The Red-Baiting of Bernie Sanders Has Begun and is Already Laughable By Dave Lindorff!
(2020-02-11 at 18:42:45 )

The Red-Baiting of Bernie Sanders Has Begun and is Already Laughable By Dave Lindorff!

Executions of enemies on the National Mall?

It seems like red-baiting Mr. Sanders when he is drawing huge crowds may be a losing proposition

With Bernie Sanders now the frontrunner for president in the Democratic Party primaries (the New York Times poll guru Nate Silver is giving him a better than 40% chance of gaining enough delegates by the end of the primary season to win the nomination on the all-important first ballot at the National Convention in July (meaning the neo-liberal Party Establishment would not have a chance to steal it away from him using "Superdelegates"), it is becoming open season on socialism and its more anodyne relative democratic socialism.

A few days ago, right-wing columnist Marc Thiessen, writing in my local paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, mocked the catastrophic mess of the Iowa Democratic Caucus, where there is still, six days after the voting, no clear decision on who won, Mr. Sanders or Pete Buttigieg, blaming the fiasco on "the same brilliant minds who came up with Medicare-for-All and the "Green New Deal." His conclusion, "The Democrats failure in Iowa stemmed from the same fundamental flaw that has caused socialism to fail (sic) wherever it is tried - the hubris of a tiny cadre whose grand visions and lack of humility far exceed their ability to deliver."

Mr. Thiessens thesis fails on a number of factual grounds, of course.

First of all, the failure of the Iowa Caucus was not the work of socialists at all or of the Sanders campaign.

In fact the self-described social democrat in that race, Bernie Sanders, was the victim of the foul-up (if that is what it was and not sabotage). It was the work of neoliberal veterans of the 2016 Clinton campaign and the earlier Obama years who had teamed up to found a tech company, Shadow Inc., which got hired by the neoliberal Democratic National Committee in secret to create a totally unneeded smartphone-based app for counting and tracking the votes in state caucuses and primaries.

The app was so poorly designed, so untested, and was presented so late and with no training to Iowa caucus workers that it failed stunningly, even awarding delegates to the wrong candidates.

This has led experts to conclude that it may be impossible to find out who really won the Iowa delegate count.

What is clear and unarguable is that Mr. Sanders won the popular vote, both on the first round of voting, and on the second when supporters of losing candidates were allowed to shift their vote to their second-favorite top-tier candidate.

Socialism was not to blame for the Iowa Caucus Fiasco

What Mr. Thiessen should have said was "The same brilliant minds in the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee who stole the primary from Bernie Sanders in 2016 are trying to do it again."

But he could not say that because he was so eager to tar "socialism" with the blame. He even linked the alleged "socialist" fiasco to Soviet Russia, citing a Soviet-era joke about it taking 10 years to get delivery of a car after purchase. Of course admitting that blame lay with the Democratic Party leadership would have ruined his plan to use the caucus cock-up as an opening to besmirch "socialism."

But Mr. Thiessen is not alone in his willful ignorance about socialism - or in his willingness to lie about its reality in countries where its virtues have been practiced for over half a century.

For another example of how luridly ignorant and dishonest the media and the political opponents of socialist ideas are in this intellectual backwater of reaction we rather ironically call the United States, take the MSNBC talking-head host, Chris Matthews. Speaking on an MSNBC panel after the Thursday evening New Hampshire Democratic candidates debate, Mr. Matthews opined that if Mr. Sanders were to win the presidency, he would end up establishing a dictatorship and start having his opponents shot.

Even his co-panelists were aghast it the absurdity of this claim, but Mr. Matthews doubled down saying, "I believe if Castro and the reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed," adding, "I do not know who Bernie Sanders supports over these years, I do not know what he means by socialism."

Fellow MSNBC host Chris Hayes noted that Mr. Sanders frequently cites the decidedly peaceful democratic nation of Denmark, which boasts democratic socialist policies like government-run health insurance, free college, government-owned public transit and expansive paid maternity-paternity leave. To that Mr. Matthews replied combatively, "How do you know that? Has he said that?"

Well, yes, countless numbers of times, Chris, but maybe it does not get reported on your network.

This is, I am afraid, only the start.

So propagandized has the United States been by almost a century of lurid anti-Communist and anti-socialist red-baiting in our schools, our media and in our political duopoly of pro-capitalist parties, that all too many United States Americans unthinkingly accept and parrot this kind of nonsense.

Listen to Donald Trumps vow in his State of the Union rant, to "never allow socialism" to "take over" the United States, made to fervent bi-partisan applause in Congress.

Think I am paranoid? Look at how MSNBC commentator Jake Johnson (supposedly a political scientist professor!) freaked out when Bernie Sanders spokeswoman Nina Turner referred to Democratic Primary late buy-in candidate Mike Bloomberg, $60-billion former mayor of New York City and worlds 12th-richest person, an "oligarch."

An outraged Mr. Johnson called her word choice "unfair and inaccurate" and added that the word "oligarch" had "implications in this country that I think are unfair and unreasonable."

An Oligarch is an Oligarch, Whatever the Country

In other words, to people like Mr. Johnson, it is countries like Russia, Ukraine, Byelorus and maybe China that have "oligarchs," but not the United States, where we instead have "billionaires" whom we often refer to euphemistically as "philanthropists" because they donate a small portion of their years profits to charities of one kind or another.

To Ms Turner, however, there is no difference. "Buying his way into the primaries" which Mr. Bloomburg, who is bypassing all the early contests while spending, so far, a staggering $350 million within a few months on advertising and on hiring paid "influencers" to promote his brand, is doing, she argued, makes him an "oligarch." (That by way of comparison is ten times what Mr. Sanders has spent over the past 12 months of campaigning, all of it raised in small donations from backers!)

This is the problem in a nutshell: The harsh reality is that the United States today has among the most extreme wealth and income gaps in the world - indeed in the history of mankind. Our government - and this has been documented - is today almost exclusively responsive only to the needs and wishes of the wealthy and their corporations, whose lobbyists, it turns out, actually write most of the legislation that gets passed into law by the United States Congress.

The rich, who are for the most part beyond the law, pay little or nothing in taxes, shift their profits and wealth abroad to off-shore banking shelters with impunity, and legally bribe the members of Congress and the candidates for the presidency as well as their cabinet officers with what are called "campaign contributions," free trips on corporate jets to exotic resorts, and promises of lucrative do-nothing positions on corporate boards after they leave their political jobs as errand-boys and girls for the rich and powerful.

So let us take a look for the uneducated, ignorant and propagandized at what socialism and democratic socialism actually mean in the real world.

What is Socialism?

Socialism is for starters fundamentally democratic. It advocates and celebrates the idea of people controlling their government by the electing of representatives who run the government, but also envisions extending that democratic control to the workplace, particularly in areas of economic activity where there is a paucity of competition (as in the energy industry, the arms industry, the power sector, utilities, health care the media and mass transit).

Sometimes that control comes in the form of government takeover of an industry, as for example of health care in the United Kingdom, the railways in Germany or France, or the Post Office in the United States. Sometimes it can come in the form of giving workers and even local communities - so-called stakeholders in the proper running of a company where they work or live - seats on the boards of enterprises. This is a requirement for large industrial firms in Germany and some other countries.

The United States, since at least 1917 and the success of the Russian Revolution, has deliberately conflated socialism with Soviet Communism and later with Chinese Communism. (I should add that the United States has also, all the way back to 1917, actively worked through economic strangulation and military action, to crush any attempts around the world to actually create a socialist society, from the Russian Revolution through election manipulation in France, Italy and Australia, to embargo and subversion in Cuba, coups in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, and elsewhere, and wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Congo and other countries. This sordid history makes the argument that socialism "does not work," spurious in the extreme.)

Actually though, even Lenin himself readily admitted that Russia had not succeeded (and could not expect to succeed) in achieving the "socialism" described above, because of its primitive level of industrial and class development, and so it was limited to a kind of "state capitalism." He was correct, but the thought leaders in the United States ruling class backed by the lickspittle "independent media" in this country have ignored that point and stuck with the false claim that the Soviet Union and Maoist China, with all the horrors of dictatorship they imposed on their peoples, provide perfect examples of the "evils of socialism." (Never mind that before the Russian and Chinese revolutions peasants were virtual or even legal slaves of the land-owners, the countries were either a ruled by a czar or a bunch of brutal warlords, respectively, and freedom did not exist for most people.)

Back in the early 1960s, as first President Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson worked to establish what eventually became the Medicare program for the elderly and disabled, a Hollywood B actor named Ronald Reagan was hired by the American Medical Assn. to attack the idea in a series of paid public advertisements on radio and TV.

As Mr. Reagan warned darkly, if "socialized medicine," which is what he called government insurance for the elderly and disabled, were established by Congress, "behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until, one day as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism.. and one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our childrens children what it was like in America when men were free."

Red-baiting Ronnie warned Americans in the 1960s that "government-run" health care would quickly mean socialist tyranny in the United States. (Warning: Do not drink anything while you are watching this).

Of course, by 1981 when Reagan was elected president, Medicare and Medicaid had been operating for 16 years and the AMAs members loved it. By that point, American patients also loved both programs, which were significantly improving the health and longevity of the nations people even if they did not always realize the programs were socialist in form and inspiration.

Freedom in any event had not declined at all. Indeed freedom from poverty was far greater because far fewer of the elderly were going bust paying for medical care, and far fewer younger adults were being bankrupted trying to care for their aging parents, grandparents and disabled family members.

The United States Already Has Socialist Programs

Medicare, Medicaid, free public college, subsidized transit, the United States Postal Service and the like are not, in themselves, socialism, but they are socialist ideas, as are electric power cooperatives and municipally owned water systems.

Bernie Sanders idea of expanding and improving Medicare into a cradle-to-grave program of Medicare for All so that nobody (and nobodys employer) needs to pay thousands of dollars annually for individual medical insurance or tens of thousands of dollars for family medical insurance and related health care costs.

Mr. Sanders favors free public college because a nations young people are all of our responsibility. If they succeed, we all succeed as a nation. If they fail, as tens of millions do, they end up homeless, helpless and hopeless. And they cannot succeed if they graduate with a degree and $50-100,000 in student loans, some bearing interest rates as high as 9%.

Socialism has nothing to do with freedom and democracy and everything to do with building a caring society that seeks to raise everyone and give everyone the opportunity to work and succeed in that society. Socialism is not scary, it is not Communism and it is not dictatorship, whatever the wack-jobs like Jake Johnson, Chris Matthews of MSNBC or Mr. Sanders latest attacker, Joe Biden, may say.

Bernie got it right when he told Pete Buttigieg, who has the financial backing of 40 billionaires, "You cannot take support to billionaires and then say you are going to be for the people."

True Socialism is Democratic by Definition

For me, the way to look at it is this: Socialism is the idea that democracy should be expanded beyond the political sphere to include the economic sphere.

It takes the freedom which today exists largely only in the home and on ones front yard but that gets chipped away elsewhere and does not even exist inside the workplace, and extends it to the workplace and beyond.

Socialisms premise is that government and society at large have a responsibility for the welfare of a countrys most vulnerable, and that the aggregation of vast wealth and the existence of grinding poverty are antithetical to a good society.

Capitalisms premise, in contrast, is that the pursuit of wealth is a positive thing, and that the achieving of wealth is prima face evidence of the virtue of the person who has it, while poverty is the deserved result of a persons lack of industry.

Reprinted here with the permission of "This Can Not Be Happening" The only news organization in the United States to be labeled a threat by the Department of Homeland Security!!