Burning Sanders
For several years now, I’ve been intrigued by the Sanders phenomenon – not least because his heart is in the right place when it comes to those poor souls left behind by the overall US obsession with money and the power it delivers.
As it happens, the day before yesterday I’d decided to go to a terrific bookstore here in The Gambia [TimBookTwo] and while browsing there I saw a paperback copy of Bernie Sander’s magnum opus, ‘It’s OK to be angry about capitalism’.
I’ve rarely had such an experience of expecting so much from a book and getting so little.
On reading the introduction fleshing out what Bernie sees as his career to date, I was immediately struck by the assertion he uses as the ‘header’ to his overture:
CAPITALISM IS THE PROBLEM
That presented me with two potential (and conflicting) interpretations about him as a person:
1. Is he just another devious politician looking to shed the best possible light on himself?
2. ….or is he just naive in his judgement of cultures, economic theory, human tribalism and specific issues and individuals?
The strong impression I took away from reading this book is that Mr Sanders is ten per cent the former, and 90 per cent the latter.
1.The devious Bernie element
Capitalism is an easy target that Cat Ballou could hit and harm with a kid’s catapult from twenty yards away.
But Bernie Sanders refuses to accept any other term beyond ‘capitalism’. He calls the current go-to First World system of production, distribution and exchange “uber-capitalist”. A couple of pages later, he correctly concludes that ‘Oligarchs own America’ – but won’t accept that Oligarch-run big business isn’t capitalism….it’s monopolism.
Sanders refuses to acknowledge a model of capitalism based on mutuality. By contrast, I focus on the New World Order desire to kill off all competition and then dictate monopolised diktats that leave the citizen as a slave.
I define myself – and this is nothing new – as a defender of mutualist capitalism. That is to say, capitalism that supports entrepreneurs offering new products and services for the benefit of all social classes - as a just alternative to Mussolini-style fascist monopolism.
At one time – not that long ago – Banks took a risk in order to nurture those risk-taking entrepreneurs with the creativity to challenge the established order.
Not any more: banks give money to big business today to make it bigger and more able to snuff out the distribution and manufacturing aims of the Little Man.
Bernie Sanders wants all the blame to be lumped on the shoulders of capitalism. I suspect this is because he wants to suggest that democracy and capitalism are incompatible.
And this is his devious side as a socialist ideologue: because nothing could be further from the Truth.
There are clear signs in Bernie’s book that he thinks like a Marxist. Right at the end of his Introduction, he embraces the thought of ‘democratic socialism’ as a synthesis using classic Marxism’s infamous dialectical materialism theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
That theory is pure humbug: it has always depended on when you set the history clock ticking as to what the thesis was and why one thing or another miraculously becomes the synthesis.
Lest we forget, towards the end of his life, Karl Marx wrote to French compatriots, “Moi – je suis pas Marxiste”.
So it is that, as the first main Chapter of Bernie’s book begins, he asserts again
NOT ME, US
I could not have come up with a better definition of what mutualist capitalism is about: that is, an update of Jeremy Bentham’s ideology-free social empiricism.
Bentham wrote that the State imperative should be ‘The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number’. Ever since starting out as an online commentator in 2005, I have updated Benthamism to suggest that “The State should aspire to creating the greatest potential of the greatest number of its citizens”.
I did this purely because social science has progressed since Bentham’s time to define ‘potential’ as more inclusive than varietal, ill-defined ‘happiness’.
2. The naif Bernie Element
On Page five of his introduction, Sanders says, ‘Yes, we have freedom of speech and a free press’.
No you don’t, Bernie….you have scoundrels like CNN, the New York Times, Bloomberg, MSN, the Washington Post and Google censoring everything that is deemed to be ‘off message’ or pro-Trump or sympathetic to the anti-Pharma aims of RFK Jr.
In the very next paragraph, Bernie contradicts himself and asserts, ‘to a significant degree, the oligarchs own that media’. But one man’s oligarch is another man’s neo-fascist progressive commentator.
I italicise the p-word there, because it’s clear – as his book proceeds through a litany of lockstep ideology – that for Bernie, ‘progressive’ is a hurray term with no ‘boo’ term downsides involving cancel culture, BLM narcissism, online silencing tactics and everyday yob-heckling of the other side’s rallies….pace, Obama’s stormtroopers during the 2012 POTUS election campaign. [In the light of emerging events, in fact, Sanders’ hero-worship of Barack Obama really doesn’t look very smart in a historical context. He admits that after two terms of Obama, the lives of the poor did not improve….but never asks himself why – viz, Obama was an Oligarchs’ stool-pigeon….and is being gradually revealed (and reviled) as such]
Bernie’s misreading of character is one of the most startling elements of his naivete. On page 7 of the introduction, we read, ‘I have known Joe Biden for years and consider him a friend and a very decent human being’. The trail of depraved greed that the Biden family (most notably Sleepy Joe’s son Hunter) has been involved in is not in any way diluted by the father figure showering inappropriately with his children and being involved in Beijing pay-offs to lessen criticisms of the Chinese regime.
The blindness of Bernie applies to every trumped up event created by the Secret State during the first Trump administration: he buys into the 2021 January 6th insurrection psy-op totally, explaining, ‘this was a battle over whether we would remain a democracy….I made it clear that Trump was a despot and would not leave office voluntarily’. But once elected, his hero Biden moved to legislate in favour of any questions (for example, about US postal worker mobile ballot-stuffing) becoming illegal. Free speech?
Bernie Sanders accepts the entire Fauci nonsense about bats in Wuhan, doesn’t want to know about military bio-weapon development in that city, and can’t see why the Wuhan programme being under the control [and funding] of Chinese and US military factions is any kind of problem. Instead, he woffles on about ‘the job of Government being to deliver Human Rights’.
There is no such thing as Human Rights - any more than there is a case for praying mantis or venomous snake rights. There are only Civil Rights like genuine free speech, the right to bear arms and the right to expect Truth to be discernible in the cacophony of media invention we endure day in, day out. [The bold and dedicated attempt by Roger Lewis to establish and make available a truly 360-degree sensitive algorithm as a replacement for crude, weaponised AI is a developing story as I write].
Equally baffling is Sanders’ ignorance on the subject of carbon footprints, so-called greenhouse gases and what he calls ‘the existential threat posed by climate change’.
The real existential threats to our species’ existence on a useable planet are first, playing dangerous nuclear games in Ukraine and the Middle East; and second, the headlong scramble to establish a trans-human bot culture as the centrepiece of a New World Order diktat run by eight billionaires bossing around 80 billion human beings.
But on those subjects, Bernie remains silent.
BOTTOM LINE: No it is not OK to be angry about capitalism
Bernie Sanders is ideologically selective in his use of nomenclature. What he calls ‘uber-Capitalism’ [and many others dub ‘neoliberal capitalism] is not Capitalism at all and never has been….it is globalist monopolism.
What is the never-ending business strategy of the Elon Musks, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerbergs, currency digitalising Central Bankers, Caliphatist fundamentalists and Intelligence communities on our planet?
Answer: Unipolar Earthly hegemony
Monopolism that kills competition and then dictates supply is the thing to get angry about. As Homo allegedly sapiens, we have to examine our wiring and ask the $64 trillion Dollar question: will the greed for money-power wind up killing us all off?
Bernie Sanders’ tendency to blindside that reality is a crime. And the crime is compounded by his inability to do the electoral maths and thus play a pivotal role in dooming the Democratic Party to potentially infinite Opposition. 'I was deeply moved by seven million people tuning in to a livestream from my home' he writes of the 2020 campaign. The American electorate is 262 million.
Like or loathe the reality, in 2024 Donald Trump's popular vote was 77 milion. His electoral College victory by 312 to Kamala's 226 was a landslide that left the Democrats marginalised as a political force.
But on the last page of his book, Democratic Socialist Sanders remains upbeat: