July 23, 2011

Bernie Sanders vs Obama: Here's the Algebra



From DraftBernieSanders2012.org




The first three items on this list are obvious, or should be, with the recent collapses of Obama around the Bush Tax Cuts, and cuts to medicare and Social Security, and the fact that we're now involved in 4-ish illegal, undeclared wars now.

The next few are less obvious.

So let me help a little:

Protect Environment

: Obama does not oppose the coal industry. He does not oppose mountain top removal. In doing so, he has implicitly decided that the people of West Virginia and the Tennessee Valley are expendable pawns. We are all willing to kill those people to have cheap electricity. He does not oppose nuclear power, which is insane. Nuclear power requires the burning of coal to generate electricity for enriching uranium. And the nuclear waste lasts for tens of thousands of years. To put that in perspective, 20 thousand years ago, human beings were living in caves and wearing animal pelts.

Invest in Public Education and Jobs

: This is more of a sin of inaction than anything. I do not want to discount the fact that thanks to the Obama Whitehouse and the Democrats in congress, we now have student debt forgiveness. After something like 40 years-- that is. While it's SOMETHING, it does nothing to fix the problem, and it's not the sort of bold leadership that we need to get our country out of the toilet.

Bernie Sanders supports universal college education. That means you go to college, study what you want, and the government picks up the tab. Sound like Soviet Russia? Try Denmark. Or Finland or Norway. Or even Cuba or Argentina. All of which are kicking our ass when it comes to secondary education graduation rates, literacy rates, math, science, etc. Wait --Cuba is kicking our ass in education? They're shit poor! Ah, but so are 60% of Americans, especially after college.

And none of the youth in these places have to worry about being saddled with debt, and so they are free to spend time as entrepreneurs, building up businesses from the ground up, and creating innovative technology.

Curb Corporate Greed


The "Wall Street Reform" bill was a total fucking joke. Goldman Sachs was Obama's top donor.
Bernie Sanders supports the kind of REAL reform that would make the gambling that ruined the economy to start with illegal. We have not seen any push to reinstate the Glass-Steagall act from the White House. They've remained tepid servents of Wall Street proposing limp reforms that are little more than showboating for the Democratic Party's base.


Protect Civil Rights


This one hits close to home for me. Obama voted for the FISA reform bill that gave the US Gov't unprecedented new powers to spy on American citizens. I found that I was on a long list of people who Verizon monitored and turned information over to the Government without a warrant or suspicion, but because of the FISA bill, neither I nor the ACLU could do anything to sue them for violating my rights to privacy. Then there's the whole thing about claiming the right to assassinate US citizens suspected of terrorism.



It's also been under the Obama Administration that we've seen these creepy "If you see something, say something" spots, with Janet Napalitano telling Wal*Mart shoppers to turn their neighbors in to the Homeland Security Dept.

Protect Rights in the Workplace


While the Progressive base of the DNC has been rallying around worker's rights in Wisconsin, Maine, Ohio, and all over the USA, Obama has remained silent. Another sin of inaction.




And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head. If you can think of any of the other damning things I've missed, please let me know and I'll add them.

4 comments:

  1. everything about the war on some drugs, especially medical marijuana.

    everything about promoting monsanto and gmo.

    everything about fda attacks on anything outside the realm of big pharmaceutical companies.

    continuing to back nuclear power as the hope of the future.

    in his attacks on whistleblowers, he has outdone all previous presidents.

    he has expanded the use of torture and refused to prosecute known perpetrators.

    i'm sure there's more.

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  2. Thank you! Can you find articles and sources to back these up?

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  3. Ok, so everyone can go to college and government just picks up the tab? Its just that easy? Ok, well, where does government get the money to pay the tab? Huh? They need to get it from someone. Need you forget, the government makes nothing and has nothing. In order to function, it needs to take the goods, services or money from someone else. The people going to college go for free, but someone is still paying for it. So you want someone else to pay for your education? That would be amazing, but we dont live in a world where everything is free. It seems you want all of this free stuff and want someone else to pay the bill. What a wonderful plan. This plan would also lead to higher prices in education that would eventually bankrupt the country. If universities are guaranteed the money for the education of all their students, then why not keep raising the price every year? We can already see this with the rising cost of universities and college which is contributed to government educational loans. Government will just pay for it, so who cares right? Or do you want government to fix the cost of education across the board? Well, how do you determine such prices? Will Harvard get the same amount of money as does the local community college? This would then make the assumption that the quality of education is the same at both schools, when it obviously wouldnt be. So, why would anyone go to a community college when government will just pay the tab for them to go to Harvard? Or do you just want standardized education across the board where everything is the same? Well, who sets the standards? My standards may be different then yours. Do you want some wise overlord to set the standards? This is a piss poor plan. Socialized education would be a complete failure. The US already has a highly socialized education system and as you stated above, its not doing so well. All we have been doing for the last 50 years is throwing more and more money at our education and have more government involvement in our education and it just keeps getting worse and worse. How will socializing this even more make it better?

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  4. Message bodySecondly, the government can not invest properly in jobs. It does not receive the same signals as the free market and private companies. Private companies base their employment needs based off cost and profitability. They create jobs and structure themselves in such a way that maximizes efficiency and profit. If they dont do this well, they go out of business. Unless of course they use big government to bail them out. But this is not a free market principle. The government does not receive any cost or profitability signals. Without these signals, they have no way of knowing if a department or agency is organized efficiently or if some goventment jobs are even needed. We can see this all around us with numerous agencies. How many people work for the DEA? What are they doing? Spending billions on a failed drug war that has shown zero results and has put millions of nonviolent citizens in jail. If this was a private company, it would have bankrupt long ago.
    But the government on the other hand, even with these horrid results staring them in the face, just keep giving the DEA more money. How about all of our security agencies. We have homeland security, the TSA, FBI, CIA, etc.. How many more of these organizations do we need? It has become so bloated and huge, that there is no evidence its even working efficiency and correctly. Again, what does government do? Throw more money at it. How many bureacrats do we have that make 100,000 a year and just move papers around? Gvnt solution, throw more money at. And you want more of this? All this is doing is sucking resources and manpower from the private sector. Gvnt can create jobs, but it cant create efficient jobs that will benefit society and satisfy our needs properly. I recall reading some article that showed that from all the stimulous money used to create jobs, it ended up being about 500,000 per job created. That sounds like a great use of our tax dollars.
    We as consumers in free market make choices everyday on what products and services we want. If companies dont please us, we go somewhere else. With gvnt, we get their service or agency whether we like it or not or whether it works or not. But perhaps you dont care about this. Maybe you want gvmt to create jobs regardless of what that job is. If thats the case, why dont we just pay the unemployed to dig holes and fill them up when they are done. Its a job right?

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