Source: Tedglick.com
It’s all hands on deck time.
It’s time for all good women and men to come to the aid of their country.
We are unstoppable, another world is possible.
The Bernie Sanders victory in Nevada yesterday is such a big deal. It is huge. It is historic. It is over-the-top hopeful.
How are the corporate rulers going to stop this political juggernaut?
Ninth richest man in the world Michael Bloomberg emerged as a potential savior when Joe Biden’s campaign kept sagging and sagging, but he totally blew it in the Nevada debate a few nights ago. He’ll keep on spending his hundreds of millions, but he is looking right now like a big, bumbling, egotistical loser of a candidate.
They tried to link Bernie to Putin one day before the Nevada elections, working through Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post which in 2016 carried 16 negative articles on Bernie in 16 hours. That sure didn’t work yesterday in Nevada, but it’s likely they’ll keep pushing the ridiculous, implied fiction that Bernie is letting himself be used by Trump’s man in Moscow. Bernie hit back strongly on that one, doing what Trump has never done, calling Putin an “autocratic thug” and telling him to stay out of US elections.
Then just today, the New York Times carried a long article by a Lisa Lerer which listed literally 16, by my count, already used or potential lines of attack against Bernie. Some of them are actually strengths, such as Bernie’s “commitment to remaining uncommitted to the Democratic Party” (until the day that it becomes a true party of the people, I would say, if that day ever comes) or his support for the Sandinistas who led a successful popular uprising to overthrow the US-government-supported, brutal Somoza dictatorship in the 1970s.
Unfortunately for the rulers, Bernie has 40 years of experience dealing with these kinds of attacks and, much, much more important, the guy has personal and political integrity. He’s not perfect; I don’t agree with every position he has taken on issues; but compared to the 1/10th of 1% who run this country and many of their bought politicians, Bernie is Mr. Clean. And he is known far and wide for his consistency in standing up for working people and la causa de la justicia.
Sisters and brothers, we need to recognize what time it is! All who believe in “liberty and justice for all,” which is a majority of the US American people, should do whatever we can right now to support this tribune of the people. If you’re still supporting Elizabeth Warren, or even another candidate, the least you can do is speak out in opposition to the out-in-the-open efforts underway to steal a Bernie victory from us at the Democratic Convention. Even former Barack Obama campaign manager David Flouffe has come out against this.
For those of us who like Bernie, or who are already supporting him, or who are already active in some way in his campaign, we really need to step it up. The Bernie army, already massive, needs to grow even more and those of us in it each need to figure out how we can do more, or do our work better.
Yesterday I heard Lawrence Hamm, chair of the NJ Bernie campaign and running on the Bernie line for US Senate against Corey Booker, speak about how he has never seen anything in his life like what he is seeing right now as far as the potential for “power to the people” to become reality. I said something similar to some young people I was with on Thursday, riding home from a successful nonviolent direct action at the headquarters of FERC in DC. This is a political period ripe with possibilities I’ve not seen in the 70 years I’ve been alive.
Literally, it’s all hands on deck time, time for all good women and men to come to the aid of their country because if we do, we are unstoppable, another world is possible. Si, se puede!
Ted Glick is the author of the forthcoming Burglar for Peace: Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left’s Resistance to the Vietnam War. Other writing and more information can be found at https://tedglick.com, and he can be followed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jtglick.
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2 Comments
Very hopeful times, indeed. One point of disagreement:
“If you’re still supporting Elizabeth Warren, or even another candidate, the least you can do is speak out in opposition to the out-in-the-open efforts underway to steal a Bernie victory from us at the Democratic Convention.”
Warren supporters ought to disavow their candidate entirely, whose only effect at this point is to convert a solid Bernie delegate majority to a contested plurality. It’s clear Warren is hoping she is picked in Milwaukee as the compromise candidate. That is her only route to the nomination, and she’s been putting the plan into motion. It is increasingly being recognized even by elites as a monumentally dangerous gamble for a candidate to contest Bernie at the convention.
Right on!