Bernie With Nothing To Lose
Bernie Calls for a Progressive Populist Overthrow of the Establishment
Bernie Sanders recently posted online the “Tough times” note, below, in which he pushes for an all-out rise of democracy: people’s meetings; people’s media; workers’ unions; independent anti-Democrat and anti-Republican candidates, primary elections free of big money (including PAC money); and race and age diverse actions and institutions to create change so sweeping and basic that it will neutralize the bigoted and supremacist electoral college that helps the one tenth of one percent cling to power and hammer their destructive and profiteering will onto the people.
Bernie correctly notes that Republicans are the worst, most destructive, and that “Democratic leadership” is also terrible and in fact the enemy of the popular efforts of progressive populists. The Democrat establishment leaders “are much too wedded to the billionaires and corporate interests that fund their campaigns,” as with the campaigns of their factional opponents, the Republicans. It’s a one party country, America, that attacks people with its two predatory, plutocratic, profiteering factions, the Ds and the Rs. Time for the Ps to arrive, the Progressive Populists to defeat the frauds, the fakes, the Pseudo Populists of both establishment parties.
In the country as a whole and in the “blue” Democrat states in particular, the electoral way forward has long been clear (as I detail in Con Don, The Con Dems, and The Left). Badly needed is a takeover of the hostile Democrat party in the primaries so that the even more hostile Republican party can be defeated in the general election. The Establishment has no clothes — as social media, the people’s media at its best, makes clear going back to Occupy Wall Street and to Bernie Sander’s two runs for President, at the very latest.
The Establishment is absolutely predatory and vicious — criminal, no less — in its international and domestic policies both. The Outlaws are in power, always have been. The multiple ways forward to end the predatory Establishment can now be seen more clearly than ever, and Bernie has nothing to lose, few more strategic moves to make inside the recently defeated Democrat party, by pointing this out. Of course, the Establishment Outlaws who rule are bought and paid for by Big Money that dominates both the society and the bigoted, idiotic, and anti-democracy electoral system. Big money in the hands of a few, big problem.
This month, semi-progressive Nebraska Independent Senate Candidate Dan Osborn lost to right-wing Republican incumbent Deb Fischer in a deep “red” Republican state by merely 63,000 votes of nearly a million votes cast. A Democrat running in Osborn’s place would have lost by far more, would have been entirely uncompetitive. Osborn is an example of the way forward in most Republican states where Democrats are completely useless and reviled in electoral realms.
The Establishment Democrats and Republicans are deeply discredited across the entire country. Mainly now they run ghoulish and hollow candidates to oppose one another. It’s like watching a 50 state faceoff between monsters — social monsters who do their damnedest to rip away health care from people, to rip away education, and housing, and income, and healthy food, and family time, personal time, who hammer communities, while shredding the environment and ecology, and locking up as many people as possible, and spying on and threatening everyone else. No one sane wants to vote for this, to live with this, to die from this, to offer to their children nor to see their elders suffer from this. No matter how brainwashed everyone is by the constant mental cleansing efforts of big money, no one wants to endure this hideous freedom for the profiteering and murderous financial tyrannies that basically own and command and control the country (and world).
But how to beat it all back and replace it with something healing, healthy, sane, just, workable, livable, truly free and loving?
With nothing left to lose now, or rather, nothing much more to gain by trying to strategize within the establishment against the establishment, Bernie makes his call to action, post-election, reminiscent of his similar calls to action during his two nearly successful election runs for the Presidency. It’s time to respond in a way that eliminates the corrupt heads of the “Democratic leadership.” It’s time to replace them with independent and progressive leadership so that the even more corrupt and vile Republican party can also be overcome or ended.
How great would it be to conquer and morph the vicious war mongering and world-ending parties from Dem and Rep to peaceful and popular Social Democrat and Progressive Populist parties. That would be a good start to a better world. Fake populists both are the Dems and the Reps, bloody and lying, horrible pretenders. The two establishment parties wear no clothes, as they are stripped naked in the people’s media day by day, and are seen to be dripping red in tooth and claw, clenching fistfuls of money, and weapons, and lies.
It’s all populism now. The pseudo populist Con Don Trump and the progressive populist Bernie Sanders rose at the same time, in the 2016 election cycle. They were the two angriest candidates and the two most popular, in an angry, angry country, and they have remained most popular for nearly a decade. The people are so angry because they are so under attack by oceans of painful and violent exploitation, profiteering, and fraud that they can see with their own two eyes, even as they are brainwashed and confused about who to blame and how to cure the various types of predatory diseases that are killing everyone and the planet.
The women of color of the so-called Squad and their allies are the angriest candidates now and for the foreseeable future that is progressive and populist, and properly so: Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Jasmine Crockett, Summer Lee, and others. Along with Bernie, Jamaal Bowman, and other progressive populists, these are the real leaders of the country, at their most progressive — win, lose, or draw. Consequently, they are battled and opposed by the biggest and most depraved forces of the Establishment. The vicious profiteers come for them first, seeking out the strongest, most principled, most threatening, most capable, most inspiring leaders — just as they first came for Bernie.
And so Bernie makes another call for action on the people’s behalf. Anyone campaigning, playing, or pivoting to Bernie’s right (especially in the “blue” Democrat states, as well as in the country as a whole) can only be realistically seen as embarrassingly weak now, unprincipled and dishonest — the people’s cringeworthy and unpopular enemies — Cruellas and Creeps — serfs to infernal and fraudulent finance and war — and no leaders of the people.
Because the establishment Democrats and Republicans constantly expose themselves with their flagrant depravity, there’s no time like the present to help them exit the bloody stage of their well-paid pretense. The bigger they come, the harder they fall. For a surge of independent progressives against Republicans in red states — Dan Osborn showed the way. And in blue states the Bernies and the AOCs and the Tlaibs. Progressive populist Democrats against establishment Democrats can undercut both predatory parties like an ax to two towering diseased trees, one after the other, in electoral realms — just as currently goes down in the people’s media, where establishment tyrannies and imperial holocausts are shown for what they are — as the FUBAR monsters of our time, devouring people, plants, animals, the planet. The big owners kill systemically in plain site now, visible to everyone with an eye on the instant electronic history of the day. It’s so long past time to throw out the predators, the Establishment, and replace them with a sane and inspiring wave of progressive populist people and actions.
To say that these are “tough times” is the understatement of all time. These are terminal times, terrible times. Terroristic times, torturous times. The Establishment terrorizes and tortures and terminates, and then points its bloody, monied finger at the brutalized and massacred and impoverished people who dare to fight back, at home and abroad. It’s Orwellian fraud. The establishment is outlaw, and the system is rigged to pretend otherwise, to maintain its hateful and unjust, homicidal and genocidal order.
Paradoxically, the two establishment parties are simultaneously incredibly strong and more weak than ever, ripe to be ripped out. So much is known now in real time. The revelatory contrast is immediately visible in split screen totality — establishment lies and attacks on the one side, and their simultaneous scandalous exposure on the other side. The Evil sick nature of the Establishment in this obvious reality makes people increasingly angry and increasingly populist and creates the situation now where the progressive populists fight the fake populists and both fight the fraudulent criminal establishments of both parties.
Populists also fight the fraudulent establishments of corporate media and corporate culture and corporate society. Corporations and banks are anti-democracy private governments structured as tyrannies of money. They select, fund, and dominate the public governments, and must all be thrown out or democratized into oblivion, in a people’s renaissance.
Bernie’s national call to action renews the battle. It’s a plea and a push for a people’s surge to stop the war mongers and the profiteers and the ghouls of the establishment and to replace them with progressive populist forces. It’s a call to fight for a massive expansion of human rights for people in America and abroad, in this continued genocidal and possibly terminal age. The Outlaws remain in power. The ways to arrest their advance and bloody efforts are known. It’s always a good time to get together and act. Never more so than now.
And we the people might do well to put out our own call back to Bernie and to other progressive populist leaders: Go farther. Get together and go farther forward. Election cycles come quick. Time to get ready.
Bernie Sanders:
Tough times.
The American people understand that our economic and political systems are rigged. They know that the very rich get much richer while almost everyone else becomes poorer. They know that we are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society.
The Democrats ran a campaign protecting the status quo and tinkering around the edges.
Trump and the Republicans campaigned on change and on smashing the existing order.
Not surprisingly, the Republicans won. Unfortunately, the “change” that Republicans will bring about will make a bad situation worse, and a society of gross inequality even more unequal, more unjust and more bigoted.
Will the Democratic leadership learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class and is prepared to take on the enormously powerful special interests that dominate our economy, our media and our political life?
Highly unlikely.
They are much too wedded to the billionaires and corporate interests that fund their campaigns.
Given that reality, where do we go from here? That is the very serious question that needs a lot of discussion in the coming weeks and months.
How do we expand our efforts to build a multi-racial, multi-generational working class movement?
How do we create a 50 state movement, not politics based on the electoral college and “battleground” states?
How do we deal with Citizens United and the ability of billionaires to buy elections?
How do we recruit more working class candidates for office at all levels of government?
Should we be supporting Independent candidates who are prepared to take on both parties?
How do we better support union organizing?
How do we put together listening sessions around the country that intentionally seek input from people who did not vote for Democrats in the last election?
How do we best use social media to build our movement and combat the lies and disinformation coming from the billionaire class and right wing media?
How do we build sustainable and long-term issue-based organizing structures that live beyond individual campaigns?
These are some of the political questions that, together, we need to address. And it is absolutely critical that you make your voice heard during this process.
Not me. Us.
That is the only way forward.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
