Thank you, Bernie Sanders
By Saswat Pattanayak
New York, April 12, 2020
(Also on Medium)
The Novel Coronavirus may eventually subside in a couple of months, and most Americans are hoping to get back on their familiar schedules as soon as the status quo is restored. Hopefully before fall. Then the new academic year shall commence. And the most important election season in this country will get people excited. To reelect yet another candidate who will vigorously maintain the status quo, and carry forward the environment for which we have all developed a herd immunity by now.
With Bernie Sanders out of the race, Americans can heave a sigh of relief that we can finally protect our political economy by all means. Bushes can come and go, Clintons and Obama too. Trump of course must leave. No matter who is in charge, what the long list of White House occupants have uniformly espoused must continue uninterrupted. Long live the Wall Street. Long live the 1%. Long live the corporate elites. And to allow them to put profit above people, long live the tradition of November elections every four years that chooses a duopoly which can then provide more of the same.
This has been the mainstay of American democracy — the facade.
Against this stream of comfortable consciousness, there have been many radicals and for a mighty long time. They have been imprisoned, tortured, sidelined and refused. They have been relegated to the dustbins of electoral histories where the so-called third parties and independents are clubbed together as irrelevant. Very occasionally when someone like Shirley Chisholm has tried to rise up and has expressed an ambition to enter the political battlefield shaped by Republicans/Democrats, she has been shown the door early on. There is no space for people with radical ideas in the mainstream electoral arena. It is one irrefutable truth of liberal democracies in modern times. Chisholm was an unlikely candidate therefore, back in 1972.
Fast forward, Bernie Sanders in 2016. Like Chisholm, he too realized the system was rigged. No one messes with DNC, the establishment, the status quo within the status quo — the powerful elites of the Democratic Party who shape the agendas, set up the debates, outline the talking points, and make the rules on super delegates and super PACs. As evidence upon evidence suggested DNC favored their candidate Hillary Clinton and did everything possible to keep Sanders away. As Chris Hedges once said, “Whereas the cost of running a Primary is paid for by the taxpayers, the rules for Primaries are determined by the Democratic Party so that they can manipulate the system.” This enabled them to steal the votes from Sanders in Nevada, and to lock out the independents which resulted in Sanders’ loss in every state in a cycle except Rhode Island, where the independents were allowed to vote. Bernie knew his campaign was sabotaged by the Democrats themselves, and DNC used to routinely leak questions to Clinton in advance, to help her lead. Donna Brazile was just a token ouster. The real culprits still run that organization.
2020. Unlike Chisholm, Bernie Sanders decided to trust the Democrats again. That was his changing-the-system-from-within strategy. And yet, he was never considered an insider. He thought he would overcome that by sheer diplomacy. Being independent for decades, he had either no clue how DNC operated, or knowing fully well, he was willing to take chances. He even garnered enthusiastic support from the newly elected women of color Democrats who were pronouncedly to the left of the party.
What he soon faced was an unceasing tirade of abuses. From Hillary Clinton herself who denounced him as someone that no one liked, to Liz Warren who alleged him to be someone that did not want a woman president — a claim that was deemed true without any investigative journalism from any side, to an accusation that “Bernie Bros” were a toxic lot even as his coalition was centered around, and was led by amazing women like Nina Turner. In fact, it was black and brown women supporters of Bernie including Turner herself, who were continuously being attacked by Clinton and her supporters. The very white feminists who used to plead for votes from women of color during 2016 were all over Twitter deriding Pramila Jayapal when she took on HRC. “Listen to the women of color” worked for Democrats until the time those very women wanted to be heard.
Not only Jayapal, all the prominent women of color who supported Bernie Sanders were subjected to unprecedented levels of hostilities and harassments and racist threats — they famously included Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Linda Sarsour, Nina Turner among many many others. The movement within the Democratic Party to invisibilize women of color by calling them all “Bernie Bros” was a display of unchecked toxic masculinity. It was little wonder that the party then had to settle for their candidate of choice, Joe Biden, who has exemplified that masculinity all throughout his career.
Liberal media’s role in decimating Bernie Sanders in 2016 was well documented through WikiLeaks. But in 2020, with more guarded secrecies within which establishment operatives led the anti-Sanders campaign through CNN and others, it was not as obviously apparent to the viewers about who their candidate would be this time. Despite performing extremely poorly in the first couple of rounds, CNN kept promoting Biden. Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper and the likes kept appearing to be very concerned as to why Biden was not picking up. Segment after segment throughout media coverages of the primaries and the debates, every liberal media channel kept sidelining Sanders and devoted hardly any space to discussion of his candidature as one worth pursuing. Instead, the focus of almost every analysis was centered around what the Democratic Party must do now to defeat Sanders. Watching those analysis were cringeworthy for any objective nonpartisan viewer. Witnessing those should have been utterly revoltingly disgusting for any lifelong Democrat considering the foul play that was being allowed in the name of their beloved party.
Alas, that were not to be the case. Anecdotally, friends and community members all around were more concerned by the narrative of “Bernie Bros” being hostile on Twitter and how we are all supposed to be decent moralists. Among the potential voters there was scant discussions on the material basis of their voting agendas, if any. No issues of significance was worth addressing when it came to choosing candidates. Little wonder, Bernie Sanders who ran a campaign on a plethora of issues and promises to transform the foundational norms of this diseased society kept getting dismissed as a hack, and “Vote for me because I am not Trump” candidate Biden who touted his Obama/Clinton love secured his position that was already offered to him by the DNC folks.
Once again what Bernie supporters thought was a “rigged” system appeared to be a totally normal system. Because the unsavory truth is, the DNC system was not rigged by anyone. It was meant to function exactly like this.
Embedded within the narratives of decency and morality are series of lies by Warren and series of sexually predatory behavior of Biden. Within the narrative of “getting things done” are legacies of racist legislations supported by Bloomberg and absolutely nonsensical and meaningless pursuits of Biden. Those are way too many to be listed, but more importantly way too redundant to be mentioned considering they are commonplace, well-known, and eerily enough, accepted as norms by the Democratic Party.
Once again, Bernie Sanders has only himself to blame if he ever believed that such a party was the right platform for him to contest from. Surely, Green Party hasn’t been able to make its agendas known and certainly Communist Party has all but vanished, and PSL is hardly on the horizon, and so on. But if Sanders was promising radical transformation of American society, then that vision of transformation on his part should have at least included the realities of political landscape — and that is where he drastically failed. As Audre Lorde has reminded us, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”
Democratic Party is the masters’ house. Nancy Pelosi, the unapologetic capitalist, is the custodian of that house. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the rape culture apologist, is the custodian of that house. Barack Obama, the biggest militarist president in recent times, and his pick Joe Biden, the children’s hair fixer and disbeliever in women who come forward with allegations against him, are also custodians of that house.
Bernie Sanders had thought he would win the nomination based on a list of principles and agendas that had overwhelming support of the American people. But he did not think it through and did not learn from the mistakes of 2016. American people are not being fooled since Donald Trump, whom Sanders used to call the “worst president in the history of this country”, arrived at the scene. American people are being fooled since decades now through numerous presidencies. Donald Trump did not sabotage Bernie Sanders campaign. He did not discredit millions of young voters and dreamers who formed an unprecedented coalition to keep Sanders relevant. Its the establishment Democrats who caused the harm.
Perhaps out of exasperation at this late realization, Sanders finally wrote something on Twitter one find day that quite naturally did not sit well with the Dems. On February 21 this year he wrote, “I’ve got news for the Republican establishment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.”
And on February 23, he wrote, “The Israeli people have the right to live in peace and security. So do the Palestinian people. I remain concerned about the platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights. For that reason I will not attend their conference.”
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(Bernie Sanders. Photo by Saswat Pattanayak)
Bernie has always been a curious case for the liberals in this country. I was personally introduced to his brand of independent progressive politics back in 2006 and have followed his works closely. His appeal has been his actions, not rhetorics. He doesn’t come across as someone with any charisma of Obama, tone of Biden, or mass appeal of Trump. But he has something unique to offer to American politics — a consistent reminder about the class society. In the US, it has been rather predictably easy to talk about racial tensions, gender dynamics, immigration issues, and so on. “Class” however has remained bereft of mentions in politics, journalism, and academia alike because it is associated with communistic discourses and that is a pure evil which must be opposed by all political parties. From time to time politicians like Obama have spoken to the inequality that exists between Wall Street and Main Street. But those have been merely lip services to the cause which Obama had no interest in addressing — on the contrary, when it came to Wall Street crisis, he conveniently got the occupiers arrested and the billionaires bailed out.
Bernie Sanders has always consistently persisted on the “Class War” component that is uniquely his contribution. He has not much bothered with political correctness around this phrase. Even as he has felt like bringing together a “movement” with a “NotMeButUs” kind of a “coalition” politics, he has never let go of his priority to mention the word class and the phrase class war. How does one acknowledge a class war without being a communist at heart? Within the limited scope of declaring oneself a communist, Bernie has praised Castro and all the “dictators” that make American elites uncomfortable, but he has also steered clear of embracing communism. Part of that emphasis owed itself to his interest in being accepted at a mainstream level, ambitiously enough through a Democratic Party ticket, no less.
But the contradictions were too obvious to have been missed. His personal ambition (or aspiration to represent the American people, if that makes it more acceptable) was overpowering his political commitments. In terms of principles, everything he espoused were absolutely communistic and yet when it came to explaining his political positions, he would act like Cornel West and try to distinguish his politics as democratic-socialist. The only problem is, communism in its pure form can never exist within a western democratic setup. Both Marx and Lenin have advised the radicals from time to time to collaborate with the bourgeois progressive party of the time without losing sight of the goal. So if Fox News was openly and CNN was hideously characterizing Sanders as a communist, they were not so wrong. And more importantly, if labour unions and working class of America were feeling liberated by being recognized solely by their class status, they were not wrong either. It was however only Sanders who refused to accept the reality that it is important to support a bourgeois liberal party when situation so demands, but not to really aim to spearhead it. That is a sure recipe for electoral disaster and that is exactly what has happened today.
More tragically however what has happened is a series of disappointments resulting out of a newly formed vacuum that temporarily had appeared to have been filled by the Sanders campaign. For 2016 and 2020 campaigns, hundreds of thousands of new voters, young voters, dreamy voters, utopian voters, voters who were feeling empowered to imagine — they worked really hard to materialize the issues at hand. They were not really so much for Sanders as they were for their own voices. And yet those voices have been betrayed. And by whom? Sanders had to extend an endorsement to Hillary Clinton in 2016 because she was the lesser of two evils. And today he has already given up and extended support to Biden because the greater evil must be stopped. Bernie wrote to his supporters on the 8th of April: “I cannot in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win, and which would interfere with the important work required of all of us in this difficult hour.”
Democrats can no longer be trusted, for sure. But will the young people who rallied so much of their dreams behind Sanders trust another great candidate like him, again? Perhaps not, and that would be a good thing. Because beneath it all, Sanders reminds us, it is not his greatness that needed to drive the people, but the issues that are at stake which did and they must now remain on the forefront, now that they are being widely talked about. Perhaps he is right. And now that there are no illusions and there is no obligation, and there is nothing really to expect from the decent man Biden, who offers absolutely zero to any socialistic person on this planet — let us revisit the issues that matter. Issues that neither of the parties have any intention to address, but which is all the more reason why they must remain at the forefront. The grassroots politics, activist politics, anti-war politics, social justice politics have never been about these two parties anyway — they have been merely co-opted by the parties at their will. This is precisely why the issues have to be addressed separately from the parties.
The Issues -
Sanders, informed by the brilliance of young progressive minds all across the country that are engaged in movements towards intersectional feminism, racial justice and environmental justice, has highlighted some issues that neither of the political parties are willing to address anytime soon. This was his primary appeal. Sanders is not a young man, but his appeal to the youth owes itself from the pressing demands of the younger generation which has no patience for political status quo, has no tolerance for a slut-shaming rape culture, no time to waste while fossil fuel industry ravages on. These are among the reasons why he was so wildly popular among the youths of America. The key differences from other politicians were largely because Sanders had unique organizational strategies, often times, quite risky.
For instance, take Linda Sarsour. The firebrand feminist who spearheaded and organized the most vibrant women’s coalition against Donald Trump’s ascension to power, and who was later charged as anti-Semitic and for her insistence on representation of women of color at the forefront, she was labeled as a divisive figure. So much so that the most successful women’s movement in recent history had to be split up into two groups because most white liberal women who did not agree with Sarsour created their own group, and even tried to physically disrupt the Women’s March of Sarsour. Subsequently, owing to biased coverages across media, Sarsour was completely sidelined and was no longer deemed a representative of the women’s marches that took place this year. And yet for Sanders, that did not matter. At the cost of alienating a lot of mainstream feminists who do not value intersectionality, Sanders continued to work with Sarsour and allowed her to represent him as a surrogate.
Likewise, the women of color politicians who represent Democratic Party in Washington DC — most of them newly elected and many of them known to be very vocal against Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton. They are hardly half a dozen. Sanders could have simply ignored them. And yet he welcomed them and valued their endorsements and indeed they emerged as his greatest champions — which further alienated the traditional Democratic base that remains subservient to Clinton family. Sanders did not compromise his values for easy political gains and stood with the oppressed Muslims and undocumented immigrants and young people seeped in student loans. His fight was not one predicated upon his decades long past experience as a senator. His was hinged upon necessary promises of an unseen future dreamt collectively with people, many of whom were not even voters.
Democrats laughed at Sanders when those people did not eventually show up. How could they? I was one of them too. I have donated to Sanders campaign several times. And yet, I am not a registered Democrat and I am not eligible to vote. I know many people just like me who have contributed small amounts from their savings, if any, to support Sanders and yet they could not vote. Thousands of international students view Sanders as the leader they would like to see in the world, and they too rallied for him and contributed their savings even while knowing fully well that they could not vote. Many undocumented immigrants supported him and they could not vote. Many working poor who are probably even registered Republicans came to his rallies and they too were hoping he would win, even as they could not vote. If anything, Sanders brought together the entire society — not merely party loyalists. He was welcome to anyone that dared to dream for a replacement of this structure and in turn he received warmest welcome. Sanders campaign pooled in the highest amount of money ever in the history of american politics — record breaking amount of cash that was contributed by individual donations from the working class. Everyone else including Elizabeth Warren’s were funded by Super PACs. Sanders was entirely funded by small donations by individuals. And yet his garnered the most. And who was his campaign manager? A Muslim-American Faiz Shakir, indeed the first Muslim person to ever manage a presidential campaign.
Watching and covering Sanders rallies has been an incredible journey for me. His decency, ethics, admiration for the teeming millions of Americans across social locations — were all superlative. As Nina Turner used to say, “Why settle for the copies, when you can have the original?” Sanders is the only original that has graced the Democratic Party in decades. But the issues he held unto were not his own — they were shared by Americans and by extension by the 99% world over.
Inside the US, Sanders constantly reminded us, there are on an average over 500,000 homeless who go to sleep every night at shelters. In New York City alone, the number hovers around 130,000 out of which 45,000 are children. Sanders usually always addressed homelessness crisis first in his speeches. His bill, he would say, was aiming to end homelessness once and for all. He shared with AOC the sentiment that in the richest country in the history of the world, every American should have a fundamental right to a decent and affordable housing. He considered it “unAmerican” that 80 million families are paying over half of their limited incomes on housing while wealthy real estate developers were gentrifying. On his first campaign speech for the nomination bid, which he held in New York City (Queens), he said it was “absolutely unacceptable that the largest public housing development in North America right across this street lacks decent heat and hot water, and is in urgent need of repair. We will establish funds necessary to build 10 million new apartments and homes throughout this country. Our program will eliminate homelessness in America. It will end gentrification taking places in cities like NYC, Seattle and SFO, and all over. Our legislation will create a national rent control standard — landlords all across America will no longer rip off tenants and throw them out of their houses. Our proposal will have 20 billion dollars to repair and modernize public housing and to make all public housing accessible, and to provide high speed broadband to all its residents.”
Sanders highlighted how 50% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck, and were struggling to pay rents; how 87 million americans are uninsured or underinsured — unable to go to doctors when they got sick because of the “most dysfunctional and cruel healthcare system in the world”. Millions of families can’t afford childcare, hundreds of thousands can’t afford higher education and equal numbers continue to struggle with students debts and interests. Likewise, he connected with the anguish of millions of senior citizens who are unable to afford prescription drugs, because big pharma crooks are fixing political primaries, and were threatening to undermine medicare, medicaid and social security.
Economic disparity in America has always deserved a special mention in Sanders addresses — 25 hedge fund managers make twice as much money as all kindergarten teachers in America combined together. Three wealthiest Americans have more wealth than bottom half of the entire American society; and top 1% have seen their wealth increase by 21 trillion dollars over the last 30 years. (Remember, 30 years. Not just since Trump started). Sanders would remind us that today we need to say to the Wall Street and the billionaires the following — “You ain’t gonna get it all anymore.”
Even when an average working class employee in America worked 2 to 3 jobs to put food on their family’s table, 49% of all new income go to the top 1%. If that is not palpable enough, Sanders would remind us the deliberate consequence of this inequality — “The richest people live 15 years longer than the poorest people. Poverty is a death sentence. And we are going to end that death sentence. It is not a radical idea to say that all our people regardless of income have their right to lead long and happy life.”
Sanders has always spoken of ideas that are fundamental and yet not supposed to appear as though they required an impossible feat. That is where his now-famous, “its not a radical idea” phrase germinates from. Gathering a multiracial, multigenerational coalition is ineffective if their concerns were not being addressed. Sanders would always make it a point to not stop at simply saying there is a class war, but he extended that always to include the wars within the war. “There is a racial disparity within the overall disparity”, Sanders would say.
That is because, an average white family of America owns more than 10 times the wealth of the average black family. Likewise black women are three times more likely to die of pregnancy than white women, and infant mortality in black communities is more than double that of white communities. “As a result of broken and racist criminal justice system, black men are sent to 90% more jail time for committing the exact crime as white people. And blacks are jailed five times more than whites,” Sanders would expand this way on the very living and thriving racist system that prevails in America — one which by no mere accident has given birth to Trump as its commander-in-chief.
Sanders campaign was focused on raising of minimum wage. He was famously known as the political advocate behind Amazon’s policy to incorporate $15 hourly wage, long before some states considered it. “No one who works 40 hours a week should live in poverty,” and to do that every worker in America needs to have a right to join a union. This is not an electoral promise any politician was willing to offer. Millions of workers today are not allowed to join unions and the corporations who exploit the working class thus are the very ones who fund Democratic Party nominees to begin with. Sanders said he would change that law so that every worker has a union representation even in the citadel of global capitalism.
One of Sanders’ favorite quotes is attributed to Nelson Mandela. Mandela’s quote is a significant one that most likely fueled Sander’s visions for goals that were rarely set before him — “It always seems impossible until it is done”. It is worth mentioning that, his invoking of Mandela was to empower his campaign activists, not to deceive them, like Biden does. Biden straight up lied about being arrested in South Africa on grounds of his support for Mandela. None of his claims have been verified and it is embarrassing to notice someone aspiring to be a world leader resorting to such blatant lies to further his appeals to the black mainstream.
Sanders would remind that “they” (the establishment) always wants us to believe that the status quo is the norm and this norm cannot be changed. “They want us to believe our vision for future is unrealistic. That its a pipe dream and it is utopian… Not just Republicans who give us that line, that is exactly what I hear on stage of Democratic debates. Let me respectfully disagree with them,” Sanders would make the entire establishment uncomfortable by exposing their true standards.
If the establishment is bent upon dividing people up and to make us believe that it was a norm, Sanders said, his plan was to do just the opposite — “We are going to bring our people together — Black and White, Hispanics and Asians and Native Americans. Whether they are gay or straight, male or female, young or old, together we are going to fight every vestige of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and religious bigotry that exists. Our administration will take America forward in ending all forms of discrimination.”
Since economic rights are human rights, Sanders planned to implement universal affordable childcare so that every working family knows their children are receiving high quality emotional and intellectual enrichment that in turn would aid in building a robust economy. Sanders’ socialistic vision for public education led him to trust the teachers the most — “to respect the teachers and to compensate them with what they deserve so that teachers all over this country do not have to take money out of their own pockets to order school supplies their kids need.”
Sanders’ offering that made many nervous also included a notion of equality that was to be achieved through making public colleges and universities completely tuition-free, and to adequately fund HBUCs (Historically Black Universities and Colleges). And what’s more, he was the only candidate who offered to cancel ALL student debts without any precondition. This is in sharp contrast with Biden who was an architect of a sadistic legal provision that makes it impossible to absolve student loans even in bankruptcy.
In a country that has a privatized higher education system that on an average expects students to keep paying back loans for rest of their lifetime, Sanders’ proposal might seem radical, but his words were exactly this: “If the Congress 11 years ago (Obama) could bailout the crooks of Wall Street and provided them trillion of dollars of zero interest loans, and if Trump and his Republican friends could give billions of dollars tax breaks to large corporations, and if we can spend $750 billion a year for the military — we can cancel all student debts in America. How? With a modest tax on Wall Street speculation.”
Again, many seasoned politicians world over talk about economic inequality, but hardly anyone has the audacity to talk about reducing military budgets in order to flatten the inequality curve. Democrats and Republicans alike have always emphasized on increasing military budget and to intervene into other lands with unaudited amount of arms and ammunitions. To call for an end to the “endless wars”, either it took someone like Tulsi Gabbard as a candidate, or it had to be Bernie Sanders (apart from a few other independent candidates, of course).
To take care of the 99%, Sanders had a plan — 15 million good paying jobs to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure. And to keep them healthy, a universal healthcare — a plan most close to Sanders’ heart. From providing clean drinking water across the country to make sure there is a “Medicare for all single pay program” — Sanders always invoked numbers to drive his point. While the US spends at least twice as much per capita on healthcare compared to other major countries in the world, as many as 87 million Americans remain underinsured or uninsured. More sobering facts — 30,000 Americans die each year because they can’t reach a doctor on time, and 500,000 go bankrupt because they cant afford to pay medical bills. Sanders would say, “Healthcare is a human right. It is a priority to end the international embarrassment for the US which remains the only major country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee healthcare to all.”
Another topic close to Sanders has been “Environmental Racism”. In Queens, New York, Sanders had correctly noticed that the city’s largest public housing development — an indicator of concentrated poverty — was alongside NYC’s largest fossil fuel power plant. Whereas rest of the city were in relative peace with the environment, its the poor by the Queensbridge “projects” who have had to endure the Ravenswood Generating Station — a 2,480 megawatt power plant. Only the New Green Deal co-authored by AOC was capable of ending this racism in Queens and elsewhere in the city.
Racism permeates criminal justice system in the US and Sanders campaign made that point time and again. On the other hand, even as he did not remind folks, it was Joe Biden who had helped write the Crime Bill that literally launched the biggest assaults on civil liberties of Black America. For this 1994 bill, of course Biden was supported by Bill Clinton himself. Its all in the house after all.
It was not any Republican, but a liberal democratic president Bill Clinton who made the biggest push to criminalize and incarcerate more people than any other president in history. His “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994”, helped construct state prisons, hired 100,000 new police officers, increased mandatory minimum sentences and applied the death penalty to 60 crimes. Clinton proudly declared this law was “the toughest, largest, smartest federal attack on crime in the history of our country.” And it was Biden who wrote and supported this law and indeed defended it to assert how liberals needed to be happily redefined. Biden said, “Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties, 70 enhanced penalties, we are for 100,000 cops and for 125,000 new state prison cells”.
When Clinton left office, the incarcerated in America were seven times greater than at the beginning of the Johnson administration, and the black-to-white ratio had gone up, from 3-to-1 to 6-to-1.
Sanders is no Bill Clinton or Obama or Biden. Maybe that’s why establishment Democrats simply cannot stand him. Sanders has always maintained we need to fix this broken and racist criminal justice system which lets America have more people in jail than any other country in the world. “Instead of spending $80 billon on jail and incarceration, we are going to invest in young people for jobs and education, not jails and incarceration. We shall end private prisons and detention centers in America and end horrifically destructive war on drugs and shall legalize marijuana.” Again, not many liberals are open to talking about marijuana legalization or about their stand on ending private prisons altogether; yet Sanders publicly laid out his plans which naturally met with no corporate or DNC support, but got overwhelming support of the masses throughout both his campaigns.
Sanders wanted to end the “disgrace of having 400,000 people locked up behind bars simply because they are too poor to get bail. Our criminal justice system jails people for selling marijuana, while crooks in Wall Street and in drug companies that have killed people all over the country are not facing any criminal charges.”
For the undocumented immigrants too, Sanders stood up and made his policy quite clear — he wanted an end to the culture of demonizing them and he wanted to pass comprehensive immigration reform that provided citizenship to all undocumented. This is something every democratic nominee talks about but they never say when and how they would attain that goal. Just like Trump is in the business of snatching babies from mothers’ arms, so was Obama who started the process of border deportations. Sanders said he would provide citizenship to the undocumented on the very first day of taking oath to office. And he would not wait for bipartisan mumbo-jumbos. He would simply pass an executive order to provide legal status to 1.8 million people who are eligible for DACA program and he will also extend it to their parents — and, he will put the disastrous ICE agency to an end. Sanders kept it plain, as beloved Malcolm X would have said.
Sanders’ past records on NRA were brought up by many Democrats to finally find a fault in his legacies. But he unequivocally said he will take on NRA to move aggressively to end epidemic of gun violence and to pass “the commonsense gun safety legislation which majority of Americans want. Those people who should not have guns, will not have guns”.
Regarding women’s rights, Sanders is well known for his feminism. Indeed Vermont has been time and again declared as the safest place for women in all of US. Sanders has always said it is the women of this country who have the right to control their own bodies and to ensure that he would of course appoint US Supreme Court judges who are 100% pro Roe v Wade.
Democrats have always wondered how Sanders was planning to fund all his seemingly utopian plans, and to that, Sanders had a three-point program -
Wealthy people will have to pay their fair share of taxes, so higher taxation for the 1%, and no more there will be tax breaks for the rich;
An end to providing hundred of billions of dollars as tax breaks and subsidies to the fossil fuel industry;
And, finally to cut down the military budget — “We don’t have to spend more than next 10 nations combined on defense budgets”.
Sanders proposals were enthusiastically and indeed emotionally supported by his voters and bases. Every time Sanders would talk about military, the people would chant “End All Wars”. Let’s imagine for a moment John Lennon, and the power of imagining an end to all wars. How beautiful and moving would such an audience be which without a prompt starts demanding an end to wars! Every time Sanders would talk about transforming the country, the chant would be “We Will Win” — the idea of a collective victory that takes into account everyone and does not leave out anyone. That is the quintessential Sanders campaign I have observed throughout. Every time Bernie would talk about canceling all student debts in America, the audience would chant “Bernie! Bernie!”. Each time he would mention New Green Deal, the crowd would roar into “AOC! AOC!”
Not just the candidate, a great president becomes that person who has exceptionally astute following — a conscientious class of vigilant voters who know right from wrong, need from greed, moral from immoral. Bernie’s audience is sensitive and caring people — just the opposite of how the liberal media would characterize them time and again. I did not see any “Bros” as CNN and corporate media kept depicting. Instead whenever I looked around, all I could see were women and men, young and old, people of different colors. At one such gathering, Bernie asked us to look around each other and to sense the reflection of the diversity and strength of the movement we have built. Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans. And then Bernie asked the existential questions we needed to answer in order to call this movement, ours -
“They will not give up their wealth or power without a fight. The question we need to answer is, are we prepared to stand up to them to transform this country? I want you all to take a look around — find someone you don’t know — maybe someone who doesn’t look like you. Someone of a different religion, someone from a different country — my question now to you is — are you willing to fight for that person who you don’t even know as much? Are you willing to fight for them? Are you then willing to stand together and fight for those people who are struggling economically in this country? Are you willing to fight for those young people who are drowned in student debts even if you are not? Are you willing to fight to ensure that every American has healthcare as a human right, even if you have good healthcare yourself? Are you willing to fight for the rights of immigrants even if you are a native-born? Are you willing to fight for a future for generations of people who have not been born yet but are entitled to live in a planet that is healthy and happy? Are you willing to do that? If you are willing to love, if you are willing to fight for a government of compassion, justice, and decency? If you are willing to stand up against (Trump’s) desire to divide us up, if you are prepared to stand up to the greed and corruption of the corporate elite — if you and millions of us are prepared to do that — there is no doubt in my mind, that not only will we win this election, but together we will transform this country.”
Bernie Sanders might have left this electoral race, but none of these questions have been rendered insignificant or irrelevant. On the contrary, we will need to equip ourselves with the answers more urgently now, because its no longer solely a Trump or the Republican Party that is the obstacle ahead. It is the fundamental transformation of our society that is long overdue, and with numerous obstacles ahead, it is that transformation, which is at stake. And absence the backing of any mainstream political apparatus or any leadership of Sanders stature, it may as well be a radical thing for the rest of us to reimagine the collective — transformed — future.
Thank you, Bernie Sanders.
