Nothing revolutionary about Sanders’ “Our Revolution”
29 August 2016
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders launched the successor organization to his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination with the rollout August 24 of “Our Revolution.” Despite the pretentious name and the slick video introduction on the group’s web site, there is nothing revolutionary about Our Revolution.
The video invokes “the idealism and the energy and the intelligence of millions of people” and suggests that their actions will be in line with a long tradition of popular struggle going back hundreds and even thousands of years. But according to the perspective laid out by Sanders in his live-streamed speech, this supposedly mighty river of struggle will deposit its waters into the cesspool of the Democratic Party and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Our Revolution “will focus on three distinct areas of work,” according to email and Facebook announcements: “(1) bringing millions of working people and young people into the political system; (2) inspiring, recruiting and supporting progressive candidates across the entire spectrum of government—from school board to the US Senate; (3) educating the public about the most pressing issues confronting our nation and the bold solutions needed to address them.”
What this means in reality is (1) registering people as Democrats and encouraging them to vote for the Democratic Party; (2) supporting candidates in Democratic Party primaries and Democratic candidates in general elections; (3) conducting propaganda to portray the reactionary capitalist and imperialist politics of the Democratic Party as the solution to the social problems confronting working people.
Every one of the candidates endorsed on the Our Revolution web site is a Democrat, including such longtime party standard-bearers as former Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who is seeking his old job after being defeated in 2010 by a right-wing Republican; incumbent Democratic representatives Raul Grijalva of Arizona, Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio; and a slew of Democratic candidates for Congress and state and local office.
The only even nominally “independent” candidate associated with Our Revolution is Sanders himself, who resumed that purely token status when he returned to his post as a US senator from Vermont. Our Revolution thus reinforces the political monopoly of the two-party system, which enables the American financial aristocracy to control and manipulate the political life of the country.
While only a few hundred people attended the official launch in Burlington, Vermont, Sanders addressed an audience of some 2,600 house parties and over 200,000 Facebook Live viewers. In the four days since, the launch video has been viewed nearly 200,000 times on YouTube. These figures suggest that Sanders continues to attract considerable interest among working people and youth after a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in which he won 22 states and 13 million votes.
The speech Sanders delivered differed little from the threadbare platitudes of his stump speeches, except that it was even more tame. Not once did he mention the words “socialism,” “capitalism,” “working class” or “capitalist class.” He made no reference to the “millionaires and billionaires” whose political influence he regularly denounced during the primary campaign, but whose support may be required to sustain Our Revolution.
As was the case throughout the primary campaign, Sanders made no mention of the growing threat of war and no criticism of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, including the escalation of US warfare in Syria and Iraq, the widespread use of drone-fired missiles to assassinate those targeted by the CIA and Pentagon, and the continuing military buildup against Russia and China. The “Our Issues” section of the Our Revolution web site lists 17 subjects, every one of them related to domestic concerns. There is not a single reference to foreign policy or war.
Sanders’ silence on war was all the more striking since that very morning the Syrian conflict was dramatically expanded by the entry of Turkish ground troops, who crossed the border with the aid of US air cover and began to seize Syrian territory.
While making no reference to this ominous development, which increases the risk of direct military conflict between the US and nuclear-armed Russia, Sanders repeated his claim that the Democratic Party platform he negotiated with Hillary Clinton is the “most progressive” in history. That platform endorses the Obama administration’s war with ISIS, including its illegal intervention in Syria, as well as the US-NATO buildup along Russia’s western border and the Obama-Clinton “pivot” to Asia, which will place 60 percent of US naval and air forces within striking distance of China.
Answering critics who note that Democratic Party platforms are routinely ignored by Democratic presidents and their administrations, Sanders said, “If anybody thinks that that document and what is in that platform is simply going to be resting on a shelf somewhere, accumulating dust, they are very mistaken.”
When it comes to the tepid social reforms listed in the platform, Sanders’ statement is false, and he knows it. If Clinton wins the election, the promises of expanded healthcare, a massive jobs program, free college education and a $15 minimum wage will be unceremoniously scrapped. The platform’s pledges, on the other hand, to build the strongest possible US military and use it in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Asia-Pacific region will certainly be on Clinton’s agenda.
Sanders made only a single criticism of the Obama administration, and that was Obama’s support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade deal that seeks to mobilize Asian, North American and South American countries under US leadership against China—which is excluded from the agreement. Sanders wants an even more nationalistic economic policy, echoing the rabid anti-China chauvinism of Republican Donald Trump.
Of Our Revolution’s 15 original staff members, eight quit after Sanders named his former campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, as president. There were objections to his decision to seek 501(c)(4) status, which allows the group to collect large contributions and keep donors secret.
The entire operation underscores the real political function of the Sanders campaign from its outset. It was not the political expression of the growing anti-capitalist sentiment of workers and young people in the US, but rather the response of a section of the ruling class to this alarming development. Sanders very consciously offered his services as a political lightning rod, using talk of a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class” to channel mass anger against social inequality and the domination of the political system by Wall Street back behind the Democratic Party, where it could be strangled and dissipated.
Sanders himself was shocked by the mass
response to his rhetoric and the entire
financial aristocracy was aghast when his
claim to be a “democratic socialist” proved to
be a powerful point of attraction.
response to his rhetoric and the entire
financial aristocracy was aghast when his
claim to be a “democratic socialist” proved to
be a powerful point of attraction.
The formation of Our Revolution shows that Sanders seeks to continue his services to the capitalist two-party system. But the conditions of capitalist crisis, unemployment, poverty, inequality and war that fueled the political radicalization of which Sanders was a temporary and initial beneficiary will not go away after the elections. The outcome of the contest between the fascistic billionaire Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the favored candidate of Wall Street, the Pentagon and the CIA, will be a further lurch to the right and a vast escalation of US military violence internationally.
In the impending mass struggles of the working class, it is critical that the lessons of the Sanders campaign be assimilated. The fight against war and inequality cannot be carried out within the framework of capitalist politics. There is no avoiding a direct assault on the wealth and power of the ruling class. The working class must break free of the Democratic Party and bourgeois politics as a whole and build an independent political movement to fight for workers’ power and socialism.
Patrick Martin
HILLARY CLINTON: Closet Republican
and Openly a LA RAZA SUPREMACIST agent for Mexico!
"The same period has seen a massive growth of social
inequality, with income and wealth concentrated at the very top of American
society to an extent not seen since the 1920s."
"He
(Trump) is able to get a hearing because millions of people are being
driven into economic insecurity and poverty while the rich and
the super-rich continue to amass obscene levels
of wealth. He is able with some success to divert mass discontent
along reactionary nationalist and racialist channels precisely because what passes for the
“left” in American politics, anchor by the Democratic
Party, has moved ever further to the right, culminating in the
Obama administration which has presided over endless war and
an unprecedented redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the
top of the economic ladder."
GLOBALIST
HILLARY’S PROMISE TO ILLEGALS: Amnesty,
legalization of Mexico’s looting, millions more American jobs and billions more
in welfare…. Just to keep wages DEPRESSED.
A Hillary victory means there won’t be a departure; merely a
doubling-down by the elite, as they act with renewed zest to secure their
interests -- versus the national welfare. The Great Imposition -- a war waged
on average Americans -- will continue with awful consequences. J. ROBERT SMITH - THE
AMERICAN THINKER.COM
“Forget the arrogance and
corruption -- $153 million in Clinton family speaking fees from 2001, mainly
bribes during her State Department years. Forget the lies, the lies about lies,
and the perjury. Forget the security breaches. Forget enabling America’s most
prominent sexual predator. Forget the trail of bodies stretching from Little
Rock to Benghazi. Forget every scandal from Whitewater to deleted e-mails.
Forget all of it.”
UPDATES ON HILLARY’S HEALTH CRISIS:
SUCKING IN THE BRIBES
THE TAWDRY
LIVES OF HILLARY & BILLARY: AMERICAN PREDATORS!
The
Clintons have been a criminal enterprise since they came to power in
Arkansas. The list of scandals they have generated is long and
tawdry. Their principal goal then and now has always been to enrich
themselves. They never once had a moral compunction about lying,
cheating, selling, and stealing their way to wealth. They are the Perons
of America. They eventually set up a "foundation" and the
money kept rolling in.
Only ten
percent of the billions of dollars the "Foundation" takes in goes to
charity. The rest subsidizes the lavish lifestyles of the Clintons
and their sycophants; those people who have sold their souls to rub shoulders
with unadulterated power.
THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION… FUNDED BY OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS,
MUSLIM DICTATORS, CRIMINAL BILLIONAIRES….
THE SAVE CHELSEA CLINTON MOVEMENT
Chelsea lives in a $11 million dollar New York City condo her
parents bought with their bribes for speeches money.
The Clinton phony charity foundation has paid out less than $9
million out of the hundreds of millions they have sucked in from Obama’s crony
banksters, Muslim dictators whom Hillary served as Secretary of State and
criminal billionaires Billary has long known on a first name basis.
Let’s work together to save this nation from these three low-life
scumbag parasites!
DANCING WITH DICTATORS....
BOTH THE CLINTONS ARE EXPERT DANCERS!
Hillary’s Russian connection
“Facilitating strategic technology
transfer in return for money is an old Clinton game. The Chinese bought
their way to access of considerable space technology when Bill Clinton was
president. Remember Charlie Trie, Loral, and the rest of the crew?”
OBAMA’S GIFT TO HILLARIA:
OPEN BORDERS AND A MILLION MEXICAN CRIMINAL LINING
UP TO VOTE FOR MORE LA RAZA SUPREMACY!
Most Americans (legals) would be appalled to know
that from day one the Obomb has funded the MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA
“The Race” with U.S. tax dollars and this racist party has operated out of the
white house under LA RAZA V.P. Cecilia Munoz.
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS:
You were wondering how many jobs went to illegals and how well Obama’s crony
banksters have done???
The sputtering economic recovering under President Obama, the last
to follow a major recession, has fallen way short of the average recovery and
ranks as the worst since the 1930s Great Depression, according to a new report.
Had the recovery under Obama been the average of the 11 since the
Depression, according to the report, family incomes would be $17,000 higher,
six million fewer Americans would be in poverty, and there would be six million
more jobs.
THE OBAMA-CLINTON ECONOMIC MELTDOWN ----- HOME OWNERSHIP – ECONOMIC MELTDOWN
THE OBAMA DOCTRINE: ABET CRONY BANKSTERS SO THEY
CAN FINSISH OFF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS. KEEP BORDERS WIDE OPEN TO EASE
MILLIONS OF MEX FLAG WAVERS INTO OUR JOBS, WELFARE OFFICES AND VOTING BOOTHS,
AND EXPAND THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS’ MARKETS IN AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS TO KILL
OFF AMERICA’S WHITE POPULATION TO BUILD A MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP FOR ONE
BARACK OBAMA, THE “Hope & Change” HUCKSTER FROM CHICAGO.
"The decline in homeownership
is one sign of the deep social crisis in the United States. As rents
and housing costs have soared, spurred on by financial speculation that
has enriched the ruling elites, incomes and jobs for most Americans
have shriveled."
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS
TO SERVE THE SUPER RICH: The slow and painful death of America
"These figures present a scathing
indictment of the social order that prevails in America, the world’s wealthiest
country, whose government proclaims itself to be the globe’s leading democracy.
They are just one manifestation of the human toll taken by the vast and
all-pervasive inequality and mass poverty that dominates American
society."
LA RAZA SUPREMACIST
OBOMB FLOODS AMERICA WITH ILLEGALS!
THE OBAMA-CLINTON
AMNESTY KEEPS WAGES DEPRESSED, DESTROYS THE
AMERICAN MIDDLE
CLASS AND BUILDS THE DEMOCRAT PARTY'S LA RAZA
PARTY BASE OF
MEXICAN FLAG WAVERS.
"More than
728,000 illegal immigrants have been shielded from being deported
and
granted work
permits through President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty
program, according
to the Migration Policy Institute."
AMERICA'S ROAD TO REVOLUTION
…..will pass right through Hillary
Clinton’s
Mansion door!
Mansion door!
“Our entire crony
capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy
approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great
country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THE AMERICAN THINKER.com
30 REASONS FOR 30 YEARS IN PRISON FOR HILLARY!
THE UGLY, SORDID, CORRUPT AND SLEAZY LIFE OF BILLARY AND HILLARY
CLINTON:Thirty
reasons not to vote for Hillary
She would make a terrible president and Bill an equally terrible
“First Gentleman” for these thirty reasons.
America’s Looming Economic Armageddon – Can the
Rich Get Even Richer During the Meltdown
HOW CLOSE IS HILLARY CLINTON TO THE ANTI-CHRIST?
Is it really true that Chelsea Clinton has a “666”
tattooed to her head and Billary doe to his willy?
“While most Democrats are dismissing Donald Trump's claim that
Hillary Clinton is the devil, a new poll shows that some of Clinton's
supporters aren't sure if she has some ties to the devil, and a few Democrats
think Clinton and the devil are linked somehow.” --- ARTICLE IN THE WASHINGTON
EXAMINER
SENATOR TIM KAINE: ONLY HILLARY IS MORE OWNED BY
THE SPECIAL INTERESTS LOOTING FROM WALL STREET.
KAINE IS ALSO AN ADVOCATE FOR OPEN BORDERS TO KEEP
WAGES DEPRESSED AND EXPAND THE LA RAZA MEX WELFARE STATE ON OUR BACKS!
TIM KAINE'S OPEN BORDERS
AND THE
MEXICAN GANGS HE PROTECTS
WITH
ENDLESS PROMISES OF
AMNESTY!
THE OBAMA-CLINTON CONSPIRACY TO DEREGULATE THEIR
CRONY BIG BANKSTERS AND UNLEASH THEM FOR ANOTHER ROUND OF DEVASTATING LOOTING
AND BAILOUTS!
MILLIONS OF AMERICAN
JOBS HANDED OVER TO ILLEGALS ALONG WITH BILLIONS IN WELFARE.... AND THE PARTY
HAS JUST BEGUN!
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY
PLATFORM:
NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED
APPLY!
VIVA
LA RAZA FASCISM? THEN VOTE DEM!
"Republicans should
call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment. But
more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order to
offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their fellow
Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
KAINE AND CLINTON-OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS…. Has
their golden age of looting America only gotten brighter?
"Between 2009 and 2011,
Kaine served as the
head of the Democratic National Committee,
the leadership
body of the Democratic Party.
He is close to Wall Street, having recently
backed measures to deregulate banks."
WHY OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS WANT MORE OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS
“Clinton has also stepped up her efforts to woo billionaires who
have traditionally supported Republican campaigns on the grounds that she will
be a more effective “commander in chief” and defender of the interests of Wall
Street.”
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan THE AMERICAN THINKER.com
HILLARY’S CAMPAIGN MOTTO:
WATCH ME FOLLOW THE MONEY RIGHT TO THE PHONY CLINTON FONDATION!
IMAGES OF
AMERICA UNDER NARCOMEX OCCUPATION…. THE PRICE WE PAID FOR THE
CLINTON-BUSH-OBOMB SABOTAGE OF OUR BORDERS TO THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS
…. After the
Clinton-Kaine and Speaker Paul Ryan’s AMNESTY and expanded open borders
TOM
TANCREDO:
THE CLINTON, OBAMA
AND PAUL RYAN CONSPIRACY TO
SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY.
THE CLINTON, OBAMA
AND PAUL RYAN CONSPIRACY TO
SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY.
FOR THE DEMOCRAT PARTY, MEXICO'S INVASION, OCCUPATION AND EVER
EXPANDING WELFARE STATE KEEPS WAGES DEPRESSED, BUILD THE DEMS' LA RAZA PARTY
BASE, AND DESTROYS THE GOP.
WE ARE SOON TO BE A ONE PARTY NATION WITH OPEN BORDERS FOR THE
MEXICAN HORDES AS THEY JUMP OUR JOBS, WELFARE OFFICES AND VOTING BOOTHS WAVING
THEIR MEXICAN FLAGS!
BARACK OBAMA
AND THE LA RAZA MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS….
There’s more
than one way to destroy America’s white middle class!
HSBC
laundered hundreds of millions and perhaps billions of dollars for drug
cartels responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people
over the past two decades. The bank transferred at least $881 million
of known drug trafficking proceeds, including money from the Sinaloa
Cartel in
Mexico,
which is known for dismembering its victims and publicly displaying their
body parts.
925k CRIMINAL ILLEGALS NOT
DEPORTED
DEPORTED
OBAMA’S
OPEN BORDERS TO DESTROY THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS - MILLIONS OF INVADING CRIMINALS NOT DEPORTED
OPEN BORDERS
KEEPS WAGES FOR LEGALS DEPRESSED AND BUILDS THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY PARTY BASE
FOR THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HELL BENT ON DESTROYING THE GOP WITH AN ENDLESS INVASION
BY MEXICO!
LA RAZA ILLEGAL CARLOS ESPARAZA RAPED A 7 YEAR OLD. THEN HE WENT OUT
AND VOTED DEM FOR WIDER OPEN BORDERS!
CARLOS
ESPARAZA IS AN ILLEGAL. HE JUMPED OUR BORDERS TO RAPE A 7 YEAR OLD AND
TO VOTE FOR MEXICAN ENDORSED LA RAZA HILLARIA CLINTON.