar position to you. But i dunno if i'd want to vote against it and then tell residents of my state i voted against jobs.
Well, there's the problem. The DoD intelligently spilt their contracting and jobs amongst the states, so it's tough to get a vote against without sacrificing jobs in their states. A couple hundred jobs is a big deal in Vermont, and Mass (my state) had a shedload of contracting here, both in production and in research.
They could go the Hillary Clinton route and say "we're going to put a lot of defense contractors out of work". Can't imagine that would work out well.
Better if they had a switch to green jobs shovel ready. Which they of course don't yet. But shutting down production and research, shifting people into call center jobs until maybe somewhere down the line we get those green jobs isn't going to be a vote getter.
A lot of blue collar/lower wage folks get their week (or long weekend) of vacation on those same beaches -- and they like the view too.
Farther offshore is where it's at for ocean wind power. A very large amount of offshore wind generation capacity is on the drawing board right now all up and down the Atlantic coast, and it's far enough out to avoid marring a nice beach day with a vulgar eyesore.
It will be built, no doubt about it.
Cape Wind == good technology but bad site selection.
I think with 732 billion dollars or whatever it is, I could create some jobs. And have some goddamn big parties, too. Several years ago, with a mere $1600 given to the right persons, I helped create a party to which the police came twice and the Fire Department once, and seemingly the populations of several city blocks. And I'm a serious shlump when it comes to parties. 732 billion -- yes, indeed, it would be long remembered.
Meh, he still voted yes on enough key bills promoting war and the war machine for me to not want to vote for him. Look up his voting record since going to D.C..
Because DC is now a bully pulpit. If you are a D/R or Caucus with a D/R, you can be bullied into voting party line. If you don't vote party line, you may find your campaign warchest a little light the next time you need to re-up for your $175k per year job that somehow magically makes you a millionaire in 2 or 3 years.
I don't think Bernie would have had to worry much about his war chest, it didn't come from establishment donors. But he would have probably not been chairing the Budget committee, for starters. iow, he would have been totally neutered.
I think he should have run as the Independent that he is. He may well have gotten somewhere playing hardball. Manchin does ok playing it.
If any one person caused Trump to win, it would be St. Bernie. In both 2016 and 2020. Of course there were a number of other factors, but he rolled over like an obedient lapdog to the scheming and essentially vote-rigging DNC that cheated him shamelessly out of the nomination both times.
Everyone but DNC-hypnotized fools detested Hillary but Bernie protected her and campaigned for her in 2016 after being screwed by her party, of which he's a loyal member and "independent" in name only. He always sides with party doctrine on every issue and only acts like an independent while campaigning for president.
It's empty, but very effective for him, bombast and populist rhetoric. The minute he's openly screwed by the party machinery (Obama at the controls now, as the Clintons had been previously, though they still exert enormous influence), he capitulates and excoriated his own loyal base for not getting on the Dem bandwagon. Which huge numbers of them refused to do, and instead voted for Trump. Because they're smart enough to know Biden and Clinton are the other two clones of Obama, or each are the twin of the other (triplets they are), and the working class has been royally fvcked by all three and they aren't taking it any more, no matter how Bernie the Cuck preaches that they must.
Bernie's a fraud, so he fits in perfectly with all the other DC con artists and frauds, liars and murderers running this crumbling empire. And I say this having voted for him in the primary, reluctantly, because I saw this shit coming, both times.
We will NEVER vote our way out of oligarchic, plutocratic, kleptocratic control. They're after Full Spectrum Dominance both domestically and internationally. Both parties want the same fundamental things, employing slightly different methods and rhetoric. Most voters don't want those things and many saw Trump as a departure from business as usual, which of course he wasn't. He was business as usual with a vengeance.
You can still fool some of the people all the time. The number of people Bernie can fool has dropped drastically.
If any one person caused Trump to win, it was Hillary. Even with no Sanders in the picture, she would have lost.
You're right, except they all caused it together, the entire Dem party. But the point is, Sanders could have and probably would have beaten Trump. But the Dem leadership, all of it, preferred Trump winning to Sanders, because . . . socialism!
And BS isn't even a real socialist, but a lame social democrat, not even as far left as FDR, who wasn't a socialist either. Even the mild reforms BS campaigned on translated to socialism in the reactionary minds of Obama, the Clintons, Schumer, Pelosi and their ilk. They run the party, Bernie doesn't. He's just a pushover, as they've apparently trained him to be.
It's socialism to them because THEY GOT RICH via politics! Why would they want to share Chappaqua and Martha's Vineyard with hoi polloi?
Memoirs!
Global Foundations!
Netflix Documentaries!
Campaign Donations!
SNL Appearances!
Nobody gives you much for these things if you are a community organizer or Governor of Arkansas.
But... once you become Prexy, you are now primed to mint money. And the last thing anyone who prints money for themselves wants to do is share with the poor.
I saw that Obama is doing a podcast w/ Bruce Springsteen. If that isnтАЩt a middle finger to The BossтАЩ ostensible fanbase, I donтАЩt know what is.....
"This study has emphasized the impact Bruce SpringsteenтАЩs music has had on his diverse fan base though the divergent perspectives established in the video segments highlighted within the
documentary Springsteen & I...."
Here's a lively scholarly piece for your reading pleasure. It's the link at the bottom.
Springsteen has an international following. He is especially popular in Germany and Australia. Indeed, he is has an extensive following across Europe. Also, it's unclear whose "middle finger" is being proffered here. Obama's? Springsteen's? And by "ostensible fan base," I presume you're referring to an insubstanial group of doltish morons that counts you as a member?
Apparently, it's your middle finger being flicked at the Boss' fanbase, Obama, and the Boss himself. Mazel tov!
A Documentary Analysis of Springsteen's Fan Base - BOSS ...https://boss.mcgill.ca тА║ article тА║ view
I'm not a Dem, and I wrote in Bernie. I was never going to vote for Hillary. But I'm still not at all convinced that Bernie would have beaten Trump.
I've never been a D or R and haven't voted for either of those parties since 1976, not for president or any other high office.
It's pure speculation whether Sanders would have beaten Trump but I think he would have. Hillary should have easily won but since she's who she is, it's no surprise she lost, even though she won the popular vote by 2.5 million, but our antiquated electoral college is there to make sure the popular vote doesn't mean much.
I've voted for the feckless and nearly nonexistent Green Party about 8 times, strictly as a protest. But I'm not voting anymore unless the real left organizes and can put forth someone who stands any chance at all. But since that can't happen, both corporate parties have invulnerable roadblocks, restrictions and sinister maneuvers to keep third parties totally impotent and invisible, and corporate media insures they stay that way, I doubt I'll ever bother voting again.
It's a rigged game top to bottom and the only way out of this hell is revolution. We can't vote out the plutocracy.
"....We will NEVER vote our way out of oligarchic, plutocratic, kleptocratic control. They're after Full Spectrum Dominance both domestically and internationally. Both parties want the same fundamental things, employing slightly different methods and rhetoric. Most voters don't want those things and many saw Trump as a departure from business as usual, which of course he wasn't. He was business as usual with a vengeance...."
This is probably true to a certain extent. Easy to say but challenging to prove. What we do know is that capitalism moves through time at increasingly greater velocity. To check this plutocratic-directed movement of big, organized capital will only come from a similarly organized effort by a majority of citizens who perceive they having nothing more to lose and everything to gain by any such effort.
Just how that effort would would take shape, politically and culturally, has yet to be revealed. And in our current political moment, what members of both U.S. political parties want primarily is to get re-elected, and access to the increasingly obscene mountains of money it requires to do so. A very real beginning, but certainly not a panacea by itself, would be to institute public financing for all federal elections, and ban private donations.
As for Trump, his core supporters were and remain primarily but not exclusively the vast numbers of the middle class who have been incrementally beaten down economically for more than 40 years from a variety of events, primarily globalization, the financialization of the economy as a whole, and the massive loss and migration of jobs overseas, this last dynamic precipitated in greater part by the first two. Technology has played a role in all of this, yes, but not to the extent to which it's often credited.
The current economic state of the U.S. is first and foremost the result of a long series of collaborative policy choices over the years, conceived and promulgated by both political parties, the three branches of the federal government, and the economic "elite." It is this last group who have disproportionally benefited by these policy choices---to the great detriment of the "middle class," or "working class," however one wishes to categorize this subset of the voting public. As a voting bloc, the economically aggrieved have mobilized their anger and fears into a formidable electoral force.
Exacerbating this economic decline, too, is a growing fear that they, overwhelmingly white and primarily rural, are being displaced in the national conversation by the growing number of minorities, and are losing their purchase on not just the nation's economic narrative, but also are being relegated to second class status in the nation's cultural narratives.
They feel abandoned and looked down on by those they perceive to be "cultural elite"---the "professional class," especially those in academia, the legacy media, and the entrenched political class, who they also perceive no longer feel their concerns or share their beliefs.
Finally, I disagree with your characterization of Bernie Sanders. That he got as far as he did electorally no longer seems like a political miracle it did at the time, but now appears as a harbinger of the future for American politics---as might Trump.
"As the former CIA analyst Martin Gurri writes [on Trump] in The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium (2018) ":
"....A candidate that innocent of qualifications and political direction can be elected only as a gesture of supreme repudiation, by the electorate, of the governing class. From start to finish, the 2016 presidential race can best be understood as the political assertion of an unhappy and highly mobilized public. In the end, Trump was chosen precisely because of, not despite, his apparent shortcomings. He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the publicтАЩs surly and mutinous moodтАж"
Highly recommend giving this a read....
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/07/01/reality-rebellion/
I once really liked Bernie, but quite honestly? He's a hypocrite at best, and phony at worst. His true colors shone brighter and brighter as he moved further and further into the forefront of American Media.
My statement was very general terms, and flows nicely all the way down politics to the local level. At the local level it might even be worse.
I think Bernie was a genuine guy who tried to do better in politics for most of his career, then found himself surprisingly in the center of an important political moment тАФ and he just didnтАЩt have the spine for it. I think Chris Hedges is right: Bernie just wasnтАЩt going to risk getting the Nader treatment, and he folded. He folded when he had a chance to make a real difference. Since the . . . I think heтАЩs kind of adrift.
"Bernie was a genuine guy who tried to do better in politics for most of his career, then found himself surprisingly in the center of an important political moment тАФ and he just didnтАЩt have the spine for it."
At his age, I don't know why one *wouldn't* become an epistemological suicide bomber -- e.g. the titular Warren Beatty character from BULWORTH. What did he really have to lose at this point? He sure disappointed and dispirited many young Americans by raising a flag and then knuckling under when the DNC said so.
That's the way politics works when the polity is (1) democratic and (2) non-communist. Some have more power than others -- one man, one vote is an illusion. Politicians in a capitalist democracy have to go along to get along, at least if they want to 'work within the system'. Now, there are alternatives -- but as the prophet Zimmerman said, 'If you live outside the law you must be honest' and that's a pretty heavy burden to bear for those who want to get ahead and succeed. It isn't liked.
He flies private. The End.
Yeah, I know. So did Warren. I wouldn't want their dilemma - vote against the war machine, and you're voting against jobs for your state. I'm the anti-war voter, so i'm in a similar position to you. But i dunno if i'd want to vote against it and then tell residents of my state i voted against jobs.
If only peacetime activities created a more robust economy than the war machine... Ah well. Another day on the Death Star.
Well, there's the problem. The DoD intelligently spilt their contracting and jobs amongst the states, so it's tough to get a vote against without sacrificing jobs in their states. A couple hundred jobs is a big deal in Vermont, and Mass (my state) had a shedload of contracting here, both in production and in research.
They could go the Hillary Clinton route and say "we're going to put a lot of defense contractors out of work". Can't imagine that would work out well.
Better if they had a switch to green jobs shovel ready. Which they of course don't yet. But shutting down production and research, shifting people into call center jobs until maybe somewhere down the line we get those green jobs isn't going to be a vote getter.
Actually they do, but no one wanted windmills spoiling their Nantucket beach views
A lot of blue collar/lower wage folks get their week (or long weekend) of vacation on those same beaches -- and they like the view too.
Farther offshore is where it's at for ocean wind power. A very large amount of offshore wind generation capacity is on the drawing board right now all up and down the Atlantic coast, and it's far enough out to avoid marring a nice beach day with a vulgar eyesore.
It will be built, no doubt about it.
Cape Wind == good technology but bad site selection.
There is that.
I think with 732 billion dollars or whatever it is, I could create some jobs. And have some goddamn big parties, too. Several years ago, with a mere $1600 given to the right persons, I helped create a party to which the police came twice and the Fire Department once, and seemingly the populations of several city blocks. And I'm a serious shlump when it comes to parties. 732 billion -- yes, indeed, it would be long remembered.
Pretty strong argument to vote against wars