For some reason I completely forgot to send anything related to this yesterday. I'm pretty sure that by now you will have already heard the new though
theintercept.com/2020/04/08/bernie-sanders-drops-out/
theintercept.com/2020/04/08/bernie-sanders-drops-out/
The Intercept
Bernie Sanders Ends Presidential Run
Joe Biden pulled off the biggest, fastest comeback in the history of modern primaries.
The coronavirus pandemic is just the latest proof that we need not so much an NHS, but a GHS – a Global Health Service. The only country that is acting on this imperative is revolutionary Cuba. They already have more than 28,000 doctors providing free health care in 61 poor countries – more than the G7 nations combined – and 52 in Italy, 120 more to Jamaica, and are helping scores of other countries to prepare for the pandemic. Even the far-right Bolsonaro government in Brazil, which last year expelled 10000 Cuban doctors, branding them terrorists, is now begging them to return.
www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/why-coronavirus-could-spark-capitalist-supernova/
www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/why-coronavirus-could-spark-capitalist-supernova/
openDemocracy
Why coronavirus could spark a capitalist supernova
There is no magic money tree – the ‘rescue packages’ aim to rescue a rotten system, and won’t work.
A collage of posts on Bernie Sanders, Neoliberalism and the future of the socialist movement
Click here to read Bernie's Speech on his decision to suspend the campaign.
> The state of Neoliberalism
It was Milton Friedman who wrote: “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”.
Unpacked famously in Naomi Klein’s book, 'The Shock Doctrine', Friedman espoused a “disaster capitalism complex” – the manipulation of social common sense at moments of mass material and psychological unrest to the benefit of his free-market doctrine.
But even as this begins to play out, one thing is abundantly clear – in the age of the coronavirus, there are no more market fundamentalists. As Boris Johnson stated last week in a signalled repudiation of 40 years of Thatcherite neoliberalism, now apparently “there is such a thing as society”.
> On Bernie and his movement
From social movements like Black Lives Matter, to climate organisations such as Sunrise and electoral machines like Justice Democrats, Sanders’ vision is predicated on a deep grassroots coalition. (source)
Bernie Sanders understood that real political power came through organizing working-class people and building a movement. That’s why he has spent the past five years building a political revolution which has many legacies — from the election of figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib to the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America into the largest socialist organization in the United States since the 30s; and from the widespread adoption of $15 minimum wage laws and the growth of Medicare for All and Green New Deal movements to the emboldening of left-wing unions like the National Nurses United and the American Postal Workers Union. But the most important legacy of Bernie Sanders’s political revolution has been making socialism a force in American politics once again. (source)
In offering millions of people a chance to vote for a person and a program they believed in, Sanders disrupted the odious duopoly that controls the American political system.
And, in standing openly against the forces that debase and devalue human life in modern America he gave them something infinitely more precious, that is bound to endure beyond the mourning of the coming weeks: hope. (source)
He asked: Why should you tolerate a system that privileges the profit-making activities of a tiny minority over the liberation of the vast majority? Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know? Which side are you on?
These questions cut right to the core of what it means to even have a society: what we believe to be the purpose of the institutions we’ve erected to facilitate our existence, on whose terms they do and should operate, and to what ends. These are the questions that have always animated the socialist movement, from its utopian origins before Marx and Engels through the turbulent twentieth century to the present day.
Once you’ve actually internalized that society doesn’t have to be this way, that none of the exploitation you’ve experienced or witnessed is actually inevitable, that human freedom is achievable, you don’t go back to thinking otherwise. (source)
> What is to be done?
As Bernie correctly emphasized in his suspension speech this morning, the campaign has largely won the battle of ideas.
Contrary to Joe Hill’s famous slogan — Don’t Mourn, Organize — it’s fine to mourn after a loss like this. But now is not the time to give up. In fact, there’s never been a more urgent moment to get organized (source):
- join a union
- Join the One Big Union, the IWW, a must if you're a worker
- Join the DSA or other socialist organizations/parties
- Organize with coworkers
- Support and join local leftist movements and strikes
- Vote for local leftists and working-class fighters
Remember: We have a world to win.
"If there is going to be class warfare in this country, it’s about time the working class won that war.” - Bernie Sanders
Click here to read Bernie's Speech on his decision to suspend the campaign.
> The state of Neoliberalism
It was Milton Friedman who wrote: “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”.
Unpacked famously in Naomi Klein’s book, 'The Shock Doctrine', Friedman espoused a “disaster capitalism complex” – the manipulation of social common sense at moments of mass material and psychological unrest to the benefit of his free-market doctrine.
But even as this begins to play out, one thing is abundantly clear – in the age of the coronavirus, there are no more market fundamentalists. As Boris Johnson stated last week in a signalled repudiation of 40 years of Thatcherite neoliberalism, now apparently “there is such a thing as society”.
> On Bernie and his movement
From social movements like Black Lives Matter, to climate organisations such as Sunrise and electoral machines like Justice Democrats, Sanders’ vision is predicated on a deep grassroots coalition. (source)
Bernie Sanders understood that real political power came through organizing working-class people and building a movement. That’s why he has spent the past five years building a political revolution which has many legacies — from the election of figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib to the growth of the Democratic Socialists of America into the largest socialist organization in the United States since the 30s; and from the widespread adoption of $15 minimum wage laws and the growth of Medicare for All and Green New Deal movements to the emboldening of left-wing unions like the National Nurses United and the American Postal Workers Union. But the most important legacy of Bernie Sanders’s political revolution has been making socialism a force in American politics once again. (source)
In offering millions of people a chance to vote for a person and a program they believed in, Sanders disrupted the odious duopoly that controls the American political system.
And, in standing openly against the forces that debase and devalue human life in modern America he gave them something infinitely more precious, that is bound to endure beyond the mourning of the coming weeks: hope. (source)
He asked: Why should you tolerate a system that privileges the profit-making activities of a tiny minority over the liberation of the vast majority? Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know? Which side are you on?
These questions cut right to the core of what it means to even have a society: what we believe to be the purpose of the institutions we’ve erected to facilitate our existence, on whose terms they do and should operate, and to what ends. These are the questions that have always animated the socialist movement, from its utopian origins before Marx and Engels through the turbulent twentieth century to the present day.
Once you’ve actually internalized that society doesn’t have to be this way, that none of the exploitation you’ve experienced or witnessed is actually inevitable, that human freedom is achievable, you don’t go back to thinking otherwise. (source)
> What is to be done?
As Bernie correctly emphasized in his suspension speech this morning, the campaign has largely won the battle of ideas.
Contrary to Joe Hill’s famous slogan — Don’t Mourn, Organize — it’s fine to mourn after a loss like this. But now is not the time to give up. In fact, there’s never been a more urgent moment to get organized (source):
- join a union
- Join the One Big Union, the IWW, a must if you're a worker
- Join the DSA or other socialist organizations/parties
- Organize with coworkers
- Support and join local leftist movements and strikes
- Vote for local leftists and working-class fighters
Remember: We have a world to win.
"If there is going to be class warfare in this country, it’s about time the working class won that war.” - Bernie Sanders
Jacobinmag
Bernie Sanders: “We Have Won the Ideological Battle”
In a speech announcing the end of his candidacy, Bernie Sanders was defiant, saying that “together, we have transformed American consciousness as to what kind of country we can become.” We reprint the address here in full.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…” Charles Dickens – A Tale of Two Cities
www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/finding-meaning-worst-times/
www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/finding-meaning-worst-times/
openDemocracy
Finding meaning in the worst of times
Suddenly, care for each other is the central focus of human life worldwide.