If Sanders wins the nomination that is definitely the ads they will run against him. But as usual the Republicans get everything wrong. It sort of started with Reagan when he said: "the government is the problem not the solution". If we examine that statement we can see it is one of the dumbest political statements any person has ever made.
Reagan seems oblivious to the fact that in a democracy: "we, the people, are the government". So are we the problem? The Republicans don't seem to have ever figured that one out. And there's a great irony here and it is that the real enemy are the plutocrats. Because the government we have, is a government we have control over and can choose whether we want more or less socialism, or something different.
But we have no control over the plutocrats and when it comes to running a society power is everything and money means power. Power has always been what runs a society going all the way back to when we were primates eating leaves, with the most powerful males running the society as a dictatorship.
As we evolved it became tribal chiefs running their society as a dictatorship. And until the ancient Greeks figured out republics/democracies where the people decided who is to run their society, whoever was the most powerful person or group in a society ran that society. Kings, Queens, overlords, tribal chiefs, whoever had the most power. And history tells us they usually were very harsh towards the people without power, the peasants/proletariat. The the aristocracy has always made life hell for the proletariat.
Today by the very definition of the word we live in a plutocratic oligarchy. The poor have no power. We know all the power is with the plutocrats. In fact they have so much power that Obama did not want to take them on even though we know they engaged in massive fraud including laundering tens of billions of dollars of drug money and blatantly defrauding customers. Crimes that would've put the average person jail for decades.
Obama did not put one plutocrat in jail even though they engaged in fraud so huge that they paid something like $110 billion in fines. Of course the CEOs don't care anything about fines because they just use the stockholders money to pay them, and they continue to get their high salaries and no one goes to jail.
There's a difference between a political system and a social system. What that woman was talking about with socialism is a political system. But what Sanders is talking about is not even really socialism it is a run-of-the-mill democratic welfare state (democratic socialism) like every other Western democracy in the world.
All Bernie is talking about is an enhanced social system. That's why he emphasizes Democratic socialism. As long as the people get to vote what they want that is not socialism in the Communist, or political sense. We vote what social systems we want constantly. At the local level we vote for the school board members, we vote for the assembly, and they decide what social programs we will have in the community. Same goes at the state level and the federal level.
Public schools, the police, the fire departments, public sewer and water, Social Security, Medicare, our streets and roads, clean air and water, protection of our food, those are all social programs that we voted for. It is impossible to run a country without having a certain amount of socialism and as long as we are democracy that is how the best societies in the world are run. |
