Bernie Sanders

The loon-ification begins. Bernie Sanders: ‘The guy who eats a pickle with every meal’ | Elections | McClatchy DC:   See this excellent post on how the major parties believe some pretty loony stuff (On the UK but applies here too). Stumbling and Mumbling: Serious Politics

My view....

Given the Corporate party's grip on power, I don't think Bernie has a chance but this country could use jerk to the left. The All-for-business-all-the-time group have been in control too long and the election of the Obama gave the Libertarian, TeaBagger, Evangelical, Marxist-Kenyan-Hating-Racists a common enemy to unite around pulling us even more to the right. The American voter needs to hear some policy proposals that focus on people rather than business.

This at the Jacobin [Bernie for President] makes some good points on a Bernie run.

1. He is not really that far left in real world terms. He is in the Corporate-American political sense but in reality he's basically on the liberal side of the US Democrats. He wouldn't make a pimple on a European lefty's ass.

Sanders doesn’t offer the sweeping emancipatory vision or principled anti-imperialist politics that we should demand on the Left, but his full-throated defense of the welfare state stands in marked contrast to frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s business-friendly policies.

... Unlike most of Europe, the United States never developed a mass labor party that vied for power and built a generous welfare state. But for most of the twentieth century, many within the Democratic Party were able build the fragments of one within its tent.

2. There are some left-y things happening out there that could unite around him.

the Occupy movement, labor insurgencies such as the Chicago Teachers Union strike, fast-food worker activity, movements against police violence, and increased attention to income inequality all point to the incipient reemergence of the American left.

3. Hillary isn't the flag-waving communist the right makes her out to be. She's really just a little on the left side of the Corporate Party. She ain't in it to help the American working class.

The Clintons’s role in transforming the Democratic Party at a national level throughout the 1990s (winning short-term electoral payoffs in the process) is undeniable. After all, it was President Clinton — not Ronald Reagan — who balanced the budget and ended “welfare as we know it.” And it was Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, who strongly supported landmark, DLC-backed achievements like the 1996 welfare reform bill.

So Bernie doesn't have much of a chance to win but he could make enough noise to unite the left and jerk the Democrats a little more toward the interests of people instead of global business.

'via Blog this'