Bernie Sanders & Socialism

Discussion in 'Politics & Government' started by Lara Moss, Feb 8, 2016.

  1. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    This is not mine, but some of you will find it interesting.

    In all her years in Congress, Elizabeth Warren introduced 110 bills. 2 passed. Cory Booker introduced 120 bills. 0 passed.

    Kamala Harris introduced 54 bills. 0 passed.

    Bernie Sanders is truly special. He never held a job until he was finally elected mayor at age 53. He lived off of welfare and four different women had a child out-of-wedlock with one and the three marriages did not work out.

    In all his years in the Senate, he introduced 364 bills. 3 passed. Two of those were to name post offices.

    If you want to know what kind of leader Bernie is, go to Wikipedia, it’s a long report.

    The following is condensed: Bernie Sanders’ father was a high school drop-out, who tormented his family with rants about their financial problems. He blamed society and economic inequality for his plight, though as a white male in a middle-class neighborhood, he was hardly among the downtrodden. This was Bernie’s inspiration to take up the cause of economic justice, though he would spend half of his life as an able-bodied college graduate living off of unemployment checks, and the women in his life, between odd jobs.

    By his own admission, Bernie was not a great student, starting at Brooklyn College and transferring to Univ. of Chicago, but this enrollment kept him protected from the draft. He joined socialist organizations and dabbled in far-left communist politics, gaining national notoriety by petitioning the school to let students have sex in the dormitories.

    This was before birth control and abortion was legal when there were still very serious repercussions for women if the condom broke, but that didn’t stop him from crusading against those silly rules that were an obstacle to his own satisfaction. He participated in the 1963 March on Washington, a few demonstrations, and was arrested once, but his activism for civil rights ended when he became obsessed with socialism. NOT “democratic socialism”, but oppressive far-left Marxism.

    Bernie married his college sweetheart, Deborah Shilling, and spent his small inheritance on a summer home in Vermont on 85 acres. The shack had a dirt floor and no electricity, maintaining his proletariat credibility, but not impressing his new bride. He refused to get a steady job, so his wife didn’t stick around long, divorced after 18 months.

    The Viet Nam war was escalating, and when the next draft was announced, Bernie applied for a conscientious objector deferment. His deferment was denied, so he dodged the draft by having a kid out of wedlock in 1969 with his new girlfriend, Susan Mott, even though he STILL wasn’t working, and had no way to support the child. By the time his draft number came up, he was too old to be drafted anyway.

    He continued to subsist on odd carpentry jobs and unemployment checks, and occasionally selling $15 articles, including the one about how women fantasize about gang rape. He still refused to get a steady job to support his child. His girlfriend left him. In 1988 he married Jane Driscoll and took a cold-war era honeymoon in communist USSR. His new wife supported Bernie financially through his many attempts to win a public office and shared his radical leftist political views. They visited the pro-Soviet Sandinista Government in Nicaragua known for their human rights violations, support for anti-American terrorists, and the imprisonment and exile of opponents. Bernie blindly overlooked the carnage to stand with fellow socialists.

    They traveled to Cuba in hopes of meeting Bernie’s hero Fidel Castro, but access to him was denied. Bernie Sanders managed not to hold a full-time job his entire life or vote in a single election until he finally ran for Mayor of Burlington at the age of 40. After several failed elections, he finally won the office of Mayor of Burlington, VT, and eventually a Senate seat, which he has managed to keep off and on. For all of his years representing Vermont, Bernie Sanders passed a total of three bills, and two of them were for naming post offices. He’s a draft-dodging deadbeat dad, a globe-trotting communist dilettante, and a petulant detractor of hard-working honorable Democrats.

    His one skill is yelling about how unfair the world is, and how everything SHOULD be.

    But he has no plans for how to make it happen, and no idea what goes on in the rest of the world or how to deal with problems overseas. His excuse for not having a foreign policy or national security plank on his platform: “I’ve only been campaigning for three months.”

    His socialist friends are bitter about what they see as a betrayal of their values by Bernie’s pursuit of the Democratic nomination. His former wife and girlfriend run when they see reporters and will not speak to the press.

    Bernie’s past, including a brief stint living in a kibbutz in Israel, is cloaked in secrecy. (It worked for B Hussein.)

    Former employees and coworkers describe him as hostile and belligerent. All of the Democrats in Vermont’s government endorsed Hillary Clinton.

    The people who know Bernie best cannot stand him. His supporters cannot explain how he is qualified to be president.
     
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  2. Lois Winters

    Lois Winters Veteran Member
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    Sadly, many of his followers are much like him, Ken. I cannot understand why, this morning, Maine is still deadlocked between him and Biden. I see a run off looming.
     
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  3. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    The idea of a far left that is in opposition to the far right is not an accurate one. The systems on the two ends of what is commonly regarded to be the two ends of the political spectrum, such as socialism, fascism, and Nazism, all have communism as their base, and they all share a belief in the core concepts of communism, which are state collectivism, planned economies, and class struggle.

    Each of these was rooted in Marxism, and played a significant part in world politics after World War I, a time when the ideas of Karl Marx failed to materialize. They represent a time when various communist factions had gone back to the drawing board.

    But wait! Wasn’t Hitler fighting communism? Didn’t he come to power in opposition to communism? Yes, he did that, but he did so as a competing socialist faction, not because his own agenda was so different.

    After characterizing capitalism as a society in which people are able to trade freely, Karl Marx proposed that the next step would be socialism, followed by communism. Socialism was described by Lenin as a period of state-capitalist monopoly, in which the government had operating control of all of the means of production. Although production facilities might be owned by corporate interests, in one form or another, the government had control.

    Largely through our bureaucracy, we’re constantly moving in that direction here in the United States using ever-widening government regulations and mandates.

    Marx and Lenin both envisioned that a socialist government would use its absolute power to destroy the values, religions, traditions, and institutions, with the intention of replacing all of this with a communist utopia. Of course, this would be a utopia in which the leadership was considerably more equal than the populace.

    While the political system might be described as socialism, the goal was communism. Indeed, this is why proponents of socialism invariably argue that true communism has never been achieved. For one thing, it has been unsuccessful in completely destroying the vestiges of human morality and religious beliefs, although millions of people have been murdered in pursuit of this.

    Both socialism and communism refer to an economic system in which the government has full control over the means of production.

    Because Marxism failed wherever it was tried, this gave rise to other interpretations of communism, which include Leninism, fascism, and Nazism, as well as, if he could ever win an election, Bernie Sanders' democratic socialism.

    Each of these groups was characterized by a plea to the common (working) people to unite against the rich and the elite, as does the American Democrat Party. Also like the Democrat Party, the leadership of each of these groups regarded themselves and those around them in a different class, enjoying all of the advantages of the rich and the elite, while not including themselves among those who the working people were supposed to be in opposition to.

    This is why Bernie Sanders, a millionaire with three expensive homes and more wealth than any of us would be able to accumulate in four lifetimes, can nevertheless rail against the rich, insisting that they pay their fair share, even as he has absolutely no intention of surrendering one cent of his own wealth. Instead, he would take yours.

    This is why people like Al Gore can fly around the world in a private jet, dining on $4,000 plate meals, and using more electricity than the average small city, all the while preaching about how the American people are going to have to do with less in order to save the world from global warming. He has no intention of doing with less himself, as he holds himself above all of that.

    Meanwhile, the common working people, whom socialists view as their base, do much better under capitalism. While socialists called for the working people to unite against capitalism, their lives became much better under capitalism.

    Because of this, those countries that were able to form socialist governments have had to resort to force and mass murder in order to maintain power. Rather than a struggle between the working people and the rich, the reality was an oppressive government using police and military force to hold down the working people, many of whom were duped into uniting to bring the oppressors to power, to begin with.

    After Lenin, the next major communist revisionist was Benito Mussolini, who had learned from World War I that nationalism was a more uniting force than a worker’s revolution, so he revised the ideas of Karl Marx to create fascism, which was based on the idea of a bundle of sticks reinforcing the handle of an axe.

    “The citizen in the Fascist State is no longer a selfish individual who has the antisocial right of rebelling against any law of the Collective.” -- Benito Mussolini

    In a short time, Adolf Hitler emerged with a rebranded socialist system that he referred to as national socialism. While he railed against intellectuals, he believed that workers were not, by nature, revolutionary and had to be prodded to action by a smarter elite.

    Taking advantage of the fact that the German people had been divided by new national borders established as a consequence of World War I, Hitler used national and identity politics to fuel his rise to power.

    However, far from being warriors against communism, both Mussolini and Hitler followed the communist model, which included universal free health care and education, the nationalism of major corporations, government control of banking and credit, and the splitting up of large landholdings into smaller units.

    Both Mussolini and Hitler identified socialism as the core of their political philosophies. Mussolini was an Italian socialist who never relinquished his allegiance to socialism, and Hitler referred to his system of government as national socialism.

    Hitler did not have a hatred of communism; rather, the conflict was a fight over which interpretation of communism would prevail.

    From the start, Karl Marx envisioned the path to communism to be a progressive one. Historically, this path has begun with a progressive increase in the influence of government over education and production, with a simultaneous erosion of the country’s traditions, values, and institutions. This is followed either by an election of a socialist government or an eventual realization that the government is no longer a democratic republic, but a socialist one.

    Once this occurs, the people no longer have the right to vote themselves out of it. When the socialist system of government fails, as it inevitably will, its leaders maintain power by force. That’s where the reeducation camps, the concentration camps, and the mass executions come into play.

    We’re already on that road, but the election of Bernie Sanders could be a step into the abyss. Sadly, the election of any Democrat is a step toward the abyss, and there are many Republicans who wouldn’t be any better.
     
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  4. Admin

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    Posts related to the JBS are being moved to a thread about the John Birch Society. It's a good topic, but it's not this topic.
     
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