Submitted by Serban V.C. Enache…
I can perfectly understand why some people choose to vote Bernie Sanders, based on his economic proposals. Yet I contest the idea that Sanders is a “good” candidate. In 2016, he gave a big slap to the face to his loyal supporters by endorsing Killary Clinton for president of the United States. Sanders overlooked Clinton’s illegal email server [“I’m tired of hearing about your damn emails”], ignored the DNC rigging the competition against him, and ignored Clinton’s dismal track record on foreign policy. This tells you that he was never serious about challenging the party machine. In fact, Bernie Sanders’ track record in largely fabricated to make him appear good. We’ll focus on Bernie’s pro-war record in just a minute. But first I want to say a couple of things about his economic policies and about his embarrassing praise of Jeff Bezos…
First, he did an incredibly stupid thing. He advertised Medicare For All [Single Payer] as socialism. M4A is not a socialist program! An example of a socialist program in the United Kingdom is the NHS [albeit they’re aiming to privatize it]. An example of a socialist program in the United States is the VA, because the Government owns and operates the VA clinics and hospitals. On the other hand, M4A is just the state taking over the role of insurer. The state allocates a sum of money for each citizen to be spent exclusively for medical services. But the recipient of the funds chooses the medical service provider; the recipient ‘shops around,’ and medical service providers compete among each other for market share. Calling it socialist is a case of terrible PR. And secondly, Sanders advertised M4A alongside a tax hike [which would invevitably fall on labor] when he should have advertised it alongside a tax cut! Why? Because Single Payer would have a deflationary effect on employment levels, due to all the redundancies in the private insurance sector’s bureaucracy.
Bernie Sanders was advised by Stephanie Kelton on matters pertaining to economics, and Sanders has never challenged the deficit dove vs deficit hawk narrative. In her academic work and on social media, Stephanie Kelton challenges the economic orthodoxy, both in premise and conclusion. But Sanders never took her advice seriously and couldn’t even be bothered to link to Taxes for Revenue are Obsolete, written by the then Chairman of the New York Fed in 1946 [an insider blowing away zombie economic myths at the time]. Politicians who seek to preserve this mythology are not agents of change. They’re just frauds, they are straw men, controlled opposition. As for the so-called Green New Deal… they can throw all the money they want at it. Will it create jobs? Yes. Will it create physical output? Yes. Is it necessary in order to avoid planetary destruction in the next 10-12 years? Absolutely not. In fact, the climate aspect of the Green New Deal is complete hokum – it’s just good advertising. See the Church of Climate Apocalypse in action. AOC, Beto and Greta Thunberg trading in fear, drivel, shaming, and fake tears. AOC [the new Al Gore] is the biggest fraud of them all. I can give Thunberg a pass since she’s a kid and kids are a lot easier to indoctrinate. Notice how politicians, including freshmen congresswomen “address” things like mass extinction of human beings. Look up George Carlin’s speech at the National Press Club from 1999, in which he pokes fun at this type of lingo. Meanwhile, the Obamas bought a massive beach-front estate in Martha’s Vineyard…
As for the embarrassing episode with Amazon and Bezos… Bernie Sanders thanked Bezos because Amazon had raised the minimum wage to 15 bucks per hour. “It is absurd that the taxpayers of this country have to subsidize the wealthiest person on Earth, who happens to be Mr. Bezos, because so many of his workers made wages that were so low that they were forced to go on food stamps and Medicaid – it doesn’t make sense,” Sanders told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “So I applaud Jeff Bezos today for raising the minimum wage at Amazon.” If you have to applaud a monopolist like Bezos for raising wages well below what the company can afford, you’re a damn cuck, plain and simple. Some fools on Twitter were saying, “See? Shaming works.” Rubbish. But what they didn’t know [or ignored] was that Amazon had also removed stock awards and incentive pay for hourly warehouse workers and customer service employees. This hurt the bottom line of longtime workers. Bezos was praised for giving with one hand and taking with another.
Now let’s move to Sanders’ rotten pro-war track record. Between Clinton and him there’s hardly any difference on US foreign policy. Both are veteran interventionists, the ‘humanitarian hawks’ type. Bernie Sanders voted twice for regime change in Iraq. He voted to support the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, which said: “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” Later that same year, just to be consistent I guess and double down on his loyalty to the [hawkish] democratic establishment, Sanders backed another resolution which reiterated the efforts, “Congress reaffirms [the same measures mentioned earlier].” This gave Congressional backing for the CIA’s covert schemes to overthrow the regime in Baghdad, as well as hiking economic sanctions, which killed as many as 500,000 Iraqi children. It also gave the green light to Operation Desert Fox, a four day bombing campaign striking 100 targets across the country – with several Tomahawk cruise missiles specifically set loose on Hussein himself. Over the 8 years of Clinton’s administration, Iraq was bombed on average once every four days.
Sanders also supported Bill Clinton’s war against Serbia. He backed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists [AUMF] of 2001, giving the executive [Bush Jr] the freedom to go to war on a whim. He backed Obama’s intervention in Libya [which killed people, partitioned the country into warring fiefdoms, brought in Islamists [like Al Qaeda and Daesh] and revived the slave trade. Bernie Sanders backed and continues to support a bigger role for the United States intervention in the Syrian conflict [i.e. continues to back the illegal presence of the United States military on sovereign Syrian land].
HRC admitted, albeit in a tardiv manner, that the [more recent] war on Iraq was a mistake. But Sanders never apologized for voting twice [in 1998] in support of the same thing. Sanders casually refers to these voting instances as parliament being “almost unanimous” on the issue of intervention. Here’s the list with the “NO” votes on the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. Some libertarians and leftists [38 in number] chose not to be war hawks and voted against the legislation.
Sanders is a pro-war Zionist and millionaire pseudo-socialist [again, Medicare For All is a good policy, but it’s not a socialist program and should not be advertised as such; it is fully compatible with capitalism]. If you call yourself a progressive, if you care at all about foreign policy and respect your vote, I say throw it in the direction of Tulsi Gabbard. As far as I can tell, at least she’s not a straw man for the [Clintonian] DNC like Sanders was during the last election. Bruce Dixon from the Black Agenda Report pretty much said the same about “democrat sheepdog” Sanders ahead of anyone else. At any rate, it’s your vote, you do what you want with it.
Conclusion
Folks need to be aware who they’re voting for, and not fall into the trap of believing their candidate to be wholly positive. Instead, they should be circumspect, they should be realists, and understand that Bernie Sanders, the millionaire pseudo-socialist has been a war hawk for the majority of his political career, and still is. Overall he does appear as a lesser evil. Since democrats have embraced the expression “blood on his hands” referring to Trump’s “betrayal” of the Kurds, be sure that Bernie Sanders, alongside mainstream republicans and democrats, contributed politically to the murder of 500,000 Iraqi children.
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