Bernie Sanders is campaigning as a Democratic Socialist. With no apology, no hedging, he's calling for socialism. His right-wing opponents are already using the label as an epithet. The attacks started long before he announced his candidacy. Here's a hilarious example.
News flash: We are a socialist nation!
Socialism's hallmark is redistribution of wealth, right? Ask any anti-socialist. Well, redistribution of wealth has been going on since Reagan-era "trickle-down economics" got invented. We've been redistributing taxpayer-generated wealth upward. Billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies to the nation's smallest minority, the one percent, and their multi-billion dollar corporations.
Bernie's campaign is all about straightening out our upside-down socialism.
Thank you, smiley7, for posting this video here last month. Seeing as how the Sanders campaign has gained a lot more momentum and attention since then, I thought I'd repost it, just in case there might be few occasional Daily Kos visitors who don't yet understand all the excitement that many of the regulars here are already feeling.
The Atlantic says The Clinton Campaign Is Afraid of Bernie Sanders.
Politicus calls it "the Bernie Sanders Revolution."
And the crowds keep getting bigger!
Lots of appreciation to Katie Couric for conducting an intelligent interview full of the kind of questions that seldom occur to mainstream journalists. As Bernie says in the interview:
Sometimes the inside-the-Beltway pundits really don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the world.
For those who don't have 40 spare minutes to watch the video, I've posted my favorite excerpts below the fold.
When Katie Couric asked if his goal is to move Hillary Clinton a bit more to the left:
We’re in this race to win. I think that there are millions and millions of people who are tired of establishment politics, who are tired of corporate greed, who want a candidate who will lead a mass movement in this country of millions of people who essentially say enough is enough, the billionaire class can’t have it all.
On how he would get his program through a hopelessly gridlocked Congress, Bernie said
no President can do it. It will take a "revolution" by the American people:
We need a political revolution, in my view, when people begin to stand up and fight and take on the big money interests. If we don’t have that, no President, not the best President in the world, will be able to accomplish anything.
Here's the fight we, the American people, must take on:
People understand that there is something fundamentally wrong.
We have large profitable corporations that are not paying a nickel in corporate income tax. That’s absurd.
The people of this country bailed out Wall Street. Now it is time for Wall Street to start helping the middle class of this country.
Given the greed and recklessness and illegal behavior on Wall Street, where you have six financial institutions that have assets that are the equivalent of sixty percent of the gross domestic product of this country, who have caused the worst recession in the modern history of this country - many of these banks are bigger today than they were before we bailed them out - enough is enough, yes, we should break them up.
We need to go back to where we were 45, 50 years ago. Know how much it cost to go to the City University of New York 50 years ago? It was free. University of California? Free. Today? Unaffordable.
How we got into this mess:
Campaign contributions are a form of freedom of speech. Now you can use your freedom to buy the United States Government. You can spend as much money as you want on the political process.
What spending "as much money as you want on the political process" has brought us:
They do not even believe in the reality of climate change. The entire scientific community, with few exceptions, telling us that climate change is real, already causing devastating problems, and caused by human activity. They reject the science because their money folks say, hey, we make a lot of money off of fossil fuel. I think that’s pretty scary when you have a major political party rejecting science.
On being considered too extreme:
These people who want to cut Social Security, cut Medicare, cut Medicaid, and give tax breaks to billionaires at a time we have more income and wealth inequality, who reject science, who like a campaign finance system that allows billionaires to buy elections, They are telling the American people that I am too extreme? Sorry, I don’t buy it.
And, in conclusion:
I am very proud to be Vermont’s Senator. And I don’t wake up in the morning, "Oh! I’ve gotta be President of the United States!" But what I do look at is a country in deep, deep trouble, a country which is increasingly dominated by wealthy and powerful forces. And I think we’ve gotta fight back to make our government and our country work for all the people and not just a handful.
Feel the Bern?