WendyDarling wrote:I only asked because he ran a communist organization in his younger years and honeymooned in a communist country, Cuba, during the cold war among other things.
Alright, let's investigate this.
I discovered this
article bit of propaganda that reiterates what you're saying and then some, so I'll address the claims therein and maybe that will cover it
https://nypost.com/2016/01/16/dont-be-f ... communist/He was a communist collaborator during the height of the Cold War. Rewind to 1964. While attending the University of Chicago, Sanders joined the Young People’s Socialist League,
I found the YPSL here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Peo ... ague_(1907)
A quick read reveals that it actually competed with the communist leagues and therefore it wasn't one.
Also, why did Bernie not join the Communist Party USA?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA Started in 1919 and continuing to this day, Bernie certainly could have joined, but didn't. If he's a flaming commie, why not?
He also organized for a communist front, the United Packinghouse Workers Union, which at the time was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
That appears to be an innocent labor union for meat packers and I could find no mention of "communism" on this page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Pa ... of_AmericaThis claim appears to be a fabrication with intent to demonize. Reagan was a union boss, twice, but does that mean he's communist?
And being under investigation is not a conviction of anything. Trump is under investigation for colluding with Russia right now, but does that mean he is guilty?
Anyone with an eyeball can see Trump is in bed with Putin, but no one gives a shit. They only care if it's Bernie because he's the REAL threat to the elites.
After graduating with a political science degree, Sanders moved to Vermont, where he headed the American People’s History Society, an organ for Marxist propaganda.
I can't find reputable info on that organization.
There, he produced a glowing documentary on the life of socialist revolutionary Eugene Debs
Eugene Victor Debs (November 5, 1855 – October 20, 1926) was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies), and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States.[1] Through his presidential candidacies, as well as his work with labor movements, Debs eventually became one of the best-known socialists living in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._DebsA socialist is not a communist.
who was jailed for espionage during the Red Scare and hailed by the Bolsheviks as “America’s greatest Marxist.”
The Red Scare was a propaganda operation to smear communism precisely like what this author is engaging in:
A "Red Scare" is promotion of widespread fear by a society or state about a potential rise of communism, anarchism, or radical leftism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_ScareAnd he was not jailed for espionage, but speaking against "dear leader":
Debs' speeches against the Wilson administration and the war earned the enmity of President Woodrow Wilson, who later called Debs a "traitor to his country."[41] On June 16, 1918, Debs made a speech in Canton, Ohio, urging resistance to the military draft of World War I. He was arrested on June 30 and charged with ten counts of sedition.[42] Debs was sentenced on November 18, 1918, to ten years in prison.
Debs appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court. In its ruling on Debs v. United States, the court examined several statements Debs had made regarding World War I and socialism. While Debs had carefully worded his speeches in an attempt to comply with the Espionage Act, the Court found he had the intention and effect of obstructing the draft and military recruitment.
On December 23, 1921, President Harding commuted Debs' sentence to time served https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V. ... arcerationWilson signed the Federal Reserve Act and started the income tax. Who is the traitor? I'll leave it to the audience to decide whether the pot or kettle is blacker.
“Those Russian comrades of ours have made greater sacrifices, have suffered more, and have shed more heroic blood than any like number of men and women anywhere on Earth,” Debs proclaimed. “They have laid the foundation of the first real democracy that ever drew the breath of life in this world.”
Democracy?!? Oh the horror! Since when is democracy synonymous with communism?
In a 1918 speech in Canton, Ohio, Debs reaffirmed his solidarity with Lenin and Trotsky, despite clear evidence of their violent plunder and treachery.
Source?
Sanders still hangs a portrait of Debs on the wall in his Senate office.
I'd be more worried if the portrait were of that toryist traitor: Reagan
In the early ’70s, Sanders helped found the Liberty Union Party,
It's just a political party competing with democrats and republicans by representing labor unions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Union_Party I don't care much for labor unions and would rather the state mandate working conditions. Unions are too easy to corrupt and incentivize laziness.
which called for the nationalization of all US banks and the public takeover of all private utility companies.
Problem?
It's a good idea imo, and if that's communism, then a communist has his picture on all $10 bills: Hamilton! He advocated a strong federal government with diminished rights for the states and he advocated a national bank.
After failed runs for Congress, Sanders in 1981 managed to get elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., where he restricted property rights for landlords, set price controls and raised property taxes to pay for communal land trusts.
I don't know much about this nor how to find the relevant info presented objectively, but whatever the truth of it, Bernie said it was one of his proudest achievements in the first paragraph on his own site
https://berniesanders.com/issues/fighti ... e-housing/Considering the tenor and journalistic scruples of this author so far (Paul Sperry, aspiring conservative bootlicker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Sperry ), I'm betting there is an untold noble aspect to this story explaining why Bernie is so proud.
Local small businesses distributed fliers complaining their new mayor “does not believe in free enterprise.”
Problem?
Should enterprises be free to use lead? Asbestos? Should they be free to form backroom deals that screw the public? Should they be free to discriminate? Anyone who believes in absolute free enterprise is either an asshole or an idiot (Trump covers both by advocating asbestos
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... os-707642/ )
Sanders took several “goodwill” trips not only to the USSR, but also to Cuba and Nicaragua, where the Soviets were trying to expand their influence in our hemisphere.
I've made trips to crack neighborhoods before. Guess I must be a crackhead
In 1985, he traveled to Managua to celebrate the rise to power of the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government. He called it a “heroic revolution.” Undermining anti-communist US policy, Sanders denounced the Reagan administration’s backing of the Contra rebels in a letter to the Sandinistas.
The Contras also carried out a systematic campaign to disrupt the social reform programs of the government. This campaign included attacks on schools, health centers and the majority of the rural population that was sympathetic to the Sandinistas. Widespread murder, rape, and torture were also used as tools to destabilize the government and to "terrorize" the population into collaborating with the Contras. Throughout this campaign, the Contras received military and financial support from the CIA and the Reagan Administration.[54] This campaign has been condemned internationally for its many human rights violations. Contra supporters have often tried to downplay these violations, or countered that the Sandinista government carried out much more. In particular, the Reagan administration engaged in a campaign to alter public opinion on the Contras that has been termed "white propaganda".[55] In 1984, the International Court of Justice judged that the United States Government had been in violation of International law when it supported the Contras.[56] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinist ... s._ContrasHis betrayal did not end there. Sanders lobbied the White House to stop the proxy war and even tried to broker a peace deal.
Oh hell... stop war? No, we can't have that!
He exalted Ortega as “an impressive guy,” while attacking President Reagan.
Reagan was a grade-A asshole who shouldn't even qualify as a former president, but a traitorous Redcoat infiltrate who charmed his way into office for the purpose of consolidating power away from the people with his trickle-down nonsense, expanding the prison population with his war on drugs, and sowing the seeds for the destruction of the middle class, among other offenses now requiring someone like Bernie to clean up.
Sanders also adopted a Soviet sister city outside Moscow and honeymooned with his second wife in the USSR. He put up a Soviet flag in his office, shocking even the Birkenstock-wearing local liberals. At the time, the Evil Empire was on the march around the world, and threatening the US with nuclear annihilation.
Politifact dug into that
https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/s ... sanders-u/We wanted to see if Sanders actually honeymooned on the turf of the United States’ former adversary during the final years of the Cold War.
The trip took place while Sanders was mayor of Burlington, Vt., from 1981 to 1989. Toward the end of his mayoral tenure, the small city on Lake Champlain launched a sister-city program with Yaroslavl, located 160 miles northeast of Moscow.
The program, which is still operating today, has facilitated exchanges between the two cities involving "mayors, business people, firefighters, jazz musicians, youth orchestras, mural painters, high school students, medical students, nurses, librarians and the (Yaroslavl) ice-hockey team," according to its website.
The timing of the trip was unusual. Bernie and Jane were married May 28, 1988. The delegation left Burlington the next day.
"Trust me," Sanders writes in the book. "It was a very strange honeymoon."
When reached for comment, Sanders’ campaign said that the dates for the trip had already been set, and the couple "set their wedding date to coincide with that trip because they didn't want to take more time off."
Will made it sound as if Sanders was visiting to condone Soviet torture practices, but the Burlington trip was more of a dialogue-building exchange program. The Vermont weekly newspaper Seven Days reported in 2009 that the sister-city relationship "helped local residents who sought to ease tensions between the United States and Soviet Union by initiating citizen-to-citizen exchanges with a Russian city."
Also, the Soviet Union was barely intact at the time of the trip.
The trip’s primary purpose was diplomacy, not leisure, and included about 10 extra guests.
Will’s claim is accurate but is missing context about the trip’s underlying purpose. We rate his claim Mostly True.Today, Sanders wants to bring what he admired in the USSR, Cuba, Nicaragua and other communist states to America.
For starters, he proposes completely nationalizing our health care system and putting private health insurance and drug companies “out of business.”
Good! The US lags the world in healthcare while spending 10x more!
He also wants to break up “big banks” and control the energy industry, while providing “free” college tuition, a “living wage” and guaranteed homeownership and jobs through massive public works projects.
Who would be against that?
Price tag: $18 trillion.
Says who and how would they know? Most of Bernie's initiatives would pay for themselves and increased efficiency would reduce costs, mainly by the removal of profit from the equations (the gov doesn't make a profit).
Who will pay for it all?
The machines and those capitalizing off the machines and the people. The robots need to start paying taxes by our taxing the owners of the robots.
The purpose of machines is to make less work for people; not more!
Sanders plans to not only soak the rich with a 90 percent-plus tax rate, while charging Wall Street a “speculation tax,” but hit every American with a “global-warming tax.”
Not according to this
http://www.bernietax.com/Of course, even that wouldn’t cover the cost of his communist schemes; a President Sanders would eventually soak the middle class he claims to champion.
If the unfounded speculation comes about, then we'll vote him out.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, right?
No, but people shouldn't be expected to struggle just so the rich can be a little richer, especially considering that most of the rich want to raise their own taxes.
That whole diatribe resembles a demonization operation straight from the Goebbel's playbook.
They call people marxists, communists, stalinists, etc because nobody knows what those terms mean except that they conjure the association of miserable tyranny where everyone wears the same color of drab brown while standing in long lines for bread.
The last thing the plutocracy wants is to have Bernie come to power or they'll be back in the same pit where they endured FDR's reign, so they'll resort to all manner of ad hominous propaganda to prevent that fate.
The real question here is why are poor, uneducated, exclusively-white people coming to the aid of their oppressors by slandering those who want to help them?
Actually, no, not really. I mean, in some respects, maybe, but I prefer democracy not because the crowd is so smart, but because it's the only system that can dethrone an aspiring authoritarian and expel corrupt leaders, but a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and a crowd is only as smart as the individual members, so education is paramount in a democracy.
Stop handing idiots unearned power! 