William Sharp (1749–1824), after George Romney Engraving, 1793
(Image by National Portrait Gallery, Public Domain) Details DMCA
William Sharp (1749-1824), after George Romney Engraving, 1793
(Image by National Portrait Gallery, Public Domain) Details DMCA
"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends, and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."---John Lennon, BBC Interview June 22, 1968
A poll by The Huffington Post states that Bernie Sanders is "the most popular politician in America."
A July 9, 2016 article in The Economist shows that the majority of people who do not vote in Presidential elections are people who would vote to the left of center.
So tell me again why Bernie Sanders can't be elected President?
The corporate Democrats and their allies in mainstream media are scared to death that if Bernie were nominated and won, it would again put most of the Democratic Party beyond the reach of the large corporations and their plutocratic owners for forty years, just as Franklin Roosevelt's win in 1932 had done. The errors that led to The Great Depression had crippled the "economic royalists" (to use FDR's phrase) position in the minds of the American people, showing them to be an uncaring group of pirates who would pillage and plunder the very heart of America. An estimated fifty percent of the American people lived in poverty (having an income of less than $1000 annually if one was married) in the year before the Great Crash---
---[This information is derived from Internal Revenue Service data cited in Donald Barlett's and James Steele's 1994 book, America: Who Really Pays the Taxes; chapter 2 in general, pp. 61 and 66-7 in particular; as well as John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929; 1954; pp. 14-5].
The elitists within the Democratic Party do not enjoy rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi to get money for their campaigns, whether they are union members or minorities. They want to get it from other rich and wealthy people whose personal aims mirror their own. (There is a difference between rich and wealthy people: wealthy people sign rich people's checks.) The elitists breathed a sigh of relief when politicians like Dick Gephardt established the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985.
Bernie demonstrated in 2016 that you do not need corporations to raise money. You do have to be credible among your constituency that you will actually carry through on your promises. People knew Bernie would do his damnedest to help the poor, working and middle classes. No one believed that Hillary would do so, and no one knew what Trump would do.
Joe Biden--and most of the Democrats running for President--are only a click or two to the left of Donald Trump. They admit the need for a minimal government safety net, but nothing more. They oppose any New Deal, "Green" or otherwise. They are pawns of FDR's "economic royalists;" who the President despised, and who hated him in turn. Only Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren would have received any support from FDR or his wife Eleanor. Bernie is the last, best hope for our nation and its middle class; Senator Warren cannot attain that august level until she unequivocally renounces the Neoliberalism that has permeated American politics for more than 40 years.
Old Wine in New Bottles
Neoliberalism arose from the blind faith in the economics of von Mises, Hayek and Friedman. Their Austro-Chicago School of Economics promised a continuation of the glory days of the 1950's with sustained four percent-plus annual economic growth, while returning economic domination to the wealthiest members of society, whom the individuals Marx called the rentiers. For those unfamiliar with the term, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a rentier as "a person who lives on income from property or securities."
Here's what Meagan Day wrote of Neoliberalism in her July 26, 2017 article in In These Times, "Jonathan Chait Is Wrong: Neoliberalism Is Real and Fundamentally Opposed to Left Principles." She wrote:
"Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy that has its origins in Germany, France and the United Kingdom. After World War II, the doctrine migrated to the University of Chicago, where neoliberal economists, chief among them Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, established what became known as the Chicago School. This bastion of free-market fundamentalism proved massively influential in advancing neoliberal ideology around the world, most notably in Chile following the U.S.-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende's socialist government in 1973.
Neoliberal ideology is rooted in the belief that the capitalist economy should be buttressed and protected from collapse by state assistance. But the state should otherwise allow market forces to move freely, unimpeded by government regulation.
In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Marxist scholar David Harvey points out that the 1970s global financial crises "appeared to point towards the emergence of a socialist alternative", and neoliberalism surged in popularity among capitalists who were unwilling to lose the "social compromise between capital and labor that had grounded capital accumulation so successfully in the post-war period."
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