Op
CounterPunch een artikel geschreven door Dave Lindorff over
Bernie Sanders en wat je gerust een haat-campagne door de VS massamedia tegen hem kan noemen, een campagne die moet
voorkomen dat Sanders in het Witte Huis belandt…. Bloomberg, één
van de Democratische kandidaten, doet alleen mee om te voorkomen dat
Sanders inderdaad in het genoemde huis kan plaatsnemen als president
van de VS….. (van 2001 tot 2018 was Bloomberg zelfs Republikein en men stelt terecht dat hij terugkeerde in de Democratische Partij om te voorkomen dat Sanders de verkiezingen zou winnen….*)

De
voorverkiezing in Iowa is volgens Lindorff een fiasco geworden door
machinaties in de Democratische partij van figuren die Sanders niet
lusten…… Iowa waar in feite is nog steeds niet bekend is wie echt
heeft gewonnen, ook al weet men dat Sanders de meeste stemmen wist te
verzamelen….. 

Lindorff betoogt terecht dat socialisme niet haaks staat op democratie, maar in feite 2 kanten van dezelfde munt zijn. Socialisme is niet hetzelfde als communisme ‘zoals we hebben gezien in de Sovjet-Unie en China, zo concludeert Lindorff, waar ik aan toe zou willen voegen dat de situatie in de Sovjet-Unie niets met communisme van doen had, zoals de Chinese maatschappij niets met communisme te maken had en heeft. Beide landen werden (en wat China betreft wordt) geregeerd als een politiestaat ofwel dictatuur…….

De VS kan je in feite geen democratie meer noemen, de verschillende administraties die elkaar opvolgen bedienen vooral de super welgestelden en eventueel hun grote bedrijven…… Waar de reguliere (massa-) media in de VS Sanders afmaken als een communist die eenmaal aan de macht tegenstanders zal laten executeren, ofwel deze media maken van Sanders een ‘communistisch monster’ en dat middels leugens, verdraaiingen, fake news (nepnieuws), propaganda en vooral door haat en angst te zaaien (tegen/voor deze politicus)…..

Lees het
(soms ook humoristische) artikel van Lindorff en verbaas je, zoals ik,
over de smerige machinaties in de VS, een ‘land’ dat zegt overal democratie te
willen brengen (door landen plat te bombarderen) en zelf in feite al
lang geen democratie meer is, niet alleen daar het grote geld
uitmaakt wie de verkiezingen wint, maar ook door alle belemmeringen
die arme en/of gekleurde burgers moet beletten te gaan
stemmen……..

Sanders wordt niet alleen in de VS pers onderuitgehaald, maar ook in de rest van het westen laten mediaorganen weten dat ze hem niet lusten, vanmorgen nog ‘een mooi voorbeeld’ in het megasuffe MAX Nieuwsweekend, waar leeghoofden Willem Post (‘Amerika deskundige’) en presentator de Bie hem wegzetten als een gevaarlijke halve zool; later wellicht meer over dit meer dan belachelijke gesprek op Radio1)

De wereld snakt naar rust en stabiliteit, zaken die je niet krijgt als Trump een tweede termijn mag dienen, hetzelfde is het geval met figuren als de Democraten Buttigieg en Bloomberg aan de macht……. Laten we hopen dat Sanders de voorverkiezingen en uiteindelijk het presidentschap van de VS wint, echter ik vrees dat dit niet zal gebeuren en het is zeker dat wanneer dit mislukt, de media, de grote bedrijven en de plutocraten (of oligarchen, wat je wilt) daar verantwoordelijk voor zijn……

February
13, 2020

The
Red-Baiting of Bernie Sanders Has Begun and is Already Becoming
Laughable

by
Dave Lindorff

With Bernie Sanders now having won
New Hampshire (and probably Iowa, where he won the popular vote) and
confirmed his position as 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),
it’s 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,
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.”

Thiessen’s 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 contracted 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 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.

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

But he couldn’t 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 that would have ruined his plan to use the
cock-up as an opening to besmirch “socialism.”

Thiessen’s not alone, though, 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 last Thursday
evening’s New Hampshire Democratic candidates’ debate, Matthews
opined that if 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 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 don’t know who Bernie
Sanders supports over these years, I don’t know what he means by
socialism.”

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

Well, yes, countless numbers of
times, Chris, but maybe it doesn’t get reported on your network.

This is, I’m afraid, only the
start. So propagandized has the US been by almost a century of lurid
anti-Communist and anti-socialist red-baiting in our schools, our
media and in the rhetoric of our political duopoly of pro-capitalist
parties that all too many Americans unthinkingly accept and parrot
this kind of ignorant nonsense. People don’t even realize that our
own excellently run Veterans Health Care system is a purely socialist
example of a UK-style National Health System (NHS), government-owned with
doctors on salary, or that our Medicare program is a socialist-style,
single-payer government-run health insurance program like Canada’s.
You just have to be old or disabled to qualify for it.

Look at Trump’s vow in his State
of the Union rant, to “never allow socialism” to “take over”
the United States. Think I’m 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 NY City and world’s
12th-richest person, an “oligarch.” 
Johnson called her word choice “unfair and inaccurate” and added
that the word had “implications in this country that I think are
unfair and unreasonable.”

In other words, to people like
Johnson, it’s countries like Russia, Ukraine, Byelorus and maybe
China that have “oligarchs,”  but not the US, where we
instead have “billionaires” whom we often refer to
euphemistically as “philanthropists” because they donate a small
portion of their year’s profits to charities of one kind or
another.

Turner argues there is little or no
difference. “Buying his way into the primaries” which
Bloomburg, who is bypassing all the early contests while spending so
far over $350 million on advertising and on hiring paid ‘influencers’
to promote his brand, is doing, she argued, makes him an “oligarch.”

This is the problem in a nutshell:
The harsh reality is that the US 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 totally
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 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’s take a look for the
uneducated, ignorant and propagandized at what socialism and
democratic socialism actually mean in the real world.

Socialism is for starters
fundamentally democratic (democratic socialism
is really a tautology). 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
healthcare in the UK,  the railways in Germany or France, or the
Post Office in the US. 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 US, 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 US 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 common argument spouted in
the US that socialism “doesn’t 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 US ruling class backed by
the lickspittle “independent media” in this country have ignored
that point and stick with the false claim that the Soviet Union and
Maoist China, with all the horrors of dictatorship they imposed on
their peoples, provide 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 a ruled by a Czar or a bunch of brutal warlords, respectively,
and freedom didn’t exist for the vast majority of the 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,
an actor named Ronald Reagan was hired by the American Medical
Association to attack the idea in a series of paid public
advertisements on radio and TV. As 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
children’s children what it was like in America when men were
free.”

Of course, by 1981 when Reagan was
elected president, Medicare and Medicaid had been operating for 16
years. By that point, Americans loved both programs, which were
significantly improving the health and longevity of the nation’s
people even if they didn’t always realize they were benefitting
from a program that is socialist in form and inspiration. 

Freedom in
any event hadn’t 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.

Medicare, Medicaid, free public
college, subsidized transit 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 program of Medicare for All so that nobody (and nobody’s
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. Sanders favors free public
college because a nation’s young people are all of our
responsibility. If they succeed, we all succeed as a nation. And they
cannot succeed if they graduate with a degree and $50-100,000 in
student loans, some bearing interest as high as 9%.

Socialism has nothing to do with
freedom and democracy or a lack of it 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’s not Communism and it’s not
dictatorship, whatever the wack-jobs like Jake Johnson, Chris
Matthews of MSNBC or Sanders’ latest red-baiting 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’re going to be for the people.”

For me, the simple 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 one’s front yard but that gets chipped away elsewhere and
doesn’t even exist inside the workplace, and extends it to the
workplace and beyond. Socialism’s premise is that government and
society at large have a responsibility for the welfare of a country’s
most vulnerable, and that the aggregation of vast wealth and the
existence of grinding poverty are antithetical to a good society. 
Capitalism’s premise, in contrast, is that the pursuit of wealth in
itself 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 person’s presumed lack of industry.

More articles by:Dave
Lindorff

Dave Lindorff is a
founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!,
an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless:
Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

===============================

*
Het is voor velen in de VS wel duidelijk dat wanneer hare
kwaadaardigheid Hillary Clinton niet misdadig vals had gespeeld tijdens de democratische voorverkiezingen, ze deze had
verloren en de kans groot was geweest dat Sanders tot president was verkozen…….

Zie ook:

‘Robert Epstein: Google en Facebook corrumperen de politiek en manipuleren de presidentsverkiezingen‘ 

‘Joe Biden met dubbel verlies: hij dreigde met een rechtszaak om zo de resultaten van de voorverkiezingen in Iowa tegen te houden van publicatie‘

‘Democratische
voorverkiezingen presidentschap Iowa: de soap is begonnen, nu is het
nog wachten op de beschuldiging van ‘Russische inmenging’‘

‘Facebook staat valse informatie toe tijdens de (voor-) verkiezingen van het presidentschap in de VS‘

‘Max Boot, promotor van de illegale oorlog tegen Irak is pissig dat Bernie Sanders kritiek levert op die oorlog‘ 

‘VS burgers zijn gewaarschuwd: Rusland kan hun hersenen hacken en laten geloven dat Joe Biden niet geschikt is als president‘

‘Hillary Clinton: Bernie Sanders is a ‘Russian Asset’‘

‘Nieuwe Russische hack samenzweringstheorie t.a.v. Joe Biden ‘schokt’ VS Democraten‘

‘VS presidentschap wordt gekocht met 100 dollar per uitgebrachte stem‘

‘Hillary Clinton manipuleert democratische voorverkiezingen‘

‘Michael Bloombergs deelname aan de verkiezingen laten nog eens zien hoe ondemocratisch de VS presidentsverkiezingen zijn‘

‘Media en politiek bepalen waar wel en niet over gesproken wordt >> over manipulatie en desinformatie gesproken‘

‘Niet Rusland maar Trump beïnvloedt nu al de verkiezingen in Groot-Brittannië‘

‘Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilt Zuckerberg over misleidende advertenties op Facebook: liegen in verkiezingstijd is toegestaan‘

‘Tulsi Gabbard (Democratische presidentskandidaat) en de gestoken verkiezingen‘

‘Ollongren (D66 minister) manipuleerde bevolking met beschuldiging Russische manipulatie door desinformatie en nepnieuws‘ (zie ook de links in dat bericht naar meer berichten over Ollongren en haar leugens)