The Case for Bernie Sanders and the Socialist Myth

This is my reasoning behind voting for Bernie Sanders for president. It's written to both my Republican and Democrat friends. If political posts offend you, please feel free to skip it.

Bernie Sanders isn’t radical. He just wants to swap corporate socialism for democratic socialism.

We already live in a socialistic country, but we’re serving corporations over people. We handed out trillions of taxpayer dollars (that’s the taxes WE pay each year) to bailout reckless bankers and speculators. In New York, Yahoo is receiving $2 million for every job it creates in the area. Alcoa is receiving $5.6 billion in electricity discounts. Boeing is receiving billions in subsidies to build a plant in South Carolina. Cabela’s received $32 million in government subsidies to build a store in Hamburg, Pa. The largest 500 companies in the U.S. legally keep more than $2.1 trillion in tax havens abroad. Yes, corporate socialism is alive and well.

Corporate socialism serves the rich on the backs of everyone else. The $21 billion saved by the nation’s largest banks last year didn’t create more jobs as promised—it went into massive bonuses for bank executives (while 4,000 lower-level employees lost their jobs altogether).

General Motors received $600 million in federal contracts and another $500 million in tax breaks. GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra took in nearly $22 million in total compensation while some 14,000 workers were laid off.

Trump perfected the art of shielding himself from liability by claiming bankruptcy and then letting the suckers (a.k.a. employees and contractors) who worked for him twist in the wind.

Executives are free to run their businesses into the ground while pulling the ripcord on their golden parachutes. Sears, for example, paid out $25 million to executives while thousands of workers were laid off. Remember when Wells Fargo illegally opened 2 million unauthorized user accounts? CEO Carrie Tolstedt left with $125 million in her pocket as a reward.

You’re free to vote for whoever you wish, but don’t be fooled. The rich are pulling the strings of their political puppets to create legal loopholes, safety nets, government handouts, and everything else they can do to enjoy the benefits of corporate socialism.

But there’s a problem. None of this will last if the U.S. debt continues to balloon. Increased debt would raise interest rates, put downward pressure on the dollar, and grow the risk of a massive fiscal crises. And that’s not good for business, which isn’t good for the uber rich.

So billionaire funded organizations like Americans for Prosperity pushed the Republican party further to the right. Thanks to Citizens United, huge amounts of cash now flows into the political system—like $1.2 billion from just the 10 most generous donors and their spouses over the last decade. And nobody really knows the real numbers or how much of it comes from outside of the country via shell companies. The goal is simple: protect corporate profiteering and cut costly entitlement programs like social security and other welfare programs. Fight tooth and nail to stop universal healthcare. Fight against public funding for early childhood development, education, and other social programs. This is how the 1% protect their interests while keeping the national debt from ballooning to the point the whole system becomes unsustainable.

Do the recipients of this dark money windfall dance when they're told to? Of course they do. It’s one of the primary weapons Mitch McConnell uses to control his Republican senate and keep them in line. Look, they all know Trump is self-absorbed and amoral, but he’s getting conservative judges to the bench and passed a massive tax break for the rich. So they’ll protect him even if it comes at the cost of their souls (which it will, even when such corruption will erode the welfare of the state, as played out in history time and time again). And if one senator (say a past presidential nominee from Utah) decides he just can’t stomach it when forced to swear an oath before God, well, you already know how this plays out.

Practically no one in the 2016 republican party wanted Trump as the presidential nominee (or even said nice things about him). But they underestimated his populist appeal. As Joseph Nye writes in his latest book, Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump, “The economic dislocations caused by globalization were accentuated by the 2008 Great Recession, and cultural changes related to race, the role of women, and gender identity has polarized the American electorate. Trump successfully linked white resentment over the increasing visibility and influence of racial and ethnic minorities to foreign policy by planning by blaming problems on ‘bad trade deals with countries like Mexico and China and on immigrants competing for jobs.’” If a stopped clock is right twice a day, Trump managed to be on message at just the right populist moment.

But when it came to corporate socialism, Trump delivered… bigly. Here was a man with all the reality TV instincts to fire up the base and was just amoral enough to claim he would never touch social security or preexisting condition protections at the exact same moment he was trying to abolish both. All during the state of the union chants of “Four more years” and “USA!” The rich had their Caesar and the public had the bread and circuses to keep them distracted from the hustle happening around them.

Which brings me back to Bernie.

He understands that the only way to fix all this is from the bottom up. That, as historian Sidney Mills termed the “momentous reconstructions of politics” comes from social movements and not moderate, middle of the road legislators looking to strike a compromise across the aisle. Look at the history of abolitionism, suffrage and women’s rights, civil rights, the labor movement, farming reforms, environmentalism, antiwar activism, and gay rights. Driving all of this was the belief that we do not have to wait for change from the top down. Social movements develop in response to grave injustices in American life. They serve as an independent check on mainstream progressive politics, are grounded in the moral and philosophical inspiration of the early American tradition, and advanced the values of progressivism: “freedom in its fullest sense; a commitment to the common good; pragmatic reform; human equality; social justice; democracy; and cooperation and interdependence.”

Bernie is a singularly unique political figure in our time. He has been fighting for the social good his entire life. He won’t take a single dollar from billionaire donors and corporations. He is a politician divested of personal ego, greed, and a lust for power. He can rally the majority at the bottom to fundamentally change the minority at the top. In my opinion, no other candidate can do this.

Yes, any of the other Democratic nominees are better than Trump. But, despite the hand ringing of folks like James Carver and Chris Matthews, the time for incremental change is over. We need to go all in. We need to double down on Bernie and shake the institutional elite to their very core. Or we need to die trying (figuratively). We can’t wait another four years.

I write this to not only try to persuade those on the right who aren’t part of the 1% and have been duped into believing the system is working for their benefit, as well as those on the left who feel a moderate is the only way to win. It may be a risk to try to take on all the money and special interests flooding the key electoral states and knowing that we will have to fight through the “socialist” label. But if you think Amy Klobuchar or Mayor Peter (who I like) can sit down and reason with Mitch McConnell and save our republic from the tyranny of the oligarchy class, I think you’re gravely mistaken.

When asked by Joe Rogan on his podcast how Bernie would get any of his legislative goals past Mitch, I loved his answer. He said that he would go to Kentucky where McConnell is the senator and hold large, public rallies. Bernie would take his case directly to the people and call on McConnell to explain why he isn’t willing to raise the minimum wage, or provide access to healthcare, or protect social security.

For the kind of progressive change we need, it requires someone willing to fight and galvanize a social movement. Bernie is the only candidate who can do this, who will do this, and who has spent a lifetime in the trenches fighting this fight. It’s all-or-nothing folks. That’s why I’m voting and supporting Bernie Sanders for president. I hope you will, too.

My Ineloquent Response to Grammatical Criticism

It's largely considered bad form to respond to a critic. As a fan of bad forms I decided to go ahead and give it a try. You see, I recently came across a criticism of my book, Bad Unicorn, because the reader had encountered “their” as a singular pronoun and so stopped reading. My response . . . pfft!

He or she, in writing his or her review, must have reflected on his or her experiences as an editor/copywriter/kitten euthanizer, and in his or her dedication to one prescriptive style guide or another, found his or her panties/shorts wadded in a binding grammatical knot causing him or her great rhetorical angst and discomfort. Now that's how you write a sentence! 

Just to set the record straight, however, according to Merriam-Webster, “the use of they, their, them, and themselves as pronouns of indefinite gender and indefinite number is well established in speech and writing, even in literary and formal contexts.” The use of “their” as a singular pronoun is found in the works of such hacks as Austen, Chaucer, Dickens, Shakespeare, and others. There's actually a great post about this at Daily Writing Tips.

So to any future readers, let me suggest that if such nuances are troubling for you, you probably aren’t the type to enjoy a book about a carnivorous unicorn in the first place. That being said, let me salute my critic's grammatical vigor and ask that we at least part as friends. Or as Shakespeare put it: “There's not a man I meet but doth salute me / As if I were their well-acquainted friend.” Now that guy can write. 

The only surviving photograph of "The Bard" when asked about this issue. 

A Simple Kind of Life

Goodbye social media.

I’ve given you a fair shot, but I’m turning you off and tuning you out. If you want to know why, please feel free to keep reading. If not, that’s okay too.

You see, I was born in 1967. That means my life can be comfortably divided into two halves: 1967-1990, and 1990-2013. Each of these 23 year periods are marked by remarkable differences and periods of change. And now that I reflect on both what I’ve gained and what I’ve lost in the bargain, I’ve decided to stick with what I like and get rid of what I don’t. So here's a little history—I’ll try and keep it brief:

I appreciate having grown up in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. We had a rotary phone hanging on our wall, a three-channel television with rabbit ears, and Saturday mornings were the only time you could watch a half-day’s worth of cartoons (totally worth waking up for).  When we played, we grabbed footballs, bats and gloves, or BB-guns, and peddled off to whatever adventures we could find. In the late 1970’s we discovered Dungeons and Dragons, and despite our parent’s concerns we were secretly summoning Beelzebub through candle-lit pentagrams, we gathered and stretched our imaginations into characters and worlds fantastic and wonderful. Geeky, I know. But awesome too.

I had this bad boy

I watched as the personal computer came into the home, starting with a Radio Shack TRS-80 my dad bought me; then to the much upgraded Commodore 64 thanks to mom (and a divorce that left both sides offering material incentives to keep me smiling and playing along.) I soon decided computers were cool. I watched MTV when it was a small cable channel and listened to Howard Stern when he was a local DJ in Washington DC. Life was good.

I graduated high school in 1985. That was the year the first version of Windows was released, and in a computer science class I helped a girl with her homework by writing the answer: D$=”Mr. Hacking is a Jerk.” Yep, she didn't check it and that was the name of the teacher—score! The next year the 386 PC rolled off the factory line, and those riding the vanguard of technological change were called Generation X. That was cool too.

Then the decade turned over and my second 23-year clock started ticking. And while personally these were great years (I was married and we had four kids by 2000), I remember the rise of this thing called the Internet. I was in college and schools were the early adopters. Gopher was the first point and click navigation system, and we anxiously listened to sounds of modems squelching before the long march of pixels began to trace images across our monitors. We didn’t know it was slow at the time because it just was, and there was nothing else like it. Five years later CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy started providing dial-up services, and I remember the first time I saw a URL listed on a commercial—it was for Ford. It hit me that this Internet thing was going to change things.

Totally used this phone

As far as other stuff going on I had early access to cell phones because I worked as a radio DJ, and we had a version that had both a base and a handset. This is pre-brick folks, just to put it into perspective. I remember the first time I placed a call from a car--something very few people were able to do--and I started the conversation with, “I’m totally calling you from a car!” Yep, that’s how novel it was. Then things just exploded: modems disappear, phones get smaller, bandwidth goes up, and everything gets faster.

Social media came on the heels of the technology that supported it.  I remember Geocities as the first virtual hub of sorts (it’s still available in Japan, by the way.) Blogging starts and Google comes on the scene. Jump to the 2000’s as Wikipedia arrives and Friendster, MySpace, Digg, Facebook, and YouTube bubble up to prominence to either thrive or succumb to the next offering. Meanwhile we have three more kids (awesome). Also, I realize my kids will never know a time before the Internet. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Now as we move into the next decade social media has wrapped its tentacles around everything we do. It’s no coincidence that twitter founder Jack Dorsey listened to emergency dispatch calls as a kid and found the idea of short blurbs of information announcing who you were, what you were doing, and where you were going, as inherently interesting. Now we’re all dispatchers, and if we choose we can listen in to whomever we want (notice I wrote “whomever” just to be a smarty-pants).

One of the more useful philosophers

My problem with social media goes back to my favorite philosopher, who wrote meaning is always a derivative of use. Or in other words, Facebook isn’t about what it represents but about how it’s used. If I were to reach back to my 1985 self and describe the social media experience, I’d use the following metaphor:

           

Imagine you’re walking through a crowded mall. Everyone there has a megaphone and shouts what they’re doing, thinking, or feeling. Friends are those with megaphones turned in your direction (being a friend has nothing to do with how much you really know or care about someone). Everyone else is shouting too, but their megaphones are pointed in other directions (these are non-friends). And a lot of people are angry: about the government, elected officials, the media, neighbors, religion, and social issues.  But these are not arguments in the Socratic sense of hoping to work toward some truth—these are arguments about winning. Being entrenched is seen as strength and being open-minded a surrender to moral relativism. Since this is a contest, he who shouts the loudest and with the most vitriol seems to win. Those not in the argument have lots of things to say as well, because it’s important to know what everyone is doing as often as possible. These are not mean spirited communications, and there are real moments of love, laughter, and appreciation; but every life seems to require its own running commentary, and since everything is news what’s really important is easily lost.

For some strange reason most of the stores in this mall are filled with Hallmark card shops offering various inspirational saying, platitudes, or images of cats demanding to be liked. Of course there are other stores too, but you’re never left to just quietly browse these. The maelstrom of noise is everywhere, and at each step smart billboards follow. And these billboards never leave your line of sight, constantly advocating that you buy this or do that. All the while there’s more shouting and more updates from friends who may or may not give you the time of day if you really needed them, and more opportunity for billboards to watch, track, target, and add their messaging to the fray. We have surrendered wisdom for knowledge, and conversation for data. And so long as you remain trapped in this mall that will not change.

1985 Self Reacts to Metaphor

Knowing my 1985 self I think the answer to this scenario would be rather straightforward: “That mall sucks. You should totally ditch it.”

So I’m finding the exit and walking away. If you really are my friend you’ll know that this has nothing to do with how I think of you and what I’d be willing to do for you. Instead, my analysis of the two 23 year periods of my life found more joy in the simple things, and less in the ongoing chaos of being plugged in to social media. I desire a more simple kind of life. I will continue to write and post updates via book pages and such, but I am largely disconnecting from social media. I hope you understand and don't take it personally, because my decision feels really, really good. Almost waking up on a Saturday morning and watching cartoons good.