Ooh
Superman where are you now
When
everything's gone wrong somehow
The
men of steel, the men of power
Are
losing control by the hour.
I couldn’t help being a fan of Bernie Sanders, one of
the democratic candidates for the Presidential elections in 2016.
The man with the patient and wise charisma of a
friendly, aging uncle and ideas that could be described as quite
social-democrat for American standards (or “liberal” in the US vocabulary) ran
for the nomination of the Democratic Party. He did this against Hillary Rodham Clinton, the dead-cert favorite for this presidential race and later candidate
for the November 2016 elections.
Where Hillary attracted attention with her loud voice, her attacking style of debating and aggressive
charisma, Bernie Sanders seemed quiet and somewhat shy and unassuming. Almost
like President Jimmy Carter in his heyday. It seemed to be a battle between a barking,
angry dachshund and a kind-hearted labrador dog. Eventually the noisy dachshund won and ran for
president against Donald Trump. And everybody knows nowadays what the outcome of
this battle was.
In hindsight, a lot of people thought that Bernie
Sanders would have stood a much better chance in the presidential elections against
the blunt Donald Trump – who turned into a working class hero in spite of his
blatantly rich descent and lacking diplomatic skills – than Hillary Clinton did. Clinton seemed rather part of the
problem, instead of being part of the solution, in contrary to Bernie Sanders.
This American problem was to these eyes the ubiquitous intertwinedness of politicians and officials, extremely rich Americans, multinational companies and financial institutions. This resulted in an overall extremely poor representation of less influential groups in the
American political landscape.
Winning elections had become extremely expensive
in the USA over the years, so every private person and company that had much funding money on offer for the candidates,
got a lot of listening ears to talk to. Hillary Clinton seemed much more
contaminated with this American modus operandi than Sanders.
On top of that Hillary Clinton had made a bad
mistake, with respect to receiving state secrets on her private email account.
This and other things in her behaviour made her very vulnerable for
below-the-belt attacks, by a candidate who had made his bluntness into a weapon
of vocal mass destruction.
The reason that I loved Bernie Sanders so much, was
that he really seemed determined to do something about the widening gap between
the haves and the have-nots in American society.
There had been almost ten years of this
depression-like crisis in the United States. Years, in which the American middle and
lower classes had suffered badly from the consequences and lost almost all
their built-up wealth. This turned their sheer survival in a day-to-day business.
Especially the circumstances in which the poor classes in the US had to live,
had been deteriorating very rapidly. Hence the Flint
water crisis and the generally lackluster way in which the
American government reacted to crises of nature, that smashed the
futures of many poor people to pieces.
And nobody in charge really seemed to care about this, as those poor
people were not decisive for their (re-)election and for the remainder of their political career.
And at the same time, there had been five years of
sturdy economic growth for the rich parts of American society, due to the
flooding of the American market with cash money coming from the Fed (i.e.
quantitative easing) and the ample availability of borrowing money against near-zero
interest rates.
This made borrowing large sums of money almost for
free for the people with access to the money and capital markets: extremely
wealthy Americans, multinational companies and the financial wizards of the
hedgefunds and the private equity companies.
Hence, a situation had emerged in which the wealthy
part of American society could avoid litterally everything, while Joe and Jane
Sixpack had to deal with a stabilizing or even dropping real income and more
private and public crises than they could stand.
The American society always had a
religious, almost fundamental hate towards anybody, who they saw as a “commie
bastard” (i.e. a communist) and against everybody carrying the reputation of
being a social-democrat (i.e. sneeringly called “a liberal”). Nevertheless, there seemed to
be more room for a social-democrat president than in the nearly fourty years before.
It seemed that Bernie Sanders could have become the
right president at the right time and place, in order to restore the confidence
of the poor and middle class citizens in their political leaders. Just like
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman had done three quarters of a century
before him… But Bernie did not get the nomination eventually and had nothing else to do
than withdrawing from the presidential race.
Hillary’s campaign, however, was destined to end in
tears, frustration and incomprehension about what went wrong! Especially for
all the people who did not see this trainwreck campaign coming and wondered where Donald Trump came from
and what he had done to win the elections from a seemingly hopeless position…
Roughly two weeks ago, a story emerged that made
clear that Hillary Clinton had not won the Democratic candidacy just by
coincidence or as a consequence of the fact that she was so much better and
more experienced than her liberal adversary Sanders.
The writer of this shocking story was the unsuspected
chairwoman of the Democratic Party, Donna Brazil. She claimed that Hillary
Clinton “wheeled and dealed” herself into getting the democratic nomination, by
using “every dirty trick in the book” and lots of other cunning tricks.
The following pertinent snippets came from the political magazine Politico and were written
bij Donna Brazil, the chairwoman of the American Democratic Party:
I
had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee
after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary
Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen
by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested.
Debbie
[Wasserman Schultz, the previous chairman of the Democratic National Party - EL] was not a good manager. She hadn’t
been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in
Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how
bad the situation was.
“What?”
I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us
everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”
That
wasn’t true, he [Gary Gensler, the Chief Financial Officer of Hillary Clinton’s
presidential campaign – EL] said.
Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s [Democratic
National Committee] books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million
in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012
campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not
scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the
Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken
care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had
placed the party on an allowance.
Gensler
described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which
seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC
on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while
the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC
law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a
presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to
state parties and a party’s national committee.
Individuals
who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write
an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund. The money would
be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after
that.
“Wait,”
I said. “That
victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state
party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since
before she got the nomination?”
Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.
Right
around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s
campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes
The
agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a
copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing
in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money
raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party
communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other
staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other
staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.
The
funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal,
but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would
not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they
wanted to lead.
I
told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that
the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she
became its nominee.
There you have it. The to these eyes most suitable candidate
for the American presidency was sidelined before he even stood a chance. And this happened by a
candidate that was as close to being charged with corruption as she could be. That is at least when
everything that Donna Brazil stated, is indeed true.
It is stated by the red and bold snippets from Donna Brazil, that the victory fund was not eventually for the official winner of the
nomination, but was used instead as a private piggy bank at the disposal of
Hillary Clinton. And Clinton also purchased a make or break decision with
respect to the party’s communications manager and the decisive vote with
respect to the other executive staff and anything else important in the DNC. No
questions asked…
The candidacy of Bernie Sanders was now in fact a car with four empty tyres and no gasoline on board. The race was over before it even started.
Bernie Sanders was an “unamerican”,
almost European candidate in his charisma. No self-inflicted, overly brown tan, no “wintersports”
teeth, no voice that could shatter glass in a jiffy and no $1000 haircut.
Summarized, he was a little bit older looking and not so smooth as the Clintons,
but with the battle scars of a few decades in politics. He seemed an elderly
politician with a lot of experience and (to these eyes) the wisdom to make the
right decisions and not one who would start yet another useless war.
I am convinced that
Bernie Sanders would have been a really good president and a very acceptable
candidate for the overlooked workers and poor people all over America, who had
suffered dearly from the Second
Great Depression.
He was not hit so hard by scandals and not so
contaminated with the stench of Wall Street money as Hillary Clinton was. On
top of that he seemed a nice and honest guy to these eyes and a decent chap. But we all saw what happened in the months before the
official nomination of Hillary Clinton as presidential candidate in the
national elections. By controlling the money flow from the victory fund and by
increasing her influence within the executive levels of the Democratic party
itself, Hillary Clinton could “rig” the democratic elections, without acting
illegally.
Hillary Clinton, however, was not liked and sometimes even hated by
many low class workers and “white trash” and also by many – normally democratic
voting – middle-class people within the party’s grassroots. People, who hated
her husband’s filandering and his shameless lying about it.
Or people who disliked Hillary’s arrogant charisma and distractedness from the likes of Joe and Jane Sixpack, in favour
of the ‘fat cat’ bankers on Wall Street. In spite of the fact that Hillary
Clinton could count on the black votes in the United States, it was not enough
to save her from the angry majority, even though everybody anticipated that in
advance. I believe that many votes for Donald Trump were in fact votes against
Hillary and Bill Clinton and against everything she stood for in reality...
So many Americans – including the very religious
Republican voters from the deep South and South-East and the Democratic “pentitos”
who were deeply disappointed in their own party’s candidate – decided to vote
for “Pied Piper” Donald Trump.
Trump told them his stories about shutting out the Mexicans with a wall. And he promised them to tell their truths and opinions, about mass production outside the US and dumping of iron on the American market, to the Chinese government. And, last but not least, he promised to bring factories and jobs back to the
United States, away from the low wage countries.
The fact that Trump himself was an accident-prone
businessman at best and was not very diplomatic in his utterings against women
and minorities, did not scare his voters away. And so Donald Trump became the 45th
president of the United States and scared the shit out of many people
all over the world.
We will never know if Bernie Sanders would indeed have
become a better president than either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
Nevertheless, I think that Bernie Sanders is the best president the Americans
never had.
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