by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Bernie Sanders: Zenger’s
Newsmagazine cover, March 1998
Bernie Sanders
supporters in the rain at San Diego Pride, July 18, 2015
Crowd at “Bernie
Man,” Observatory North Park Theatre, July 29, 2015
“Bernie Man”
Merchandise Table, San Diego, July 29, 2015
U.S. Senator
Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has long been one of my culture heroes. Ever since
he emerged from the political wilderness of third-party politics and won
election as mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, in 1981 I’ve been one
of his fans. I cheered when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives
in 1990 as Vermont’s only Congressmember (the state is so small it gets just
one) and when he won an overwhelming victory for Vermont’s junior U.S. Senate
seat in 2006. In between the two, Sanders scheduled a speech in San Diego in
1998 and I grabbed the chance to do a phone interview with him to promote his
appearance. He was the cover boy for Zenger’s issue 44 in March 1998, and the topics we spoke about in our interview
— the vastly unequal distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. and the
control of American politics and media by giant corporations and the super-rich
individuals who own and run them — are the foundation of his Presidential
campaign today.
But I hadn’t
anticipated that I’d end up supporting Bernie Sanders for President. I came
into the 2016 Presidential campaign — and it’s a measure of how absurd U.S.
politics has become that the 2016 Presidential campaign is already in full
swing nearly six months before anyone
will actually have the chance to vote in it — expecting, reluctantly, to
support Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination. When progressive
activists in the Democratic Party pressured Senator Elizabeth Warren
(D-Massachusetts) to run for President, I heaved a sigh of relief when she said
no. When Sanders stepped in, with the air of an understudy filling in for the
billed actor in a stage play — “Senator Elizabeth Warren is indisposed and will
not appear tonight. Her part is being played by Senator Bernie Sanders” — I
worried about whether or not this was the right strategy.
My assumption
was that America is in the grip of a major ideological offensive by a far-Right
Republican Party which already controls three-fourths of the federal government
— both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court — and needs only the presidency
to achieve total control. What’s more, they’ve made it clear what they will do
with that control: reverse all the progressive reforms of the 1890’s, the
1930’s and the 1960’s; abolish what’s left of the social welfare state,
including Social Security, unemployment compensation, Medicare, Medicaid and,
of course, Obamacare; end all meaningful
regulation on corporations; privatize public education; nullify workers’ rights
to organize into unions; enact huge tax cuts and rewrite the tax laws to
benefit the rich; end all rules governing worker health and safety; end all
laws protecting the environment; end all limits on media consolidation and turn
the Internet into an exclusive preserve for pro-corporate and pro-Republican
political views; severely restrict all immigration (not just so-called “illegal”
immigration!) and make the immigrants already here permanent indentured
servants to their employers; end women’s access to safe and legal abortion and
contraception, making them permanent slaves to their wombs; and stay in power
indefinitely by gerrymandering electoral districts and passing laws restricting
the right to vote so people who would be inclined to vote against them will not
be able to vote at all.
The Republicans
want to do all this because they’re in thrall to an extreme Libertarian ideology
that regards government’s only
legitimate functions as national defense, maintaining internal order and
providing a mechanism to resolve contract disputes between otherwise unfettered
private businesses. The much-talked about “splits” in the Republican Party are
not about the basic core of this ideology, but simply over how fast to push it through. We know that Republicans in
total control of the U.S. government will push this agenda in as relentless,
unscrupulous and authoritarian a fashion as possible because that’s what
they’ve done in states in which they had the governorship and both houses of
the legislature: Scott Walker’s Wisconsin, Rick Snyder’s Michigan, John
Kasich’s Ohio, Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana, Sam Brownback’s Kansas, Rick Perry’s
and Greg Abbott’s Texas.
What’s more, the
historical odds in 2016 overwhelmingly favor the Republicans. Since the passage
of the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1947, which
limited the president to two terms, only once has the same major party won three Presidential elections in a row —
the Republicans, with Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 and George H. W. Bush in
1988. The parties come into 2016 on the heels of an economic debacle in 2008
and an anemic “recovery” whose benefits have overwhelmingly gone to the top 1
percent of the U.S. population. Though a lot of the blame for this can be
traced to Republican policies and priorities, both major parties are dependent on financial
contributions from wealthy individuals and corporations — the Republicans a bit
more so than the Democrats — and therefore both parties, as Sanders said when I
interviewed him and is saying again in his speeches, have passed laws and
policies that benefit the rich at the expense of everyone else.
Nonetheless,
because Barack Obama has been president since January 20, 2009, it will be the
Democrats — not the Republicans — who will suffer at the polls for the fact
that so few of the fruits of the so-called “recovery” have trickled down to
ordinary middle- and working-class Americans. The Republicans regained control
of the House of Representatives in 2010 and the Senate in 2014 largely through faux-populist appeals stating that the Democrats had
skewed America’s economy in favor of the rich and it was only by voting
Republican that working- and middle-class Americans could put the balance right
again. It worked because, as the late political scientist V. O. Key said,
Americans do vote on issues, but
“retrospectively and negatively” — that is, they vote against what hasn’t worked for them in the past, not on what
candidates and parties are promising to do for them in the future.
Hillary
Will Self-Destruct Again!
I entered 2015
feeling reluctantly resigned to Hillary Clinton — with her awesome name
recognition and well-stocked, corporate-funded war chest — as the only
Democratic candidate for President who could beat the post-1947 historical jinx
against either major party winning three presidential races in a row. It was
certainly a lesser-of-two-evils choice, but as I argued with my friends who’ve
long since departed the Democratic Party (as well as my husband Charles, who
has never been a Democrat — he
registered with the Peace and Freedom Party as soon as he was old enough to
vote and he’s been with it ever since), sometimes you have to vote for the lesser evil because the greater evil
is so evil. This was the case in
Germany in the early 1930’s, when the pointless and self-destructive conflicts
between the Social Democrats and the Communists allowed the greater evil, Adolf
Hitler and the Nazis, to come to power. And it is true in the U.S. today, with
the Republicans pushing an agenda so insanely destructive of basic human values
and civil rights that it has to
be stopped at all costs, no matter how many compromises we have to make to do
so.
So why did I
change my mind and endorse Bernie Sanders? Partly for the same reason I
endorsed Ralph Nader in the 2000 Presidential election over both George W. Bush
and Al Gore: I had a hard time sitting on the sidelines and making historical
analogies — excuses, really — for not
supporting a candidate who was saying so much of what I believe. Partly for
personal reasons: just before the Pride events, my husband Charles came back
from a vacation in the Bay Area, in which he visited the memorial museum to socialist
author Jack London and came back fired up with radical pride and a
determination that our participation in this year’s Pride Parade should be with
an openly radical political contingent. And partly because the way the campaign
has been playing out, I’ve re-evaluated my original analysis that Hillary
Clinton was the Democrats’ best hope and have decided that she is simply
unelectable: her nomination will consign the Democrats to electoral oblivion in
2016 and ensure the victory of whatever crazy Republican survives their marathon-dance nomination process.
I soured on
Hillary Clinton big-time after the atrocious meeting of the San Diego Democrats
for Equality, a club originally organized in 1974 to push for Queer rights
within the Democratic Party and get local Democrats to support Queer issues, on
June 30. It was one of the club’s marathon meetings, lasting four hours, and
the main agenda of the club’s leadership was to shove through an endorsement of
Hillary Clinton no matter how many dissenting members they had to alienate or
how many pretzel shapes they had to bend the club’s rules into to do it. The
meeting attracted a lot of Sanders supporters, but many of them are not
registered in the Democratic Party and therefore weren’t eligible to vote in the
club’s endorsement process. (Under California law, many of them won’t be able
to vote for Sanders in the state’s presidential primary, either, since they’re
registered in alternative parties like Peace and Freedom or the Greens.)
With one
significant exception — Andrea Villa, who opposed all the election endorsements that night on the ground
that was simply too early to be making endorsements for 2016 in June 2015,
months before the period for candidates to file to run even begins — the club’s current and former presidents, David
Warmoth, Craig Roberts and Doug Case, formed a solid phalanx behind Clinton.
There were two votes on whether the club should endorse for president at all,
and both of them were ties; Warmoth used his chair’s prerogative to break the
ties and push through the endorsement. He also prevented people who weren’t
club members from participating in the debate, even though at previous meetings
non-members have been allowed to speak once all the members who wanted to talk
had been heard. Roberts, with a tinge of panic in his voice, said, “We’ve got
to get this done before Pride!” Though the in-person vote on whether to endorse
at all had been virtually even, Clinton won the endorsement by 50 votes to 21
for Sanders and 12 for no endorsement, mainly because club members had been
allowed to show up, cast ballots and then leave — and Clinton’s supporters in
the club had obviously done their get-out-the-vote work well and turned out
most of the voters who didn’t stay.
Why the big
push? Because, as Roberts and other Clinton supporters in the room said, her
nomination is inevitable anyway and if the Democrats for Equality want to
retain any credibility with the party, they’ve got to get on board the
bandwagon before it leaves without them. When it was my turn to speak, I said
that if we’d debated a presidential endorsement in 2007, we’d probably have
heard the same thing: Hillary Clinton will
be the nominee. She’s got the major party leaders behind her, she’s got the big
money, she’s got the campaign organization. But the true progressives in the
Democratic party had other ideas; instead of accepting Clinton as inevitable,
they rallied behind a young, inexperienced Democratic Senator from Illinois
named Barack Obama and he became
the next president.
Obama won partly
because he worked harder than Clinton did — that’s what happens when you’re the
scrappy underdog instead of the establishment favorite — partly because he put
together a larger network of small donors, partly because he had Clinton’s horrendous
mistake on the war in Iraq to help him (she voted to authorize Bush’s war in
2003), and partly because Hillary Clinton is simply a terrible politician.
She’s been able to conceal this for a long time because she’s married to a great politician. But on her own, Hillary Clinton can be
counted on to self-sabotage every campaign she gets involved in. She did it in
2008 and she’s doing it again. What’s more, polls show that 45 percent of the
American people simply don’t trust her — and while the ongoing scandal about
her use of her private e-mail server to conduct official government business as
Secretary of State isn’t all that important intrinsically, it is reinforcing
voters’ basic distrust of her.
Hillary Clinton
didn’t come up from hardscrabble roots in Arkansas like her husband did. She
was born to a well-to-do family in Illinois and her public persona just drips
with a sense of entitlement, a sense that she deserves things just because of
who she is. If she’s the nominee, we can expect months of Republican propaganda
skillfully reminding voters of the gap between who they are and who she thinks
she is. Much of it will be unfair, and no doubt some of it will be out-and-out
lies, but it will work. Bill Clinton famously claimed that as President he
would “feel your pain.” It’s impossible to imagine many Americans — except
maybe other married women whose husbands can’t or won’t keep their dicks in
their pants — who would think that Hillary Clinton could feel their pain.
Bernie
Says What I Believe
Bernie — like
Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, he’s almost invariably referred to by his
supporters with only his first name — officially kicked off his campaign with a
nationwide video event July 29 called “Bernie Man.” (His supporters seem
addicted to bad puns on his name; at the merchandise table for that event were
T-shirts with a cartoon drawing of him and the slogan, “Feel the Bern.”) The
idea was to use the modern technology of Internet video streaming to broadcast
Sanders giving a short speech at locations throughout the country. In San
Diego, the campaign chose the Observatory North Park Theatre at 29th
and University — and Charles, recovering from an appendix operation, and I
chose to attend as our first public outing since his surgery. It was that important to us to be there.
The theme of his
speech was, “Enough is enough.” Americans, Sanders said, have had it with a
ruling elite that grabs more and more of this country’s — and the world’s —
wealth and income for itself. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to
understand that there is something immoral when the top one-tenth of one
percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; when almost all of
the new income being created in America is going to the top 1 or 2 percent.”
(When I interviewed him in 1998 his lament was that the top 1 percent of
Americans owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent; that’s an
indication of how an already severely unequal distribution of wealth and income
has worsened in the last 17 years.)
“The American people
understand also that it is simply not right that major corporation after major
corporation, many of whom are making billions of profits, pay nothing — zero —
or, at most, very little in taxes, because they stash their profits in the
Cayman Islands,” Sanders said. “We have got to reverse the decline of the
middle class over the last 40 years. People are asking how does it happen, with
all of the new technology out there, with all of the increase in productivity
that workers are producing, that millions of people are working longer hours
than ever before?” And that, of course, is if they’re lucky to have a job at
all; as Sanders said, America’s actual unemployment rate is not the “official”
5.3 percent, but 10.5 percent — a statistic you can expect to hear a lot of Republicans cite next year, even if their policies
would likely only make it worse.
“One of the
great tragedies we are experiencing, that we do not talk about at all, is youth
unemployment,” Sanders said. “A recent study came out that said kids between
the ages of 17 to 20 who have graduated from high school have an unemployment
rate of 33 percent — if they’re white. If they are Hispanic, it’s 36 percent.
If they’re African-American, it’s 51 percent. In other words, we are turning
our backs on an entire generation of young people. And if anyone thinks it’s a
coincidence that we end up having more people in jail than any other country on
earth, you would be mistaken. It seems to be that instead of having 5 ½ million
young people throughout this country who have no jobs and no schooling, maybe
it makes a lot more sense for us to be investing in jobs and education than in
jails and incarceration.”
Sanders’
comments on race — particularly his acknowledgment that, as badly as white
people are being screwed by an economy run for the benefit of corporations and
the rich, it’s even worse for people of color — are especially important given
the fraught relations between him and the African-American community in
particular. For some reason, when the “Black Lives Matter” movement decided to
start disrupting Presidential campaign events, the first candidate they picked
to go after was not any of the
Republicans (for whom Black lives really don’t matter because Blacks — if they vote at all —
overwhelmingly vote Democratic anyway), nor was it Hillary Clinton. It was
Bernie Sanders, at the Netroots Nation conference of on-line progressive
activists June 18.
They were
demanding that Sanders give them time on the podium — which he was willing to
do, though the audience vetoed it — and that he speak the name of Sandra Bland,
the latest victim of the police onslaught against the lives of
African-Americans. A 28-year-old African-American woman who had already
collected videos of police abuses and posted them online, Bland was stopped by
state trooper Richard Encinia in Prairie View, Texas July 10 for failure to
signal a lane change. After the two got into an argument, Encinia pulled Bland
out of her car, threw her to the ground and arrested her. She was held in jail
for three days and found hanged in her cell on July 13; the authorities claim
she committed suicide, but the incident sparked nationwide protests by
activists convinced she had been murdered.
Judging from his
comments on the “Bernie Man” video, Sanders got the message loud and clear.
“All of us are tired, sick and tired, of seeing institutional racism at work;
of seeing Black people handcuffed and thrown to the ground, as in the case of
Sandra Bland,” he said. “People should not die because they didn’t put a signal
on. We need significant criminal justice reform. We need to deal with a whole
lot of issues, but the bottom line is we cannot and should not lead the world
in the number of people who are in jail. We should lead the world in having the
best-educated population.”
Sanders has also
been criticized by some progressives for a mixed record on gun legislation —
he’s voted for some restrictions but not others, reflecting the large hunting
community in Vermont — and for not taking a strong enough anti-war and anti-imperialism
stand in his current campaign. An August 4 e-mail from RootsAction urged
recipients to sign an appeal to Sanders to add anti-war points to his platform.
“Militarism and corporate power are fueling each other,” the RootsAction e-mail
said. Sanders has a strong anti-war record in Congress. In 2003 he spoke
against then-President Bush’s request for Congress to authorize the Iraq war,
and in 2006 he criticized the “outing” of Valerie Plame, wife of Iraq war
critic Joseph Wilson, as a CIA agent.
“The revelation
that the President authorized the release of classified information in order to
discredit an Iraq war critic should tell every member of Congress that the time
is now for a serious investigation of how we got into the war in
Iraq and why Congress can no longer act as
a rubber stamp for the President,” Sanders said on the Plame matter in 2006.
But as of August 16, the “Issues” list on his Presidential campaign Web site,
https://berniesanders.com/issues/, lists
“Income and Wealth Inequality,” “Getting Big Money Out of Politics,” “Creating
Decent-Paying Jobs,” “Racial Justice,” “A Living Wage,” “Real Family Values,”
“Climate Change & Environment,” and “Reforming Wall Street” — nothing about
militarism, imperialism or foreign policy in general. And the “Bernie Man”
speech also avoided foreign issues except for a brief reference to “the
military-industrial complex” — a phrase coined in 1961 by former Republican
President Dwight Eisenhower — towards the end.
Nonetheless,
Bernie Sanders remains a bright light in a depressing Presidential campaign
otherwise containing either dim bulbs or potentially destructive fires. He’s a
candidate with a long-standing commitment to progressive issues, not another
Bill Clinton or Barack Obama seeking the progressive community’s support and
then selling us out once he’s been elected. In some ways he’s the Left-wing
version of Donald Trump, saying what the other politicians fear to say and
articulating the real ideals of their respective parties’ bases. But while the
multibillionaire Trump is unwittingly laying bare the true ugliness of the
Republican party and its ruling ideology, and his main campaign backer is himself,
the non-rich Sanders is articulating a hopeful, optimistic progressive vision
from what the late Paul Wellstone called “the democratic wing of the Democratic
Party.” What’s more, he proudly boasts that in the era of unaccountable
“super-PAC’s” and the other well-heeled beasts let loose by the U.S. Supreme
Court’s Citizens United decision, the
average contribution to Bernie Sanders’ campaign is … $35.
Whether Bernie
Sanders wins the nomination or not, the massive attendance at his rallies and
his upward climb in the polls will hopefully end the collective paralysis of
Democratic activists in the face of Hillary Clinton’s so-called
“inevitability.” Though the optimal goal of supporting Bernie Sanders is to get
him nominated by the Democratic Party and elected President, his campaign will
be at least a partial success if he either moves her closer to the Left (and
she’s been making more populist, more anti-corporate speeches since he entered
the race and began to steal her thunder) or paves the way for another Democrat
who might defeat Clinton and stand a chance at winning the election.
Read the original
1998 Zenger’s Newsmagazine
interview with Bernie Sanders (copyright © 1998 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine) below:
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