Bernie Sanders thanks Kamala Harris for endorsing single-payer

[BainsBane]

122. Yours is the first I've seen mention any issue

and there have been many threads about her on DU. Not that it's specific, but it does identify an area of disagreement. I have no position on her potential candidacy. No one is running for president now (at least they shouldn't be), and I won't make any decision about who to support until shortly before my state primary. But I do find it ironic that people claim outrage about some things while ignoring or even defending the environmental racism of Sierra Blanca and vote for the Minutemen. Just like charges of corporatism conveniently exempt the gun industry, defense, and big sugar.

How have you decided she is the "establishment" favorite? Because you read one of those miscreants on Twitter say so? And what exactly is the "establishment"? Considering I've seen people with shit loads of money regularly insult the poor as "establishment," I tend to not put such stock in those terms. In fact, what I see is the use of terms like establishment, centrist, and progressive as obfuscation for power grabs by a group whose wealth and privilege averages well above those they regularly insult with the labels that comprise the entirety of their political analysis. When single women on welfare are insulted as the "establishment," while millionaires who have been in DC for three or four decades have not, something is seriously wrong.

I'll point to one example of the gaping hypocrisy that turns my stomach. One percenter Nomiki Konst is quoted in a number of different articles talking about how Harris, as a black woman, needs to address poverty and economic equality. Meanwhile, Konst is using her position on the DNC unity commission to try to expand the caucus system, a system with THE lowest voter turnout, which excludes shift workers, the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and women with childcare obligations, and has the lowest participation rates by voters of color. It is a disenfranchisement effort, identical to GOP voter ID laws in that it targets the exact same populations for the exact same reasons. Now, I understand principles of equal rights and voting rights are insignificant compared to engineering power grabs by the right sort of people, but I find the values revealed in such efforts repugnant. That is just one of many reasons why I don't for a second believe one solitary word of the rhetoric about equality, which are always accompanied by efforts to undermine equality, both economic and legal, and roll the clock back 50-75 years.

But what would I know. I'm part of the ash heap of history, as you informed me. The future belongs to the bourgeoisie, determined to restore the "party of FDR." Because nothing says anti-corporatist like lionizing a president born to aristocracy who made a fortune as a Wall Street financier (and of course we're supposed to ignore Jim Crow and lynchings because they just aren't important enough). That even violates the prevailing, extremely narrow definition of corporatist that exclude the merchants of death and virtually every industry except finance. But hey, if it keeps the wrong sort of people out of power, that's all that matters.