The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1987
Sanders loyalists I plead with you to get real. The anti-communist paranoia is not over yet. Your grandparents are alive and kicking and those who believed everything that generation ever said about socialism, and those who were equating that political bent to communism are still very much alive. Don’t screw this up by allowing senator Bernie Sanders to get the democratic party nomination. Not just yet. Not now. If your efforts result in the defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton you will be sorry. Our entire nation will be sorry.
This sound warning comes to you from someone who is more socialist than Bernie Sanders. I know it's not the time to build the democratic utopia we know that the United States can be.
We liberals tend to be huge dreamers. We actually have political dreams at night, in REM. But consider please what the opposition to senator Sanders will be. Scrolling map views of the U.S.S.S.R. where the camera slows down just a little bit over the word “socialist.” Fast flashing pictures of Chairman Mao, interspersed with pictures of bread lines and starving laborers working government owned vegetable fields. The announcer’s voice saying the S-word about 10 times in 30 seconds. Pictures of an angry Bernie Sanders in black and white switching back and forth between images of starving communists and Joseph Stalin.
Now imagine where all the money is going to come from to fund those ads. That’s right, plenty of locations for funding. This country has over 3 million people who earn more than 1 million dollars in one year’s earnings (each year). There are tens of millions of Americans who look-up to them as something they can become. Never mind the more than 1700 billionaires who will think that Donald Trump or some other asshole conservative monied capitalist will make a great U.S. president. The odds are against us. The campaign funding system is not yet on our side. Dreamy dreams of a true socialist who can make your dreams come true before you die are not timely at this time in the United States. If you continue to froth at the mouth over the peace and love and economic equality message of the true socialist then senator Sanders will be the nominee and we’ll be losing the entire country to conservatives with such backward thinking we’ll be moving toward corporate fascism so fast you’ll wish for the Watergate days.
Then you can just say goodbye to all those dreams of a single-payer health care system, banking reform that protects the middle class, criminal justice reform that protects the poor, Wall Street reform that reigns in greed and wealth distribution that grows us into what we can be, education reform that makes us the shining city on the hill that can actually compete in the twenty-first century. Just kiss it all goodbye.
Please get real. The dream may come one day soon, just not yet, not this election year.
~~~~~
The modern day Socialist divides and conflict:
I am a socialist. I have not been afraid of saying so publicly for decades. It will be twenty years before a majority of the population of the United States is willing to vote for someone who calls him or herself “a socialist.”
I am a consistent voter for the Democratic party in the United States for over 25 years. A democratic party voter who is asked: “What is a socialist?” Will not answer that simplistic question with only 30 seconds to do so. They will avoid an answer because they do not expect it to be understood. The public does not understand the differentiation between the old and worn-out comparison of similarities to communism that was touted in speech and print for over 50 years in the west when we were at war with the Russians over idealistic foundations. The public equates socialism with Stalinist Communism. That’s the way it is still. That’s unfortunate but it is to be expected in the educational demographic of the United States citizen.
In the United States the club of like-minded representatives who in this modern time of the present day defined Democratic party, has had a consistent record since they became dominantly the liberal party after the white flight of southern Democrats to the Republican party following the 1964 Civil Rights Act of protecting children and families in priority over the protection of profits. I say a “priority’” because they do not discount the role of capitalism in making our community what it can be, but that favoritism comes secondary in the priorities of needs. Where the strive among individuals to have the earning ability to have more material goods does indeed drive us toward growth and more public capital to provide that the affect of that growth beyond our previously conceived of forethoughts of what the future needs. Unexpected growth requires new money not the same source of old money. New money requires inspired creative entrepreneurship of the type that is fomented by the desire to have more material goods to one’s self and one’s family. A Democratic representative who shies away from the socialist label is exhibiting this pragmatic viewpoint. This is why it is tough to a get a fast answer to “What is a socialist?” from a Democrat.
I have long felt that what belongs to the Earth should belong to all and not owned privately. That includes our water that is deep underneath us and rains down on the Earth, to the minerals and fossil fuels we mine and pump out of the Earth that was layed there hundreds of thousands of years ago by life previous on this planet. Food to be eaten by all on Earth comes from these resources that are made available to private companies because they profit from farming and milling and producing the packaging and delivery of that food. But processing our resources to deliver and sell them to us is not enough reason to allow companies on Earth to restrict their availability to us based on how much money we the people have. The constantly rising cost of these resources is evidence enough, to me, that allowing those resources to be controlled by private profit is not only immoral but well proven by time and human history to be impractical in the long run and I wish that my fellow humans can all survive plentifully for the long run. That is socialism. That is why if I were a politician I would be the last person on Earth a for-profit resource gathering company or lobby of one of those companies would call a friend in government.
What distinguishes me from the hard definition of socialism: that no land should be owned by a private individual but by the government, so that the people only benefit from all resources that that land can reap, is that I’m fine with real estate. Fine, I would say, you can own this piece of land, but if you are pumping water or oil or mining any long standing resources from that land you may not own that. You may borrow it and only for the cost of it’s processing and delivery and not for a profit upon my fellow human because you did not create it and you can not own it.
A Democrat is a very much a socialist. We generally find very distasteful what a for-profit private company does in an exploitative manner to the population. We dislike the long run affect of more hungry people with greater needs who then need the only source for their welfare that then comes from some for-profit company. We want them regulated for safety and for affordability. We want children and families protected from the harm that they create when they think foremost of their profits before thinking of the long run effect on the welfare of those children and those families.
2/10/2016
Congratulations Senator Bernie Sanders (D - Vermont)! I knew you would win the state next door to your own where you have been a political folk hero of liberals for decades, ever since you took over as the mayor of Burlington and fixed that medium sized city.
If you are a pundit get your recent past straight before making a fool of yourself. It was predicted as very likely by any smart politico who knows the senator’s past that he would win the votes of the liberal Democrats of New Hampshire. I have known this for all of this past year and (silly me) I expected that you political reporters would also have known this. I was expecting his big win there.
Hold on Bernie your real challenge is coming. In the Carolinas and those many states you are the tomato in the pickle barrel. Get ready for a Hillary Rodham Clinton win in nearly all of those states. That is where the delegate windfall begins for her.
Guess what voters: Hillary Clinton does stand for everything Bernie Sanders is touting as if those issues were his own unique and new advocacy. I have known this since the early 1990’s when her husband William Jefferson Clinton ran for the office of President of the United States and I witnessed a fighter who as a woman stood-out and fought against white male assholes, day after day. That white male machismo club has kept women like herself as an enemy to be subdued since the evolvement of bands of homo sapiens began to be thinkers and builders of their environment.
What Bernie says he will do is what Hillary has had close experience advocating for for decades. But she stands alone as the one candidate, between the two of you, who has stuck her neck out as a party participant who actually wanted the opposition to get onboard with her ideas. Bernie has mostly stood alone and has been comfortable as both a congressional representative and a U.S. senator from a small population state of voters in a demographic that is fairly new to the state of Vermont - not the old-timers of Vermont, but the demographic that fled the lower New England states, beginning in the late 1980’s, for cities like Burlington, who then voted for the passionate Jewish man from Brooklyn. As if he was more likely to understand the populace of the largest voting block population of that small state.
Senator Sanders sir,
Your history as a politician clearly portrays that you have stood alone as a rebellious independent. Except for all those votes against a national waiting period and background check for gun buyers, in which you chose to listen to the National Rifle Association propaganda and so you thought that you were representing the people of a hunting state; Vermont.
You have been voting as a minority who stuck to his guns for the price of getting very few of your issues understood and accepted in the very partisanly divided government that is the United States. You have very little history as a moderate who seeks to bring people together to have accomplishments. Hillary has been that person of the later. That is a distinguishing difference that makes her a far better candidate to take-over the highest office in the United States as our commander-in-chief on day one. You know of this difference sir, and you subconscious knows it also. Those dreamy liberals (I am often one of them) are mesmerized by an ideal that this country is not ready for. Not this entire country, a very different place than Burlington Vermont liberals portray your following as.
All Rights Reserved; James Gray Mason, January, 2016.
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