Article link: www.salon.com/...
Continuing a bit on yesterday’s diary I wrote about Bernie’s Democratic Socialism, today I found another article that touches on socialism, but more into how it plays into modern-day America. Essentially, Ronald Reagan started eroding, and the Koch brothers seem to be wanting to finish off, federal programs that are so critical to our everyday lives, and provides a safety net for us as Americans.
Reagan led the Republican Party to the idea that the market would take care of everything — that its efficiency and equality would ensure fairness for everyone, and that government only mucked up the works. By 1990, only ten years after Reagan’s trickle-down low-regulation folly, huge budget deficits, banking corruption, and a poor economy made it clear that America had been duped.
Unfortunately, it is 2015, and Democrats, in 25 years, have been unable to undo most of the rigged economic laws that Reagan put into place. Our upper tax brackets are too low, corporate loopholes are too many, regulation has allowed corporations to rape the land, and the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer.
As the article states, that is why Bernie Sanders is so important.
Bernie Sanders, FDR, MLK, and many other past and present Americans have a very different view of freedom, and believe that the freedom to starve or to be left untreated after being seriously injured is no freedom at all. As FDR said while listing his Second Bill of Rights, “we have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.” This is one of the fundamental values of socialism.
Economic inequality, according to Sanders and liberal Democrats, is the cause of the majority of our country’s ills. Broken educational systems, poor healthcare systems, and inequitable criminal justice all can logically be traced back to a rigged and unfair economy, primarily caused by corruption in campaign financing, which lead to laws benefiting the rich:
“Democratic socialism, to me, does not just mean that we must create a nation of economic and social justice. It also means that we must create a vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person one vote.”
-Bernie Sanders
Our only hope to break out of this cycle is someone who refuses to play by the corrupt rules, and vows to change them once elected.
The two political parties, who for decades have been neoliberal parties serving the interests of the capitalist class first and foremost, seem to be moving further apart. Since the ISIS attacks on Paris, some Republicans have started to sound increasingly like their fascist forbearers, while also talking about the importance of freedom. But the only candidate who offers the real freedom that so many great Americans have advocated in the past, it seems, is Bernie Sanders.
More and more Americans are finally realizing that BOTH parties are serving the rich, one just being more disgustingly fascist than the other. Neither is doing us any good at all. There is only one chance, and it is very, very likely we won’t get that chance again until it’s too late.
Vote for Bernie Sanders, and make a REAL effort, not a false political one that ends up going nowhere, to save ourselves from global warming, plutocracy, middle-class collapse, and endless and unwinnable warfare.