Bernie Sanders supporters: please reclaim your agency, and vigorously
Bill Martin
This is for my friends who supported Bernie Sanders. I suppose it is also directed toward all of my friends who believe that, despite everything, they should support the Democratic Party.
One very general thing I would like to say to this: Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, and the like will continue to go the way they are going. Everything in their lives, especially their professional lives as politicians and media figures, determines—almost to a metaphysical certainty—that they have to keep going the way they are going. You, my friends, don’t have to.
Bernie cannot (and will not) say this, but some Bernie supporters will say it: There is a lot more in common between Bernie, at his best, and Donald Trump, than there is between Bernie and the other establishment Democrats.
I realize that very few, if any, of you will support Trump. That’s hardly worth talking about. But will you support the party that said to you, if you are a Bernie Supporter, we don’t care about you, it is more important to us that we defeat Bernie than that we defeat Trump? If you do support this party, then you are supporting that conclusion, and not because this is the best way to defeat Trump. It’s not the best way, and it won’t work in any case.
And to others who were/are not Bernie supporters, will you accept this as how things should work? And will you accept the contempt that this party has for you, where it says, “hey, we know we’ve got you, you have to support whoever we put out there, so we’ll have as our front-runner and presumptive nominee …”?
Even apart from the language of “deplorables” and what you think about that (most of my friends disavow it, or say they do, while having supported the candidate who stuck by her language—but I also know plenty out there who are fine with this language), is it not clear that the Democratic Party has nothing but contempt for “ordinary people,” including those of you in some sort of liberal or left bubble who probably don’t consider yourselves to be “ordinary people”?
This nothing for ordinary people is also evidenced by the fact that the only response by Democratic Party and its “left” followers to the virus crisis is to spew vitriol at Trump and his supporters. Big help!
So why stay in this camp where the people who really control things do nothing but spit in your face, and where everyone is just encouraged to be a bunch of maniacal haters?
(By the way, when I said something about the latter point to a friend the other day, adding that it does not appear that, other than some—admittedly significant exceptions—ordinary people who support Trump are not even remotely haters on this level, my friend responded that he “didn’t know about that, what about calling people ‘snowflakes’?” This really sums it all up, right there.)
Really, though, I am writing this post to ask my Bernie-supporter friends: What’s next?
I’d like to know your thoughts—other than just to tell me that “Trump is so bad that …,” etc. Believe it or not, I have already heard this sort of thing a few times in the last few years. If you’re tempted to write something along these lines (or to think it, for that matter), perhaps consider that this rhetoric is simply the hot air that is the only thing that keeps the anti-Trump movement going. And, if you’re in the “Trump is Hitler” or “… worse than Hitler” camp, I frankly consider you to be mentally ill and an anti-Semite.
I am writing a series of articles on the Covid-19 situation, and various aspects of it, such as the popular discourses of “science” and “expertise.” Here is some material from the first of these articles that relates to the Bernie situation:
The evening before Bernie Sander’s suspension of his campaign, I wrote the following:
For sure, the Democrats are in quite a bit of a fix. The only one of their main figures who is saying anything worthwhile and concrete about the Covid-19 crisis and the attendant economic crisis is Bernie Sanders. (He says some crap, too, but leave that aside for the moment.)
The globalist mainstream of the DP, however, has made clear its everlasting disdain for Bernie, and will not support him no matter how sensible and relevant his ideas. Now they have a problem, though, because OP Dems (ordinary-people Democrats and others who want a Democrat to replace Trump) don’t always ask “How high?” when the DNC says “jump!”—and meanwhile, Joe Biden is giving his own bizarre press briefings from the basement of his house in Delaware.
Much of the time he is lucky if he can put one or two sentences together. Therefore, there’s new hope for the DNC, or what they think of as hope—it’s truly sick—in being able to just concentrate their efforts on spewing vitriolic bullshit about Trump.
Sanders has now provided the Democratic Party a way out of this fix. When I first heard the news, I was hoping that Bernie was doing this as a challenge to Biden—but no. His statement that he is suspending the campaign because he did not think it right to go on with a campaign he could not win will be read in two different ways.
Bernie very likely could have “won” if he had been willing to do what needed to be done, to really tear Biden down and to really rip into the power-structure of the Democratic Party and the social system of which it is apart.
Others will praise Bernie for what he is “doing for the country,” and I am not saying this is completely wrong in the context of the coronavirus, but obviously it is wrong in terms of Bernie’s stated aim of putting the defeat of Trump in the forefront, given that the mainstream of the Democratic Party put defeating Bernie ahead of defeating Trump—and now they have succeeded.
As for how Bernie and his supporters will shape the party platform or a legislative agenda, why would that get any further than the campaign did? Bernie will be told to back down, and for whatever set of complex and deeply messed-up “reasons,” he will do this again, just as he has now, just as he did in 2016. The real question for Bernie supporters is how much longer they want to kid themselves.
For my part, I am very sorry to see Sanders pull out, not mainly because I had great hope in what he could do, but because there could have been a different kind of discussion with him as the nominee, especially regarding the possibilities of populism. I was also hoping such a discussion would also push Trump toward being a better populist. But it is no surprise that the DNC and other power-players do not want such a discussion, and indeed greatly fear anything going in this direction.
Again, I will remind those who have supported Bernie, and even those who are desperately clinging to some justification for supporting the worst of two reactionary parties, the leading party of the neoliberal globalism which is the basis for evermore dangerous pandemics, the party that doesn’t care about ordinary working people and is indeed fine with having them die off, the party that holds you in contempt because it feels sure you are caught in the trap of having to support them…
No, you do not have to support this garbage!
Bill Martin is a philosopher and musician, retired from DePaul University. He is completing a book with the title, “The Trump Clarification: Disruption at the Edge of the System (toward a theory).” His most recent albums are “Raga Chaturanga” (Bill Martin + Zugzwang; Avant-Bass 3) and “Emptiness, Garden: String Quartets nos. 1 and 2 (Ryokucha Bass Guitar Quartet; Avant-Bass 4). He lives in Salina, Kansas, and plays bass guitar with The Radicles.
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
I have an old toy drum everyone can bang. It has a nice wipe-clean shell, so I can draw logos and write names of candidates on it, then wipe them off when the next clones come marching in.
As a Brit, it is kind of ugly witnessing American’s obsession with their politics. We have some die-hard Thatcherite-Tories (which we spell “c-u-n-t-s”) and Dark Satanic Mill Labourites (which we spell “c-o-m-m-i-e-s”) here, but most people think it is hateful, half-baked, empty rubbish.
I think maybe all Americans dream “They Might One Day Be The One”, or be buddies with that person and get their parking tickets wiped off the police computers and get invites to bigwig social gatherings. I don’t know. I partly don’t know because when a group of “real” Americans start talking about “their” politics – in a public place I hasten to add – they often shun “foreigners”, especially sarcastic, truth-seeking ones like me. We have to endure but not engage. Or just walk away.
But that is not so easy now. The last election round that brought us the so-far actually quite dull Trump administration was imposed on us “foreign” observers in what seemed to be Democracy’s version of a raping, with intrusive things being forced down our throats or giving to us as a shafting, trying to make us accept the American insane political merri-go-round as the world’s most important political merri-go-round and normalise it and the same time.
I must admit, if this is so, I am keenly awaiting when the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution is duly extended to us “foreigner”, being most of yours’ ancestrial lines and sort of blood-relatives after all, so I can dust off my flintlock and do the thing you “real” Americans have so far failed to do. I have a map, I can find the Delaware crossing by myself.
In a nutshell, you are LONG LONG LONG past it worthwhile trying to make a Jefferson-like Silk Purse out of a Sanders-like Pig’s Ear, and I cannot even begin to imagine where the rest of the candidates are cut from. The time to rise has been engaged…
Common Ground?
Instead of ranting on Bernie or Trump, I am wondering if an exchange centered around identifying common ground between free-market conservatives (say me) and those who supported Bernie? I will be the first to posit a possibility:
“Redistribution of Wealth” – I know this subject is a major taboo with the free-market capitalist but I would argue that it is bad for free-markets and capitalism for the concentration of wealth to be isolated with a very small percentage of the business sector or society as a whole. I would also argue that the most effective source in enabling this disaster is the Federal Government. As a small business owner, I am crushed with regulation and compliance requirements, but, the larger competitors have the resources to navigate the maze of compliance obligations and of course lobby for exceptions to their favor. The solutions are not more government but rather less in order to make it easier for innovators, entrepreneurs, risk-takers, and individuals to compete against the larger companies to take away their market share. I would rather see a million millionaires than a few billionaires. Acknowledging that no system is perfect what system creates more wealth for all and not the few then capitalism w/ out a crushing government.
Your opinions matter – let’s build common ground and not divide.
Thanks
This is very encouraging. I hold a similar view. I would be very happy for a ‘socialist’ government to create millionaires provided those millionaires paid there taxes and provided something of value and did not exploit others.
A ‘socialist government’ creating millionaires? By definition Socialism destroys millionaires and wealth. The middle class is eliminated and replaced with the elite few at the top of the government hierarchy and everyone else is in poverty waiting for their allotment. Government, other than the top members, does not create wealth.
Have you been watching reality?
Those good old communist countries seem to be choc-a-bloc full of gazillionaires. Big Business can ONLY exist through the policies of a centralising and monopolising Big Government. These guys even openly say “Competition is evil”. This new billionaire gang was created through killing competition, not embracing it. If you don’t even get the basics, you should go get yourself some edjikayshun.
ur talking about one kind of socialism – centralized and (from your explanation, authoritarian) socialism. there are many kinds…
are u talking about the USSR? I have a few friends from Russia (they left the USSR AFTER the wall fell) who laugh when we talk of the “poverty” and all the terrible things of the USSR. Of course, it wasnt some paradise, for sure, but from their experiences it was livable and people had what they needed and didnt go hungry (of course this is their experiences). That was until the breakup and the coming of “freedom” and capitalism. Then, they began to go hungry as the new oligarchs stole the wealth of the people for themselves and left the people destitute. We in the west often hear horror stories of leftist governments (or any government, left or right that doesnt follow our particular brand of liberal capitalist “democracy”) and we should take such stories with a grain of salt imo.
Tax is theft. The State Must Die, to usher in the Age of the Sovereign Self! EVERY MAN A NATION! It will get a bit crowded at the UN, but I think we can cope if we allow Skype conferencing. I have already designed my own flag. It has squirrels on it.
How can one put this gently, but Bernie Sanders (Senator Alter Kocker) is kinda of a fraud, a hack. Even old curmudgeon, Murray Bookchin, who was wrong on quite a few things, was right on that. Why, several decades down the line, do more people not see that? Sad.
Any man who hands over his loyal support to Hillsdog and gracefully ducks out after being character-assassinated by his OWN Party is a walking turdfest in my books. The Yankee-Doodles do love their representatives utterly repugnant, don’t they? Now, if we can get Freddie Kruger out of retirement and running as an indepenedent, we just might have something…
“evermore dangerous pandemics”? If the global police State ‘needs’ more dangerous ‘pandemics’ after this hoax runs its course, I’d be surprised. Actually, I hope that ‘this course’ ends in the termination of this hellish system of things. Call me strange.
Hi how did you change your ‘logo’ to one of your own preference?
Honestly, I don’t remember. Sorry. I would say that if I can figure it out, you probably can. I’m not terribly tech savvy.
I am strange too. There is a collective insanity going on, like a shared evil people are bathing in and enjoying the stink, like when your dog rolls in fox shit then wags it tail at you, seeking approval!!!
I just told my parents that the WHO are misquoting their own figures, which is easily fact-checkable and they just told me I am hateful! They do not want to hear that the “Plucky Health Workers” are risking “life and limb” treating something less dangerous than seasonal flu. I’d put them in the Loony Bin but it seems that is called Planet Earth right now…
That’s awful. What the Corporatocracy/Police/War-making State is doing to us is unforgiveable. And since there is a God…
I am probably a case in point for this article. When Trump was elected, I got a “sharing my grief” letter from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR). This was my response to his letter, posted November 18, 2016:
Thank you, Sen. Merkley, for the reassurance and encouragement.
Although I voted a straight Democratic ticket, I had no enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton.
I was angry that the Democratic Party has allowed itself to fall into the neo-con,
neo-liberal, globalist approach/understanding of our most important issues and
gave up the nationalism and populism that was so important to the Progressive
movement. This morphing of the Party is something I’ve watched with considerable
dismay for many years. The powers and influences that have taken over the Party
are bringing it to ruin, and are ultimately responsible for this mind-boggling defeat.
We are all going to have to pay a lot more attention to politics in the coming years.
We no longer have the luxury of tending to our own families and affairs, trusting
that our government is in good hands, led by people who will do the right thing
and not let anything catastrophic happen. I did not have such confidence in Hillary
Clinton, by the way. From the outset I was in favor of a Biden/Warren ticket, and
hoped that Elizabeth would be our first female President, not Hillary. But then, I grew
up in Oklahoma, and believe she’s a progressive, Oklahoma populist down deep.
The news coverage of the election by NPR was abysmal, in my view. This defeat
was not a revolt of the “losers,” of the declining White middle class males, and the
rise of misogyny, racism and isolationism. (Those words were not used, of course,
but that understanding appeared to me to be embedded in the analysis.)
Isn’t it possible that liberal, progressive, educated Americans might be
unhappy with the way American power, prestige, money and “soft” power
has been squandered, and towards what ends? Do you think educated
Americans are in favor of paring down the Constitution, beginning with
the First and Second Amendments? Do you believe that ordinary American
citizens are to be feared, are the enemy? Do you think they are all on board with
spending trillions of dollars on Middle East wars, creating destabilized states
and the refugee crisis, and letting our own infrastructure deteriorate and
Social Security go bankrupt? Will the SS funds borrowed to fund these
and other wars, and to balance budgets, ever be repaid? Do you think
Americans are so dumbed down and cynical that they would look to the Clintons
as “wholesome” examples of what is best in America and for uncorrupted
leadership? Do you think no one either heard or remembered “We came,
we saw, he died! Ha, ha, ha”? Or have not heard Hillary’s intent to establish
a no-fly zone in Syria, knowing full well that such an action could lead to war
with Russia? Do you think educated Americans really bought the “killing of
Osama bin Laden” theater? Did you? I admit that the tired “Osama” specter had
to be laid to rest, but why not do it in an upright and out front manner? Why
all the deceit? It is this kind of deeply embedded dishonesty and resulting
corruption of justice, integrity and open political process that has brought
the Democratic Party into disrepute. Do you think people remain ignorant
of the Clinton Foundation’s pay-for-play method of enriching themselves,
or that the Foundation transferred $1.8 billion to Doha? Where did all that
loot come from? We are not talking here of Bill Gates, or the CEO of Google.
Where did the money come from?
I do not put you in the same camp. My first encounter with you was when
you gave the keynote speech at the first graduating class of the MET in
Tigard. You have never tainted yourself with lies and falseness. Maybe
it is easier to retain your integrity being from Oregon, since I have the same
high regard for Rep. Earl Blumenauer and Peter DeFazio. You are the exemplars
of liberal, progressive values and grassroots democracy, not Hillary Clinton.
As much as I have grown to dislike Hillary Clinton, listening to her concession
speech, I had a sense of tragedy. She seems such an intelligent, lovely woman.
It could and probably should have ended differently. Was it ambition that destroyed
her, or hubris and lack of humility? What happened to her respect for the intelligence
and basic decency of the American people? Where has simple honesty gone?
She appears to me to have taken the “left-hand path,” and perhaps it is better that
she be personally ruined than allowed to take the country to ruin along with her,
since that path always ends in ruin.
I hope for the best. We will, I trust, survive a Donald Trump administration.
There will be damage, of course. Trump has to repay supporters who put
their own political careers at risk to back him. This is frightening all by itself–
imagine a Sarah Palin in charge of the Department of Energy! I fear the
dismantling of all the federal regulatory agencies that five generations of
Americans have worked so hard to put in place–one of the great achievements
of the Progressive movement. Imagine BPA sold off to the highest bidder,
or our public lands bartered off to pay for the ruinous wars we have been
visiting on the Middle East!
By writing you in this frank way, I do not mean to be disrespectful. As I said,
I hold you, Rep. Blumenauer and Rep. DeFazio in high regard, and believe
Oregon has the best congressional delegation in the nation, bar none. More
Than ever, we all depend upon you to be honest, vigilant and courageous,
and prevent the worst possible outcomes from this disaster from being realized.
Best of luck!
Sincerely,
John D. Flanagan
Your mistake, John, I believe, is thinking that the ‘electoral process’ is anything but a dirty farce to hide the Rule of Money.
So what are you saying that we don’t already know? Seriously, this is an opinion piece with no direction.
With you all the way, Bridget: and the comments below? especially EricZzzz …
It’s like a post mortem of the scientifically obvious reality bites…
from Black Widows ! Still, think positively: Maxwell took time to comment seriously 😉 & very constructively: that saved time 🙂 for us both …
Let’s hope he hangs around. 😉
When rules fail within an economic system, it is time to change the rules… Direct democracy and civilian organizations wherein members are chosen by lot could provide solutions to our failed “representative” democracies. When “Super delegates” and “electoral” systems determine the final outcome of elections (as occurred in the 2000 presidential selection) something false and completely undemocratic is taking place.
Excerpted from: Direct democracy – Wikipedia
“The pure form of direct democracy exists only in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell Innerrhoden and Glarus.[15] The Swiss Confederation is a semi-direct democracy (representative democracy with strong instruments of direct democracy).[15] The nature of direct democracy in Switzerland is fundamentally complemented by its federal governmental structures (in German also called the Subsidiaritätsprinzip).[4][5][6][7]
Most western countries have representative systems. [15] Switzerland is a rare example of a country with instruments of direct democracy (at the levels of the municipalities, cantons, and federal state). Citizens have more power than in a representative democracy. On any political level citizens can propose changes to the constitution (popular initiative), or ask for an optional referendum to be held on any law voted by the federal, cantonal parliament and/or municipal legislative body. [16]”
Please refer to complete text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_democracy
The rules have not failed in the current economic system. COVID aside, they are doing what they are designed to do.
Back in 2016 Noam Chomsky argued that people should vote for Hillary Clinton on basis of the lesser of two evils, which struck me as a lot like – to coin a phrase – manufacturing consent. The Democratic Party is the merely one side of a coin; the other side of that coin is the Republican Party. Neither party promotes the interests and concerns of the vast majority of the people. This is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention. Both parties represent the interests finance and corporate capitalists, and they will do this regardless of who is their nominee for the presidency. Voting for either party is voting for the maintenance of the existing structure of inequality. It is, as Chomsky unintentionally revealed, voting for evil.
Anyone who votes for either of them is just complicit in maintaining a system that is quite simply evil.
I notice that the comments have quickly diverted from the subject. What Bernie Sanders should do is stand as an Independent and chose a younger female candidate as his running mate promising to only run one term.
Would he win? probably not. But he might and in any case he would provide the USA with what it most needs, a viable third party.
This is what establisment Democrats most fear.
I live in the UK and we have our own problems with the Labour Party going the same way.
destroying the Democrat party is job 1. Tell the DEM voters – vote progress or go f off.
It’s really not about the candidates at all but the human capacity to cut off their noses to spite their faces. As a long dead Roman said ‘we see the better way but choose the worse’.
Sadly, this is a mirroring of the UK and Corbyn… It is the era of career politicians ding the corporations bidding… Trump is different… he is just serving himself! But, it’s all coming to an abrupt end when enough people wake up to the reality of this :: Our Economy Is Way More Sick Than Us!
I want to put a word in for Donald Trump!
I am from the UK, but we are all at risk if a war were to start and get out of control. I noticed that in 2016 it was Hillary who explicitly stated her wish to revitalise the war in Syria (which was ignited by US meddling in the first place) and Donald Trump who wanted out. We toasted his victory with a bottle of wine on the Wednesday evening after the election was over.
As President, Trump has avoided starting any wars, which is one hell of a lot better than Obama, who started the war against Gaddafi, and the war in Syria. Obama also authorised (I assume) the meddling which led to the ousting of a democratically elected president in Ukraine, and ignited the civil war there – a potentially very dangerous act.
I followed the science of Global Warming/Climate Change, for a while, and it always seemed politicised to me. The official rise of 1 degree C in 140 years (since 1880) hardly seems significant, so I tend to support President Trump in pulling out of the Paris accords etc.
That does not mean I would not welcome other Green projects, such as getting rid of plastic pollution, but each goal must be judged on a case by case basis.
The entire game has changed. James Corbett’s grim wake-up call . . .
Trump isn’t a Republican – he was NOT a politician before his presidency!
If anything Donald was a Democrat supporter – one of these liberal New York types – so happilly derided by rednecks acroos that demented continent. A big supporter of Hillary and golfing buddy of Bill.
Trump’s job was to destroy the nominees of the Republican party and be installed as their candidate so that he would then easily lose against Hillary – by being obnoxious and populist and sexist!
It was all part of her coronation – her right, she has been an operator all her life and her marriage was of a couple of psychopaths hot housed to attain the chief executive role for the Pathocracy – she started as a Republican.
The whole pantomime was choreographed including the stalking on stage and the ‘lock her up’ shtick, probably by Bill with his mesmeric political sensibility; a lot of the potus’ tweets too, with their simplistic genius.
Unfortunately the plan didn’t work because the Dems couldn’t control their own grassroots and young activists – the leaks of the plot to steal the nomination. And because Psycho Hillary is no Bill and couldn’t campaign her way out of a wet paper bag!
She asked the mirror who the prettiest of them was?
The reply was the Donald! He couldn’t turn round and say he was only kidding and Hillary should get it could he?
So he ended up being the Chair of the Board of American Interests!
All the board positions taken by the ceo’s of the lobby finance – no need for proxies when they could get in without political experience just like their President – Tillerson ceo of Exxon Mobile at State! Hell who needs Hillary when he can drive himself. All the neocon shithead psychos from the last 40 years. Bolton.
BUT – something seems to have gone wrong in the grand setup – maybe how General Flynn was targeted immediately.
Donald maybe realised that he was expected to put new blood on his hands – start new wars. He probably realised that the Clintons weren’t as straight with him as they claimed, he probably understood that the neocons foisted upon him were the same and he probably got the gen on the fake plot of Russiagate and attacks on him personally being carried on in panic by the three lettered agencies to have him resign and let their man Pence in before it was too late to put the boots on the ground in Iran, Damascus and Ukraine – take on Russia! and incite the North Koreans causing a conflagration on that front and with the Uyghurs on the other front take in China!
And send in the troops in Venezuela!
A full on World War.
He seemed a bit shaken when he came out of the long briefing with Obama at the White House and appears to have decided that – he wouldn’t be rubber stamping the shitshows that his ‘pals’ the Clintons were deep into and he wouldn’t be blackmailed by the western security services conspiracy against him and his family – so his inauguration speech was something unexpected and ought to be watched again !
“That was some weird shit” dumb pres dubya got caught saying live, to his DS cold eyed assassin daddy president as they left the platform!
Yup – Trumps the nearest thing to an Independent President the US has had since JFK (and maybe Carter).
I’d only consider Paul and Gabbard as the only viable alternative non deepstate owned politicians independents who could be the game changers from a hundred years of FED owned and run exceptionalism.
Trump inadvertently has found himself to be in the right place at the right time – luckilly for most of us in the world.
( I don’t know whether the Clintons and Trumps are still great buddies ot he fired them!)
Fantastic. Couldn’t agree more..
New York Times
Did Bill (Clinton) tell you that you should run?” I asked.
“He didn’t say one way or the other,” Trump replied, over a plate of meatballs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/magazine/when-hillary-and-donald-were-friends.html
Donald Trump isn’t a politician. He has mostly been a Democrat during his lifetime and given more money to them.
“Until 2008, Trump Was a Big Democratic Donor
He donated more than $10,000 to Hillary Clinton between 2002 and 2007, and Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., is his top beneficiary, raking in $18,350 over the years”.
https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/articles/2016-01-14/donald-trump-donated-to-democrats-until-2008
How the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately “elevated” Donald Trump with its “pied piper” strategy
An email released by WikiLeaks shows how the Democratic Party purposefully “elevated” Trump to “leader of the pack”
“We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously,” the Clinton campaign concluded.
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strate
Trump is a fascist. Bernie recognizes that. The perceptive skills and agenda of the author, and hence this entire publication, is discounted, thereby.
Vic,
Trump is as much a fascist as Bernie is a Zionist.
Um. No.
Correct.
Glad you get it.
You know precisely what I meant. Namely, that your denial about WTF Donald Trump is and has wrought is just that — denial. The extent of mind-fuckery this nation has endured, supported by defunding of education (a decided asset for Republicans) has engendered a terrifying portion of the electorate that believes sociopaths. #Problem
Dr Shiva’s latest. On politics so sits well under this piece:
What Bernie did or didn’t do doesn’t matter one bit in this Bread and Circuses primary. After the sham of the “Impeachment” it became quite obvious that Dear Leader can do whatever he wishes and no one, DNC or RNC, is going to stop him or even try. We’re in the End Game of the plodding 30-plus year global fascist coup now. Rule of law in the US is gone; the “pandemic” is the final act and our rights and any semblance of our Republic and Constitution are crumbling before our eyes. The 2020 election was never going to mean anything (none of them do anyway–they are even less worried about hiding that fact than ever before..) The stage had been set and we’re all along for the ride our lives into the death throes of the Great and Powerful USA. It will be surprising to me if we even have an election in November. Dear Leader (Or whoever they decide it’s going to be) will just become the Supreme Ruler without any of us having a say in the matter, as usual.
The American Constitution was suspended in 1871. Every fake “election” since 1871 has intrinsically included acts of sedition or treason by those who have “won” our vote.
There are numerous pages devoted to “The Organic Act” of 1871. Persons such as Bernie Sanders fail to bring this into focus when running for political office, as any informed candidate becomes a co-conspirator in the “representative” election sham.
William Foust presenting a very interesting set of concepts regarding Law versus “legal”.
The District of Columbia Act of 1871 – William Foust
Please reclaim your agency, and vigorously …transfer it? And while you are at it: don’t forget your subjectivity, your intentionality, the cause and effect determination with your external object, your personal autonomous will, and your faculty psychology (the array of homuncular attributes you have: ordered by the universal reason of the Cartesian will you realise in *concursus Dei*). And when you have found them – and they are probably in a pile of words next to your mind, your rationality, your individual autonomy, and your radical free will – we’ll have a perfectly functional classical liberal democracy. Won’t we?
I’m actually finding this corona thing liberating. There is absolutely no reason to conform to the shitfuckerry of ridiculous beliefs we have ever again. The conceptual covidiocy that owes its allegiance only to the openly fascising and clearly metastasising stasis theory of a essentially eternal order of dumbfuckerry. No offence to erstwhile intelligent chaps like Bill who still believe in tooth faeries and agency and freedoms of will we never had. But it’s all bollocks.
Look at the papers. Look at what all those subjects exercising their radical freedoms and independent, autonomous agency in something called a civil society brought with their inalienable right to democratic agentive voting. Now do you believe me? It was all an invented inauthentic agency and ersatz freedom that only and ever hid the discipline and control in a BS behaving system …where all that political ‘agency’ was worth diddlysquat. But the illusion of it sure bought the obedience of subjects and actors and agents of their own imagination to a stasis. All this radical freedom and agency brought forth was a nasty case of bio-medical fascism. And are we still to believe the inauthentic agency of an actualised servility will bring us liberation and freedom? Not me.
Words do not mean: not singly or even in sentential combinations. The holophrastic (singular meaning) lexis is just a bunch of phonemes and graphemes …sounds or marks on a page. They mean nothing without a structure: which is ”lexico-grammatical” …which is the structural functional combination of syntax and semantics [MAK Halliday]. When you start stringing some paras together: you got some ”consubstantiality” of sense making …but it does not stand alone …it’s intertextual. Texts, essays, discourses, begin to mean because that meaning ”transacts” from other domains of other discourses. Political discourse draws heavily on its philosophical presuppositions …which do not actually appear in the text – but the meaning of the text is connoted by the meaning of other texts; which is underpinned by the connotations of the philosophical assumptions and presuppositions of certainties. All the way back to the axiomatic foundations of discourses: that need no further supporting facts. The very bedrock of metaphysical certainty.
Each relational and interdependency of meaning also has a paradigmatic contextual framework that makes sense of all that ”sense”. That paradigm is further underpinned by a core cognitive conceptual framework that underpins all discourses – the Episteme. Which takes us back in a line of flight through the political discourse of the Enlightenment; Cartesian dualism; to Aristotle, Plato and the the early metaphysicians of Miletus. No Western essentialist metaphysical intellectual tradition; no Episteme of core beliefs (ontological primitives); no consubstantiality of paradigmatic meaning; no classical liberal democratic political discourse; no transitive agency; no sense; no reference; no meaning.
It kind of all hangs together: or it is supposed to. But political non-sense manifests political non-sense. You can tell me I was talking bollocks before: but I kinda got a point now? We never had any agency outside the illusion of an imaginary metaphysical discourse. The true essentialist meaning of which is now plain to see.
When you metaphysically manifest a mind independent objective world that is always and already ”out there”: and you manifest an individuated mind ”in here” …you have to invent something that bridges the imaginary intentional gap. Let me string some lexemes together to invent a root agency that means holistically with political freedom, liberty, universal reason, fully autonomous subjectivity, intentional free will, and Classical Liberal democracy …that should keep them quiet for a few hundred years. And it did: like a charm. And still does: if we transfer our agency vigorously enough.
So when you transfer this conceptual lexical invention of the semanticised behaving order within the taxonomic lexicon or paradigmatic conceptual framework of the behaving order: what will happen? Will there be no more fascism? Or will things in the real world – repudiated in the discursive paradigmatic fancy – still be slightly worse in a few more months as we remain in a self-induced coma of agentive obedience and passivity to a rather nasty looking behaving order that is going to take away all our imaginary freedoms …to reveal the mental cage we have made for ourselves these few hundred years past?
My guess is the last one.
That’s why I can no longer hide my scorn for the inauthentic agency and vigorous transitivity of nothing to nothing …but hollow and empty sense-less words. [”On Margate Sands/ I can connect nothing/ With nothing./ The broken fingernails of dirty hands./My people humble people who expect/ Nothing.”].
We never had any real agency. We never were radically free. We believed the BS of the behaving system because it made us feel better about our obsequiousness and voluntary servitude to authoritarianism. No one wants to be politically trammeled: that is what invented agency was for. But it won’t make a flying fucks worth of difference to continue to believe. Wake up and smell the self-imposed mental slavery of the self-disciplined behaving system we consubstantiated the meaning of together. It’s real. Get used to it.
On the basis that there may yet be an ”out”: it will require a monumental overhaul of what really constitutes sense and meaning. By everyone who wants to be actually – and not just conceptually – free [Freedom is the freedom from conceptual agency].
There is no sense in the dualist discourse. There never was. There is no meaning in the concept of agency. And I am not even being radically or abstrusely Zen. Words can mean and construe reality: but not from radical duality. The Cartesian rational order is a total travesty of humanism and a mockery of what autonomy and agency could mean if and when we get rid of the shear shitfuckerry of dumb beliefs everyone takes for granted and refuses to examine. Well, look were that led? If there is an out: it is not through the re-entrance of the dualistic paradigm of intellectual subjugation and bio-medical control of life and death.
And if you think ”agency” is just a word; in a one-to-one correspondence to an exterior world; where it represents an atomistic fact literally; in a topological isomorphy (inner states represent outer realities perfectly and objectively: sharing the same categorical structure of inner and outer worlds) …enjoy your agency manifesting fascism.
That is the problem: no one can tell if my words have meaning when I challenge the habitual non-sense meaning of ”agency”. It is just some mad fucker on the internet who says that language is ideological and the holistic canonical meaning is fascism. Don’t mind me: if we all reclaim our agency vigorously enough – it will all be over soon …won’t it? 😉
Big B huh?
Yeah. That works for me.
You could try to use the language of the normally enlightened, educated common man.
Ephemeral phonophemes and blasphemous gramophones, along with their “ersatzes”, are never going to cut it with your fellow man, at least not as long as you consider only those who are emeritus professors of arcane linguistics to be your “fellow man”.
Mark Twain was a wise man, and if he could find a way to communicate in accessible English, then surely you can too. It is not necessary to demonstrate your comprehension of the entire Oxford Dictionary to make your point.
I don’t mean to be difficult or argumentative, but you make it hard for those of us who wish to follow your trains of thought.
Precisely, wardropper.
Or, to put it another way, let Orwell’s Six Rules of Good Writing be our guide.
Perhaps you miss the point: the clear, precise, and collectively meaningful use of language is the exact Cartesian *novum ordo seclorum* of constative control and world-order maintenance that we find ourselves subordinate to …precisely because we have to conform to the linguistic collectivity in order to mean. Well, it’s bollocks: words do not mean anything in the classical canonical intellectual tradition of metaphysical essentialism. Which has been heavily critiqued for the ethnocentric exceptionalist proto-fascism it is since de Saussure.
Twain lived before the linguistic turn to social semiotics. He probably thought power was located in powerful individuals: and not spread diffusely through everyday social intercourse. You cannot see how descriptive power shapes social reality: but you can see the manifested result. That is the result of clear, precise, descriptive, and representative social linguistics …racially biased authoritarianism and the apotheosis of purist logical formalist greed …euphemistically character masked as objective reason and scientific certainty. Well, it’s bollocks. And were Twain and Orwell alive: they would probably say so. Using the language as we have always done consubstatiates the order we have always had …which is plain dumbfuckerry. And it is about time more people said so …plainly, in a new post-Burkeian rhetoric of poetic configuration.
You see, linguistics moved on – the political refugia, where language goes to die as a burnt offering to the stasis of the *novum ordo seclorum* of dead linguistic metaphors. What you are both suggesting is that I conform to the old order of correspondence, representation, and logical formalist structuring of inner and outer. Where individual words have a word to world bi-directional fit …or ”picture” as the early Wittgenstein termed it. For words to pick out facts and sentences to pick out states of affairs: words must mean in isolated, objective, and completely independent correspondence between word and world. It is this logical formal objective literal relation that give words sense and meaning. There can be no polysemy (words mean different things in different contexts) or metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.
Objective meaning can have no subjective connotative construal at all. That means words exist autonomously from minds and bodies. That means meaning is floating around …”out there” …somewhere. Waiting for someone else to construct and sell back to us to internalise. Is that we are expected to conform to: a disembodied non-sensical meaningless semantics and a disembodied logical formalist structural functional social reality …with no agency or meaning?
Well, I think we have got that already. I think the lack of any real meaning, agency, or autonomy is absolutely clear and present …consubstantiated by consenting communions of inauthentic reclamations of agencies. Language – and modern cognitive linguistics – is all and only metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. And conceptual blending across domains. Read Lakoff, Johnson, Fauconnier, Turner; Rorsch; Gibbs; etc. If language is configuration and conceptual blending – and meaning is neurally embodied – external objective reality cannot exist. I repeat; it cannot exist. Read Philosophy in the Flesh. We socially construct ‘external’ reality and internalise it as objectivated. This is why the world is totally meaningless, sense-less, and openly fascising …because of the language we use and the peer policing we employ to keep it within the collectivity of consensual reason.
Well, that reason is anything but reasonable …and who knows which way it will turn. It is a bit late to change the course of social realities by changing the discourse …as Debord tried to. I can only reclaim my own limited agency from the pseudo-sentences of non-sense and constative control descriptions of fascising and metastasising social realities we consubstantiated by years of consent to the constitutive order of a parallel semanticised pseudoworld.
It’s the language – or ”languaging” …which is the consensual domain of coordinated meaningful complex adaptive behaviours (or merely linguistic but paralinguistic) which has ordered our behaviour in subordination to authoritarianism. Everyone can get that much. To go further: you’ll have to do your own research …if you so desire. Language does not mean by a one-to-one correspondence to an exterior reality: it generates and socially constructs an externalised reality as an empowerment of semantic dictators …who control the descriptions of a lawful objectivated exterior world through scientific principles …then feed it back to us to internalise. I can’t be clearer than that.
Great response BigB, that deserves an example (of which we both have so many, ’tis hard to know where to start demonstrating)… so, let’s say in the interests of
“Our National Security”
Because we must surely understand that anti-fracking dumbfuckery is a danger to us all 😉 🙂 (I chose fracking for financial reasoning, especially right NOW 🙂 as recipient of briefs from ex-B.P. CEO, personally, not just about HAARP, logic dictated, many moons ago)
http://spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/climate/item/6006-why-are-counter-terrorism-police-still-spying-on-the-anti-fracking-movement
Hello BigB: Your use of language is exemplary, and is understandable by anyone who takes the time to grasp true language and definition versus popular slang and euphemism…
I once considered myself a poet. As time went on, I boiled concepts down to the bare bone…
“Man joined the eternal abyss
When food became a commodity”
– Paul Vonharnish –
January 2, 2020
Fine words, Paul: may I add,
“… & the weather became a force multiplier,
with derivative fund investment planning”
Hello Tim Jenkins and interested readers: As Tim alludes, Geoengineering (manipulation of weather) is indeed a force multiplier. Weather all over the planet is being utilized as a weapon against those who refuse to kowtow to “New World” banksters and puppet politicians.
I have too many pages to list. Start here: Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) and Climate Change
The manipulation of climate for military use
By Prof Michel Chossudovsky
Global Research, November 12, 2013
Originally published December 5, 2009
https://www.globalresearch.ca/environmental-modification-techniques-enmod-and-climate-change/16413
Also this: GeoengineeringWatch.org http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/
🙂
Bernie, having a major platform, could have done good by speaking out against the ongoing Mass-Hysteria Pandemic. I am sure there are people in high positions who know how wrong this is, how crazy and irrational the Corona Panic is, the big mistake of mass shutdowns and empowering close-it-all-down wackos and extremist Doomers. But most lack the courage to speak out.
Bernie already knew he wasn’t going to win the nomination and he could’ve done a great service by speaking out against the shutdowns and calling for a swift re-opening. He didn’t. He failed.
I used to support Bernie Sanders but woke up and realize he was just a liar and a crook just like the rest of the Democratic Party. They truly are a branch of Organized Crime. So my position is to Vote for Donald Trump and all Republicans because I am sick of getting lied to and treated like dirt. I was a like long Democrat and am now 67 years old. I will never vote for another Democrat again. So don’t not vote. Vote for “The Donald” because each and every Democratic Politician is a Criminal. If you don’t agree, prove me wrong with facts not ephemeral BS.
Perhaps not so much a liar as a more shallow person than most of us thought. For some misguided people, the urge to be in the political limelight is remarkably strong, especially considering the wretched, superficial world you are condemned to live in if that urge brings you success. I have heard people say, “But somebody has to govern the nation,” as if letting just anybody do it was bound to be better than waiting for someone actually qualified to do so. But the current political environment in Washington could not possibly allow a decent human being to become President, because a decent human being would constantly, and intensely, irritate all the wealthy lobbyists whom he needs to support his campaign. It’s a vicious circle which could only be broken by putting a very large spanner in the works – a positively cosmic one.
Interesting times…
And that is the problem, “perhaps not so much a liar “. Trump ,the man who knows great words, the best words, should be called out for all his lies. He is not mistaken,or misinformed, or misquoted ,he just chooses to lie all the time.
And our stable, genius leader never lies ?
Same can be said of the RNC.
USA has only two major political parties, both are controlled by Corporate donors and ultra wealthy individual donors.
The two parties take turns at supplying the figurehead in the Oval Office.
If Donald Trump was an outsider, why was he not marginalized by the RNC, as was Dr. Ron Paul in 2012? Even the mainstream media (which appears to be mostly anti RNC) participated in that marginalization of Dr. Ron Paul.
Tulsi Gabbard received the same silent treatment in 2020.
But Trump did not in 2016.
Why is that?
Republicans never regard one of their own as “an outsider”. Ron Paul was an outsider because he considered himself to be an Independent, rather than a Republican, and was very outspoken in his opposition to endless, ruinously expensive wars. Republicans, like our Conservatives, have supported war for a long time now, because they seriously believe that only war can enhance a nation’s “greatness”…
The Democrats have now abandoned all pretence of being even slightly less keen on war than the Republicans, but they still live with the hilarious reputation of being “more left wing”, which, for far too many Americans, means practically the same thing as “communist” – that being the purely imagined horror of their worst nightmares.
There’s nothing like vaudeville.
Boynie was never more than controlled opposition.
Reported US CV cases now exceed half a million.
We can only hope that the Orange Baboon himself and all his Zionist goon handlers, Saban, Singer, Adelson and all the rest do us all a favour by getting a good dose and croaking.
Wouldn’t change the political circus in any way, just make the air smell a bit sweeter.
Fuck the Democrats. They are the new fascisits. My hard core Dem friends are far worse than Trump supporters in terms of agreeing to have their rights completely stripped away. It’s unbelievable that they would rather have a mandatory ID/vaccine, border checks, security checks, lockdowns, police state, yada-yada, just to see Trump removed. It may be a ruse, but Trump is doing far more to tear into WHO, Gates, and the fraud Fauci than anyone else on the big stage. I hesitate to say it; this whole pandemic farce has made me an NRA supporter overnight.
For the record I voted for Jill Stein last election, but I was a Bernie supporter.
Absolutely – but take it easy – your NRA support will avail you naught. The World Health Organization’s guns are overwhelmingly bigger…
On the other hand, I suppose we might take a few of them down with us…
Well, livingusb, this is about freedom v slavery. The choice is clear. I’m with the preppers and the “deplorables” heading for the hills. And I’m a dark-skinned South Asian guy, very liberal in my politics but light years from the rancid, identity-obsessed Warren-Clinton-Obama mafia.
In the novel “1984,” BETRAYAL is the fundamental theme explaining how authoritarian societies deploy perfidy to psychologically manipulate the fearful and ignorant. A repressive culture encourages everyone to betray each other. This destroys trust heightens alienation and fear. In such an environment an obedient population knows any act of betrayal will be fiercely punished.
Against the backdrop of the novel “1984” and the theme of “betrayal” one can better understand the machinations of the corrupt Democratic Party. In fact, to really understand the American political system it’s imperative to be mindful that the corrupt political duopoly is really a corrupt political “monopoly” with slight variations. Both are right-wing neoliberal imperialist parties.
Any working-class, working-poor, or debt ridden student believing that genuine change can occur hanging onto the coattails of fraudulent political politicians is like partaking in a whirling dervish dance spinning in circles but never going anywhere.
History should tell the working-class that all political campaign promises, especially those made to the “down-and-out” will be immediately abandoned once the political snake slithers into office. Party bosses, know the public is becoming wise to all the insidious shenanigans and are choosing to stay home rather than vote.
Enter Bernie Sanders who 2016 was a bit of a surprise to those in power, but in 2020 is usefully deployed as a Democratic pied piper.
The relentless attacks over the last three years against the Orangeman allowed the public to forget that the Obama/Biden administration was a reactionary pile of crap “betraying” every campaign promise.
Here’s just a few highlights:
Obama relentingly attacked the press and whistleblowers. The Committee to Protect Journalists, said of Obama’s media attacks, “In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press.”
Obama Nominated John Brennan as CIA director who under oath lied to the public about mass surveillance practices.
Obama’s bailout during the 2008 financial crisis laid the groundwork for the 2020 crash. Obama/Biden oversaw the transfer of trillions to the most wealthiest and none of the financial crooks were ever prosecuted. The economic devastation resulted in miserly for millions.
Obama/Biden heightened the war in Afghanistan and expanded two wars into seven. More than 500,000 were slaughtered in Syria, more than 10,000 in Libya, tens of thousands in Yemen, and more than 10,000 in Ukraine. And if the slaughter in Eastern Europe was not enough Biden, Obama’s point man, seized the moment to make sweetheart multi-million dollar deals for his son Hunter.
CIA Obama/Biden let the intelligence agencies run the White House. No one was ever held responsible for torture In fact, Obama allowed the CIA to interfere with the Senate investigations into torture.
On basic social reforms like healthcare Obama/Biden were a total failure. The Affordable Care Act was written by the healthcare insurance lobbyists. The premiums are exorbitant and the deductibles are outrageous.
These are just a few highlights of an administration promising “hope and change,” but substituted those promises with unemployment and eviction.
If we focus specifically on Biden’s political career we’ll totally understand why sellout Obama chose “the snake” to be his running-mate. During Biden’s 40 year political career every reactionary piece of legislation was promoted to secure a sweetheart deal for either his brother or son. Biden’s vote for the Iraq war demonstrates the actions of a bloodthirsty creature who convinced other Democrats to support the preemptive attack of Iraq. Biden’s payoff was a multi-million dollar government construction contract for his brother in Iraq. How much is genocide worth. I’ll answer that–trillions……
The insidious wheelings and dealings of the corrupt political duopoly is the backdrop for the Sanders campaign which promised so much. However, The purpose of Bernie’s candidacy was NEVER to win the nomination, but to gather together millions of voters who might never vote for the Democratic Party’s “chosen” nominee. It should be mentioned, that I supported Bernie, and was highly criticized for doing so by the Left, and excoriated regularly on WSWS before they shadowbanned me (so much for Marxist freedom of expression ).
I supported Bernie, because his social justice platform was a vehicle to raise political consciousness. I did say from the start, that when Bernie is cheated out of the nomination voters should stay home or vote Third Party.
The following comment was posted approximately a month ago after a Democratic Primary Debate, It was never seen since it was posted on WSWS and at that point I was already shadowbanned:
Apprehensive Bernie refuses to fight back. Sanders, never called Biden a liar, crook, and war criminal. Mainstream media news outlets glossed over Biden’s untruths by mocking Bernie who cited Biden’s anti-working-class legislative history.
Bernie neglected to point out that every piece of anti-working-class legislation promoted by Biden was a payoff for a lucrative deal for his brother or son. In the case of Iraq, Biden’s brother received a multi-million dollar construction contract to rebuild it. First you advocate for the destruction, devastation, and genocide of a country and its population, and then you secure a government contract for your brother to rebuild it. Sounds like a war criminal to me.
Bernie never mentioned that the bankruptcy bill Biden pushed to screw over the working-class secured a high-paying job at a bank for his son Hunter. And let’s not forget Ukraine and Burismo–more than 10,000 died in a 2014 CIA coup, but for Biden it became another opportunity to suck out millions for his son.
Bernie, never mentioned any of this as he stood there shaking his head from the podium. And since Bernie fully embraced Russiagate, he foolishly backed away from criticizing Bidens warmongering.
Biden, arrogantly smirked and told Bernie the large turnout at the primaries were for “him.” Cowardly lion Bernie, didn’t shout back and say the primaries were rigged.
Bernie should’ve said–let me tell you how it was done: In Iowa a Shadow app was deployed to miscalculate the votes and to thwart the campaign’s momentum; in Texas massive voter suppression was implemented by closing numerous polling centers in working-class pro-Sanders communities; in California ballots are still being counted, but more than 700,000 were already discarded. Bernie should have continued by saying what also needs to be discussed is the collusion which occurred within the DNC when Obama told Buttigieg and Klobuchar to drop out, but told Warren to “stay in”causing a loss in Massachusetts and Minnesota.
And of course, let’s not forget sellout Clyburn (part of the Clinton/Obama ghoul gang) who was tempted to endorse Bloomberg, but in the end rallied all other black sellouts persuading their downtrodden black constituency to vote for racist Biden. And most importantly, we can’t overlook the power of the state-run mainstream media news propaganda machine. This slimy machine creates false narratives and pounds them into the viewers psyche, in the same way they demonize foreign leaders prior to every regime change war.
Cowardly Bernie, is not brave enough to say the collusion against his campaign by the national security state was greater than anything which supposedly was done by the Russians in 2016. Bernie, could not say this since he fully accepted and promoted the concocted Russiagate narrative.
So the cowardly lion Bernie, stood behind the podium shaking his head and saying he would “unify” behind a liar, war criminal, and thief.
POSTED AS A GENERIC REPLY TO VOTING SKEPTICS BELOW, AND ALL THOSE WHO TELLINGLY CALL SANDERS “COWARDLY LION” “SHEEP DOG” “PIED PIPER” AND OTHERS. I CALL HIM, HAVING FIRST RECEIVED FUNDING REQUESTS FROM HIM IN EARLY 1980s, ETC., A “STALKING HORSE” WITH SOME HISTORY OF MY OWN – MEMOS FROM NATIONAL AND INTENSE (NEAR DEATH) EXPERIENCES IN “VOTING REFORM” AND PUBLISHING, RADIO INTERVIEWS, ARMED COMBAT (THEIRS, WITH ME AS BULLSEYE) ET AL. AND INTER ALIA:
SO right you are. Voting was rendered irrelevant completely by HAVA (“Help” America Vote Act) about 15 years ago.
(The congressional head of that charade, Bob Ney, resigned during the Abramoff scandals, of which he was a sleazy part, and later asked forgiveness for his epic alcoholism.)
Electronic voting ~almost 100% of what’s done now, tabulated all by private companies who refuse to allow public oversight on the deeply absurdist “Alice in Wonderland” grounds that since it’s their proprietary software it’s none of the public’s “business” (!) ~ is simply an embedded systems, completely, now of fabricating ~actually pre-fabricating~ whatever vote results “you” (they) want. While “all” that is being done behind closed doors, the RMM (Rich Man’s Media: Mass Media BY the plutocrats, OF the plutocrats, and -especially- FOR the plutocrats) has made sure that ALL public is kept “entertained” by a merciless magic show “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (which, as Shakespeare implied when he wrote those words, is kind of suggestive of non-spiritual life “down here” in general, and increasingly specific, though ever acceleratedly more so now by the (DARPA-created-and-DEEPLY-embedded) internet/technology capacity of the rich few to hold great sway over the many ~sort of like having a weapon at the top of a hill, say, a machine gun, that gives you daunting emprise and command over all those below).
The entire voting architecture is an ongoing redundant corruption throughout. Part of the prank is that it keeps some resemblance to what’s going on above those fortified bunkers, on the ground we peasants share, by a show of sounding “public opinion” and “focus groups” and “polls” and all the rest of that sad little homeboy ambience of Carnaval that gives most of “the people” the belief that something real is happening.
Like a loaf of cheap bread that is so full of “preservatives” that it may have been made on the moon, and you wouldn’t know, voting in America, and by multi-national export now in most of the world, has become so off the hook of reality, or legality, that we see results like Donald Trump or Schwarzenegger, where very very occult processes (Mafia-based) are conjured and realized to shoehorn those “types” into power.
To be able to say things like this, I paid some quantifiable dues in the “Election Integrity” movement (itself even then nearly a free-for-all of spooks) over the last 20 years to really grasp how rotten voting has become.
Lynn Landes was one of the last few clean avatars of our many wars to save voting, and I had some correspondence and exchanges with her when we watched her court battle as it went to the U.S. Supreme Court, having begun from her base in Philadelphia, to challenge machine voting of any kind. She modeled her argument on the constitutional framing of the “one man, one vote” clause, arguing that machines are part of a deconstructionist process.
That no doubt would appeal to the current climate of that sad little Court, which revels in so many democracy-insulting “concepts” that it can squeeze into it’s bogus readings of “strict constructionism” as championed by that avatar of the same, Antonin Scalia, whose roots ran deep in Sicilian culture?
It was, in fact, that sad little homeboy “Nino” Scalia who dismissed her case, summarily, for “lack of standing” – his one-size-fits-all baseball cap of Supreme Court hardball when they want to pitch “up and inside” ~out of the strike zone of the law~ and thus bean any decent opponent. Any plausible patriot. So unlike their sorry black~robed rear ends.
I wrote Landes after the case reached that über-Sicilian deadend of judicial Omertà (apologies to the vast majority of decent Sicilians), suggesting that SCOTUS had set her up with certain unacceptable aspects, to them, of legal reasoning. And she lamented that they had heard all kinds of other similar cases, much weaker than hers in those respects. I concurred, but that was the last we wrote. And the last I heard of that noble cause. 2006 or so.
I spoke on the phone about seven years later, in 2013, with Jim Hogue in VT, he had hosted both of us (Landes/me) at different times, separately, on his radio show, and he had also shepherded legislation in Vermont that was the first in the U.S. to ban touch screen machines, early 2000s, such as have been mocked so riotously in “Simpsons” episodes. We had spoken several times about the case. He had even asked me in ’06 to send amicus curiae arguments for her brief, when it was on the threshold of SCOTUS ~ out of my wheelhouse of expertise, but still within the range of logical and elenctic pondering, which was also apparently what Hogue summoned when he got Vermont to ban touch screens “early in the game” (he had told me when I offered kudos in 2004 as having championed Landes’ causes,
and got them SO much farther than anyone else, that , “Yeah, but she’s still upset with me that I didn’t package it to ban ALL voting machines.” And rightly so. Voting machines are, categorically, nothing more than Trojan Horses for all and every “bad actor” trying to undermine -destroy- democracy.
When Hogue and I last spoke in 2013, we had both then, tête-à-tête, mumbled that our voting-reform efforts had pretty much been rendered de-activated activism, since the hacktivists had turned voting so ubiquitously into “ultra-organized crime”.
Gandhi had said famously that when a government has become nothing more than organized crime it is the citizen’s sacred duty to disobey it.
And so, this week, I have been unmasked. Seriously, when I went out last night maskless to do my shopping, actually touching things, I got a lot of angry looks from tough guys in masks. Of course, that lost some of the fearsomeness, since you could only see their EYES. The young cashier wasn’t wearing one, though, still a free man, he had it around his neck. When I asked him as I walked away, “What’s your guess, “Global Hoax”? , he wearily answered, “I don’t know what to think.”
I said, “That’s a start.” And good enough. I suggested it is the global version of THE ENRON 2000 ROLLING BLACKOUTS.
And other such (MKULTRA-fied) scams.
He wanly nodded. People are catching on here. Like one memorable and darling young Mexican (“Indiana”) lady told me a couple years ago, “I think a lot of people get what’s going on. They just don’t know what to do.”
But we can be confident there’s a solution. Only, God knows what it is.
~Jaw Nervin’
~~~~~~
One footnote to Vermont that applies serendipitously to the above, and Bernie Sanders: Hogue had been at the time, maybe still is, the President of The Second Vermont Republic. Vermont was the last sovereign republic, its own country, to join the other original colonies as “United States” (I consider that latter entity mostly a business fiction, as USA, INC, but I digress).
So the Second Vermont Republic, ergo, are a very substantial number of Vermonters who want to secede from the U.S. In fact, Hogue first contacted me in 2004 by email, with a note: “Secede! And be my radio guest”. An offer I found hard to refuse. He had, earlier that year, been the first to interview Sibel Edmonds and publish the transcript at the mysterious “Baltimore Chronicle” which I was startled to see a year later as the banner in an X FILES Episode, with the headline “FBI Agent Commits Suicide”. Well, the BC is in the backdoor of Quantico and Fox Mulder, Special Agent FBI. (As was Sibel, come to think of it.)
Hogue approached Sanders in early 2000s, after 9/12 ~ at a 4th of July rally when Hogue rides on horseback no less, dressed in colonist Minuteman garb, as patriot Ethan Hale from 1700s days of yore, no less ~ and asked Bernie some pointed questions, off the record, about the WTC collapses and wanted his take on it. (This was actually the beginning of the Hogue show at WGDR.org called “The House at Pooh Corner” based in his interest about ,9/12 -one which I am still unable to deeply vet -very real and honest? or another inspiring panel in a House of Mirrors? ~ too deep a rabbit hole for me to say. Hogue has been a regular guest speaker at the 9/11 Truth Conferences in Septembers, NYC. Like John Judge: legend or fact, hard to completely discern. But Hogue contributes a whole lot of info and pointed questioning, as did the late John Judge, at the very least. How much of all of it can WE truly vet though, the omnipresent burning question….)
He asked for Bernie’s input on 9/11, and the anomalies in the record, early in the game, and Hogue, a stage actor and musician (I note that the author above includes in his resumé “musician”, as I also do, as AFM, local 4 past member, pianist and once chorister with Cleveland Orchestra ~ maybe we should start a rock power trio).
Hogue did a nice voice actors take on Bernie squirming visibly, when he asked Sanders the touchy 9/11 questions, his voice range going up not quite an octave, and BS’ politely declining to respond. And then disappearing.
I first came across Sanders out here in CA when we frequently got mailers from him, from the early 1980s and on and on, asking for donations. We were mostly of the thought that he was too vanilla to give him a strong ($ -etc.) response.
Unlike another in the Senate, our hero Paul WELLSTONE, who we supported, sent cash money, and even wrote in Minnesota (whence my family had emigrated)
I was shocked one day checking email to find he had sent me a very moving and noble reply of thanks. I thought it was an auto-response, when I first saw the heading and photo, but no, it was personal.
That was just weeks before he was (clearly) assassinated. Like Kobe, in a crash that took out some of his family. Like Mel Carnahan, not so long after WELLSTONE.
Sometimes I think that said business fiction, dba USA, INC. stands for, like Murder Incorporated, “The Uniformed States of Assassinations”.
But maybe that’s just me. I am not “That Masked Man, from those thrilling days of yesteryear. The Lone Ranger…”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Voting is fairly easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”
~Howard Zinn
(that quote is 90% + verbatim lol)
[Editor’s NB: Carnahan died in a plane crash just days before the 2002 “election”. He was running against John Ashcroft, soon to be appointed AG by the infamousvW, who presided over 9/11 and the gag order of Sibel Edmonds, interviewed seminally first by Jim Hogue, which led to her high profile and appearance on CBS “Sixty Minute”. She had been fired for trumped up charges by Robert Mueller, when then head of FBI.
The bottom line, in effectiveness and sincerity in the Democratic Party:
Wellstone: Assassinated
Bernie Sanders: Still alive
Not that I’m encouraging Sanders to get himself shot, I’ve always loved so many of his ideas.
But he is simply a useful tool of the Reich (and its “right”).
I tell people Sanders is just a (willing, knowing) Stalking 🏇 Horse of the Enemy.
What else?
What. Else.
And as knowledgeable as the writer of the above article may sound, why does he not know that relevant fact?
For real?
This might have been one of the reasons Wellstone was knocked off by the Cheney ghoul crowd. Democrats held just a one seat edge over the Republicans in the Senate. Wellstone’s death opened the way for the most hideous reactionary legislation to be passed.
“U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, DFL-Minn., spoke out on the floor of the U.S. Senate Thursday against unilateral U.S. action against Iraq. Wellstone says he will vote “no” on the use-of-force resolution the White House is requesting. Republican leaders say it’s a dangerous vote for Wellstone, who’s in a tough re-election race with Republican Norm Coleman. Coleman supports the White House.
Wellstone has been saying for weeks the U.S. should not take action against Iraq alone. In deciding to vote against the resolution, Wellstone places himself, once again, in the minority in Congress.”
Absolument sans doute, Charlotte, notre dame des ruses.
Brilliant post, Charlotte. I only wish it could be read by some on the Australian soft ‘left’ who insist that Biden is on the ‘progressive’ side of politics.
Sadly, there are echoes of Corbyn in Sanders’ failure to stand up to his traducers and call out their villainies.
Sanders has ALWAYS been “controlled opposition”. How meaningful is “well-meaning” when a whole political lifetime? He simply takes scraps from the table of the hideous powers that be, who have been entrenched here without much more rights than usurpers’ rights. Which is not very much rights, or right, just aleays here on the farther and farther right.
Self-endowed right is almost all self-righteousness, and Reinhold Niebuhr, a huger influence on MLK, practically, than Gandhi (according to MLK) said that self-righteousness is always the fruit of shallow moral judgements.
Hello Charlotte Russe: Right on! Most civilians know their political systems are rotten, yet few bother to rise to the occasion. They’re not hungry and homeless… yet…
22 Signs That Voter Fraud Is Wildly Out Of Control And The Election Was A Sham
November 13, 2012 by Michael Snyder
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/22-signs-that-voter-fraud-is-wildly-out-of-control-and-the-election-was-a-sham
Here’s a video you might find informative:
But that’s not what sheepdogs do, and Bernie is just a sheepdog. Good riddance! (Hard to believe I was once interested in Bernie … four long years ago.)
That is the point. Bernie was never trying to win.
The very last vestige of “American democracy” died on November 22, 1963. Sure, the interred corpse twitched a bit a few years later when in 1968 Bobby ran and was poised to become the Democratic Party nominee. Just in the nick of time Bobby was assassinated by an apparently semi-comatose Sirhan Sirhan. Did I mention – just in the nick of time – talk about a “lucky coincidence” smiling on the MIC yet again. Twice in the span of five years no less. Well, ok, four times if you count Malcolm and Martin. All “assassinated” within five years of each other. “Only in America” – as we like to say.
Though never closer than 4 feet away and in front of Bobby, Sirhan supposedly managed to fire the fatal shot at point blank range from only 1.5 inches away (complete with powder burns) – but somehow into the “back” of Bobby’s skull behind his right ear – per the official autopsy report. Apparently yet again a second “magic bullet” had materialized – and just in the nick of time.
Today what we are witness to here in America is what might be best described as some version of a walking dead sort of – “zombie democracy.” It appears like clockwork every four years, but otherwise you’d never know it existed. Like other – “zombies”- it sort or “looks like” the real thing, but the pungent stench it emits gives away the truth of the matter. It is dead, dead, dead, and no amount of gangrenous – “hopey changey” – “yes we can” – “we are the revolution” – rhetoric can ever bring it back to life again.
Trump’s similarity to Bernie was the anti-war stuff he was saying, which compared favorably to Hillary Clinton’s stupid and dangerous vows to invade Syria and Russia. However, Trump hasn’t withdrawn from anywhere, and his assassination of General Soleimani was beyond the pale, showing him not just to be a warmonger, but a common criminal. So I’ll be checking out the third party candidates this time around.
How many thousands of Iranians, Venezuelans and Syrians have died as a direct result of US economic terrorism on his watch?
With the mass graves now being dug in New York, Americans are at long last getting a richly deserved and long overdue small taste of the misery they have inflicted on so many for so long.
What goes around, comes around.
New York is the dark heart of the Evil Empire.
Couldn’t happen to nicer people.
Voting in the United States isn’t about “democracy”—it’s about perpetuating the illusion of democracy. The voting ritual serves to disguise the symptoms. The patient is gasping for air. A face lift won’t help. In today’s US, especially at the national level, elections are worse than worthless — they simply perpetuate illusions and siphon precious valuable political energy into this destructive system. They are degrading and repulsive exercises in Madison Avenue PR techniques, where “the truth” is off limits from the get-go. Effort should be directed not at participating in this system, but at bringing it down, exposing its corrupt essence and building genuinely constructive alternatives.
You can’t effect change through the highly controlled and managed bourgeois electoral system. The capitalist class, thru both mainstream parties and the media, ensure that no significant changes to the system will ever occur through this mechanism- it’s designed for the exact opposite. The collapsing capitalist system will no longer allow even minor revisions to the system such as those previously tried and overturned.
As for the Democrats it is their central function to always be dangling before the people’s noses vague pseudo-hints of possible change, so as to keep them from bolting from bourgeois politics altogether. It is the Democrats’ intention to never deliver meaningful change, but rather to keep dangling hints of it alluringly forever. This produces control — a populace habituated to remain safely within the lines required by ruling class interests.
And as for Sanders his job, as we witnessed in 2016, is not to get elected. His job is to channel those who were left disaffected and frustrated after nearly eight years of Obama’s service to the capitalist robber barons BACK into the fold of the Democratic Party. The “realism” of those who espouse the belief that we must attempt such a proven failure yet again is little more than a defense of suicidal madness on a mass scale, rooted in a failure to conceive of a better or different world. As we have seen through the years the madness of “lesser evil voting” is nothing more than a defensive action that necessarily loses ground politically because it institutionalizes and normalizes the evils which were once objectionable.
Precisely, Maxwell. One sees the same caricature of democracy in almost all the capitalist countries with two-party political systems.
What, I wonder, can one say about the role of democracy in the UK that has, let’s say, a 3-party system, although the exact composition has varied, if we just consider the late 20th century and 21st century.
If we just consider for a moment the 2nd half of the 20th century, the once powerful Liberal Party acted as a kind of safety valve for Tory voters wanting to express a protest, but who could not bring themselves to vote Labour. Early 20th century Liberal politicians had been quite radical (albeit coming largely from the upper classes), and the most radical went over to Labour, leaving the Liberal Party somewhat high and dry, and seeking a role, which it never quite found, except as a party of protest.
When right-wing/centrist Labour MPs split to form the SDP in 1981, we became briefly a 4 party system. The SDP hoped to replace Labour, but that never happened, and eventually, they merged with the Liberals to become the Liberal Democrats. The latter have had periods of national success (and have always been popular at local level), and for a while, it looked like they might succeed where the SDP failed, and replace Labour, but they blew it by going into coalition with the Tories in 2010, and in the 2015 were devastated, and have never really recovered, to date.
The Green Party have one MP, but in spite of advances at local level, don’t seem to have come close to making any kind of national breakthrough. Perhaps they are victims of their own success. Having successfully sold their climate alarmism story to the other main parties and the populace at large, on the face of it, what need is there any more of a Green Party? I actually say that with sadness, as a former GP sympathiser. There used to be a lot more to the GP than the climate story, but they have allowed their obsession with climate alarmism to overshadow everything else, and as I dismiss the alarmism (although not the climate) just as equally as I dismiss the covid-19 alarmism, then I have had to part company with the GP.
I might have had hopes for the Labour Party had they managed to find a new leader who was a younger, more politically agile (possibly more intelligent) version of Jeremy (Jessica Corbyn perhaps?), who appealed to “Middle England” without selling out, but instead, we have got “Sir” Keir, and apparently Blairism/NewLabour 2.0.
So, is the UK’s 3-ish party system fundamentally different to the USA’s 2-party system? We know that the US Dems are really little different to the Republicans in practice. But even in the 1960s, people were beginning to say that the (then) modern Labour Party was little different to the Tories: they had become a party of managers, that is to say, they were just going to manage capitalism a bit better than the Tories; they certainly weren’t going to do anything radical to it.
With hindsight, I don’t think that was quite true. For example there was still a lot of trade union influence (played up by the right-wing press to look like something evil, of course). In many ways, I think Wilson was an admirable politician, and had he won in 1970 instead of Heath, then UK history might be very different. He was never going to bring about the Promised Land of true socialism, but I think he could have allowed capitalism to evolve into something that worked a lot better for most people, much as Corbyn might have done (but Corbyn was nowhere near as canny as Wilson, and might not have pulled it off).
We know that capital buys political influence in the USA. It is in your face and inescapable. In the UK, at least in the past, this was also true, but done more subtly, although it is much more brazen now.
But whether you believe in the left-right political model or not, we still have, and will always have to some extent, the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the getting-poorer, the 1% and the 99% or the 5% and the 95%, however you want to express it. We know who the Tories represent. And we used to know who the Labour Party represented, and whom it still claims to represent. So what role does the 3rd (or 4th) party play? Are the small parties simply a way of helping to siphon off anti-Tory (anti-capital) votes, and guarantee Tory (capital) victory?
That is often the way it has seemed to work, especially when the SDP broke away from Labour, and guaranteed Thatcher a win in the 1983 general election.
And that’s the way things were going when “Change UK” (or whatever they were called; SDP 2.0 perhaps) detached itself as the tumour that had been festering within the rotting guts of the right wing of the Labour Party. They imploded in the election which they didn’t manage to forestall, but we will have to wait and see what happens in a post-Brexit (if there will be a Brexit – still far from certain), post-covid-19 world (if there will be a post-covid-19 world….. I think the powers that be will keep the fear of covid-19 going long long after it disappears (if it ever existed), just as Snowball was forever vilified in Animal Farm, and just as Big Brother’s rival Emmanuel Goldstein is forever reviled in 1984).
What do you mean?
You can have a dogshit sandwich or a catshit sandwich, and both of them kosher.
What more do you want?
Some people are never satisfied.
How the blazes did the universal epithet ‘antisemite’ appear in this, otherwise cogent, diatribe? The first thing for the Bernouts to realise is that ‘Boynie’ is a fraud, as you would expect. His one job in the political pantomime was to lead the Leftist and young and working-class suckers into the desert, pretending to be Moses, then leave them there to die. He put up even less of a fight this time, as the nomination was stolen, than he did in 2016, when it was stolen then. ‘Fool me once.. ‘.
Isn’t the question as to who is going to be put forward as Bidens’ potential VP?
It’s glaringly obvious to the vast majority of people that Biden has memory problems – not related to boasting in the past I mean real problems with brain functions.
Reagan could bluff his way through it due to being an actor but he was nowhere near Bidens’ level.
Now if Biden was an animal this would be judged as cruelty ( basically using a baffled old mans’ lack of cognisance to benefit AN Other ) yet in the weird and wonderful world of politics it’s OK.
If there is one thing – ” Joe is a good friend of mine ” – Bernie should say ( because he is a ” good friend “)
is that Biden should not be manipulated by a cynical group of DNC exploiters for any purpose – never mind political purposes.
I’m no great admirer of Biden and certainly not of Trump but this is all politics of the lowest of the low.
Barrel scraping.
Watch who the potential VP is and wait for the moves if Biden wins.
I don’t think he will but the cynics will have back up just in case.
It will be Kamala Harris, Steve Mnuchin’s protector, and the harasser of the underclass.
Isn’t that Kabbala Haaretz?
In a mess like today’s Washington, it really doesn’t matter a damn who becomes V.P.
When the world is finally screwed into a cosmic grave, nobody is going to be wondering what the V.P.’s part in it was.
I’ll vote Green again. I would like to see the Greens get 3 or 4% in national elections.
Vote green – well ok….but why, you can just – be green, like you can just be kind to people, not greedy or hateful, no interest in making war, not controlled by a machine or feel duped by a sham, be a person, not a number or a slave to debt – eat food that hasn’t had it’s DNA fooled with etc etc….and foremost – whoever is keeping the books, lives exactly by those same simple rules as we do – But to fight for them, divide ourselves for them – Vote for them even – Ha…. no thankyou, life isn’t that complicated – time we remembered it, and reminded “them” of it.
I’m the anti-war left. I wasn’t a fan of bernie I thought I would give a shoot. I use to grow all my on veggies but do health issues wasn’t able the last few years but will start again this spring.I don’t own a home but have rent the same home on a farm in Calif. for over 40yrs. I have the greatest landlords ever. I live on small pension and max SS. I drive a small Ford Ranger about once week to town 10 miles away. I don’t have cable or anything like that. My life is very simple and I like it that way. Cheers
jo6
sounds good….seems you kept it simple – supporting the system to a mimimum, but (imo) the strongest support they can get, is by the Vote….it matters not who for, They Win – because the Vote mandates the System, just as long as the people sanction it.
Be well.
Frankly, I think that even if nobody voted at all, the media would still be quite happy to tell us by how many millions their favoured candidate won.
Voting machines, or no voting machines, the quip attributed to Napoleon, Stalin and others applies perfectly: “It’s not the votes that count; it’s who counts the votes”.
Very true
Grow up. Don’t vote for anybody.
Root-toodleoo-dootle-oodle-oodle
Until Americans acknowledge that much of U.S. politics is constructed as a clown show, there can be no freedom. The political system laughs in your face. The balloons and the bunting and the bawdy British songs represented as American heritage is the proof. The Star Spangled Banner is a pub brawl. It’s a drinking society song. Even if it was not British it would be the equivalent of raising the Skull and Bones ass wipe as the national flag. How do you live with this?
How do you live with this?
Exactly the same as Brits live with Thatcher, Blair, May and Boris – all figureheads on a hole-ridden ship sinking into the same reeking ocean of corporate filth as the USA.
If Bernie now asks his supporters to vote Biden, the answer will mostly be NO and a Trump victory is guaranteed. But we assume the Democratic party are unhappy with Trump when for the most part they are not, they are passing all his bills without objection, including a massive 6 trillion bailout for large corporations and infinite QE for the banks, what is there not to like for the Democratic elite? Their only problem is they can’t really run Biden because he is quickly becoming obviously senile, they will need another candidate for the race, anyone but Bernie will do.
As the late great George Carlin said, “there’s one giant party and you ain’t invited.”
Bernie has already virtually done that (endorsed Biden). I hereby urge the Green Party to nominate Sanders without his approval. He’s the only prominent person whom they might nominate who might actually win the Presidency. He doesn’t need the DNC. But he can’t afford to alienate the millions of Democratic voters who are suckers of the DNC (i.e., of the billionaires who keep it going). He doesn’t need those billionaires, but he can’t afford to alienate the voters whose minds they control. He needs his name to be on the ballot in all or almost all of the 50 states. That’s all. It’s up to the Green Party to do this. Let Bernie frail against them for it. The more he does that, the more votes he will get — as the Green Party’s nominee. He won’t be any Ralph Nader, who was never elected to any political office and had no voting record as a member of Congress or otherwise. Nader was merely a campaigner against Al Gore, and thus a key Republican asset in 2000. Sanders would never be such a slime, and he won’t be. He will campaign nationally ONLY against Republicans. That’s okay with me. He might actually win the Presidency this way. Even if he doesn’t, I don’t care whether the victor then will turn out to be Trump or instead Biden. They are both megacorporate political whores. But if Sanders’s name will be on the ballot in all states, he might become the winner — and that would be a major change for the better. It’s our best chance. But only the Green Party can make it happen.
Let me give you a friendly tip: your “analysis” is almost comically wrong, from top to bottom.
Sanders is a hood ornament whose candidacy serves to distract the shallow political consumer from the fact that it is the engine that makes the car run. That engine is the economic foundation upon which the superstructure of the government rests. That bad smell you get from this engine is called capitalism as it burns up everything in sight. Bernie, who is a Democrat in all meaningful ways, this latest ‘hope for change”, is in agreement with this rotten system only wishing to ameliorate it’s worst transgressions which is not possible under the current system.
That horse left the barn many years ago.
If Sanders were an Independent or a Socialist he would run as one and he would vote as one. He does neither. This is all very easy to understand. He is a Democrat- his record on supporting Democrats and their policies is lengthy and consistent- 97% of the time he votes with Democrats. And everyone knows the Democrats are one aspect of the Uni-Party mafioso that runs this shabby Empire. And within that rancid party Bernie Sanders rests his hat.
Let’s not forget that Bernie supported and supports the US aggression in the Ukraine where Obama was lending material support to outright fascists (not rhetorically these are real live Nazis).
Well sure the latest liberal fad Bernie the Great Hope circa 2020 lends his support to fascists and openly speaks out against China and supports the US Military and supports any number of US interventions but hey he’s trending with the liberal hipster class of moderate warmongers so it’s all good.
“We need a strong military, it is a dangerous world. But I think we can make judicious cuts.”
– Bernie Sanders, University of Iowa 2-19-15
“ISIS clearly is a brutal, dangerous organization, we all agree that it has got to be defeated.”
– Bernie Sanders
On authorization for Obama to go to war with ISIS:
“I support, have and do, support the President using airstrikes, he has the right to do it, I think that they are working. I support that.”
– Bernie Sanders
Sound familiar?
DESPITE HIS own claims, Sanders has not been an antiwar leader. Ever since he won election to the House, he has taken either equivocal positions on U.S. wars or outright supported them.
His hawkish positions–especially his decision to support Bill Clinton’s 1999 Kosovo War–drove one of his key advisers, Jeremy Brecher, to resign from his staff. Brecher wrote in his resignation letter, “Is there a moral limit to the military violence you are willing to participate in or support?”
So outraged were peace activists over Sanders’ support of the Kosovo War that they occupied his office in 1999. Sanders had them arrested.
Under the Bush regime, Sanders’ militarism grew worse. While he called for alternative approaches to the war on Afghanistan, he failed to join the sole Democrat, Barbara Lee, to vote against Congress’ resolution that gave George Bush a blank check to launch war on any country he deemed connected to the September 11 attacks.
Ever since, he has voted for appropriations bills to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, despite their horrific toll on the occupied peoples as well as U.S. soldiers.
Sanders also scuttled any action on a wave of Bush impeachment resolutions that swept Vermont towns in 2006. Like House Majority Leader-to-be Nancy Pelosi, who promised not to impeach Bush, Sanders argued that impeachment was impractical and that activists should put energy into electing Democrats.
Another item that is important to note is how Sanders sanitized Hillary’s record and proves himself (yet again) to be the reliable weasel on all things Hillary. In Sanders view the fact that he and Hillary voted differently on Iraq, for example,is only a disagreement that can be casually talked about amongst friends. How nice.
And that Bernie openly speaks to his respect for Hillary (a war criminal by any measure among her many crimes) and his admiration for John McCain (another war monger), which he has done several times, speaks to Sanders depravity and cowardice in that he respects those who have been doing all manner of dirty work for decades including outright support of brutal dictators around the globe and mass murder of innocent people in the Middle East and elsewhere.
What does all of this say about Sanders? What does all of this say about his supporters?
As a Brit with an interest thanks for a most enlightening post Maxwell.
Upvoted with pleasure, Maxwell. Yes, this whole shitshow is smoke and mirrors. The only thing that makes the world run is money. Now it’s gone. A coup d’etat happened a long time ago. Once again I will point everyone in the direction of John Titus’s videos on YouTube. Essential viewing.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLvRDyn_rVvZ7RRwdcEiJGw/videos
I’m going to take look at that.
What I can say is that here in the US folks have little idea what just hit them- and I’m not talking about the COVID frenzy.
It took the barracudas on Wall St. about one day- if that- to start slopping up the debt (that they created BTW) and we are already seeing massive purchases by Wall St. of bad debt- which with the new COVID stimulus package has the guarantee of another bailout baked into it- further looting the US taxpayer. Pennies on the dollar purchases and guaranteed return- all of it sanctioned by all politicians.
Going back a few decades now when the anti-globalization was in full swing a friend asked once, “What do they want?” and I replied, “Everything.”
Now I have to say I’ve been at this awhile but these latest moves are brazen even by the standards of these colossal bandits. They are really going for it this time- but also keep in mind they fail a lot. Even before this, everywhere you look people are fed up if disoriented and disorganized. Give care my friend. Never give up.
Sanders is intelligent enough to know that if he were simply to say everything that he thinks would be good policy — such as drastically cutting the ‘defense’ (aggression) budget, he’s have no possibility of becoming President. Among the many “Institutions” that Gallup polls Americans on each year regarding their trust in each “Institution” is “The Military, and each year “The Military” gets the most trust, of any “Institution” as you can see for yourself at
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx
so ANY candidate for the Presidency must express considerable support for “The Military.”
Voters who interpret a candidate’s assertions in the way you do — devoid of political strategy and oblivious to the will of the electorate — are among the main reasons America is ruled by fascists.
No Eric- fools like yourself are the precise reason why actual leftist movements don’t gain traction. You are the classic left gatekeeper- just another milquetoast liberal who keeps pimping the same tired lies year in year out.
If you were honest you would notice I decidedly DID NOT nor do I ever simply interpret someone’s assertions- is that how you do it- read tea leaves? To do such is the worst form of liberal idealism which is one of your hallmarks.
Sorry Eric, but I focus solely on someone’s record- shall I post an extensive example of Sander’s atrocious record. He’s a pro-war, hawkish imperialist and has been his entire career. You avoid these things religiously to maintain your fairy tale version of the the political world.
What you have posted here is just another warmed over version of “11 dimensional chess”- it’s all bullshyte comrade.
But go ahead and try to square that with Sanders full on support of the F-35- one of the military’s biggest boondoggles ever. Square that with Sanders having anti-war activists arrested?
Square that with Sanders support of Iraqi Sanctions that killed 500,000 Iraqi children- that’s called a war crime Eric.
Now Eric you are suppose to be some sort of political commentator so how come you don’t know any of the below- or is it you support this:
Bernie Sanders voted to use “force” on the following nations:
1. Afghanistan
2. Lebanon
3. Libya
4. Somalia
5. Syria
6. Yemen
7. Yugoslavia
8. Haiti
9. Congo
10. Liberia
11. Sudan
Sanders supported US attacks on Kosovo- War Crimes- When antiwar activists occupied Sanders’ office in 1999 due to his support for the war, he had them arrested.
Sanders backed the buildup in the Persian Gulf during GHWB Gulf War;
Sanders supported sanctions in Iraq even as the Iraqi body count passed 1.5 million including 500,000 children- In voting in favor of these sanctions and interventions, Sanders is a direct accomplice to the deaths they caused;
Sanders supported Bill Clinton when he sent military units to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in October, 1994- Bernie supported this because “we cannot tolerate aggression.”
Sanders supported US intervention in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Liberia, Zaire (Congo), Albania, Sudan, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.
Sanders voted for appropriations bills to fund the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan;
Sanders supported pro-war measures–such as a March 21, 2003, resolution stating, “Congress expresses the unequivocal support and appreciation of the nation to the President as Commander-in-Chief for his firm leadership and decisive action in the conduct of military operations in Iraq as part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism”;
Sanders supported the Lockheed Martin F-35 program the epitome of Pentagon waste.
Sanders approved a $1 billion aid package to the coup government in Ukraine, aiding and abetting Nazis.
Sanders supports sanctions against Russia. This was an act of war.
Sanders signed declarations for regime change in Iraq and Iran while in Congress.
In 1993, Bernie voted YEA on HR 2446 – Military Construction Fiscal Year 1994 Appropriations Bill, which provided $3.63 billion for military construction.
That same year, he also voted in favor of S J Res 45 – Authorization for Use of US Armed Forces in Somalia, which authorized President Bill Clinton to use US troops in Somalia for the purpose of providing logistical support to the United Nations peacekeeping force.
In 1994, Bernie voted in favor of HR 4453 – Military Construction FY95 Appropriations bill, which provided $2.52 billion for military construction.
Bernie voted in favor of HR 3107 – Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, which “imposes sanctions on persons exporting certain goods or technology that would enhance Iran’s ability to explore for, extract, refine, or transport by pipeline petroleum resources, and for other purposes.”
In 1997, Bernie voted for HR 2159 – Foreign Operations FY98 Appropriations bill, which included: $3 billion for Israel, including $1.8 billion in military assistance and $1.2 billion in economic assistance; $2.12 billion for Egypt, including $1.3 billion in military assistance and $815 million in economic assistance; $770 million for former Soviet Republics; and $215 million for international narcotics control and law enforcement.
In 1998, Bernie’s name was included as a YEA vote on HR 4655, the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, which expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the aim of the United States to remove Saddam Hussein from power. President George W. Bush later used the Iraqi Liberation Act to provide justification for military action for the 2003 invasion.
In 1999, Bernie voted for HR 2465, which provided $4 billion for military construction, and he voted for HR 3196, which provided: $2.16 billion for military and economic assistance to Israel; $760 million for military and economic assistance to Egypt; $535 million for Eastern European and the Baltic States, including $150 million for assistance to Kosovo; $300 million for military and economic assistance to Jordan; and $285 million for international narcotics control.
Bernie’s was a staunch support for Clinton’s 100-day bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo in 1999. These were war crimes.
In 2001, Bernie supported HR 1954, which extended the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act of 1996.
Following the 9/11 attacks, Bernie voted in favor of H J Res 64 – Authorization for Use of Military Force, which allowed President Bush to use the United States Armed Forces against anyone involved with 9/11 and any nation that harbors these individuals.
In 2003, Bernie supported HR 5010, which provided $355.1 billion in appropriations for the Defense Department for fiscal year 2003 – an increase of $37.5 billion from 2002 – as well as: $71.6 billion for procurement of aircraft, missiles, weapons, combat vehicles and shipbuilding; $7.4 billion for ballistic missile defense; and $58.4 million for foreign aid, which includes humanitarian assistance, foreign disaster relief and de-mining programs.
He also voted in favor of HR 2800 – Foreign Operations Appropriations, FY 2004 bill, which granted $1.8 billion in military and economic assistance to Egypt and $2.2 billion for Israeli military assistance.
In 2004, Bernie supported HR 4613, which allocated $25 billion for emergency defense spending for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and $77.4 billion for the procurement of new weapons.
In 2005, Sanders supported HR 2863 – Defense Department FY2006 Appropriations Bill, which provided $50 billion for ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2006, Bernie voted for HR 5631, which provided $70 billion for ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In 2007, he supported HR 1585 – National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, which granted $187.14 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan operations.
In 2009, he voted in favor of HR 2647, which authorized $309 million for research and evaluation, procurement, or deployment of an alternative Missile Defense System in Europe, and also allowed the Secretary of Defense to increase the active-duty number for the US Army to a number greater than otherwise allowed by law up to the 2010 baseline plus 30,000 troops.
During the same year, he called closing the torturous gulag at Guantanamo a “complicated issue” and ultimately rejected a proposal to shut it down.
In 2011, Bernie co-sponsored S. Res. 85, which urged the UN Security Council to take action to protect civilians in Libya from attack, including the possible imposition of a no-fly zone over Libyan territory.
In 2014, Bernie came out in favor of levying economic sanctions (an act of war) against Russia: “The entire world has got to stand up to Putin,” he said. “We’ve got to deal with sanctions.”
Bernie also didn’t object to having his name included – by unanimous consent – in S.498, which backed Israel’s brutal, summer-long military assault against Gaza.
That’s the short list Eric. Shame on you.
An ugly litany of Bernie’s sycophantic ways there Maxwell.
More like a psychopaths shopping list.
The neoconservatism in the U.S. Congress is close to 100% in both Parties and in both houses. If you are alleging that a U.S. Presidential candidate should be someone like Ralph Nader who never occupied elective office and has no actual voting record by which that persom can be compared with other elective office-holders on the important actual issues (in any other way than mere frhetorical mouthings), I disagree. However, if you acknowledge that amongst the office-holders should be chosen the person who has the best voting-record on the most important issues, then we might be able to agree on something. However, I would never, as you do, list numerous bills and say, without providing documentation (links) explaining an office-holder’s votes on those bills, whether those votes, understood in their full political and policy contexts, were good or bad by comparison to the vast majority of other federal office-holders’ votes on those same bills. However, I shall take here from my personal notes (which link to the sources, though I don’t know whether those links will be live here) a few issues that I followed in particular detail:
Joe Biden virtually started his Presidential campaign on 23 January 2018 when he said
The good news is that Congress has already demonstrated its clear understanding of the Russian threat: in an overwhelmingly bipartisan manner, it passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act by a margin of 419 to 3 in the House of Representatives and by 98 to 2 in the Senate.” That’s a sgtrongly neocon position, and it is consistent with the rest of Biden’s record.
Biden there laid down the gauntlet against the few Democrats in the U.S. Government who were opposed to that bill, including the 3 in the House and 2 in the Senate. (So, it passed, on 15 June 2017, 98-2 in the Senate, and, on 25 July 2017, 419-3 in the House). One of the two “Nay” votes on it happened to be by Sanders in the Senate. One of the 419 “Yea” votes on it (showing her “clear understanding of the Russian threat”) was by Gabbard in the House.
I don’t know (since you didn’t identify) whom you think to have a better record in public office than Sanders has, but I shall provide here a few votes by the only other Democratic Presidential candidate whom I thought to be worthy of considering to vote for in the Democratic primary, Tulsi Gabbard, and if these links will appear live, then you will be able to click onto each to see how she voted on these issues, which happen to be closely related to the matter that Biden was talking about:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2014/roll114.xml 6 March 2014
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2014/roll117.xml 11 March 2014
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2014/roll148.xml 27 March 2014
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2014/roll149.xml 1 April 2014
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2017/roll413.xml 25 July 2017
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/955/cosponsors?r=69 12 Feb. 2015
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/356/cosponsors 6 Jan. 2017
I voted for Sanders. I have no idea of whom you voted for (if you did), because you have thus far been writing here only against, not for anything or (in particular) not in favor of any candidate or politician. You have thus far hidden which politicians you support. I do not, because I am not only against, but I also am for. A purely negative approach toward politics can be nothing more than negative.
Eric I’m quite familiar with your “work” and how consistently you have been wrong on most everything for years. You still reside in some delusional state that operates on about a high school civics level. Probably not possible but truly don’t take that personally- its just that you are out of touch with what’s happening right in front of your eyes. Your lib/prog “analysis” has no basis in material reality.
Anyone who is still pimping “lesser-evilism” is no longer a useful benchmark for what is happening in the world- and likely never was.
As for Sanders record you should have known all that chapter and verse but you didn’t- so how astute are you again? And really all you need to know was Sanders support of war crimes in Kosovo and his support of the murder of over 500,000 children in Iraq. Yet you still supported someone of this caliber. That speaks to your hypocrisy Eric- at best.
Can you rise above insulting, to asserting whom you support in American politics?
The context for Sanders’s votes regarding Kosovo, and regarding Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait (an invasion by him which I have no formulated opinion about, because I don’t express an opinion about something that I have not sufficiently investigated), were not mentioned by you, nor did you mention the congresspeople who voted against those U.S. actions. You have pontificated without providing any of the context, and even without providing links to your sources. And you have not stated what and whom you stand for. I know nothing about you except that you hide, pontificate, and insult. (Unfortunately, the links that I had embedded in my comment did not show here, but at least I tried. Anyway, I printed out the links regarding Tulsi Gabbard’s votes.)
Maxwell, I have now had an opportunity to spot-check some of the items on your list, and found your criticism correct on each. However, on each, I also found things such as “passed with unanimous consent,” which indicate that the entire U.S. Senate are guilty (often with no exceptions whatsoever). How do you propose that a voter vote in such a country? Would you consider the following to be the optimum solution to such a problem?:
https://theduran.com/a-proposed-amendment-to-the-u-s-constitution/
Why vote for ANY of them?
Every man and woman jack of them are LESS THAN FILTH.
Why pretend otherwise?
Your response shows that you failed even to look at what I linked to. Please look at it, and THEN respond.
I did read your article, Eric, thus I quote
“… both of them naturally being publicly well-known. ”
How do you propose that occurs ? The Key Question !
Our media thus far has corrupted minds way beyond any natural humanity, going way back ! See the problems Hollywood has created, with the BBC ?
We are none of us neutral, not even the ‘sainted Swiss’, I know well their banking & lifestyle BS & B.I.S. of today, all with Diplomatic Immunity, just like Vatican Bankers, & all of them are NEVER AUDITED and never have been !
Do you comprehend CIA Drug Payments ?
Via Catholic Bankers, like George Pell ?
You did notice his recent release, I’m sure …
Eric, please listen to Maxwell and stop thinking so introspectively and only for the USA: the country with
NO name, Officially, just a bunch of united states that wish to dictate to all, exploiting secret banking with Secret Services, in every sense >>> I see the wall as essential for both the USA and Israel, to keep you inconsiderate mothers’ within >>> and dependent on Chinese Medications (to the tune of 90% dependent), until,
you own up to your military CRIMES and we can audit the Vatican and certain Swiss Banks & Bankers, professionally >>> otherwise, you are just
pissing into wind & media forums, without equating
R E A L I T Y ! in financial services …
See the chain? War on Terror ? War on Drugs ?
Get real, Eric … start thinking outside of your environment.
I thought that under the stated conditions (that both of those individuals’ names had been freely volunteered by a larger number of Americans to become the next U.S. President, each of the two having been volunteered as the best choice by more than any of the other millions of Americans have been so chosen), anyone but an idiot would immediately recognize that no one who is one of the two most-frequently mentioned persons who have been chosen to be the next U.S. President could even POSSIBLY be NOT famous. I had thought that any reader with an IQ of more than, say, 5, would recognize this fact automatically.
Julian Assange is publicly well known and unlike Bernie Sanders or you, Eric, Assange has a 100% accuracy rating >>> so, don’t dodge the question, the key question !
I’m suggesting that your thought processes are fundamentally flawed & constrained by a bunch of united states, that include the UK & France, whence the expression FUKUS, see ? Historically speaking, from the Gulf of Tonkin & USS Liberty onwards, you had to be aware of the devils within … and media’s monopoly on who is well known & for what reason, see?
Have you ever heard of Leveson ?
Then Assange would have a real chance of winning, if he were a U.S. citizen — which he’s not.
Eric: That’s already 2 key questions you’ve dodged ! Likely wilfully …
1) How do you propose that occurs ?
2) Have you ever heard of Leveson ?
Eric, maybe my last comment has slipped your mind, even wilfully !? I have not been insulting towards you (YET), despite the fact that I have an extremely high IQ, , (which was why I was Headhunted by an external company, to work DIRECTLY & EXCLUSIVELY for the CEO of BP, overnight, preparing his breakfast briefing after studying ALL English speaking newspapers, journals & print media, worldwide, hot off the press, delivered by couriers! Including speed reading every edition of the Times, New York Times, WSJ, IHT &&& from The Sun to the South China Morning Post & Cape Times, daily, back in the 80’s, before they purchased HAARP & ARCO Oil & Gas in its’ entirety, with US D.o.D approval, on one very specific contractual condition …)
It might interest you also, that I have direct personal experience of working for the White House Communications Centre, during the 90’s, also even chauffeuring Al Gore’s kids to Davos from Kloten, Zürich, in ice & snow, (with the CIA inside my vehicle), I had the courage & brought the whole of the White House convoy to an ABRUPT CALCULATED STOP, in utter disgust at their unprofessional incompetence, along with my utter disgust at the boss of the SWISS Anti-Terror police, who was probably a bigger DICK than YOU, even !! Whatever you may think in your arrogant stupidity, (insulting my intellect), I could not give a tinker’s cuss what you utilise for insults, as Marlene A. Chiatovich can confirm from our extremely angry but muted & muffled Tête à Tête, on the hard shoulder of the motorway, with the Swiss ‘boss’ man of the day: even, she BACKED ME UP, all the way and ordered him to do what I INSISTED UPON, or I was gonna’ hitch hike home there & then, and leave Al Fuckin’ GORE’s kids to assholes, (as the youngest ever Transport Manager and Truck driver, EVER, in the UK in 1982 !) ! So FUCK YOU, Eric, I know who I am and I know very well where I’m headed with my criticism of you and your fundamentally flawed PATHETIC propositions and amendments FFS!
WAKE UP MAN !!!
Having done professional Media Research & Analysis for well over 40 years and having been trained in electronics and military intelligence ‘games’, as a boy, from my Grandfather, who was working in a Pyramid in 1946, for British Military intelligence, as Radar & Radio Engineer, when Begin & Irgun blew up their base in the basement of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing B’Amp’s friends, who’d survived the whole War in North Africa, WORKING with M.BEGIN, on Black Ops. & False Flags, can you imagine his and therein, my disgust with you, right now ! ?
Have you worked out who Leveson truly is/was…
I mean the Judge who made Rupert Murdoch Whimper & Whine about his “MOST HUMBLING MOMENT …” (Quote) in court ?
I mean the same Murdoch that has financial interests in GENIE Energy Oil & Gas, operating on the Golan Heights, THIEVING SYRIAN RESOURCES, (as we communicate) with Dick Cheney, James Woolsey and the Ubiquitous ROTHSCHILDS … of Balfour Fame … in tow, as financial & strategic partners …
Forget Bernie, FFS:- eric Eric, who the fuck is ERIC, to insult me, who clearly understands the media & electronics way better than, YOU, Eric!
*********************************
So Eric, there are already 2 major questions you have failed to address, one of which I’ve answered for you, so, i’ll replace it with another question and add one to BOOT YOUR DUMB insulting character into gear & move your fuckin’ insulting ass, in the direction of your keyboard & finally respond! I repeat, Eric …
1) How do you propose that occurs ? The Key Question !
2) Define “Parallel Platforms” (Check Bill Binney)
3) Define ” Force multipliers ” & maybe, (if you are not too fucking dumb, scientifically speaking) HAARP’s various capabilities …
As we progress, if you are not a coward and resting on your squashed laurels, you may well learn something, immediately, even, many things most are afraid to learn, or address & discuss, especially Military & Corporate Intelligence: just like our resident troll team leader and controlled opposition, who goes by the name of ‘milosevic’ … Don’t be scared to discuss SCIENTIFIC REALITY Eric, (like our milosevic), don’t be a coward: a simple minded apology will do.
I’m waiting, with open mind, but is yours ?
P.s. My Grandfather (an original long pre-WW2 Nikola Tesla fanatic, before the BBC ever existed, who signed up in 1938, to design & build RADAR, on hearing Chamberlain’s “Peace In Our Times” bullshit) trained my Godfather, as well as me. To save you searching, too much, he was not only the youngest ever professor @Loughborough, ‘they’ even named a building after him and after all, he was chief scientific advisor to the M.o.D. 1993 – 1999, as well as working for NASA in the 70’s (not mentioned in his Wikipedia profile). Uncle DEN’s dad was killed in WW2 and my Grandfather became his electronic mentor, because he was my father’s best school friend… so, every school holiday, just like me, he was experimenting with electronics, with sincere help from an electronic Genius, who also designed the national grid for S.Wales, after he THREATENED to walk home from Palestine ! Bampa, was commissioned until 1948, but, after what Begin did, they shipped him out ASAP, coz’ otherwise he was gonna’ walk n’ talk, like me… in the family, see?
Fuck Bernie, wake the fuck UP, to people with an IQ way higher than Eric Zeusse’s, of that I’m also 100% sure, having read your articles, many many times, over the years, PROFESSIONALLY, you dick ! I know you way better than you know me!
As Maxwell said, you damned “Hypocrite …”
Answer the QUESTIONS !
and stop pissing into the wind, that is
ENGINEERED !!! by FUKUS !
Tim, regarding your new #1, the phrase “The Key Question” was introduced in this string by you, not by me, and you didn’t define it in any way other than introducing it by”… both of them naturally being well-known.” I responded to that by saying that the two most-frequently mentioned persons by voters would necessarily be “famous” because otherwise their names wouldn’t even be known to (and thus available to) voters to vote for. So, I already answered that question, unless you meant a different meaning for it than the one you stated.
Regarding your new #2 “Define ‘Parallel Platforms’ (Check Bill Binney)” that too is opaque to me, and I don’t know how a knowledge of its meaning would be necessary in order to evaluate https://theduran.com/a-proposed-amendment-to-the-u-s-constitution/ — which doesn’t even employ that phrase “Parallel Platforms.” You ask me to define a term which is from a technically specialized field that I’ve never studied, and therefore your asking me to define it is obviously ridiculous.
Regarding your new #3, “Define ‘Force multipliers'” you again are asking me to define a phrase which I’ve never even used.
OK, Eric, no apology i see: let that be …
this is going to be tedious for me, explaining things that are truly elementary to me, in my eyes and in my face, for well over 40 years, regarding the media & regulation of same !
I can see now, that I’m going to have to inform you, progressively, FAR more than i’d ever expected, as to why your thinking is fundamentally flawed, both legally & intellectually. So, first before I get to the points you’ve raised, first the intangible !
Money has its’ limitations.Norwegian poet Arne Garborg said that with money “You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; soft beds, but not sleep; knowledge, but not wisdom; glitter, but not beauty; splendour, but not warmth; fun, but not joy; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness.” >>>
It’s Good Friday today, in the Orthodox world so, first & foremost, CHESTIT PRAZNIK, Eric. , where people say … Hristos VosCRAZY, (& if he’s watching, he would be, most certainly!) B’cause,
When humans aspire to be GODS, bad things happen … happening right now !
You appear to believe that the present prevailing (preVEILing) capitalist system, that permits characters like Rupert Murdoch & Silvio Berlusconi to influence our daily politics & military activities, can be reformed and amended, with a few tiny tweaks, by giving Figures that they have made “well known”, the opportunity to answer a few direct questions, publicly, via a medium that they OWN & CONTROL: see the problem?
I’m pretty sure, now, that you have no idea about how computing works, the history of same or what a “Parallel Platform” is, so, I will address this, once you’ve responded to my first question.
And the same applies to FORCE MULTIPLIERS, a term applied by the US D.o.D for the engineering of the WEATHER ! At this juncture, the low IQ guy appears to be you … and still, an apology is in order, for your arrogance. Right now, to a multi-lingual, well travelled, almost 60 year old man, the only thing that exceeds your arrogance, is your ignorance !
Start connecting Dots & Nodes on media ‘control & ownership’ first and consider future regulation of same: something that Rupert Murdoch desperately did not want to discuss further in court, with somebody like Lord Justice Leveson, who offered to conduct LEVESON2:0, to Theresa May, who squashed his proposal asap.
at Murdoch’s behest, no damn doubt! I don’t like or Trust Wikipedia, but maybe you do, so, to fill you in on the history of Lord Leveson, a little, this here low IQ guy will spoon feed you 🙂
Happy Easter, Eric 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveson_Inquiry
Look at Mr. Hypocrite here. Just a few comments ago he spoke to someone insulting him- and now here is Mr. Hypocrite doing exactly what he says others should not do.
Poor Eric- unable to wake up as he’s always pretending to be asleep.
in short, Eric: who the fuck is Bernie? See ?
Absofirkin’lutely honestly speaking,
an unimportant “Also-Ran” & total distraction,
from corrupted governments, our military intelligence
& Crime Syndicates !
Sounds like a pretty bloodthirsty war criminal POS to me.
How does he differ from McCain or Clinton?
Eric, the US has been ruled by fascists for ever. Kennedy – not a saint from the starting block though – saw the light and was duly snuffed out.
You make a valid point,but I’m not at all sure there is much truth to it.Sanders reminds me of the Labour for the Empire people like Ernest Bevin etc in the post war British Labour party.
There’s more chance of a leopard changing its spots than psychopaths/sociopaths behaving sanely.
BTW. Are you the erudite Maxwell from the defunct Truthdig?
If so, welcome back Max.
Yes.
Maxwell, thanks for that simple clarification (and well deserved comments to Eric) 🙂 I reckon you’ll be a real asset to these columns of comments, for a wide variety of reasoning, going forward >>> I was getting a bit bored, due to the levels of trolling and especially controlled opposition, being so ‘Fleißig’, in recent times: but I’m now rather looking forward to hearing more from you and speed reading over the simply childish framed ‘likes’ of others. Matters are rapidly becoming deadly serious. Ask Julian Assange …
There are solutions.
Clearly, not within the framework of Eric’s thought processing.
Boynie’s a good Zionist, that’s all.
How did that ole’ song go ?
Like a puppet on a string …
of Media Ownership. 😉
Politics is a non issue. We should all get out of any left/right ideology mindset and discuss the real issues crucial to our immediate survival. These are:
1 – what is currently going on in terms of covid19
2 – Syria, Iran and geopolitical battles which are likely to resume shortly. And result in WWW3.
Once these have been resolved we can go back to Bernie, Boris and the celebrities etc.
Let’s just add a third item from Chomsky:
3 – Climate change/global warming, or just good ol’-fashioned pollution.
Crucial enough, I’d say.
VENEZUELA
The choice is clear: there is no choice.
Well, that at least will save us the US election bonanza (aka the greatest show on earth), and all the energy that goes into discussing that.
As always, there never was a choice, and it is good to know that Sanders confirms to his supporters, as it will (hopefully finally) dawn on people who think that voting matters: that voting doesn’t matter, and that if you want to change society for the better, you should think of other ways.
There is no choice. Tulsie Gabbard the only candidate before she sold her soul. In the UK there is no one in politics. The sooner people start focusing on non ideology we can save our world from WW3 which is probably imminent.
Once we get past that we can talk politics and talk up the Corbyns, Bernies and Gabbards only to be disappointed…. yet again.
Shouldn’t have been a surprise. Bernie did exactly the same thing in 2016. Led a group of hopeful dissidents off the cliff. Like Trump, his job is Pied Piper.
This will get more complicated soon, because the democrats realize they face a revolt from Bernie supporters who will never vote for Biden. Many of them now I suspect wouldn’t even vote for Bernie, given his complete surrender to the democratic establishment. I have no doubt they have already found their candidate, they just need to work out how to put him in place. Bernie has just made it easier by surrendering to an incoherent rambler who is unable to complete a sentence let alone lead the country.
What is embarrassing is how obvious it is that bernie clearly never intended to win, last time around it wasn’t so clear, it looked like he was cheated out of the nomination. But this time it is clear he caved, under almost no pressure at all and refused to put up a fight against the worst presidential candidate in living memory.
Like AOC and the other ‘progressive’ democrats he betrayed all his supporters for all to see. Is he controlled opposition?, has his family been threatened? It doesn’t matter now, it was a nice dream while it lasted but social justice is well and truly dead for another decade in the US, thanks for that Bernie.
For the very last time.
killer mike ‘the time is now’
He looks like he was blackmailed. The DNC had leverage over him.
‘Sanders leverage (Wikileaks Podesta email).
This isn’t in keeping w the agreement. Since we clearly have some leverage, would be good to flag this for him.
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/47397
What Bernie was advocating wasn’t revolutionary, its what I grew up with in post-war Britain. My parents told me that it wasn’t a gift, it was something that was fought for and earned by generations of working people and was likely to be clawed back if people were not careful to defend it.
Well, they took if for granted and sure enough its been taken from them, leaving only vestiges of the cradle to grave security that was once taken for granted. Its back to the Good Old Days (only this time in color) with a large segment of the population living hand to mouth existence and an increasing part of the once prosperous middle classes gradually moving towards the abyss.
The US — where I’ve been living for some time — has a somewhat different experience because of a lack of the ‘post war consensus’ but the same basic pattern applied (at least if you were white….). Post war prosperity, the middle class dream, gradually faded as the clawbacks took away secure jobs, unions, social safety nets, leaving a significant segment of the popualtion living hand to mouth and many others who thought they were secure gradually edging towards their abyss.
Bernie was just advocating sharing the national pie a bit more evenly, something that’s made sense to even quite reactionary politicians over the years, since a stable, secure and education population makes for domestic tranquility and a productive workforce. Unfortunately the scourge of financilization — not a new concept — means that the money changers can’t see beyond their balance sheets, they’re into making money, not value, and they’re ruling the roost.
So, what’s the solution? To claim that Trump and Bernie are somehow twins in their anti-establishment stances is to suggest that there’s been some serious Kool-Aid drinking going on. Trump is Establishment on Steroids — like populists before him he claims to be one with the working people but his real support is the Establishment, the very people who have no time for or interest in the welfare of ordinary people beyond what keeps them in power. A figure like Biden represents a different sort of Establishment, one that does understand that a balance is good for the country as a whole. They won’t deliver on the best of the promise because the environment they work in. Its not perfect but its a step in the right direction. Remember, being President doesn’t give you carte blanche to dictate laws and policy — Trump only gets to do this because its what the Establishment wants (and has never quite dared to do up until now), a Bernie, even if he was allowed to be elected, would be blocked at every turn if he tried to change anything.
I have no idea your point or what you said. You want Bernie supporters to vote for Biden? Hasn’t this already been done before?
I’ve been voting for 40 years, and none of them were my president. Voting every 4 years for a president of the U.S. is not democracy, and will not get us what we need. Listen to George Carlin. Although dead, he’s the most reasonable voice. His commentary on germs is immediately relevant. And of course his commentary on government, actually all of his commentaries are relevant. Especially right now.
No that is not at all what he was saying.
Never quite understood why politics has to be only two parties, but if you say there are only two sexes nowadays you are pretty much run out of town by every LGBTQI…. in town.
I say: the more sexual choices available, the more political party choices should be available.
If you want a new beginning in America, you need to begin with a new vehicle to acquire power.
You will not get there using either the Democrats or Republicans, because both organisations are controlled lock, stock and barrel by big money.
Sexual orientation is not the same as gender. Lesbians, Gays, bisexuals and transexuals don’t have another gender. They are either men or women.
Glad we got that straightened out.
There are two sides in the world today. There’s the neoliberal globalist establishment and there’s the opposition to it. Ludicrous as he may be, Trump is the only credible opposition. He’s not a politician, he fell out of the sky but he’s all we’ve got.
Bernie was owned by the DNC from the minute he ran for president at the age of 75, a registered independent. A sheepdog for progressives to be handed over to Hillary and Joe. Nothing more.
Trump is not in opposition to the neoliberal, neocon project he is at the heart of it. He gives a good show because he’s a showman, not because he believes in anything. He is the good cop to win the hearts of voters as the rest of the washington elite and the deep state empty their pockets.
Trump has expressed his clear opposition to the Neocon war machine (including war with Russia) and the neoliberal new world order (NAFTA). He has tried to repatriate jobs rather than support the bankster like the Bushes, Clintons and Obamas. He’s the only president since Bush senior with no CIA career in his history.
You quote Trump because in the past when a political said something he believed it, or at least he would be held to it, but those times are gone, meaning it is irrelevant to quote what trump says, he expression his opposition to war as he increased the US military budget to the highest level ever seen in history, giving them more than they asked for.
The military machine is independent of the president. He either feeds it or it bites him.
I think Martin is right on target, right now as a small business person in the small hotel and restaurant business, two months ago named a national historic landmark, we are threatened with potential bankruptcy. But we are not going to let that happen. Yes the system is corrupt, but Nancy Pelosi was able to give 350million to the Kennedy Center which layed off its staff, and I’ve been told the National Endowment for the Arts, both organizations which I love and heartily support, but now she is holding up the Paycheck Protection Program which is geared to companies under 500 employees, because she says that there is not enough data to support that small business is in that much trouble. Mindblowing. And there is talk that she will not bring back Congress until May, so that aid for small businesses under 500 cannot be discussed because she refuses to allow the consent legislation to go through. Has anyone in Congress or in the Federal Government taken a cut in salary,
and maybe its time for the Congress and the US Government to get their health care just like regular people do.
Well just as Martin pointed out that he would have liked to see Bernie as the nominee
“because there could have been a different kind of discussion with him as the nominee, especially regarding the possibilities of populism”
This is actually why I am in such contempt of the democratic party, because instead of
allowing arguments to go on in the house of representtives that MATTERED, encouraging real debate about policies et al, they chose to go after Russian Collusion and a hugely expensive and unsuccesful attempt to impeach the President. And now their hatred of the President colors all of their actions, even those relating to this pandemic.
As someone who voted for Jill Stein last time round, I actually thought it positive that the President tried to tell us not to panic, and as a small business person, the lockdown had put us in a horrible kind of purgatory.And although this may sound crazy I believe that the democrats hate Trump so much that they want to see the economy tank, it isn’t by the way for their big contributors, because they think that will help them defeat Trump.
So Bill thank you for this sensible article in a time of terrible crisis.
And he supported nearly all the wars
Two sides?
Yeah.
The exploiters and the exploited.
As long as humans continue to exploit animals for food and materials, we have no hope for social justice on a large scale.
Cross species cannibalism was/is the beginning of humanity’s decline.