By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--July 15, 2015
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"What I think is obscene, and what frightens me is, again, when you have the top one-tenth of one percent owning almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 [percent]. Does anybody think that is the kind of economy this country should have?”To people like Bernie, the economy is a plaything, a living entity that can be made subservient to government. Operating on the same assumption, communist countries created bureaucratically administered "command economies" and millions of their subjects starved. The Soviet Union, which was supposed to live forever, disintegrated after just 74 years and all but a few communist countries followed it into the dustbin of history. Nazi Germany's command economy didn't save it either; the "Thousand Year Reich" perished after just 12 years. Bernie's first lie is that he is democratic. He specifically describes himself as a "democratic socialist," as if the word democratic somehow makes his belief in socialism more noble. Left-wingers like Sanders play word games, misusing the word democratic deliberately and constantly. If they win, it is a triumph of democracy. If they lose, democracy has been betrayed, greedy capitalists rigged the election, the system is broken, and so on. And the "democratic" Left won't take no for an answer. Its activists try to implement their proposals by any means available, regardless of the will of the people as expressed at the ballot box. When leftists lost in California's Proposition 8 election, the referendum affirming traditional, opposite-sex marriage, they challenged the results in court and publicly hounded those who had donated money in support of keeping marriage an exclusively heterosexual, binary institution. Eventually they prevailed. Dramatic losses by congressional and state-level Democrats haven't weakened President Obama's resolve to preserve his command-and-control government health care scheme; in fact, the historic losses only emboldened him to unconstitutionally change the health care law repeatedly by executive fiat. Eventually he prevailed (or so it appears for now). Even though the name of the Washington, D.C. football team, the Redskins, is not offensive to the overwhelming majority of native Indians and is not unpopular with Americans generally, the "democratic" Left is pressing on. These fanatical activists don't seem to understand that the names of sports teams are intended to present a positive image. When those teams are named after a specific social group, it is intended to honor that group. That's why professional sports leagues have been populated by teams such as the Vikings, Celtics, and Nordiques, and not by teams with names such as the Rapists, Idiots, and Boors. Yet leftists continually call for boycotts and now the Obama administration is telling the Redskins it won't allow them to move from the Washington, D.C. suburbs to Washington proper unless the name is changed. Sanders has words other than democratic in his tool box. He takes the standard left-wing euphemism for government spending, "investment," and goes a step further. The senator characterizes what he considers to be inadequate levels of government "investment" in a particular policy area as "deficits." Is this redefinition of deficits imbecilic or diabolically clever? The jury is still out. As ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, Bernie released a report in January titled "We Must Rebuild the Disappearing Middle Class." In order to cut the so-called deficits he cares about, it will be necessary for the government to spend trillions of dollars more, for starters. In the report he states:
While we must continue to focus on the federal deficit, we must also be aware that there are other deficits in our society that have been causing horrendous pain for the vast majority of the American people. These are deficits in jobs, deficits in infrastructure, deficits in income, deficits in equality, deficits in retirement security, deficits in education, and deficits in trade. [...] At a time when this country has an obscene level of income and wealth inequality, we need a budget that ends the outrageous loopholes that exist and asks the wealthiest people and largest corporations to start paying their fair share of taxes. At a time when real unemployment remains much too high, we need a budget that creates millions of decent paying jobs. At a time when our infrastructure is collapsing, we need a budget that rebuilds our crumbling roads, bridges, dams, levees, water systems, waste water plants, airports, and rail systems.In other words, American consumers are spending their money on the wrong things, businesses aren't meeting the real needs of the people, and the government, which is controlled by the big bad corporations, isn't doing what Sanders thinks should be done. Government, Bernie maintains, must drastically increase its expenditures on, well, everything. Because government spending shrinks economic activity overall, Sanders's ideas, if implemented, would not help this allegedly disappearing middle class: they would disappear the middle class.
What is Obamacare? And single payer? Why do we call it single payer? It's communism. If the government controls your access to health care which is what this is about, as to what you can have and to what you can't have, how is that different from -- that is communism.Throughout the congressional debate, Obamacare backers worked strenuously to convince their fellow left-wingers that Obamacare was a stepping stone to single-payer health care. On the campaign trail in March 2007, then-Sen. Obama made it clear he wanted the government to impose a communist-style one-size-fits-all health care system on Americans. "My commitment is to make sure that we have universal healthcare for all Americans by the end of my first term as president." He added:
I would hope that we could set up a system that allows those who can go through their employer to access a federal system or a state pool of some sort. But I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There's going to be potentially some transition process.And that's exactly what Obama and congressional Democrats did in 2010 when they brought in Obamacare. Obama accepted the wealth-redistributing socialist half-measure that is the Affordable Care Act because he knows that it is destined to collapse, at which point he is gambling the American people will demand a single-payer system, the kind of thing desired by the people who raised him, including Communist Party USA operative Frank Marshall Davis. Bernie has been around communists a long time. He used to work at the communist-led United Packinghouse Workers Union. In the 1970s he belonged to the anti-war Liberty Union Party (LUP). Under the LUP banner, he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate and governor of Vermont. His platform called for all U.S. banks to be nationalized, public ownership of all utilities, and the establishment of a worker-controlled federal government. Sanders quit the LUP in 1979 and was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont. During his decade in office he displayed a Soviet flag in his mayoral office and claimed he did so to honor Yaroslavl, Burlington's sister city in the U.S.S.R. In addition, he made Puerto Cabezas in Communist Nicaragua another sister city of Burlington. In 1989 Sanders addressed the national conference of the U.S. Peace Council, a Communist Party USA front group. The event focused on how to “end the Cold War” and “fund human needs.” Fellow speakers included radicals such as Leslie Cagan and U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) Interacting with the CPUSA was a dangerous thing. During the Cold War, CPUSA members swore an oath "to the Soviet Union, to a 'Soviet America,' and to the 'triumph of Soviet power in the United States," according to Professor Paul Kengor. In the 1990s, Sanders repeatedly introduced legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives to cut the nation's intelligence budget. He reasoned that “the Soviet Union no longer exists,” and that concerns such as “massive unemployment,” “low wages,” “homelessness,” “hungry children,” and “the collapse of our educational system” represented “maybe a stronger danger [than foreign terrorists] for our national security.” Sanders hopped on the global warming/climate change bandwagon years ago, claiming that it both threatens “the fate of the entire planet” and is caused primarily by human industrial activity. He wants carbon emissions strictly limited, which would inflict tremendous damage on the U.S. economy without having much of an impact on global temperatures. In 2010 Sanders smeared climate-change skeptics by comparing them to people who had ignored the Nazi threat before World War II. He accused “big business” of being “willing to destroy the planet for short-term profits,” and in 2013 pontificated that “global warming is a far more serious problem than al-Qaeda.”
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
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