Why (or why not) to vote for Bernie Sanders

First off, let me say that I’m writing this not in any was snarkily, but that I genuinely don’t think I understand the depths of the US political system, and I was pretty sure you’d actually know the answer.

When Sanders wins, assuming that the house and senate are still corporatist backed, what is he going to be able to really change? My understanding is that the president has a lot of power to stop new bad things from happening, but doesn’t have much power to make positive changes. Would change, for example to something like campaign financing, happen only if the grassroots movement sufficiently scared enough members of congress into acquiesence?

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Personally, I’d hope (and expect) that if Sanders does deliver a grass-roots landslide that it would have a significant coattail effect to usher in similarly like-minded progressives.

I’m also of the opinion that one of the single most important powers of the President is nominating Supreme Court justices. For all of my gripes with Clinton’s track-record, that’s one area where I expect she’d be immeasurably better than any of the right-wing candidates.

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Thank you.

Aye. Comparing the Green platform with the Socialist platform reveals much in common. For that reason Greens are sometimes called watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. Likewise, comrades erupted with cheers when Jill Stein called for a “Red-Green alliance” at last year’s Socialism Conference.

The 2012 Third Party Debate, moreover, showed wide agreement between her and Rocky Anderson, representing the Justice party.

And we can show support, can shape politics and society, at least as well through our voices as we can through our votes. Speaking can educate and activate – dissolving delusions of helplessness, turning individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, spreading the language and goals and confidence that enable cooperation – much better than marking a ballot.

“Why bother? She can’t win” neglects and thereby impedes all benefits of campaigning other than electing a president. It’s a disabling meme, unworthy of repetition.

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[quote=“funruly, post:246, topic:59394”]
Personally, I’d hope (and expect) that if Sanders does deliver a grass-roots landslide that it would have a significant coattail effect to usher in similarly like-minded progressives.
[/quote]Agreed. Just look at this new progressive who has already entered the presidential race. She looks just like Hillary Clinton, however she’s espousing all kinds of progressive agendas that mimics Bernie Sanders. :wink:

Joking aside, I really do agree with you. The doors that a Sanders’ presidential win will open for other progressives will be enormous and will have many far-reaching, positive consequences throughout this nation and world.

It will be a gateway for progressive third parties and candidates we haven’t seen before in modern, American history. After all, Sanders is an Independent running against an establishment Democrat as a Democratic reformer. He may have wisely chosen to run as a Democrat in this presidential race so he can win, but he’s truly an Independent mole inside the Democratic machine.

Excellent question.

A very similar question was asked and I answered it back in June just days before our successful grassroots onslaught here in Denver, CO was underway (and, later… the rest of the nation).

Link to previous post – However, I’ll expound upon it here since this is an active, evolving thread.

Sanders won’t be changing anything alone.

https://cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/boingboing/optimized/3X/7/9/79b17b579b7e5711c4c8374c9c490f7f94403ccb_1_690x276.jpg

He’s utilizing his previous grassroots experience to harness extremely powerful grassroots organizations all across this nation that’ve been symbiotically working with him (some from the very beginning).

Some are the same people that got Obama elected, some are via powerful offshoots of the Occupy movement and some are simply incredibly smart, fiercely driven people that realize this may be one of our last shots at saving what’s left of our representative democracy in the United States.

More on what this means for Republican obstructionism below…

The befuddled corporate media seems to think a magic crowd fairy brought forth the massive turnouts for Sanders’ events (that are vastly larger than all his challengers).

In reality, it’s been the hard work of grassroots organizations and seasoned, fierce activists mobilizing offline and online outreach as if their very lives depended upon it. Despite a lack of money, these grassroots efforts are spreading across this nation in a way that typical, disingenuous, old-school, top-down, astroturfesque political campaigns can’t properly compete with.

The corporate media doesn’t get our grassroots dynamic in 2015. The political establishment sure as hell doesn’t get it either and that’s why they’re being caught off-guard. Their hubris and unwillingness to study and comprehend the new, powerful dynamics at play in 2015 is their downfall.

When Sanders was just getting started, establishment pundits within the media desperately tried to rehash memories of campaigns past from 2001, 2004, the 1950s, etc. in order to explain how Sanders was “a flash in the pan” and would shortly peter out. To their amazement, they’ve been completely wrong and Sanders has only grown in strength. They just don’t get it and in many ways, that’s working in our favor as we’re able to continue to catch our corporatist adversaries with their pants down.

For example, the corporate media attempted to thwart the size of Sanders’ crowds by engaging in local TV network media blackouts before his events. I can’t reveal my sources, but I do know for a fact this was due to corporate pressure from above. Here’s looking at you ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX.

Back in June they had hoped their blackout against Sanders would garner a paltry few hundred people in Denver, CO for his event here. To their dismay, grassroots activists strategized and dynamically worked around corporatist media obstacles and turned what should have been a tepid event of a few hundred people into this:

LINK: Bernie’s going to need a bigger boat (Photos I took in Denver, June 21st)

https://cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/boingboing/optimized/3X/5/b/5b970ffe2e5f724474176c3e34fc63bd1675d85d_1_690x227.jpg

https://cdck-file-uploads-global.s3.dualstack.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/boingboing/optimized/3X/7/2/7214cff772334195f6b7f59dcb6561ff0cc31fdc_1_690x457.jpg

Sanders didn’t do this.

We activists did it for him (and he’ll tell you the same). Bernie was shitting bricks just as many establishment pundits were. I know he had hoped our grassroots machine would perform for him, but even he didn’t expect those kind of results so early in the race in a place like Denver.

Those of us grassroots activists who worked behind the scenes in Colorado (and symbiotically across the nation) weren’t surprised. If anything, many of us were privately ashamed it wasn’t a larger event. If we had known some tactical issues beforehand, we would have easily hit closer to 10,000 people in Denver.

On the plus side, we worked hard to share our successful strategies and mistakes with other activists so they could better strategize for future grassroots events in other states. I think it goes without saying our networking and ever evolving strategies worked out quite well:

We’re dominating the field and we’re doing this with the power of grassroots support in a 2015 dynamic. This campaign is unprecedented. That’s why establishment pundits are incredibly confused as to why his surge isn’t dying, his support is growing and his competition is sinking without the usage of Super PACs, billionaire sugar daddies and Wall Street bankster bribes.

So what about the inevitable Republican and bluedog Democrat obstructionism?

We’re coming for them.

After Obama got elected, he basically threw his powerful grassroots support under the bus and told us “he’d be taking it from there”. This neutered many (but not all) progressive agendas during his term. This fact angered a lot of grassroots organizations, but we’re not ones to sit idly by and accept defeat. We didn’t just sit around in dismay. We got stronger behind the scenes. A lot stronger.

For example, while ivory tower liberals and conservatives made fun of the Occupy movement after the tents went down — we splintered into a vast array of powerful groups that continued to vastly better strategize behind the scenes. While the establishment laughed, we quietly worked our asses off and got much, much stronger.

Here’s a chart I’ve just made that illustrates this growing strength:

Yeah, this grassroots revolution wasn’t televised, so don’t go looking for too many mainstream, corporate media stories on it. You’ll have to hunt around alternative media sources if you’re so inclined to look.

I mean, you may have heard about the later success of Occupy Sandy, etc. – However, there was vastly more accomplished behind the scenes with other, larger splinter groups that the corporate media either doesn’t know about or simply doesn’t want to report on and let YOU know about.

The corporate media would rather that Americans of all stripes think that Occupy was a failure and that’s… that. The end. Now, that’s not the truth… but since when does the corporate media concern itself with uncomfortable truths for the establishment? The corporate media often doesn’t deal in truth and they sure as hell don’t want to report on (and perhaps enable) already strong grassroots organizations that’ve been rapidly spreading across this nation even without corporate media help.

These extremely powerful, grassroots organizations are stronger than ever and growing at a massive rate — and, at the same time, they’ve been increasingly combining forces for Sanders.

After our massive, multi-faceted grassroots effort gets Sanders elected, we’ll be coming after the Republicans and DINOs in the following midterms in a get-out-the-vote effort locally and nationally in a scope never before seen in this country.

Sanders has already been in many talks with us and he will not drop the ball like Obama did. Sanders is going to implement strategies that pull grassroots people into government and push the most corrupt, corporate lobbyists out.

To understand how this will work, I’ll point you an earlier part of this thread where I explain in detail why our hundreds of powerful grassroots movements in 2015 are like nothing we’ve ever seen before on this Earth:

Why Bernie Sanders’ grassroots supporters are worth more than Clinton & GOP astroturf money can buy.

LINK to my post (First sentence of mine says “Well, after intelligently observing …”)

Depending on your browser, may need to scroll down to here:

tl;dr: Hundreds of powerful, grassroots organizations have been fiercely strengthening themselves with a vengeance under radar for many years now. Millions strong soon. Massive, door-to-door “get out the vote” campaigns are coming. Unprecedented voter turnout for midterms, etc. after presidential election to symbiotically enable Sanders and progressive, grassroots agendas that include living wage, anti-war, anti-bankster, pro-single payer, pro-equality, etc. agendas supported by most Americans. If this doesn’t seem feasible, you’re gonna need to read link above to understand why 2015 is unprecedented and the recent 100,000+ supporter nationwide event we pulled off is just the very beginning of much more to come…

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Sorry, I didn’t see this until now. I apologize if you thought I was carding you. Talk about anything you’d like including your third party support, I’m not complaining. My post I linked to is old, but it really does encapsulate most of my current suppositions on lesser/greater evil dilemmas within our current, American political reality. I honestly have nothing more to add in the vein and would just be repeating myself. If you want to discuss it further in areas you think I didn’t cover within that post, we can certainly branch off another thread from here and discuss it.

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I knew Occupy was going to be big.

Thanks for the lengthy reply. So in short, President Sanders will indeed be unable to wave a magic wand and fix America, but this campaign isn’t just about electing Sanders, it’s also setting a new precedent in which actual democratic power (i.e., people) shows that it can beat corporate power (i.e., hordes of cash). If that can happen then it won’t just be Sanders making changes, it will be a new day for other reformers who will begin taking a larger and large hold of government.

I recall seeing an experiment, a year or two ago, I think, where people were given a mock US budget to play with. They had the prices of lots of different programs and data on how they perform and where asked how they would fix the budget. The conclusion was that the majority of Americans - including the majority of those who identify as Republicans - are far to the left of the Democrats.

What I particularly like about this, though, is that after you guys do it in America we can import it to Canada (I assume we are already in the process of doing so). We’re not as bad up here, but there’s a lot to be fixed.

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Which of the grass roots organizations has done the most to advance democratic socialist programs? Which is the strongest example?

I honestly don’t know. I’m not personally a democratic socialist, per se. Frankly, I don’t really even think Sanders is a socialist. I think he’s more of a capitalist/socialist hybrid. I’m concerned with fairly specific progressive agendas, not the promotion of ideologies. For example, if you asked me who is the best grassroots org for single payer, I can answer that immediately.

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Fun game. We’re listening.

Also, what’s the best organized grassroots org for immigration reform?

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Switching gears…

###Cruz, Huckabee, others gain from unprecedented political buying power of wealthy donors.

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When you wrote that Sen. Sanders is …

which two or three organizations are the strongest examples of the organizations you referenced?

Speaking of well organized capitalist/socialist hybrids …

Yikes!

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[quote=“funruly, post:254, topic:59394”]
Fun game. We’re listening … Also, what’s the best organized grassroots org for immigration reform?[/quote]

Single payer: (without a doubt)

http://www.pnhp.org

Their excellent FAQ: FAQs - PNHP

Immigration reform: Can’t really name just a main one, they’re splintered:

http://fast4families.org/about-the-fast/

http://www.fairimmigration.org/about/

As far as how it relates to Bernie Sanders, there’s a lot of nuance. Of course, that means the corporate media is confused and/or purposefully obtuse on Sanders in this regard. However, this article from Vox is surprisingly good:

In my opinion, Sanders is going to need to evolve on his current immigration stances or at least explain his positions much better. His recent statements makes him appear to not understand how immigration can create jobs. That’s not good.

Also, in the past he’s shown positive steps towards support for more open borders, but in the past week he’s used confusing language in that regard. Sanders is going to have to get it straight quick.

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Thanks, Cow. Happy to see NALEO and FIRM on your list.

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Isn’t more jobs for their own sake kind of a ruse? If jobs = problem solving, I’d think that more jobs = more unsolved problems. Not to mention that much of the current employment market seems to be arguably work which was never needed.

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Might just edit one of Cowicide’s Bernie posts and post it to BB tbh

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I think he and other Sanders supporters would appreciate that. Plus, @Cowicide is a rather eloquent spokesman for the campaign…

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You may be right. According to Zaid Jilani of Alternet, some of Vox can be full of crap on occasion. I’ve witnessed Vox screw the pooch before, so I tend to agree with Zaid on that point.

Here’s Zaid’s POV:

How the Latest Smear Campaign Against Bernie Sanders Collapsed Before It Started

The Vermont senator’s words were completely twisted. Here’s what he actually said.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-latest-smear-campaign-against-bernie-sanders-collapsed-it-started


I agree with Zaid for the most part, however I still think Sanders needs to get some national airtime soon to better explain himself on immigration. Even to an ardent supporter like me, he appeared too harsh during the last few interviews. We really don’t want the media to frame him as anti-immigration (which is ridiculous if one looks at his overall record), but they’ll do it anyway if he lets them. In my opinion, if not his recent stances, Sanders at least needs to evolve his language on immigration much better than he appears to be doing lately. Then again, this may be one of the few areas where I disagree with Sanders and/or I don’t have enough facts yet on the issue.

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