Bernie Sanders running for preznit?

[Nordic]

I know it's hard to remember, but presidential elections are now 100% bogus.

We can't vote our way out of this mess. That's what they want us to think, however. Because that is exactly how they retain their power.

[NeonLX]

I know it's hard to remember, but presidential elections are now 100% bogus.

We can't vote our way out of this mess. That's what they want us to think, however. Because that is exactly how they retain their power.

Agreed.

And when I tell people that, I'm called "part of the problem".

Back to the Skinner box to push that lever for some treats.

[notanonymous]

Wombaticus Rex » Wed Apr 29, 2015 12:46 pm

Bernie Sanders is going to spend the next 12 months promoting Facebook memes about "inequality" -- forgive me if I don't think being an info-warrior means much in the filter bubble echo chamber that is Big Blue -- and all of those memes will feature his fucking face. Bernie Sanders is working with a ghostwriter on a book. If not for the seriousness of the issues he is discussing, this would be Herman Cain level shit.

Bernie Sanders is going to be fundraising for a campaign he not only knows he won't win, but won't even seriously pursue. He is going to burn donations from idealists until it's time, inevitably, to get in line and support Hillary 2016.

So who is he really campaigning against? Elizabeth Warren. He's doing the Clinton family a big favor with this. And I get to spend a whole year watching people praise him for his courage and vision and message.

Thanks for this. More people need to see this.

And, like they say " If voting mattered, they wouldn't let us vote".

[Luther Blissett]

I thought I would care about this, but unfortunately I don't.

[BrandonD]

I know it's hard to remember, but presidential elections are now 100% bogus.

We can't vote our way out of this mess. That's what they want us to think, however. Because that is exactly how they retain their power.

I've personally never voted. I've been in some tangles about this subject, people always say "Yea the candidates suck but at least vote for (insert slightly less insane candidate here), he/she's not as bad as the other one."

I've come up with a response that works for me:

Say that you were a slave in the American pre-civil-war era. You were given the "freedom" to vote for your slave master.

Slave Master A stated that one should treat his slaves with respect, feed and clothe them well.

Slave Master B stated that one should be very strict with his slaves, and demand absolute obedience.

Some might argue that one should vote for Slave Master A. Yea they both suck but at least he sounds a little bit better than the second guy.

I can see their point, but I personally don't agree. I would vote for neither, because voting for a slave master is tacit agreement with the institution of slavery.

Participation in a corrupt and monstrous system creates the illusion that those being crushed by that system are in agreement with it. The minor reliefs or benefits one might receive as a result of a vote are among the very things that help ensure the continued existence of that corrupt system. A vote is an acknowledgement of belief that what little we currently have is the best that we can hope for.

That is why I feel compassion for those sort of people, rather than contempt. Their spirit has been pretty much stomped out.

[IanEye]

So, you go in to vote on the local stuff on the ballot, but then just leave the Presidential choice blank?

[justdrew]

well, he says he's running 'for real' so I'll take him at his word. Who knows, it might help. Maybe he'd be a fine vice prez too.

[82_28]

Taibbi:

Many years ago I pitched a magazine editor on a story about Bernie Sanders, then a congressman from Vermont, who'd agreed to something extraordinary – he agreed to let me, a reporter, stick next to him without restrictions over the course of a month in congress.

"People need to know how this place works. It's absurd," he'd said. (Bernie often uses the word absurd, his Brooklyn roots coming through in his pronunciation – ob-zert.)

Bernie wasn't quite so famous at the time and the editor scratched his head. "Bernie Sanders," he said. "That's the one who cares, right?"

"Right, that's the guy," I said.

I got the go-ahead and the resulting story was a wild journey through the tortuous bureaucratic maze of our national legislature. I didn't write this at the time, but I was struck every day by what a strange and interesting figure Sanders was.

Many of the battles he brought me along to witness, he lost. And no normal politician would be comfortable with the optics of bringing a Rolling Stone reporter to a Rules Committee hearing.

But Sanders genuinely, sincerely, does not care about optics. He is the rarest of Washington animals, a completely honest person. If he's motivated by anything other than a desire to use his influence to protect people who can't protect themselves, I've never seen it. Bernie Sanders is the kind of person who goes to bed at night thinking about how to increase the heating-oil aid program for the poor.

This is why his entrance into the 2016 presidential race is a great thing and not a mere footnote to the inevitable coronation of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. If the press is smart enough to grasp it, his entrance into the race makes for a profound storyline that could force all of us to ask some very uncomfortable questions.

Here's the thing: Sanders is a politician whose power base is derived almost entirely from the people of the state of Vermont, where he is personally known to a surprisingly enormous percentage of voters.

His chief opponents in the race to the White House, meanwhile, derive their power primarily from corporate and financial interests. That doesn't make them bad people or even bad candidates necessarily, but it's a fact that the Beltway-media cognoscenti who decide these things make access to money the primary factor in determining whether or not a presidential aspirant is "viable" or "credible." Here's how the Wall Street Journal put it in their story about Sanders (emphasis mine):

It is unclear how much money Mr. Sanders expects to raise, or what he thinks he needs to run a credible race. Mr. Sanders raised about $7 million for his last re-election in Vermont, a small state. Sums needed to run nationally are far larger.

The Washington/national press has trained all of us to worry about these questions of financing on behalf of candidates even at such an early stage of a race as this.

In this manner we're conditioned to believe that the candidate who has the early assent of a handful of executives on Wall Street and in Hollywood and Silicon Valley is the "serious" politician, while the one who is merely the favorite of large numbers of human beings is an irritating novelty act whose only possible goal could be to cut into the numbers of the real players.

Sanders offers an implicit challenge to the current system of national electoral politics. With rare exceptions, campaign season is a time when the backroom favorites of financial interests are marketed to the population. Weighed down by highly regressive policy intentions, these candidates need huge laboratories of focus groups and image consultants to guide them as they grope around for a few lines they can use to sell themselves to regular working people.

Sanders on the other hand has no constituency among the monied crowd. "Billionaires do not flock to my campaign," he quipped. So what his race is about is the reverse of the usual process: he'll be marketing the interests of regular people to the gatekeeping Washington press, in the hope that they will give his ideas a fair shot.

It's a little-known fact, but we reporters could successfully sell Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or any other populist candidate as a serious contender for the White House if we wanted to. Hell, we told Americans it was okay to vote for George Bush, a man who moves his lips when he reads.

But the lapdog mentality is deeply ingrained and most Beltway scribes prefer to wait for a signal from above before they agree to take anyone not sitting atop a mountain of cash seriously.

Thus this whole question of "seriousness" – which will dominate coverage of the Sanders campaign – should really be read as a profound indictment of our political system, which is now so openly an oligarchy that any politician who doesn't have the blessing of the bosses is marginalized before he or she steps into the ring.

I remember the first time I was sold on Bernie Sanders as a politician. He was in his congressional office and he was ranting about the fact that many of the manufacturing and financial companies who asked him and other members of congress for tax breaks and aid were also in the business of moving American jobs overseas to places like China.

Sanders spent years trying to drum up support for a simple measure that would force any company that came to Washington asking for handouts to promise they wouldn't turn around and ship jobs to China or India.

That didn't seem like a lot to ask, but his fellow members treated him like he was asking for a repeal of the free enterprise system. This issue drove Sanders crazy. Again showing his Brooklyn roots, Bernie gets genuinely mad about these things. While some pols are kept up at night worrying about the future profitability of gazillionaire banks, Sanders seethes over the many obvious wrongs that get smoothed over and covered up at his place of work.

That saltiness, I'm almost sure of it, is what drove him into this race. He just can't sit by and watch the things that go on, go on. That's not who he is.

When I first met Bernie Sanders, I'd just spent over a decade living in formerly communist Russia. The word "socialist" therefore had highly negative connotations for me, to the point where I didn't even like to say it out loud.

But Bernie Sanders is not Bukharin or Trotsky. His concept of "Democratic Socialism" as I've come to understand it over the years is that an elected government should occasionally step in and offer an objection or two toward our progress to undisguised oligarchy. Or, as in the case of not giving tax breaks to companies who move factories overseas, our government should at least not finance the disappearance of the middle class.

Maybe that does qualify as radical and unserious politics in our day and age. If that's the case, we should at least admit how much trouble we're in.

Congratulations, Bernie. Good luck and give 'em hell.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/ ... ell-bernie

[stickdog99]

I don't get it. Here we have a genuine good guy running for President and we are all looking for ways to drag the guy down or explain why "it's a trap."

And I include myself among the we.

[Nordic]

A genuine good guy? Who supports this 1000%:

http://m.democracynow.org/stories/15193

"Kill Anything": Israeli Soldiers Say Gaza Atrocities Came from Orders for Indiscriminate Fire

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Edit: I want to state things strongly and clearly. The cynicism of this bothers me.

Bernie Sanders is going to spend the next 12 months promoting Facebook memes about "inequality" -- forgive me if I don't think being an info-warrior means much in the filter bubble echo chamber that is Big Blue -- and all of those memes will feature his fucking face. Bernie Sanders is working with a ghostwriter on a book. If not for the seriousness of the issues he is discussing, this would be Herman Cain level shit.

Bernie Sanders is going to be fundraising for a campaign he not only knows he won't win, but won't even seriously pursue. He is going to burn donations from idealists until it's time, inevitably, to get in line and support Hillary 2016.

So who is he really campaigning against? Elizabeth Warren. He's doing the Clinton family a big favor with this. And I get to spend a whole year watching people praise him for his courage and vision and message.

Your assessment of just how serious the Sanders campaign is is right on the money. It's all about giving liberal Dems the illusion that having him in the debates will push Hillary farther to the left. Even Warren herself seems to acknowledge that the point of his campaign is to "play out a vision for America" without significantly impeding Clinton's electoral accumulation.

But I don't see the Sanders campaign significantly hurting Warren in the long term. It basically means she's out for 2016. Good. We're about to see more economic calamity unfold in the wake of euro and shale devaluation (among other possibilities), which if it breaks after the election will doom Clinton to a one-term legacy, or if it breaks before will put a Republican in the White House. Either way, this bodes well for Warren to strengthen her creds and message as a genuine alternative to Business as Usual. Depending on how bad the status quo becomes, this may even put her in a position to be a legitimate contender for the nomination in 2020 or 2024.

Not that they'd ever let her win, mind you. But she might get a hell of a lot closer than Sanders.

[Nordic]

Bruce A. Dixon from Black Agenda Report nails it:

http://www.blackagendareport.com/node/4461

Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016
Submitted by Bruce A. Dixon on Wed, 05/06/2015 - 16:09


By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Vermont senator and ostensible socialist Bernie Sanders is playing the sheepdog candidate for Hillary Clinton this year. Bernie's job is to warm up the crowd for Hillary, herding activist energies and the disaffected left back into the Democratic fold one more time. Bernie aims to tie up activist energies and resources till the summer of 2016 when the only remaining choice will be the usual lesser of two evils.

Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
“The sheepdog is a card the Democratic party plays every presidential primary season when there's no White House Democrat running for re-election.”

Spoiler alert: we have seen the Bernie Sanders show before, and we know exactly how it ends. Bernie has zero likelihood of winning the Democratic nomination for president over Hillary Clinton. Bernie will lose, Hillary will win. When Bernie folds his tent in the summer of 2016, the money, the hopes and prayers, the year of activist zeal that folks put behind Bernie Sanders' either vanishes into thin air, or directly benefits the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Don't believe us? Then believe Bernie himself interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on ABC News “This Week” May 3.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So if you lose in this nomination fight, will you support the Democratic nominee?
SANDERS: Yes. I have in the past.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Not going to run as an independent?
SANDERS: No, absolutely not. I've been very clear about that.
Bernie Sanders is this election's Democratic sheepdog. The sheepdog is a card the Democratic party plays every presidential primary season when there's no White House Democrat running for re-election. The sheepdog is a presidential candidate running ostensibly to the left of the establishment Democrat to whom the billionaires will award the nomination. Sheepdogs are herders, and the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party, either staying home or trying to build something outside the two party box.

1984 and 88 the sheepdog candidate was Jesse Jackson. In 92 it was California governor Jerry Brown. In 2000 and 2004 the designated sheepdog was Al Sharpton, and in 2008 it was Dennis Kucinich. This year it's Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. The function of the sheepdog candidate is to give left activists and voters a reason, however illusory, to believe there's a place of influence for them inside the Democratic party, if and only if the eventual Democratic nominee can win in November.

Despite casting millions of voters for the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and other sheepdogs, those leftish Democrat voters are always disregarded when Democrats actually win. Bill Clinton gave us NAFTA, a vicious “welfare reform,” no peace dividend or push for DC statehood, lowered unemployment but mostly in part time and low-wage jobs, and mass incarceration of black and brown people. President Obama doubled down on bailouts of banksters and GM, and immunized them from prosecution but failed to address the most catastrophic fall in black household wealth in history. We got health care for some instead of Medicare for All, the Patriot Act renewed instead of repealed, a race to privatize public education, drone wars and still more mass incarceration of black and brown people. And if President Obama gets his way, we may soon have a global job-destroying wage-lowering NAFTA on steroids, with the TTP and TTIP.

The sheepdog's job is to divert the energy and enthusiasm of activists a year, a year and a half out from a November election away from building an alternative to the Democratic party, and into his doomed effort. When the sheepdog inevitably folds in the late spring or early summer before a November election, there's no time remaining to win ballot access for alternative parties or candidates, no time to raise money or organize any effective challenge to the two capitalist parties.

At that point, with all the alternatives foreclosed, the narrative shifts to the familiar “lesser of two evils.” Every sheepdog candidate surrenders the shreds of his credibility to the Democratic nominee in time for the November election. This is how the Bernie Sanders show ends, as the left-leaning warm-up act for Hillary Clinton.

Intent on avoiding the two-party “lesser evil” trap this year, about two hundred activists gathered in Chicago last weekend to consider the future of electoral organizing outside the Democratic and Republican parties. Many of the participants were Greens, including former presidential and vice presidential candidates Jill Stein and Rosa Clemente, the former Green mayor of Richmond California, and many others. There were also representatives from Seattle, where Socialist Alternative's Kshama Sawant won election to Seattle's city council, as well as Angela Walker, a black socialist who received 67,000 votes for Milwaukee County sheriff in 2014, and many others, including some who took part in the recent Chicago mayoral election.

There was trans-partisan interest in a 50-state ballot access drive to put the Green Party's Jill Stein on the presidential ballot for 2016 presidential race. Currently the law keeps Greens and others off the ballot in more than half the states. Precise details vary according to state law, but if a third party candidate after obtaining one-time ballot access receives about 2% of total votes, a new ballot line is created, granting ballot access to any potential candidate from school board to sheriff to US congress who wants to run as something other than a Republican or Democrat. That, many participants agreed, would be a significant puncture in the legal thicket that now protects Democrats against competition on the ballot from their left. But a nationwide trans-partisan ballot access campaign to create a national alternative to the two capitalist parties is something left activists must begin serious work a good 18 months before a November election, essentially right now.

Whether or not a national ballot access campaign is undertaken by Greens and others, a Bernie Sanders candidacy is an invitation to do again what's been done in 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, 2004 and 2008. Bernie's candidacy is a blast toward the past, an invitation to herd and be herded like sheep back into the Democratic fold, to fundraise and canvass and recruit and mobilize for Bernie, as he warms up the crowd for Hillary. Bernie is a sheepdog.

The question is, are we sheep?

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a state committee member of the GA Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

[Laodicean]

[seemslikeadream]

Vermont Teddy Bear introduces Bernie Bear

[Twyla LaSarc]

We can't vote our way out of this mess. That's what they want us to think, however. Because that is exactly how they retain their power.

Yep. This^^^^. Again. Not to disparge Sanders or Warren, but by the time you get to the point of serious presidential consideration, you are either on board for the loot or dead.