America won’t listen to Sanders ... yet

[portlander23]

America won’t listen to Sanders ... yet
Ricky L. Jones
The Courier-Journal

He has argued that American capitalism has produced untenable levels of inequality. He questions why a small percentage of Americans control huge amounts of wealth while the majority endures monstrous levels of poverty and suffering. Among other things, his critiques skewer Wall Street, the criminal justice system, educational failures, and health care system problems – tying them all back to capitalism.

Our words say we value education; constant cuts on the federal and state levels say we do not. Large swaths of people are uneducated, undereducated, unemployed or underemployed and we say they do not want to learn or work. We incarcerate more people than any other first world country but see little wrong with the criminal industrial complex that does it. We see America’s poor living more like a caste than a class – locked in drudgery generation after generation and say they are lazy. Racial, gender, and ethnic inequality persist yet we say we are deeply committed to egalitarianism. From corporations to higher education, bourgeois CEOs earn massive salaries and bonuses while their proletariat workers toil in fear just to get by and we say equal opportunity is a reality.

American gladiatorial capitalism demands that every man and woman believe in individualism without bound. The valuing of profit over people ultimately sinks the dispossessed into economic and psychological despair to which they respond in myriad ways. They doubt the world and themselves. They numb themselves with drugs. They visit violence upon one another. They lose hope. They are proof that deformed systems create deformed human beings. At the end of the day, we have two choices – we must embrace the physical and psychic violent culture born of capitalist inhumanity as the norm or rail against it and seek alternatives.

Bernie Sanders is offering an argument that capitalism is the problem and it cannot be reined in. It needs to be replaced. To be sure, he is talking about a systemwide revolution. The tractionless Jim Webb dismissed Sanders’ ideas during the debate when he opined, “I don’t think the revolution’s coming.” Maybe Webb is simultaneously right and wrong. Up until now, a presidential candidate would be disqualified for favorably mentioning the word socialist – much less claiming to be one. Bernie Sanders has done both and is still standing. So, America may not be ready to listen to Sanders yet ... but that doesn’t mean it will never be.

[workinclasszero]

1. It's hard to have a revolution when

the NFL season is in full swing, the beer is flowing and everyone thinks they will be a Draft King millionaire any day now.

Bread and circuses worked quite a while for the first Roman empire.

[1StrongBlackMan]

2. Is he really? ...

Bernie Sanders is offering an argument that capitalism is the problem and it cannot be reined in. It needs to be replaced. To be sure, he is talking about a systemwide revolution.

From Debate Transcript (Ctl-F: "Capitalist&quot :

COOPER: You don't consider yourself a capitalist, though?

SANDERS: Do I consider myself part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little by which Wall Street's greed and recklessness wrecked this economy? No, I don't.

I believe in a society where all people do well. Not just a handful of billionaires.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-first-democratic-debate-full-rush-transcript/

It appears that he is distinguishing between "Capitalism" and "Casino Capitalism", attacking the latter, while being agnostic on the former.

From that view, it would seem very little space between Bernie, O'Malley, and HRC's positions.

[portlander23]

3. I agree

Last edited Mon Oct 19, 2015, 08:16 PM - Edit history (1)

That the author is overplaying the extent to which Mr. Sanders wants to wholesale replace capitalism in the classical socialist sense. I think it's more the european vein of relying on government to maintain the commons (healthcare, education, etc) and removing shareholder profit as the sole motivator of private enterprise.

That said, I don't agree there is little space between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders on these issues. Mr. Sanders is clearly in the government-manages-the-commons side of things and Mrs. Clinton fall more in the third way public-private partnership model. That is a significant distinction.

[1StrongBlackMan]

6. Okay ... I can agree with this. n/t

[whatchamacallit]

5. Masquerade aside, Clinton is more like the casino pit boss n/t

[F4lconF16]

10. Yes, there was a good thread talking about his need to distinguish himself here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251699974

[1StrongBlackMan]

11. Thanks. n/t

[reformist2]

4. America *is* listening to Sanders... and his unfavorables are way lower than Hillary's.

[orpupilofnature57]

8. MSM isn't on his side, and that's a clue to all aware people .

[orpupilofnature57]

7. Like Mozart, being light years ahead of your time has it's draw backs, people will choose familiar,

even when they know the outcome will be negative, rather than conscience going in to the great unknown, even though the trip could only help, educate and free them from oligarchy .

[TheKentuckian]

9. My alternative is to then impress the lesson all the way to the bones

Give them the uncut version of what they demand for 4 or 5 Presidential cycles and I bet they will have little choice but to listen closer.

The suffering will of course be off the meter but far less than continuing down the path of insanity in perpetuity, better to take it on the chin now than in the gut forever and kill our world in the process.

[orpupilofnature57]

12. I like Your scenario, I mean more articulate.