On 3/12/16 5:27 PM, Marv Gandall wrote: > I read your comment above, together with your subject line, as > effectively saying to Sanders and his supporters, “you’re wasting > your time condemning these deals and attempting to block them. You > need to make a socialist revolution, failing which you might as well > go home and forget about politics.” I’m sure that is how they would > hear it, notwithstanding your sarcastic claim to be in tune with them > in theory (“Oh sure, everybody knows I am infamous for supporting TPP > and other such trade agreements.”)
You don't seem to get what I am saying. Let me try again. When Sanders makes a link between NAFTA et al and the declining standard of living, he is not telling the story that needs to be told. WTO, GATT, NAFTA, TPP et al have not hollowed out Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, Baltimore, St. Louis, et al even though they have added to the attack on labor. Instead it has been the decline of American manufacturing per se. Trump demagogically talks about how he will keep Carrier air conditioners in the USA. This is about as big a fraud as his university. I have no problem with Sanders attacking TPP and NAFTA, which need to be attacked, but his program has little to do with socialism. You say he was a left-liberal or social democrat. I think it is clear that he is a left-liberal who mistakenly calls himself a socialist. Keep in mind that the European social democrats were quite open about their opposition to capitalism as a system until the post-WWII period. They just rejected revolutionary measures to achieve it. I think that Norman Thomas was a real social democrat, not Bernie Sanders. Just take a look at this: http://www.chicagodsa.org/thomasnewdeal.html Emphatically, Mr. Roosevelt did not carry out the Socialist platform, unless he carried it out on a stretcher. What is true is that when Mr. Roosevelt took office he had to act vigorously. We had demanded Federal relief for unemployment. Hence any attempts Mr. Roosevelt made at Federal relief could perhaps be called by his enemies an imitation of the Socialists platform. It was an extraordinarily poor imitation. We demanded Federal unemployment insurance. Hence any attempt to get Federal security legislation could be regarded as an imitation of the Socialist platform. It was an amazingly bad imitation. Indeed, at various times Mr. Roosevelt has taken particular and rather unnecessary pains to explain that he was not a Socialist, that he was trying to support the profit system, which by the way, he defined incorrectly. In his last message to Congress his attack was not upon the profit system but on the sins of big business. His slogan was not the Socialist cry: "Workers of the world, workers with hand and brain, in town and country, unite!" His cry was: "Workers and small stockholders unite, clean up Wall Street." That cry is at least as old as Andrew Jackson. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
