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Red-baiting Democrats are attacking me when they ambush Bernie Sanders. I'm not sure even now if I'll be able to vote Democrat if he's the nominee, but it's a sure thing I won't be casting a vote for that party if he isn't. And don't wait for me to apologize for demanding social justice and castigating uncooperative Democrats.
The Republican party, I concede, is a collection of human rubbish, but sellout Democrats--the Red-baiting crowd--are just unctuous Republicans. When it comes to war, predatory commerce, and self-dealing, there's not much to distinguish leaders of the two parties. In the eyes of many of us, McConnell and Schumer represent competing crime families, and even Bernie's going to have to maintain some distance between himself and them to gain our support. Democrats seem to think they can win without us. Hope springs eternal.
I like the image of what they call moderate Democrats shaking with fear at the prospect of people like me--free-health care/free tuition fanatics--forcing our will on people like them, the contented and comfortable. You might think I want to confiscate private property, or something, which I do. It wouldn't be their property, but it might be the property of the people who pay them, and we don't want to make that crowd mad, do we?
In 2020, I won't be voting for any candidate who won't make them mad. I'm not looking for somebody to unite my cause with that of bankers, polluters, pitchmen and heirs and heiresses; they're my enemies, and I demand a leader who can begin the process of dismantling their empires.
Your average billionaire controls more lives today than any monarch of the middle ages ever did. What would you do with a billion dollars? You couldn't spend it. Even if you spent a hundred thousand a day, it would take you a couple of decades to exhaust your supply. What you would do is control other people. You could buy a thousand liquor stores and a manufacturing plant in the Far East and a plot of farmland in Wisconsin, and your decisions would affect all the people working in your stores and plants and fields and all the people in the towns they live in, and, for all intents and purposes, you would own those people.
Your average billionaire added substantially to his wealth last year. And the year before. And the year before that. This doesn't surprise us, because we take it for granted that billionaires will use their money to make more. They don't even have to take any risks. They can borrow money for almost nothing, and then loan it out, often to governments, at usurious rates. Rich people own Greece now because of some bad debts that nation's government took out to enrich private parties. We probably shouldn't expect billionaires to use their money to make life better for the people whose wages they pay and whose land, water and air they pollute.
Your average billionaire is a billionaire because he's not the sort of person to sacrifice profit to eleemosynary pursuits. He must use his money to make more. It's a rule of thumb, and it implies that many of us--maybe all--are ruled by the decisions of billionaires in the pursuit of personal profit. That doesn't sound like public policy in the public interest, because it isn't.
Bernard Sanders pledges to confront the force of the rich and somehow initiate government in the public interest, and millions have lined up behind him. We don't know if he can succeed, but he's the only one promising to try this. The other Democrats, along with NPR and the commercial media, have capitulated to the people who fund them.
If they're frightened, good.