The Digger

Bernie Sanders, we hear, is interested in running for President in 2020. Bernie has once again shot himself in the foot before the starter’s gun goes off. Sanders best known Trump-like statement was calling Venezuelan revolutionary President Hugo Chavez  “a dead communist dictator.” Now Sanders, while bucking the establishment on regime change in Venezuela, remains woefully uninformed about neoliberalism’s effects on a global level, and therefore cannot be taken seriously as an agent of radical change. Sanders released a statement on Venezuela that had nothing of substance in relationship to the 1%, neoliberalism, neocolonialism or any of the driving forces of a clear political crisis in the country. Instead, Sanders merely echoed right-wing talking points on Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, and then, almost as an aside, said the U.S. intervening in Latin America, well, it ends badly. And perhaps, one could argue, that a non-intervention response, no matter how you get th...

Sanders: the moral backbone of a wet noodle.  He has repeatdely shown he  is a  willful  ignoramus on foreign policy or —worse—an intellectual coward. (Donkey Hotey) W hen Trump announced his support for the unfolding coup in   hen Trump announced his support for the unfolding coup in Venezuela, Bernie Sanders remained silent for 24 hours.  This matters because coups are made or broken in the first moments or hours; a day during a coup can feel like a month or more. With each hour Bernie’s silence roared louder.  So much was hanging in the balance with Trump at home and abroad, to the point where a finger could tip the scales—  yet Bernie refused to lift his. Among the many  Democratic Party candidates  running for President, only  Tulsi Gabbard  made an unequivocal statement condemning the coup, while leftist darling  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  limited her criticism to a retweet. While U.S. poli...

The rise of leaders like Sahra Wagenknecht and Jean-Luc Mélenchon marks a momentous turn against free movement in Europe—at the expense of  immigrants. In May 2016, at a conference for Germany’s left-wing Die Linke party, Torten für Menschenfeinde (“Pies for Misanthropes”) struck again. Sneaking up the side of the conference hall, a member of the anti-fascist organization threw a piece of cake at Sahra Wagenknecht, a prominent Die Linke member in the Bundestag. It was a direct hit: Wagenknecht’s face was covered in chocolate frosting, a streak of whipped cream extending from ear to ear. Torten für Menschenfeinde targeted Wagenknecht for her vocal position against an open-border policy for Germany. Earlier that year, she challenged Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to accept more than 1 million refugees, arguing that Germany should impose limits on entry and deport those who abused German “hospitality.” The cake attack—which followed a cream-pie offensive against...

Comparison of Conyers Hr.676(RIP) and Sanders/McDermott S.1804 Bills - http://www.md.pnhp.org/docs/Comparison-HR676-and-S703.pdf Excerpt: HR 676, the gold standard single payer legislation  for the past sixteen years, is no longer. The House Democrats have decided that their single payer Medicare for All bill will not carry the HR 676 number. They let that number go this week  to a bill that reiterates  “the support of the Congress of the United States for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).” [...] “Now that the Democrats can no longer ignore that their base is demanding a single payer health system, we have lost both HR 676 by number and its status as the gold standard. From what we have heard, as we have still not seen the text of the draft as promised, the new health bill being written by Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) has an unnecessarily long transition period and maintains the for-profit providers in the system. The...

Notably, 435 member of US Congress voted for the NICA Act, including regime change junkie "Dem-Soc" Bernie The Bomber Sanders... Excerpt: With patented angst, Noam Chomsky  opined  on President Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua to an agreeing Amy Goodman: “But there’s been a lot of corruption, a lot of repression. It’s autocratic, undoubtedly.” Earlier in their DemocracyNow! interview, the main talking points were established via a video clip of a dissident former official from Ortega’s Sandinista Party: Ortega’s “entire government has been, in essence, neoliberal. Then it becomes authoritarian, repressive.” Left out of this view is why the US has targeted Nicaragua for regime change. One would think that a neoliberal regime, especially if it were authoritarian and repressive, would be just the ticket to curry favor with Washington. In Chomsky’s own words, Nicaragua poses a  threat of a good example  to the US empire Since Ortega’s return election victory in 20...

"Murray Bookchin's 1986 article analyzing Bernie Sanders' Burlington Vermont mayoral campaign and the aftermath is equally relevant in relation to his 2016 presidential campaign. Also includes a response from Brian Higgins and rejoinder from Murry Bookchin from the next issue." Excerpts: "That Sanders has out-Republicaned the Republicans should not be taken lightly. Viewed in terms of its overall economic policies, the Sanders administration bears certain fascinating similarities to the Reagan administration. What Sanders has adopted with a vengeance is “trickle-down” economics — the philosophy that “growth” for profit has a spillover effect in creating jobs and improving the public welfare. Not surprisingly, the City’s 1984 “Annual Report” of the Community and Economic Development Office (a Sanders creation) really begins with a chunky section on “UDAG Spur Development.” UDAGs are Urban Development Action Grants that are meant to “leverage” commitments to ...

By Amanda Buddenbaum June 20, 2018 “We remain the only major country on earth that allows chief executives and stockholders in the health care industry to get incredibly rich, while tens of millions of people suffer because they can’t get the health care they need. This is not what the United States should be about.”[1] So wrote Senator Bernie Sanders in his New York Times Op Ed of September 13, 2017, to announce the introduction of his Medicare for All Act. During his presidential campaign of 2016, Sanders had called for a Medicare for all, single payer system to solve the nation’s health care crisis. The thousands who attended his rallies and joined in his social media network responded enthusiastically. Sanders escalated the demand for single payer health care as he reiterated the message across the country. On that same date, Senator Bernie Sanders, joined by 16 senators, introduced S. 1804, his long awaited Medicare for All Act of 2017.[2] At least four of the cosponsor...

“One can argue that the two-party system is a sham." “You don’t change the system from within the Democratic Party.” “My own feeling is that the Democratic Party is ideologically bankrupt.” “We have to ask ourselves, ‘Why should we work within the Democratic Party if we don’t agree with anything the Democratic Party says?’” "The Democratic Party is “ideologically bankrupt, they have no ideology. Their ideology is opportunism.”" - Hypocrite Link: Three GOP Kansas lawmakers defect to the Democratic Party in one week | Alternet

" Menendez – a Cuban-American whose legal defense from corruption charges was bankrolled by the pro-Israel lobby – joined his neoconservative colleagues in referring to Nicaragua’s democratically elected president, [in line with "socialist Bernie Sanders referring to Hugo Chavez as a "dead dictator" and lodging no disagreement regarding Nicaragua] Daniel Ortega, as a “dictator” who leads a “regime.” -  Every Single Member Of US Congress Approved Crushing Sanctions On Nicaragua | PopularResistance.Org Every Single Member of US Congress Approved Crushing Sanctions on Nicaragua -  https://grayzoneproject.com/2018/12/14/congress-sanctions-nicaragua-nica-act/

In challenging the honesty of this self-appointed DP neo-mavericky political hack; this self contradicting bloviator on universal human rights principles and his Dem-soc commitment to capitalism and imperialism; on Russiagate, Israel-Palestine and BDS; on "terrorist" Iran and Syria; on Empire, the FED and MIC; his commitment to labor, his DP gatekeeping political rhetoric and, perhaps most importantly, on using healthcare as a validator of his authenticity as champion of public interest, it may be possible to delegitimize the entire rightwing DP as an trustworthy representative of the working class, once and for all. The non-existent, "our democracy" undermining, Trump-Russia collusion which Bernie's bought into wholesale, in spite of the left being in the forefront of debunking this "Washington planners" aka, "deep state" propaganda,  has got nothing on the quid pro quo collusion between sheepdog Bernie and the sheep abattoir that is the D...

Link:   MoA - British Spies Infiltrated Bernie Sanders' Campaign? "It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, “Corbyn and Sanders supporting” Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, “Cold War Then and Now”, for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely  unbalanced panel  of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia." Excerpt: "The Integrity Initiative, a British pseudo-NGO tasked with running anti-Russian propaganda operation, was recently exposed. Further digging into it revealed a much wider operation. It seems to involve a mole British spies inserted into the Bernie Sanders campaign. Three weeks ago internal budget proposals and member lists of the Integrity Initiative were posted anonymously on some website. We discussed those in detail under the headline:  British Government Runs Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns : ...