Bernie Sanders is going to be the Democratic nominee, and then he'll be the President, unless the powers that be can't accept a peaceful transfer of power and something horrible happens.
Remember when Barack Obama was elected to office mostly by the virtue of his rhetoric? Do you remember what that rhetoric was like? It was populist, revolutionary, he had a transparency plan where he would use web cams to broadcast all meetings with lobbyists to us the People. He was going to bring sweeping change to Washington, take it back. His campaign was an insurgency, it broke all records. It was a grassroots movement, and I think it was just the beginning of a pendulum swing.
Remember when Barack Obama broke all previous records by having over 1 million small donors? Well he also took tons of Wall Street and Super PAC money when that became a thing. Barack Obama is a barely left-of-center centrist in policy. Now, Bernie Sanders' campaign has locked in over 2 million small donors. He has already plowed through the Obama record. He has a double digit lead over Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, and has a growing lead in Iowa.
Bernie Sanders is an unapologetic Democratic Socialist. Socialism is a word that was used in the United States to describe authoritarian governments for a generation. The Soviets called themselves socialists, they never claimed to be democratic, but theirs was a State controlled authoritarian nightmare where the State took the place of a Czar. But Democratic Socialism is something that has been in the United States for a long time, and I'd like to point out how your Ultra-Conservative relatives are already Democratic Socialists.
Democratic means the people vote and collectively control their own destiny. That's the ideal anyway, and it has always been imperfect. Every American believes in voting, even if they don't vote. Voting for how the government behaves, or who represents us, is a primary ingredient for freedom, and the one thing that prevents us from sliding into fascism. Everybody believes in this part, unless you are a Republican operative working to disenfranchise voters. That is Treason, and should be treated as such.
Socialism is an economic concept. It is the idea that we should hold certain things in common, pool our money together, and use it to provide certain things we all need. Democratic Socialism also advocates for democracy in economic affairs. A worker-owned company is an example of Democratic Socialism. Winco is worker-owned. Farmer Coops are socialistic enterprises. So are member-owned grocery store coops. All of this is a necessary ingredient of freedom. If we had no roads, we would not be free to travel. If we had no military, we would not be free from conquest. If we had no labor laws, we would not be free from exploitation. If we had no space program, we wouldn't have had one of our people walk on the moon.
Guess what, your super conservative dad is a big fan of a number of publicly funded programs. The United States military is the biggest. All conservatives like that. They like it so much that often they won't even consider the idea that it should probably be audited for waste and fraud every once in a while. The US Military is big government at its biggest, but conservatives are generally totally fine with that.
On the local front, your local conservative elected official will almost always advocate for budget increases for police and fire departments. In many towns, the police and fire budgets account for the vast majority of the public spending. The higher ranking cops are making six figures and retiring to life long salaries and benefits. Police departments are, by definition, a socialist program.
The truth is, the American economy is only as stable as it is because of the delicate dance that happens between the private sector and government. Everybody knows that when you need the safest investment possible, you buy government bonds. The banking system only seems stable to the individual depositor because of the FDIC insurance that will give you your money if the bank fails. Remember in 2008 when the Ayn Rand-iest institutions in the land on Wall Street almost destroyed themselves? Even they, who claim to symbolize the virtues of capitalism and the free market, crawled sniveling to the People to bail them out.
The American economy is a mix of capitalism and socialism. Since the reforms after the Great Depression, this mix of public and private enterprise is what has kept the whole show stitched together. Typically, the economic battles of right and left have to do with how to distribute that public money, and which public programs have virtue.
A Democratic Socialist in America, believes that health care is a right. Why? Because we are all going to get sick. Just like we are all going to need potable water. Capitalism should have a limited role in the delivery of health care because we don't have a choice in getting sick. We should hold that in common because we already have the condition in common. This is why Medicare and Social Security are bipartisan favorites. We all get old and don't want to work anymore, and we all get sick.
Public higher education should be provided to everyone who wants it because the benefit to all of us is so huge. More smart, small businesses providing jobs, a more capable workforce, a more nimble populace, less people feeling stuck doing things they liked in their twenties but hate in their forties, we all benefit from it.
But the biggest bone of contention, the real source of populist rage and the rising up of working people, is the unimaginable wealth disparity in our country. We live in the wealth disparity of feudal England. There's the working class and the investment class. And the investment class has bought the government and given themselves all of the socialism they can. Corporations get tax breaks, kick backs, deregulation, they make billions colluding with government to rebuild the countries we've bombed, they are writing the bills that get passed in Congress. The government works for them in a very literal way.
The only rugged individualists left are the working poor or the working well-to-do who feel wealthy but only in relationship to the poor. They're being debt farmed and making the banks plenty of money just like the rest of us.
Socialism is alive and well in America, which is necessary for economic stability. The problem is that the public money is being used in ways that benefit the economic elite. I'm not talking about the local restaurateur who after 20 years of hard work managed to make himself worth a few million bucks, he's under the thumb too, through oppressive rules and taxation. He doesn't have his congressman on speed dial either.
The economic elite who are milking everybody are billionaires who live on their own islands, and whose lobbyists make our laws in the dark. America is a plutocracy in function, but not in spirit, and thank God we still have the vote. The pendulum that started with Barack Obama is only gaining momentum, and more and more working Americans don't want to vote against their own interests anymore.
The candidates on the right, who have never been more doomed in an election cycle, are trying to convince your ultra-conservative friends that America is under attack by liberals and immigrants and a host of other, Others.
The enemy is domestic. And I believe that if your Ultra-Conservative dad—who worked his ass off at his auto shop business for years—if he met the little Ivy League investment capitalists making billions off the backs of working people like him, he'd want to kick their asses too. He's just looking in the wrong direction.
We can all agree on this: All Power to the People.
No comments:
Post a Comment