Like a lot of folks, I ran across Robin Alperstein’s “On Becoming Anti-Bernie” on Twitter last week, and being the political junkie and whole-hearted Bernie fan that I am, I forced myself to read it — well, most of it. Even after reading the first couple of sentences, however, the author’s disingenuousness became evident. And to tell you the truth, I find most of Alperstein’s complaints (such as Bernie’s supposed “sexism,” “laziness” and “character assassination” of Hillary) simply too ludicrous to deserve a response. But Alperstein’s attempt to portray Bernie as never having been interested in effecting a substantive influence in Congress, as well as a few other specious claims, is simply too toxic to leave standing. Here’s my heavily linked (and admittedly rushed) response.
ON THE NOTION that “Sanders [as a Senator] was less interested in…accomplishing anything than he was in staging protests.”
I’ll have more to say about this later, but for the moment, a quick reminder that in Congress, Bernie was known the “Amendment King” for good reason — and that the reason his bills rarely passed is because they were usually too progressive for the taste of our largely corporatist legislature. Given the situation, in fact, Bernie’s record of accomplishments in Congress is pretty grand. Of the 419 amendments that he sponsored, 90 were passed (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/mar/24/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-was-roll-call-amendment-king-1995-2/). Even with a Republican controlled House, as Zaid Jilani recently pointed out, Bernie’s amendments included several major reforms, “advancing goals such as reducing poverty and helping the environment,” and he passed them by building bipartisan coalitions comprised of both Republicans and Progressives — something, in other words, that Hillary can only dream of. The content of his amendments is equally impressive — look through Jilani’s article for a sample: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernie-gets-it-done-sanders-record-pushing-through-major-reforms-will-surprise-you.
ON THE CLINTON CRIME BILL, RACIAL INJUSTICE, AND “WELFARE REFORM”
It’s also striking that Alperstein attempts to accuse Bernie of misrepresenting his vote on Clinton Administration’s 1993 Crime Bill, while failing to acknowledge the Senator’s condemnation of most of what that bill entailed. She strenuously exerts herself — and her readers — to makes much, much, much to do of Bernie’s having said the bill included an assault ban, when in fact that item had been stripped from the final version of the bill and replaced with a commission to “examine the extent to which assault weapons and high power firearms have contributed to violence and murder in the United States.” Clearly, the various drafts and iterations of the assault ban were complicated, but Bernie’s story was essentially accurate. (See Linda Qiu’s article on this in Politifact (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb/28/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-chuck-todd-debate-crime-bill-vote-a/)
But is this kind of hair-splitting really worth anyone’s time? Alperstein’s argument is merely a distraction from the content of the bill and what the candidates’ handling of it shows us about them. A silly effort to point a finger at Bernie, who, as usual, happened to be on the right side — or in this case, the righter side, while Hillary, as usual, wasn’t.
Bernie’s criticism of the bill, its lack of humanity and its avoidance of the root causes of crime, was unmistakeable, as was his call for a substantive revision: “We can either educate or electrocute. We can create meaningful jobs, rebuilding our society, or we can build more jails. Mr. Speaker, let us create a society of hope and compassion, not one of hate and vengeance.” (Bernie Sanders: Incarcerating a Country (4/13/1994). Meanwhile, Hillary was marching about, invoking the nation’s fear of young, black “Super-predators” and advocating the same features of the brutal bill that Bernie was condemning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k4nmRZx9nc).
The differences here could not be clearer. Bernie was doing his Bernie-thing —pointing to income and educational inequality and asking for progressive policy changes — while Hillary was pushing for mass incarceration of African Americans and helping to set the private prison industry’s wheels in motion — an industry which, not coincidentally, continues to thank her today with large donations.
If Alperstein, as she claims, really had done her research, she would know about this — in all likelihood, she probably does. And if she had thought for a moment about her argument, she would also see that Bernie’s having signed the bill despite his misgivings about it, demonstrates the very ability to “compromise” which she claims Bernie lacks.
Not only does Alperstein miss the heart of Bernie’s opposition to the bill, she also misses the fact that Bernie’s “socialist” proposals are aimed directly at increasing equality for Blacks, Native Americans and other racial minorities. In truth, Alperstein seems to be criticizing the fact that Bernie hasn’t been pandering to Black Americans in the way that Hillary has. But as most of us know by know, while Bernie has been fighting for racial justice for several decades, Hillary has only recently begun to take an interest. Look at his website, where Bernie identifies and offers solutions to five forms of racial targeting and injustice — “physical, political, legal, economic and environmental violence…waged against black, brown and indigenous Americas” (https://berniesanders.com/issues/racial-justice/). This is a more comprehensive examination of racial injustice — and a stronger series of proposals to fix it — than any candidate has dared to offer in recent memory.
In contrast, Hillary’s claims about “ending” racial injustice and mass incarceration not only fly in the face of her continued work with and acceptance of large sums from private prison lobbyists; they require that we ‘forgive and forget’ her support for the Crime Bill as well. No wonder Alperstein wants to distract us.
“Forgiving and Forgetting” is, in fact, the underlying premise of Hillary’s campaign: Just as we must forgive and forget her support of the Crime Bill and her “Super-predator” speech, we must also forgive and forget her work to promote the Clinton Administration’s Welfare Reform Act of ’95. And just as Clinton’s Crime Bill did more damage to the Black community than any other piece legislation in modern times, so too did Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” decimate the only program that sustained America’s poor — exacerbating the very causes of crime that Bernie was working to address. As Chair of the Progressive Caucus, Bernie led the opposition to the Act, and his condemnation of it — and its consequences — are sadly even more relevant today than they were then:
“What welfare reform did…was go after some of the weakest and most vulnerable people in this country,” Sanders said at a Feb. 24 press conference in South Carolina. “During that time, I spoke out against so-called welfare reform because I thought it was scapegoating people who were helpless, people who were very, very vulnerable. Secretary Clinton at that time had a very different position on welfare reform. … Now what happened as a result of that so-called welfare reform bill? Since legislation was signed into law, the number of families living in extreme poverty has more than doubled from 636,000 to 1.6 million.”
Have you ever wondered why, after nearly four decades of public service, Hillary continually needs to reach back to her work with the Children’s Defense Fund in the early-70s to demonstrate her “progressive” history? Significantly, Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Edelman is no longer “friends in politics” with Hillary; Edelman stated that Bill Clinton’s “signature on [that] pernicious [Welfare] bill made a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.” Marion’s husband Peter resigned from his post with the Clinton Administration, calling the bill “the worst thing Clinton has done.” More pointedly, journalist/activist Barbara Ehrenreich noted, it was “hard to miss the racism and misogyny that helped motivate [the Clintons’] welfare ‘reform’” (http://www.salon.com/2015/10/15/the_worst_thing_hillary_clinton_has_ever_done/).
As Hillary’s sudden, northbound disinterest in the Flint water crisis suggests, Hillary knows that Black Votes Matter; but when it comes to Black — or Poor — Lives, there is nothing on Hillary’s record to show that she “gets it” or that she even cares to–outside of her stint with the CDF. If you’d like to see Hillary’s dismissive attitude toward the black community for yourself, take a look at two recent encounters where her condescending treatment of two young protesters — and the issues they’d like her to address — is nearly identical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqLfvQfuvsA &http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/03/02/wow-hillary-clinton-caught-telling-black-protester-why-dont-you-go-run-for-something-video/.
While both Clintons remained tight-lipped over corporate welfare, Bernie spoke sharply against the government’s hypocritical willingness to spend exorbitant amounts of money on corporate handouts, while castigating the poorest Americans and blaming the national deficit on the meager programs that sustained them. Bernie even called out the fact that many of the politicians rooting for the “reform” were taking large bribes from wealthy corporations and lobbyists working to maintain their own unwarranted government subsidies.
Where was Hillary in this? Although her corporatist political record had yet to be established at that time, in the two decades since, we’ve seen nothing short of a complete sellout from Hillary. In fact, corporate and Wall St. welfare and protection, together with unwarranted military aggression/intervention, are the only areas in which Hillary’s record shows a unwavering and full-throated commitment. Whether she’s championing trade deals that traded US jobs for greater corporate profits and tax havens for the meg-rich; backing the bank bailout; continuing to support Bill’s deregulation policies while pretending concern for those who lost their life savings and homes as a result; or pushing fracking around the world while pretending to care about the environment — Hillary has nevernot been on the side of corporate and financial industry greed — regardless of the costs.
Forgive and forget her support of NAFTA, she says. Forgive and forget her efforts to push the TPP. Forgive and forget her Wall St speeches, her acceptance of millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry. Forgive and forget, in short, nearly everything that her record demonstrates — including, though it’s rarely mentioned, her continuously fierce protection of outrageous insurance and health industry profits. As she loves to (somewhat erroneously) point out, “Obama Care” was originally known as “Hillary Care”; yet if you look the two programs with any objectivity, you’ll see that the one illogical similarity they share is prioritizing the greed of insurance and for-profit health companies over the US budget and the little “people” who pay for them. In 2014, the average annual income for top health insurance CEOs was 15 million dollars. (http://www.fiercehealthpayer.com/story/top-health-insurance-ceo-pay-exceeds-10-million-2014/2015-04-10). Who paid these outrageous salaries? We did, including the hundreds of thousands of Americans required to pay for insurance but unable to actually use it, due to their unaffordable deductibles. A look at Hillary’s major donors will show that CEOs aren’t the only ones benefiting.
ON FOREIGN POLICY
But Hillary’s most glaring “Forgive and Forget” is her vote for the Iraq War — the lesson she supposedly “learned” from but clearly hasn’t. Like her vote for that unjust war, virtually all of Hillary’s foreign policies have followed in the footsteps of Iraq and the Bush/Cheney doctrine: Bush’s frightening marriage of multinational corporate interests and unwarranted US military intervention appears to form the basis of Hillary’s understanding of the world and our role in it.
On Libya: Libya is a perfect example. While Bernie speaks accurately about the error of US/ Hillary’s endless efforts to enforce “regime change” (ie. US-led military coups) throughout the Middle East as well as Latin America, Hillary still claims her “work” in Libya was a success. As for her claim that US intervention was aimed at protecting human rights, it’s been firmly established that the real agenda was gold, oil, and preventing Gaddafi from establishing independence from Europe: googling “Hillary Gold Libya” will turn up a number of enlightening articles, such as this one (you can also find the leaked emails that back it up): Exposing the Libyan Agenda: a Closer Look at Hillary’s Emails. As even the New York Times has acknowledged, Libya is Hillary’s disaster. And as some have suggested, Osprey may well be Hillary’s Halliburton (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425295/gowdy-sidney-blumenthal-sent-classified-info-lobbied-clinton-profit-libya).
On Israel: Bernie is the first leading US politician with the courage — and insight — to come clean on the problem of unconditional US support of Israel on the one hand, with our unconditional rejection of Palestinian concerns on the other. Unlike Hillary, Bernie understands that Netanyahu is not “Israel,” but merely represents one rather extreme political faction. In contrast, Hillary’s support of Israel is so extraordinarily extreme that she even speaks of having to “battle against the alarming… [activist] movement known as BDS”: her position has been criticized for being “to the RIGHT of Trump’s”–and it actually is (https://theintercept.com/2016/03/22/clinton-attacks-israeli-boycott-movement-in-aipac-speech/).
On Diplomacy: For all of Hillary’s supposed foreign policy expertise, one might assume she would know better than to make such statements as “We Came, We Saw, He Died,” in response to any murder, much less a filmed torture of a national leader. (If you haven’t seen it, you owe it to yourself–and your vote–to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y) Unfortunately, Hillary’s lack of diplomatic finesse (or simple decency) in that interview wasn’t an isolated, momentary lapse: listen to what she said on Charley Rose about the Iran Hillary Clinton and James A. Baker laughs about possible war with Iran.
On Transparency: One might also assume that she would know better than to blow off the legal requirements of the Secretary of State’s Office by using a private server for all of her government emails — for entire length of her term. Whatever else we may think of Hillary’s “scandalous emails,” the real problem, in my opinion, is that the server — and her handling of it — has allowed the US Government get away with saying “F-You, FOIA.” Take that idea wherever it leads you, but to my mind, it couldn’t be simpler: this is not a leader any country should want.
To anyone who has read much at all about Hillary’s foreign policy (Haiti, Honduras, Libya, etc. as well as that “business opportunity” known as Iraq), it’s clear that her agenda is purely “neo-con,” a blatant continuation of the Bush/Cheney doctrine, which has done more damage to our world–and US national security–than any foreign policy agenda we’ve ever put into practice. (I wonder if Alperstein has read any of the articles on Hillary’s Saudi/Boeing arms deal, her Russian plutonium deal, or the foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation that she neglected to report while serving as SOS.) Hillary’s foreign policy is not about ISIS or human rights: it’s about the emerging market of privatized intervention, and the expansion of US global military control–regardless of the cost. And that, I’m afraid, is about it.
While he may not always sound as polished as Hillary on foreign policy, it’s clear that Bernie is the only one who isn’t invested in “emerging market” of unwarranted military aggression, the only one who views war as a Last Resort, and the only one honest enough to acknowledge the vast failure of our current foreign MO. For more on Bernie’s foreign policy and why most un-bought, intelligent experts applaud his views, seehttp://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/articles/2016-02-29/bernie-sanders-foreign-policy-doctrine-actually-makes-a-lot-of-sense andhttp://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/bernie-sanders-foreign-poicy-213619.
ON THE ECONOMY
Other than suggesting that one could write volumes about Hillary “pulling [false facts] out of [her] butt,” I can’t speak to the specifics of Alperstein’s 4% growth complaint. But I do know that many economists (which Alperstein isn’t) have agreed with him — and with his numbers. (seehttp://www.politicususa.com/2016/01/14/170-economists-bernie-sanders-plan-reform-wall-st-rein-greed.html). And I also know that Bernie is the only candidate who stands a chance of bringing about a stronger, more sustainable US economy, because he’s the only one willing to move our country toward greater buying power for the working and middle classes. In case you haven’t realized why serious bolstering of the middle class is critical to our economy, here’s a brilliant little video that puts US income inequality in graphic form: Wealth Inequality in America. Unlike Hillary, Bernie “gets it” that the mega-rich can only buy so many cars, so many rolls of toilet paper, so many dinners out. It’s the buying power of the middle and working class that needs to change if we want a sustainable economy–but Hillary is, and always has been, on the other side. (For more information on Bernie’s economic plans and why they make sense, see Why Bernie vs Hillary Matters More Than People Think.)
The Panama Trade Agreement gives an effective snapshot of the fundamental differences between the Hillary’s and Bernie’s economic priorities: Hillary pushes hard for it, claiming that it’ll generate 70,000 new jobs in the US, while Bernie calls it what it was–a lovely gift to the ultra wealthy (including about half a dozen Clinton donors) at the cost of US jobs. (For more information, seehttp://www.salon.com/2016/04/05/sanders_ardently_opposed_the_trade_deal_that_helped_make_the_panama_papers_scandal_clinton_supported_it/.)
ON “THE BIG PICTURE”
Even aside from her consistent prioritizing of corporate interests over the well-being of “the little people,” as one of the primary pushers (if not one of the architects) of TPP, Hillary has made it clear that she isn’t interested in any regulations for toxic giants like Exxon and Monsanto. (See Cables Show Hillary Clinton’s State Department Deeply Involved in Trans-Pacific Partnership). As most of us know, Hillary has been one of our country’s strongest promoters of fracking; like her shifting rhetoric on the TPP, she now pretends not to be such a fan of this disastrous new industry, but her actions indicate otherwise (How Hillary Clinton’s State Department sold fracking to the world). The fact that she continues to mislead about her donations from the fossil fuel industry is also troubling (Oil Companies Donated To Clinton Foundation While Lobbying State Department). As is her decision to hire former lobbyists for both Monsanto and Keystone, which gives us a glimpse of her long-standing connections with toxic companies and contradicts her “pro-environment” rhetoric. Although she claims to support GMO labeling, she’s also advised GMO manufacturers to come up with a better term–one that doesn’t “send up a red flag” in the minds of consumers, such as “drought resistant,” which “sounds like something you want” (Listen for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJaic2ek8aY).
Even aside from the horrors of Hillary’s economic vision and foreign policies, her unrelenting support for and refusal to regulate toxic industries are enough reason, in my opinion, not to trust her judgment or her words, and certainly never to vote for her.
Bernie, on the other hand, has repeatedly stuck his neck out against multinational corporations whose products damage the health of both consumers and planet — not only when it was popular to do so, but also when it wasn’t. This is what a genuine leader does. If Alperstein *had* educated herself on Bernie’s senatorial record — or if the entire premise of her article wasn’t utter baloney — I don’t believe she could possibly belittle it as she does. What follows are a few examples that show Bernie’s singular ability to see “the big picture” and his courage to lead us in the right direction. In my opinion, this is exactly the kind of activism — and leadership — that we need from our politicians, and I for one am extremely grateful it:
Sen Bernie Sanders — Keystone XL Pipeline
Bernie Sanders: Monsanto and the FDA (6/17/1994)
Bernie Sanders Blocks Obama’s FDA Nominee Over Big Pharma Ties
And last but not least, Bernie’s 8 hour filibuster on the extension of the Bush Tax Cuts: Senator Bernie Sanders Filibuster (Full 8 1/2 hours)
Merely grandstanding? Lazy? Come on.
Readers, in case you were even remotely tempted to take her article seriously, consider for a moment the fact that Robin Alperstein is a corporate attorney who represents hedge-funds and other large holdings companies. Her resume boasts several cases where she protected such companies from class action suits, usually involving fraud (http://www.beckerglynn.com/robin-l-alperstein/). Now, do you honestly believe that Ms. Alperstein was ever fond of Bernie and his progressive Revolution? (Sorry, Alperstein: it didn’t work.)
Look, I know Bernie isn’t (quite) perfect — but he’s about as close to perfect as we’ll ever see. A far cry from Hillary, whose presidency would likely be as dangerous as Trump’s — and whose unfavorability rating is nearly as high: 56%. (I can only imagine how many horrors we’ll be asked to “forgive and forget” by 2020, should Hillary become our next President.) It’s Bernie’s profound dedication to the 99%, his consistency and his hard work that are moving the Democratic Party forward and bringing it new voters — former Republicans as well as Independents (another of Bernie’s bi-partisan feats that Hillary no doubt envies). Hillary may manage to steal the primary, but it’s unlikely she’ll manage to win the election: there are simply too many real strikes against her.
