Thoughts on Bernie Sanders, Global Economic Crisis, the Crisis of the Earth, and Social Disintegration
Featured image courtesy Huffington Post
- - on 02/22/2016
During the past months the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clintonto be the Democratic Party (DP) nominee for US president has ignited interest around the country and globally. It is a contest noteworthy for the challenges being made: to the entrenched DP powers and their financial backers, to conventional wisdom on the current national and global economic crisis, to people everywhere about the priority now being given to the crises of our planet – misleadingly termed as ‘climate change,’ and to us all as individuals in contributing or not to social disintegration. The crises are there to see, they are being felt globally, there is fear, and not for nothing, but out of this can come a common agenda. It is time to resist the status quo.
The growing popularity of self-identified socialist Bernie Sanders must be seen as due to the issues being addressed and his perceived sincerity in this. The resonance of his economic message shows the success of the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement – We Are the 99% – which was already noted by election organisers on the ground during the 2012 presidential campaign. Sanders’ positions include: fair taxation so that the wealthy and corporations pay their fair share; a large rise in the minimum wage (to $15 per hour); break-up of the large banks; health care as a right under a single-payer insurance system, and for retirees to not live in poverty; an energy policy not based on fossil fuels and geared to creating jobs in green energy; against private prisons and the incarceration of (disproportionately) blacks, Latinos and others for minor offenses; audit of the military; a route to citizenship for illegal aliens, with no break-up of families and no border fence; equal pay for women and protection of the right to choose; and campaign finance reform to exclude big money.
In foreign policy Sanders is against the new Pacific free trade agreement(TPP), as he opposed the similar North American agreement – as both sending US jobs abroad and as uprooting people in other countries from land and jobs due to the import of cheaper US goods. He is for a two-state solution in Palestine. And in perhaps the sharpest exchanges with Clinton he has repeatedly questioned her vote for the 2003 war in Iraq, which he as a member of the US House opposed from the start. One of his most significant positions in contrast to Clinton is to be against the US strategy of regime change, noting the disastrous consequences in Iraq, Libya, Syria and other places. And in one startling segment of his recent second debate with Clinton, he pointed to the similar case of Iran in 1953, stating that the US had deposed the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in order to support (largely) British oil interests, installing the Shah, and leading to his overthrow and more recent well-known consequences. This is not the kind of information or message that the US public is used to hearing on national TV during a presidential election campaign; Sanders has broken the ‘acceptable’ information barrier. Continue Reading →
