It’s kinda like one of those stupid “Mom and Dad Save the World” movies, except this time, instead of Mom and Dad, its our national grandfather Bernie Sanders who’s doing the saving and it isn’t stupid and it’s not a movie. And the plot is becoming more and more interesting.
Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats in the House have just turned their backs on President Obama’s effort to fast track the TPP free trade bill. Well, good for them. There’s an election coming and they had to do something to try and convince the millions of unemployed, underemployed, the students and others being crushed by debt, that Democrats care about something other than campaign contributions. They get this way around election time and later seem to partake in selective amnesia.
“That’s not what I said” they say, except that it’s usually exactly what they said and they’ll probably say it again in a year or two and then move on with another round of denials while kissing babies and eating barbecue in someone’s backyard somewhere in West Texas.
Any number of progressives fear that the “TPP” will do what NAFTA, CAFTA and the WTO have done, further devastate the American middle class by dropping trade barriers even further and sending even more jobs overseas to countries where slave labor is still permissible.
Some Democrats worry out loud whether this split between House Dems and Mr. Obama, will hurt Hillary Clinton at the polls, as the giant groaning and hopefully wrong-headed assumption that Hillary Clinton will win the primary continues.
Meantime, if the polls are to be believed, Bernie Sanders continues picking up followers. And for good reason. Bernie, has none of the Wall Street baggage Hillary Clinton will carry with her wherever she goes, regardless of what she might say about the evils of what CEO’s are being paid and the scourge of tax breaks afforded hedge fund managers. Like her son-in-law for example. She wants to eliminate her son-in-laws tax breaks? What overwhelming sincerity. What forthrightness. What nonsense.
So many of the Democrats in Congress are doing nothing but carrying water for millionaires, billionaires and big corporations, and Bill and Hillary Clinton are right there, in bed with their Wall Street buddies who have paid out hundreds of thousands in speaker’s fees to Hillary will bolstering Bill’s legacy by writing checks to The Clinton Foundation. So forget them. Hopefully America will. They’ve had their very lengthy moment in the sun. Hopefully the Democrats will understand this in the runup to the primary.
Hopefully, they will realize that Bernie Sanders may be our best chance to restore some political balance to the country. He says a “political revolution” is what we need. He’s right.
An Independent from Vermont, Sanders is running as a Democrat, because it’s the only way he has a chance of winning. And he will have a chance, a very real chance, if America wakes up to the terrible fact that our political system has been bought off, our freedom of self-determination stolen, and that Bernie, may be our last best chance of recovering what we once had, a nation that works for the majority and not just a wealthy few.
At a gathering in Des Moines, Sanders put it this way, “Today, we live in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but that reality means little because almost all of that wealth is controlled by a tiny handful of individuals. America now has more income and wealth inequality than any major country on earth, and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the 1920s. The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time and it is the great political issue of our time.
Let me be very clear. There is something profoundly wrong when the top one-tenth of one percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom ninety percent, and when ninety-nine percent of all new income goes to the top one percent. There is something profoundly wrong when we have a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires at the same time as millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on earth. There is something profoundly wrong when one family owns more wealth than the bottom 130 million Americans. This grotesque level of inequality is immoral. It is bad economics. It is unsustainable. That is why we need a tax system that is fair and progressive, which makes wealthy individuals and profitable corporations begin to pay their fair share of taxes. This type of rigged economy is not what America is supposed to be about. This has got to change and, together we will change it.
This campaign is sending a message to the billionaire class: “you can’t have it all.” -Bernie Sanders
Good for Pelosi and the Democrats for standing up to Mr. Obama, Wall Street and the corporations on the TPP bill. Just remember that for years most of these people have been part of the problem. That there’s no way many of them will take part in the “political revolution” the nation so badly needs. That Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush and most of the others will only follow in the footsteps of Mr. Obama, by maintaining much of the status quo, continuing on with the best government money can buy while the remnants of representative democracy are nothing but an illusion.
Oh, and Bernie Sanders will not be serving an adequate purpose by simply pulling Hilary farther to the left. That won’t be enough. Since Reagan, the country has been pushed so far to the right that those of us who were once moderates, even Eisenhower Republicans, are now considered to be radical lefties. No, Bernie needs to win this thing. Nobody’s perfect, but he could be our last best chance.
