Sanders is one of the few senators who doesn’t have much in the form of corporate backing. He is reelected year after year because his people know him and like him, not because he outspends his opponents.
Now he does caucus and vote with the Democrats, who do by and large serve the same masters. But he has more potential than anyone else, aside from maybe Rand, to actually deliver on tackling the NSA, the drone program, 4th amendment abuses, attacks on whistle blowers, and reigning in our interventionalist foreign policies. Clinton and Bush, and pretty much everyone else will follow the same path every president has followed since JFK was assassinated.
one can realistically seek the nomination of one of the two right-wing political parties in this country without being completely willing to serve the interests of the state. For all his so-called independence, Sanders virtually always votes with the Democrats, no matter how reactionary the policy. He voted for the Authorization for the Use of Military Force after the September 11th attacks, the legal basis for the disastrous “war on terror.” He regularly votes for military appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he is a fervent supporter of the state of Israel.
Sanders’ role in the upcoming election (like that of Kucinich and Al Sharpton before him) will be to provide a pseudo-left cover for the increasingly right-wing policies of the Democratic party. He is being used to propagate the myth that the Democrats are the party of “working people,” rather than a party organization every bit as committed to serving the financial elite as the Republicans.
We need to move away from our systematic and artificially over-valued and under-valued labor markets.
There are those who believe that labor is only valuable if it results in some product that can be sold. Which is why service and education always get the shaft. But if my product is dependent on a educated workforce, or efficient transportation, then the bus driver and local school teacher are every bit as important to a businesses’ success, and should have paychecks which reflect this.
