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Add an EventBernie’s Decision: Retreat Should Not Be Confused with Surrender
Politics is ultimately about life and death, as the current pandemic horrors make clear. Policies that can seem abstract not only routinely harm quality of life; they also kill.
Both Bernie Sanders campaigns for president have brought a principled seriousness to the national discourse that no other candidate has come near matching. Now, we seem to be entering new terrain. Or are we?
You might not like “war” metaphors -- but a vicious reality is that various types of warfare are constantly happening against billions of people on this planet. Humanity is under siege from structured injustice due to anti-democratic power.
We don’t have a choice of whether or not we’re in a class war. It’s going on perpetually -- waged with enormous financial, political and media firepower. The firepower of class warfare against Bernie Sanders has been ferocious and unrelenting. The Bernie campaign is dissipating, but class war is sure to remain unrelenting.
Our choices revolve around whether and how to fight back against the centralized wealth and huge corporate interests waging that endless war. Now, as the era after the Bernie 2020 campaign gets underway, I’d like to tell you a little about one of the countless inspiring activists I’ve met -- and why his outlook is so connected to the moment we’re in now.
Fifty years ago, Fred Branfman saw the human consequences of war in Laos -- an airborne genocide that took place courtesy of U.S. taxpayers and the Orwellian-named Defense Department. Fred was a humanitarian-aid volunteer in Laos when he discovered that his country was taking the lives of peasants there by the thousands.
Fred assembled Voices from the Plain of Jars . Published in 1972, with the subtitle “Life Under an Air War,” the book included essays by Laotian people living under long-term U.S. bombardment as well drawings by children who depicted the horrors all around them. As one bookseller put it, “This is the story of the first society to be totally destroyed by aircraft.”
In 2006, when I talked with Fred, he said: “At the age of 27, a moral abyss suddenly opened before me. I was shocked to the core of my being as I found myself interviewing Laotian peasants, among the most decent, human and kind people on Earth, who described living underground for years on end, while they saw countless fellow villagers and family members burned alive by napalm, suffocated by 500-pound bombs, and shredded by antipersonnel bombs dropped by my country, the United States.”
Fred moved to Washington, where he worked with antiwar groups to lobby Congress and protest the inflicting of mass carnage on Indochina. He saw the urgent need to work inside and outside the political system to change policies and save lives.
More than three decades after his experiences in Laos, Fred wrote about “the effect on the biosphere of the interaction between global warming, biodiversity loss, water aquifer depletion, chemical contamination, and a wide variety of other new threats to the biospheric systems upon which human life depends.” He was far from optimistic. And that’s where, in April 2020, Fred has much to convey to us with a spirit that remains powerful several years after his death.
Many people who pay attention to national and global realities are in despair, and the loss of the Bernie campaign now adds to the weight of pessimism. Fred would have understood. Looking toward the future, he said, “I find it hard to have much ‘hope’ that the species will better itself in coming decades.”
But, Fred went on, “I have also reached a point in my self-inquiries where I came to dislike the whole notion of ‘hope.’ If I need to have ‘hope’ to motivate me, what will I do when I see no rational reason for hope? If I can be ‘hopeful,’ then I can also be ‘hopeless,’ and I do not like feeling hopeless.”
He added: “When I looked more deeply at my own life, I noticed that my life was not now and never had been built around ‘hope.’ Laos was an example. I went there, I learned to love the peasants, the bombing shocked my psyche and soul to the core, and I responded -- not because I was hopeful or hopeless, but because I was alive.”
And human.
That should be reason enough for solidarity and determination. We will often lose. We will not give up. We must not give up.
______________________________
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”
The Green Party of Santa Clara County has a checklist of issues as follows (at https://twitter.com/SFGreenParty, April 9 post of Kenneth Mejia):
1. Medicare for All
2. Cancel Student Debt
3. Free College
4. Living Wages
5. End Citizens United
6. Publicly Funded Elections
7. End Military Interventions
8. Green New Deal
9. Public Housing & Rent Control
10. Legalize Cannabis, End “War on Drugs”
11. Support Unions, Coops
12. Reject SuperPac & Lobbyist dollars
13. Democratize Federal Reserve
14. End the Patriot Act
15. Humane Immigration Policy and Path to Citizenship
16. Support Net Neutrality
17. Wealth & Eco taxes
18. Cut Pentagon Budget by At Least 50%
19. Stop All New Pipelines
20. Ranked Choice Voting and Proportional Representation
21. Support Boycott Divest Sanctions and End Aid to Israel
22. Reparations for African Americans
While the Green Party supports all of these positions, Bernie opposes Nos. 18 through 22. That’s right, he opposes the only effective way to end the US military base called Israel, Boycott Divest Sanctions and end US aid to Israel as he has always voted for aid to Israel. He also has been a staunch supporter of the military, including military installations in his home state of Vermont. See “No, Bernie’s Not Anti-War” by Kollibre Terre Sonnenblume, 4/12/19 at
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/12/no-bernies-not-anti-war/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/13/bernie-and-the-jets/
Sanders supports the military's F-35, opposed by the people of Vermont:
https://truthout.org/articles/burlington-vermont-says-no-to-f-35s-in-its-community-setting-off-a-chain-reaction/
Democrat Joe Biden and Republican (former lifelong Democrat who gave thousands of dollars to the Democratic Party and the Clinton Foundation) Donald Trump oppose ALL of the items on this list.
Socialists, such as Peace & Freedom Party, support much more than the above list as any socialist supports 1. Abolishing the Stock Market, 2. Taking over and nationalizing the means of production, 3. Abolishing the profit motive, including but not limited to real estate speculation, 4. Abolishing the military as it only exists to maximize the profits of the oil companies and the munitions makers, 5. Completely publicly funded socialized medicine for all who reside here regardless of legal status, eliminating all private profit and religious medical providers, 6. Abolishing all private and religious schools and fully funding all education, including pre-school and university, so that it is all public and all top quality, 7. Legalizing all drugs so as to eliminate their street market value thereby ending the prison pipeline and abolishing the entire anti-rehabilitation prison industrial complex.
If you are horrified that Biden and Trump have the SAME REACTIONARY POSITIONS on the above list, CHANGE your party registration now to either Peace & Freedom Party or the Green Party. You can register online at https://registertovote.ca.gov/
For more information, see:
http://www.peaceandfreedom.org/home/
http://www.cagreens.org/
"Bernie Sanders, face to face on March 16 with his often-proclaimed “friend” Joe Biden, could only assert that “Joe,” voted for the 2003 Iraq War. True! Sanders scored a debater’s point that a well-scripted and lying Biden brushed off in a few words. Sanders left it at that. Television debates are rarely meant for historical clarification of events long past, even if the subject is genocidal war."
"Following Biden’s “mistaken” vote, the U.S. imperialist war machine and its deadly sanctions murdered 1.5 million Iraqis. That, too, Sanders left unmentioned. Nor did he note that Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein never had “weapons of mass destruction” that he was supposedly planning to unleash against the U.S. This demonizing and manufactured pretext, deployed with the entire corporate media in tow, was employed to launch the most intensive bombing in world history."
"That the U.S. continues to occupy Iraq today also went unmentioned. Biden, and indeed all the Democrats’ primary contest contenders, supported that war which they now proclaim was a “mistake!”"
"Sanders’ list of items to score points against Biden included the latter’s support for the infamous and racist mass-incarceration-oriented 1994 crime bill, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. The well-coached Biden blithely dodged that debaters point as well while Sanders declined to drive his point home with an accounting of the literal millions of poor and oppressed people who have been herded into the nation’s racist, increasingly for-profit and privatized prison-industrial complex."
Sanders stands mute on Cuba and Nicaragua
"But Sanders silence was not matched by his repeated reference to his “longtime friend Joe,” to whom he repeatedly pledged his support should Biden win the Democratic Party nomination, an increasing certainty at that point in the primaries."
"The March 16 televised debate spectacle included Bernie Sanders failure to counter Joseph Biden’s accusations that Sanders supported the “authoritarian governments” of Cuba and the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. That the U.S. armed and financed the universally hated, corrupt, Mafia-connected Fulgencio Batista dictatorship was not mentioned. That revolutionary Cuba, under Fidel Castro, defeated and removed that government and proceeded to conduct the largest land reform in the modern era, nationalized capitalist property and used it for the common good, that Cuba’s literacy campaign and free healthcare for all system are the envy of the world’s people, were not mentioned by the “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders. Biden emerged unscathed because Sanders accepted his “authoritarian” red-baiting without question. He stood mute on national television while the imperialist warmaker and Vice Presidential accomplice in Obama’s seven wars pilloried him for refusing to denounce Cuba and Nicaragua. Sanders was lost for words when Biden demanded that he renounce the revolutions that removed these previous U.S. neo-colonies from imperialist domination."
"That Nicaragua’s U.S.-backed Anastasio Somoza dictatorship murdered 80,000 Nicaraguans in its final months in 1979 went unmentioned by Sanders. That the U.S. invaded Cuba in 1961, brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, introduced dengue hemorrhagic fever in 1981, and then swine flu that devastated Cuba’s pig population, and then a plague that devastated Cuba’s banana crop, went unmentioned. The same with the CIA’s thirty some odd documented assassination attempts against Fidel Castro!"
"Sanders’ claimed longtime friend “Joe,” Obama’s anti-school-bussing, anti-abortion, warmongering VP, was let off the hook, except for Sanders’ staccato single-phrase recitation of Biden’s “voting record,” which the lying Biden denied and the corporate media dismissed as either irrelevant or long ago superseded by Biden’s more “progressive” views today. Why dwell in the past?"
Sanders is no socialist
"Media red-baiting notwithstanding Bernie Sanders is not now and has never been a socialist. During the 2015 primary contests and ever since he has cast himself in the tradition of Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his “New Deal” politics that had the effect of saving a failing Depression-era U.S. capitalism rather than abolishing it. Roosevelt’s social reforms were aimed at countering the deepening radicalization of U.S. workers, half of whom were unemployed or barely employed part time. FDR’s limited social measures notwithstanding, he transformed U.S. industry into a war machine that had no rival on earth. With an estimated 60 million dead by the war’s end in 1945 and the infrastructure of U.S. allies and enemies alike in ruins, the intact U.S. industrial behemoth emerged as the sole world superpower. Three quarters of a century later, war production stands at the center of U.S. capitalism’s “stability.”"
"In a 2015 speech, Sanders stated that his politics “builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans.” In truth, the rights that workers won in the 1930s and beyond emerged from pitched battles with the boss class aimed at the unionization of capitalism’s major industries (See: “Labor’s Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936–55” by Art Preis, Pathfinder Press 1972)."
Sanders: “I don’t believe the government should own the means of production”
"Sanders’ 2015 speech continued, “So the next time you hear me attacked as a socialist, remember this. I don’t believe the government should own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class and working families who produce the wealth of America deserve a fair deal. I believe in private companies that thrive and invest and grow in America instead of shipping jobs and profits overseas.” (For the full Sanders speech, see: https://www.vox.com/2015/11/19/9762028/bernie-sanders-democratic-socialism)."
"Simply put, Sanders, in his own words is no socialist! There is no socialism in the framework of a capitalist society where an elite handful of multi-billionaires own and control more wealth than the combined holding of the majority of the population. Sanders’ so-called democratic socialism consists in his campaign pledge to tax the wealth of the super-rich at the rate of one percent, and impose this tax only on their wealth that exceeds $32 million! Sanders proclaims that under his policy “a married couple with $32.5 million would pay a wealth tax of just $5,000.” Pocket change for billionaires!! “There will always be billionaires in this country,” Sanders promises the ruling class."
"Sanders’ statement that “private companies that thrive and invest in America” are welcome as opposed to those that “ship jobs and profits overseas” is sheer demagoguery. Leaving aside that any self-respecting capitalist enterprise that “thrives and grows” in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world, does so at the expense of its always exploited workers, no serious socialist advocates pitting foreign workers against U.S. workers. We might add that even when U.S. corporations return their production to the U.S. it is a qualitatively new production based on state-of-the-art factories where a handful of robots replace hundreds of human beings en masse and wages still remain at near-poverty levels."
"That’s the nature of the system that Sanders in incapable of addressing. The entire complex of today’s globalized capitalism, without exception, and in the context of ever-sharper and intensified competition, is compelled to operate with the cheapest labor force and raw materials obtainable, the least government restrictions and the resulting highest profit rates possible. Those capitalists that do otherwise are effectively, if not brutally driven from the marketplace. These irrefutable fundamentals of capitalist production everywhere are of no concern to Sanders, for whom the class struggle is to be subordinated to his dreamlike fantasies where he promises today’s trade unions that he personally – not a fighting working class in alliance with the oppressed! – will “double union membership.”"
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