Robert Scheer: Amid the Crowing of the GOP and Clinton, Sanders Is on the Rise

[eridani]

Don't think that Clinton will necessarily try to appear more hawkish than the Republicans--it will be more "sane" militarism vs the batshit crazy sort.

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/10/04/amid-the-crowing-of-the-gop-and-clinton-sanders-is-on-the-rise/

Clinton, in rhetoric and action, will never allow a Republican opponent to appear more hawkish than herself. In the general election, she will burnish her record of support for every bit of military folly from George W.’s invasion of Iraq to her own engineering of the campaign to overthrow all secular dictators in the Middle East who have proved to be an inconvenience to the Saudi theocracy.

During her tenure in the Obama administration, Clinton, by her own frequent boastful admission, was the hawk in the Cabinet pressuring the president to be even more aggressive in his drone assassinations and murderous air wars, which have destabilized the region and created what the pope recently termed the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.

But it is the still-troubled economy that will dominate the election, and it is the failure of the Democratic Party establishment—now represented singularly by Clinton—to deal with the lingering recession that explains the startling rise of Bernie Sanders as a viable candidate.

The Vermont senator’s success is not a result of charisma or image manipulation, both of which he quite properly treats as dangerous distractions from what ails us, but rather his deeply informed critique of the bipartisan policies of Presidents Clinton and Bush that have brought so much misery in their wakes.

What makes Sanders appear less formidable to the party bosses is that although he is now matching Hillary Clinton in the all-important fundraising category, he has received mainly small contributions. That and the fact that his positions on health care and banking regulation take on entrenched moneyed interests rather than cravenly cater to them.

Whereas Sanders supports the efforts by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. John McCain to restore the Glass-Steagall barrier against merging commercial and investment banking, Clinton still insists her husband did the right thing in signing off on the reversal of the sensible banking practice initiated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to prevent another Great Depression.

[merrily]

1. Biggest transfers of wealth to the wealthiest. The bailout and the Fed policies following the bail

out. And, as Bernie keeps pointing out, banks that were too big to fail 2007-08 are bigger than ever.

Bernie Sanders: not infallible by any means or "pure," but almost always on the right side of history.

[Enthusiast]

3. They could have bailed out every delinqent mortgage at a fraction of the cost.

But, nooooo.

[merrily]

4. But it's not the American way to "reward bad behavior"--unless it's the 1% that's behaving badly.

Then we bail them out, enter into a settlement agreement with them that protect them from federal and state governments and the general public, protect their bonuses, let them borrow for years at 0 to negligible interest, etc.

[Enthusiast]

5. I guess this was the thing that really opened my eyes.

Millions of others, too, it seems.

[merrily]

6. Nice that Bernanke is finally admitting it 7 or 8 years after the fact, isn't it?

Statutes of limitation have probably expired. I hate when they try to have it both ways and it seems more and more of them do.

[Enthusiast]

2. Maybe John McCain had second thoughts on his choice of economic advisers in 2008—Phil Gramm.

Remember when, on the eve of the meltdown, Presidential candidate John McCain famously insisted, "The fundamentals of our economy are sound."

[merrily]

7. Wasn't that about two and a half minutes before he suspended his campaign to rescue America?

Weirdest thing: George Will recounted McCain's suspension of his campaign and said McCain had "scared some people" while Obama had been "Presidential." He spoke about it for a minute or two, comparing McCain's up and down panicky approach to Obama's measured reaction, etc., but those terms are all I remember off the top of my head.

I could not believe my ears. George Will sounded more like an Obama campaign surrogate than Obama's campaign surrogates.

I repeat, George Will.

[Enthusiast]

8. Yeah. George Will.

[merrily]

9. Whom I have never heard say a good word about any Democrat!