And I dunno about the rest of you, but I still haven't seen Bernie use the words. Apartheid. Genocide. Ethnic cleansing. CEASEFIRE.
There's the invisible party line he won't step over. Right there. He walks right up to it, and it's easy to assume he's going after the elephant in the room for real, anybody with a heart would right? But then he veers off.... symbolic gestures, no follow through.
In some corner of my brain I'm still hoping, praying for him or somebody to suddenly break loose, run to grab the nearest camera and explain in a rush what's really going on and how they've been coerced into acting like this, before they get dragged offstage... but I'm not holding my breath.
Nobody explains the issues with Bernie more clearly than Chris Hedges, if you want to dig in to that. He saw the warning signs from the beginning and tried to tell us.
Here's the thing. When Bernie signed up with the Democrats... the only reason they LET him run in the first place (and that's exactly how a Hillary staffer even said it to a Bernie delegate I know, on the plane going home from the 2016 DNC: he laughed at her and sneered, "you should just be happy we LET him run") was because he agreed to wear the party's leash. From the beginning, he was toeing their line. He may have genuinely been hoping to gather enough momentum to break past them, but the media throttled his coverage very carefully to limit his reach. (His largest rally, which I attended, was in reality at least TWICE the size that was reported in the news-- I saw it with my own eyes and I am fucking furious)
The shenanigans that rigged the 2016 and 2020 primaries were so anti-democratic it makes my hair stand on end. But Bernie didn't say a peep about it. Not one complaint. He'd avoid the subject but when directly confronted on it, actually said the primaries were "fair"... Which is a filthy, horrible LIE. Bernie lied to us. He should have broken free to run as an outraged fire-breathing independent. Instead, he let himself be used as a sheepdog-- he took us sheep on a little run around the yard, then basically shrugged and said "oh well, we tried, I guess we're too weak, best get back to the fold and pledge our loyalty to our neoliberal masters again" and led us back to our pens, turning over his mailing lists and funds to the party that just screwed him over.
He was used as a honeypot to divert radical energy and momentum into a reformist dead end. He helped turn the words "political revolution" into a depressing parody.
I don't know WHY he agreed to this shit. To be honest, I always figured they'd sooner shoot him than allow him to win-- but I don't know that personal threats alone would be enough to make him act like this. I don't get it. I don't know if he has real integrity or if he was just playing us. Obama was a convincing actor too. For people who can talk so eloquently of what's right and good and yet STILL carry water for war profiteers in a corrupt system that's wrecking the world.... That scares me. Badly.
Don’t disagree but the great betrayal narrative, played out here in the UK following the rout of Jeremy Corbyn by the establishment, is that putting our faith in so-called political leaders, however seemingly benign & charismatic, is thoroughly misguided
Our only hope is community-building and doing it for our collective selves
Exactly right! Corbyn was the UK's Bernie. The same Evil vs Diet Evil, good cop / bad cop game is being used to undermine democracies all over the world. Systems with proportional representation, parliament etc hold out a bit longer but they're all under assault, and they can't hold against all that money.
Representative democracy is inherently vulnerable to corruption, any concentrated class with power is a target for the oligarchs to seize and control. Systems built on genocidal settler colonialism are exploitative and oppressive at the core, reforms won't fix them.
It's bottom up or nothing. Superman isn't coming, and we have to stand up to help ourselves and each other in any way we can!
The day of Trump's inauguration, I was out marching in my Bernie gear. Two separate random people on the bus asked me, "Who's Bernie?" This, in downtown San Francisco. (Crowning worst moment of that whole year. I just about sat down and cried right there...) I guarantee you Trump has no such issue with name recognition-- everyone and their grandmomma and their dog knows who he is, he's been platformed by every outlet in a non-stop flood of orange filth. They'd rather broadcast Trump's empty podium than Bernie actually talking. More than $1 billion in free publicity that year alone-- the corporate media is intentionally amplifying fear while squelching hope.
It's not just the big money and Citizen's United etc-- and that is a huge problem-- it's the control, the manipulation and propaganda. Since the death of the Fairness Doctrine, we're in big trouble.
I wasn't kidding about the Oakland rally. They put up barricades in a perimeter around Frank Ogawa Plaza. You had to go through a metal detector TSA type search to get in, and they limited the number of people inside to 22,000.
There were more people stacked up against the outside of that fence, than there were on the inside. My friends asked the traffic control cops how big they thought the crowd was-- they said 40k-60k.
NO news helicopters bothered showing up. The only chopper was from the police. Just one aerial photo was published-- zoomed in and cropped so you can't see the barricades, and there's all this empty space around the 22,000 people in the center, as if they're the only ones there. This from the "liberal" media, in the most progressive part of the nation.
This is what we're dealing with. A system that would rather help a Trump win than allow a Bernie run. Fear fear fear fear. Vote blue no matter who. This is no time to risk 3rd parties, Republican fascists are going to eat us, so grow up and bend the knee. You tried, you failed, you're pathetic, now sit down and shut up, don't rock the boat, be grateful for whatever shit the DNC deigns to feed you, and call it democracy. Etc etc etc.
While climate collapse is apready roaring down on us at a speed that makes all the Dem promises-- even IF they keep any-- look like an obscene joke.
We don't have time for this. Elections won't save us. It's going to get ugly.
@violetmadder@tutwilly in 2016 and Especially 2020 VPR
(Vermon't NPR)
was amongst Bernie's harshest critics. But Obama Biden Clinton all got full passes.
@violetmadder@DrALJONES@equalitysiren
I don't know for sure but one disadvantage in the US is the majority voting system in combination with this really old fashioned electoral committee, leading to situations where someone can get elected without been voted for by the majority.
Even if you were able to elect the president directly, I think it would be a blast against GOP. 😀 ... although I think that's the reason why it has not been changed until now. 🥴
@violetmadder@DrALJONES@equalitysiren
And: Don't be too harsh with Bernie. Because of the voting system it was the only thing possible to prevent Agent Orange 😜 from winning again!
Voting in fear isn't democracy. It's a hostage situation.
Notice that the Democratic Party would rather hate on 3rd party voters, than open the system to any type of ranked choice voting. This is how we can tell they don't give a shit about real democracy. First past the post voting ALWAYS degenerates into Evil vs Diet Evil controllable opposition, it's baked in.
At every layer of this system, there are traps and blockages in place to stop any outsider campaigns from gaining traction. You can get a few people elected at the local level, but the higher you go up the ladder of power, the stronger and more entrenched the resistance gets. There's a surface veneer of democracy, but it's mostly cosmetic, just enough to lull people into complacency if they don't look too deeply. They don't want to see how broken it is, so they hide from the truth and cling to the idea that our leaders must really be swell guys, surely they're not THAT bad, right?
*...bombs continue falling on children in the background, prison populations swell, forests burn... *
@DrALJONES@equalitysiren It's not just the duopoly friend... the ENITIRE SYSTEM is owned by them.
So for example, let's pretend Bernie is just as prescribed (for the sake of argument) it wouldn't matter if he got in or not. The system will fight to ensure its own survival. No matter what.
I doubt at this point he would have changed anything (in the country or just politics)...
@DrALJONES Bernie Sanders is an American Icon. He isn’t caught up in this jingoistic populism that’s common in our society. There are no fake filters. He believes in justice, equality and accountability. Every State in the Union should be represented by a Bernie Sanders. The world would be a better place.
@aproposnix@DrALJONES
Bernie has passionately decried the IDF's indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian civilians. Full stop. His objection was to a permanent ceasefire with Hamas, a terrorist organization that has made it clear it wants to destroy Israel. Note the difference between calling a truce with a terrorist organization vs opposing killing of civilians.
As I mentioned previously, he caught a lot of flak from progressives (including myself initially) for not supporting a permanent ceasefire. But if you read his comments carefully, his reasoning behind the distinction is valid.
Imagine someone calling for a permanent ceasefire with Nazi Germany in the middle of WWII to stop the slaughter of civilians. Noble, but impractical, naive, and self-defeating in the long run.
@lightninhopkins@DrALJONES Hopefully not by killing 30,000 Mexican women and children. But, it's America right? They probably would.
My question is... how would that be okay?
@gwit@lightninhopkins@DrALJONES You're too low by at least an order of magnitude, probably two. Recall the US response to 9/11, which had similar deaths but a much smaller proportion of the population: about 4 million killed in the GWOT.
Mind you, Hamas is the government of Gaza and Al Qaeda didn't use GoPro videos of raping Americans to promote their success. If any country had done what Hamas did, the US response wouldn't have been as restrained as the GWOT.
@opendna@lightninhopkins@DrALJONES You know... maybe patience is wrong here. But I'll still give it a go.
I know about the atrocities of the Iraq war, infact, thats exactly what I meant by "they probably would". You see, my main point was, just because America would commit crimes against humanity and genocide, does not mean Israel doing it is okay. So, OpenDNA, do you have an issue with that? I can't see why anyone would.
I'm not running defence for the US, and I think you're feigning ignorance for that to make an argument. In fact, I actually think (get this) massacring civilians is bad. I also think (real shocker) its bad when Hamas did it too.
Me personally, I think 4 million dying is bad. And I think around 30-40,000 people dying within the last two months (more than all civilian deaths in the Ukraine war) is pretty bad. Do you agree? I hope you do. Or else, we really can't change eachother's minds, because you'd be a little evil.
@gwit@lightninhopkins@DrALJONES I'm more than a little evil: I'm Canadian. I know our history. Our "shame" is retaliating against SS war crimes with greater war crimes.
By all means, send the leadership of both Hamas and Israel to the Hague, and prosecute criminal trials for every war crime in this conflict. Until that happens: Hamas committed unprecedented war crimes on October 7th, and Israel gets to remind them why following the laws of war is a better idea.
@opendna@lightninhopkins@DrALJONES Huh??? There were no greater war crimes than the deaths of six million. Slaughtering the SS was nowhere near the same as Israel's campaign against the civilians of Palestine.
No, a Holocaust almost 80 years ago does not give the descendants of the survivors carte blanche to commit genocide, particularly on people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the Holocaust originally.
@lightninhopkins@aproposnix This year, like every year for decades, Israel will kill over ten times as many Palestinians as Palestinians kill Israelis.
Israel controls the number of kilocalories of food that go into Gaza - so everyone there is on the verge of starvation at all times.
Israel controls the amount of building materials that go into Gaza, not even allowing enough to fix buildings that are broken, let alone constructing new places to live.
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