Why I am Disconsolate at the Failure of the Bernie Sanders Campaign

My friends and acquaintances seem confused or at least bemused by my support of Bernie Sanders.  It is as if they think he is like all the other candidates in so many ways though some of them think the Senator is a socialist in ways they are not, as Americans, in spite of the numerous social institutions we, (as Americans,) support.  Some are frustrated I have not already transformed into a full-throated supporter of Joe Biden.  I am disconsolate about Sanders suspending his candidacy and supporting Joe Biden.  More accurately I am disconsolate at the results in Michigan and the other states Sanders did not win.  Here is why.

My first political icon was Ronald Reagan.  In my teens I was being raised by my aunt and uncle to be a strong, fundamentalist Christian.  At a younger age I remember there was a big hubbub over Richard Nixon getting impeached leading to his resignation.  Later I recall my uncle liking Jimmy Carter because he was a Christian.  I guess he voted for the Georgia peanut farmer. 

As Reagan ascended however, virtually everyone I was exposed to at 15-years-old adored Reagan.  In retrospect it seems strange.  Why would adults vote for a former movie actor.  It seemed like we should demand our best and brightest be dedicated to the craft of politics or legislating for decades at least.

As George HW Bush came to power I was beginning to question the politics of my community as well as my own faith.  I renounced my Christianity at 28 and over about the next five years I did a 180 on many of my core beliefs.  By the time Clinton won the Presidency, even though I voted for Ross Perot, I had concluded that the ideas of the American right were wrong. 

In the preceding years I had been impoverished.  I slept on floors.  I went to jail a couple of times for crimes of poverty.  I came to know what it meant to be disadvantaged and my disadvantage came from being emotionally stunted.  It came from growing up in several households because my mother was incarcerated and it came from fundamentalism being thrust upon me along with the responsibility for choosing my faith.  I went forward on February 23^rd, 1976, as ‘Just As I Am,’ filled the sanctuary of a Baptist church.  It came from not knowing or meeting my father. 

I was pissed off about how expensive being poor was.  I was frustrated at how difficult it was to gain a livable wage, which was complicated by the fact that I was extremely excited about being young and alive.  I used to joke when out drinking with friends that we were celebrating our youth and I felt absolutely entitled to do just that. 

I was surely trying to find my way.  I was focused on meeting a pretty girl who would become my partner and help me navigate all that was foreign to me. I was at ease when drinking.  I was able to laugh.  It was actually more about being with people.  I came to love the democracy of a bar setting, the freedom to move about and say whatever I wanted to say.  My money was as good as the next person’s and I cut my teeth in the bar on defending my newfound values which included being thankful for and defending the social safety net.   

I personally came to know what was wrong with our system of justice and our prisons. Having grown up a ward of the court of the county of Los Angeles and using Medi-Cal stickers to pay for fillings and vaccinations, I also knew the value of of the social safety net instinctively and intimately. I can attest to how ungreatful a kid can be for receipt of free hot lunches in elementary school but also arrive at adulthood in one piece and realize one day how generous and empathetic the good people of Los Angeles county truly are. 

I had little in the way of the power of woo.  I was a rube in the ways of the world.  I was a hayseed on transactional analysis.  I had moved away from a career fighting fire because I was not ready or interested in moving into the next phase of life, accepting a career I had fallen into and moving on to family life or whatever.  I was too irresponsible for all that, so I went back to school to become a journalist.  I took a series of low security, low paying, part-time jobs.  I landed in a bookstore and become an assistant manager, which was really just a title that allowed me to lock the doors at night but otherwise did not pay a livable wage. I lived in a saint’s living room for three years, rode a bicycle to work and took a bus to school. 

And I read.  I listened to Rage Against the Machine and read a biography of Che Guevara, (Companero.) I read the liberal ideas of Robert A Heinlein.  I read HL Mencken.  I read the classics: Hemingway and Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. I read Tayeb Salih and Chinua Achebe.  I read Shakespeare, Confucius, Hesse, and I read Henry Miller, like everything he ever wrote including his ‘On Writing.” I came to adore Milan Kundera, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Knut Hamsun, Blaise Cendrars-thank you Henry Miller.  I found life truth in Voltaire, Neruda, Emerson, Thoreau, and Wordsworth.  I cried at the end of Richard Rodriguez books and also at the end of Bridges of Madison County. 

I never understood how others could read these books and not be enlightened in a similar manner as me, which is to say to remain an American conservative.  In poli-sci classes I spoke up on behalf of unions by highlighting the strength of the American economy and how it corresponded with the strength of American unions.  I forensically defeated would be foes in class on subjects such as Vietnam, the war on drugs, supply side economics.  I was frustrated throughout the 90s at the inherent inequality in America.  We had become a society where shareholders were valued over stakeholders, factories moved to China as predicted by Marx, (and yes, I read the communist manifesto because I had a need to know.)  American workers were played like pawns in the grand scheme.  Did I tell you I also read John Reed, the great American writer who detailed the Bolshevik revolution?  I concluded that the wealthy class would always use its money to vouchsafe it from generation to generation as well as to capitalize their accounts.  I correlated the age of corporatism with the wealthy class and I deduced the only counterbalance the people had to the power of money was in organization, which is to say if and when the masses could get together, pool their money and vote in masse for the ideas and policies that benefitted them and against those that worked against them, only then could they realistically or effectively push back against the forces of capital. 

Mostly, considering how organized corporate America was, (is,) in terms of owning the levers of the dissemination of information, supporting an establishment of a two, (establishment) party system, as well as being more or less omnipotent the world over.  When Bill Clinton repealed the Glass Steagall Act I saw that both parties were true to the status quo.  Democrats were certainly not going to make structural changes that would actually alter the fundamentals of our economy nor our priorities in terms of policies around the climate, the social safety net, democracy as it relates to the electoral college, voter suppression, gerrymandering, or justice. 

In the early 2000s I became familiar with Bernie Sanders. He was an Independent Senator from Vermont and he could be heard on Fridays ‘Brunch with Bernie,’ on the Thom Hartmann radio show. For a brief moment there was a feint liberal voice on American AM radio and Senator Sanders espoused my ideals and my ideas as I had formulated them having read Noam Chomsky’s works including ‘The Common Good,’ and ‘Manufacturing Consent.’  He worked hard to take care of American veterans.  He recognized our inequality problem in a time when absolutely no one dare speak of such a thing, (let alone believe it.)

When I first heard the term democratic socialism I found it quizzical both because, what did it mean(?!), and also because why would the good Senator from Vermont openly identify with it.  Later I concluded Sanders did it to conjure FDR and his new deal and also perhaps almost tongue in cheek, as if to shock people into thinking about the meaning so that he could go about defining it for the rest of his career. 

In the nearly 20 years since I’ve been following Senator Sanders career I’ve watched closely as he advocated for veterans, his common refrain being that it was incumbent upon us as a nation to take care of our soldiers after they took care of us by risking it all. 

More he went across the Canadian border with diabetes patients to help them buy insulin at Canada’s significantly lower prices…(and fought big pharma every chance he got.)  He showed up on the strike lines with telecom workers in Boston.  H refused to accept the sorry state of our prison system. As a Senator of the United Stated he openly supported legalization of marijuana. He doesn’t only speak up for the Palestinians, which is again against the grain but the right thing to do, he also works on behalf of any number of underdogs. 

Senator Sanders understands the leverage of capital and he understands the masses get trounced in class warfare unless they can figure out how to band together.  He probably knows that when the masses didn't get together, (the usual,) conditions typically got so bad a violent revolution became the only recourse. 

In the end his run for the Presidency was always an uphill climb.  In 2015 I went to the Hollywood Musician’s Union to listen to Bernie speak.  He talked about all of positions he thought were important and not being addressed by our prominent candidates.  He was in Hollywood, (though far from “in Hollywood,” the way we think of most candidates showing up locally with hands out to the stars,) ostensibly to see if support existed for a candidate like him.  I think we were effusive in our support. 

When the Senator finished his speech I got up from my 2^nd row, (center aisle seat,) and reached him first as he stepped down two steps towards the audience. I told him I hoped he would run and that if he took a quick picture with me it would make my year.  I handed my phone to my friend Linda as Bernie smiled his agreement and we turned for the picture.  Yeah, I took a selfie with Bernie before it became a thing, certainly long before another favorite, Elizabeth Warren, began counting her selfies and reporting the statistics to the news.

Here's the thing.  We pooled our money in a corrupted system to elect our candidate to an especially powerful position.  That has been our primary hope these past six years. Otherwise, as much as I know the younger generation is true to their morals and values while the older generations preach righteousness and justify exporting arms, kids in cages, democracy crushing institutions, three strikes laws, the oil industry, lower and lower taxes on the wealthy class, union busting, and so on with all sorts of moral equivalencies and arguments about complex decisions, we know the system is influenced by money and the older generations have most of that.

We pooled our money because we know we can’t organize well enough to overcome the money poured into local elections and judges and abortion campaigns to win over the fundamentalist votes and against gun reform to win over the gun enthusiast voters and limit the vote campaigns and the torrent of right wing talk radio and the propaganda network that gets overwhelming ratings because their viewers lap up the fear and xenophobia and sensationalism they sell and the major US corporation owned corporate media that plays the foil to Fox News but in reality disseminates establishment, status quo views that may be in favor of some socially open or liberal ideas but protect the institutions and policies that protect the economic structure of the federal reserve and the stock market and the wealthy class. 

I don’t think wealthy Americans, and by wealthy I mean top 1-2%, are in any way bad people.  I do think they use their money to preserve their fortunes and I don’t think they should be allowed political power.  Bernie has been one of the few consistent voices against the Citizen’s United SCOTUS decision because he understands it allows the wealthy class to leverage their money to affect public policy and he knows that can crush the will of the people. 

So, we pooled our money because we thought if we could get one Bernie Sanders into the White House, we might be able to turn our country toward the light. We could have a President talking about the important issues like fixing our healthcare system, raising the minimum wage but more importantly about helping all Americans get a livable wage, transitioning away from fossil fuels in favor of renewables, and a sensible foreign policy based on fairness and collaboration instead of authoritarianism. 

We pooled our $27 contributions in hopes a President Sanders could allow more bright, young candidates to infiltrate our corrupted government at all levels.  We pooled our money in hopes of avoiding another Hillary Clinton.  As establishment candidates go Hillary was and is plenty capable but we know what the establishment candidates do after eight years of Barack Obama, by which I mean Timothy Geithner and the Wall Street bailout and drones and inaction on so many of the issues important to the quality of life of the masses of people on planet Earth. 

We pooled our money for Bernie Sanders because we trust him. He has been so consistent.  He cannot be bought.  One of the things the wealthy class pays to have said about Senator Sanders is that he has not been super successful in terms of passed legislation but we pooled our money because he changed the conversation and we wanted the conversation changed.  If he has been rigid about how he votes in the senate it is because he won’t play ball and we pooled our money specifically for that. 

Did we like the other primary candidates this year?  Well, compared to Donald Trump, of course we did.  We especially liked Elizabeth Warren because she had adopted so many of Sanders’ policies and she understands economy and fights bullies for justice and students and the economically oppressed.  We like that the establishment candidates have embraced so many policies in vogue if because Sanders championed them on a national stage first.  At the end however, Warren was a Republican and she was not there on many of the policy positions we espouse until much later.  Outside of Warren the candidates, particularly Joe Biden, are birds of a democratic feather.  They have been around the block.  They've played ball.  Their positions have changed.  They have secrets mostly associated with what they did for money to get into the gaggle of the powerful to begin with.  As vastly more fit as they are for high office than Donald Trump they could not be more underwhelming to us.  We pooled our money because we trust Bernie Sanders to not govern based on him but rather based on us.

Why am I disconsolate?  I'm disconsolate because in 2015 when we convinced Bernie Sanders to run for the Presidency we felt like a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens.  We wanted to change the world.  

Grand Illusion

Do I have any illusions about the USA?  No.

There are so many bad behaviors and actions in our shared history: slavery, manifest destiny, Native American removal or even genocide, Japanese internment camps, (internment = concentration,) unnecessary use of the bomb, interference in South American politics, including opposition to democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile and support of his replacement, (notice the second sentence therein,  economic warfare ordered by US President Richard Nixon,^[2]) the murderous Augusto Pinochet, (US covert and violent activities in the South American country of Chile being anything but a one-off,) the Vietnam War, the Iran Contra crimes, the war in Iraq based on a lie, to name several prominent examples without exhausting an exceedingly long list.

There are many examples of good behaviors and actions in our shared history as well: our history of immigration as personified in the Statue of Liberty's famous base, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!", putting Neil Armstrong on the moon, (inspired the peoples of the world,) the Civil Rights Act of 1964, entry into World War II and the subsequent defeat of Hitler, the Marshall Plan, women's suffrage, the Emancipation Proclamation, and of course the greatest living document on the planet; the US Constitution, to name but a few and it is worth pointing out, even many of these things have their dark side.

The world is gray after all.  It is interesting however to look back at history.  The War in Iraq seems a good place to start since it is such recent history and we can see how quickly things change and evolve.  At the time the President of the United States, likely being strongly advised by Vice President Dick Cheney and to a lesser degree Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, made a decision to invade Iraq that given certain factors could not possibly be for its stated purpose, to hit back at those who had hit us on 9/11.  Long before the campaign of shock and awe began we knew that Al Qaeda was not in Iraq, indeed that Al Qaeda and Iraq's corrupt, strongman President, Saddam Hussein, were anything but on the same team.  The information was available and widely known to those who cared to know.  This is to say a great swathe of Americans did not care to know and were, to whatever degree, bloodthirsty.  

It is increasingly common knowledge and accepted that President George W Bush concocted a reason to make war on Iraq that involved the CIA, Niger, yellow cake powder for uranium enrichment, a phantom spy with a novel pseudonym in Germany, Colin Powell addressing the UN and the use of an amount of political capital he reasoned was due him based on his being in office on 9-11 of 01.  (More, he wanted to get the man who had crossed his Dad back so the story went.  Never mind the photos of Hussein and Rumsfeld from a decade earlier cheesing it up for the camera at the US War College.)  Shock...and awe.

In the early 2000s there was a great deal of confusion.  Many believed Iraq had attacked us.  Others believed Al Qaeda was based inside of Iraq.  Few knew that we had recruited Taliban fighters to oppose the USSR and had thereby helped to create the organization even arming and training them.  (See Charlie Wilson's War.)  

Time typically changes our view.  At the time George W Bush was at the top and so the buck stopped with him.  In making the decision to invade Iraq he knew he was pleasing a great many friends of substantial influence, (read: power or wealth.)  In weighing his decision he probably understood, particularly if found out, it could damage his legacy, but he plowed forward disregarding legacy.  He may have thought who cares about legacy when I am filthy rich?  My friends will consider me a hero.  (And they probably do.)  At the exclusive gatherings of the wealthy and powerful down Texas way I bet he is treated like a bona fide champion.  His public appearances however are rare and measured.  He is responsible for the death of some 500,000 unique, individual human beings.  (Estimates on Iraqi deaths range from 150,000 up to one million.  American deaths number 4,424, including US Army Specialist Casey Sheehan.)  It is unlikely George W Bush will ever leave American soil again as he is wanted abroad and could seriously face prosecution for war crimes.  (He could even be arrested in a couple of small towns in the US.)  

In his quiet and lucid moments I tend to think George W Bush harbors some regret.  He may practice some self loathing at ever having listened to Cheney and Rumsfeld.  No doubt he lives a comfortable life.  Still, legacy is a bitch.  He is already viewed as one of the worst Presidents in our history.  No amount of philanthropy and public humility will bring back 500,000 people to say nothing of the financial crises, which happened on his watch, or the politicization of the Attorney General's office, (which really bothered me personally.)  If he could be honest wouldn't it be an interesting conversation?  

Presently we have a new President in Donald Trump.  He is in so many ways the Reality TV President.  He doesn't like to read or be briefed.  He gets his news from the television and tweets his responses out to the world as if we were sitting right there next to him.  As a millionaire if not billionaire, (we can't know because he refused to allow his taxes to be made public, which should have told us something but many Americans don't think that sort of accountability is important,) he feels especially accomplished and he both trusts his wealthy class and wants to engender loyalty in those circles and so his decisions actions and policies since taking office a mere three weeks ago have been solidly aligned with the interests of the rich.  

The crux of these policies in addition to catering to the wealthy are for the stated purpose of making America great again or putting America's interests first, even at the peril of others.  These motives will certainly ensure President Trump's legacy is a poor one.  Moreover, they will degrade our standing in the world and they are largely not representative of the ideals of most Americans.  

Virtually all of his cabinet choices are inclined to destroy their departments.  Surely that will be Betsy DeVos's role as Secretary of Education.  On the day of her confirmation a Republican congressman from Kentucky introduced a bill to abolish the Department of Education.  This is a coordinated effort.  The bill was scant in its content for reasons associated with the fact it is a trial balloon.  The republicans and the puppet masters behind the party want to see how the democrats react.  I don't think they expect success this time around but having said that their plans to overturn Roe v Wade and weaken the federal government as much as possible is coming along nicely.  

Rick Perry is Trump's selection to run the Department of Energy.  Just a few years ago Perry advocated closing down the DOE.  (He has just recently changed his tune upon learning of his appointment and what the DOE is.)  

Jeff Sessions was chosen as Attorney General to enforce the laws of the United States.  Jeff Sessions is a known good old Alabama boy racist who once upon a time used his powers in the state of Alabama to discourage certain people from voting.  We know more about this thanks to House Majority Leader Mitch McConnell bringing so much attention to it when he rebuked and stopped Senator Elizabeth Warren from reading Coretta Scott King's letter to the Judiciary committee in 1986.  So as Americans we have to ask ourselves, do we want someone who would discourage voting and who is widely thought to be a racist to be our Attorney General?  I mean, of all the people.  

This is typical of the new President's selections for his cabinet however, as well as his advisers.  What is the goal?  What is the endgame?

To appease the Christian right that they have been working hard for many years to overturn Roe v Wade.  The non-religious wealthy do not mind.  If  their daughters need an abortion they have the money and will get them a safe one.  It's the poor who will suffer, first the unwanted pregnancy no matter the circumstances and second, the insurance policy on staying among the impoverished.  

Their other big objective is to weaken the federal government.  Their battle cry is states rights.  Leave it to the states.  The states can do anything the federal government can do and it can do it regionally and locally and thereby better represent constituents.  

The problem with a weakened federal government is once it is weak, there is no power capable of standing up to and checking the power of corporations.  As it is the top corporations or conglomerations in the USA have an awesome amount of power.  If corporations want to get back to polluting so ardently the Cuyahoga again becomes as incendiary as the Sun, who or what will stop them?  The oil companies would dominate the state of Ohio in court.  Even if Pennsylvania and West Virginia joined in oil companies with their vast resources would sue and counter sue and tie up in litigation until such a time as they were damned well ready to stop polluting, (I might as add 'you puny sons of bitches.')  If GE wants to put poor children to work for slave wages because they are delinquents anyway and working for $4.50 an hour is better than on the streets and not going to school because of course they can't pay for the paid education that is the only kind of education in the republican dystopian vision of the future I cringe to bring you.  

It is important to fight this agenda.  I'm all in.  I sent a few dollars to Jeff Merkley last week because he seems as impassioned as I am about not allowing the republicans to select a Supreme Court Justice other than Merrick Garland.  Ideally we correct this thing that happened in 2016 in future elections.  The damage already being wrought is vast but we just have to do what we can do.  There is not point in whining about it.  Denouncing-that's what I am into.  

The other part of this though is that seemingly unimportant legacy.  If you clicked on that Presidential rating sheet I linked up above you saw who rated high and who rated low.  George Washington was highly rated.  Why?  I would say because of virtue and valor.  I would say the same of Thomas Jefferson who is one of my personal favorites.  Abraham Lincoln has been called the greatest President ever, (as well as The Great Emancipator.) because he worked to abolish slavery.  It was virtue that granted Lincoln his illustrious standing.  

Some might suggest legacy is overrated.  In Lincoln's case after all, he was also shot dead for his virtue.  I don't see it that way.  If I could be Lincoln I would be Lincoln.  So what value is there in legacy?  There is the value of moral goodness.  Doing the right thing is its own reward, right?  I would also posit that goodness also radiates outward to those around us and to the environment in a way.  (If the sins of the father can visited on the son after all, it stands to reason the virtues of the father can too.)

George Bush's legacy is not good and he is living with that.  Donald Trump's legacy similarly will not be good.  His is a fragile ego to begin with so the pain of criticism is already affecting him and will continue to do so largely because it will be cutting, (because the criticism is valid.)  I don't think President Trump is in anyway motivated by his legacy, though he might be deluded in part by thinking his will be a legacy of greatness.  It won't be however.  Humanity does not remember those who treated the masses badly in a favorable light.  Hitler, Stalin, the many corrupt Popes, Nicholas II, all the way back to Attila were left with horrible legacies.  Legacy is real and it has consequences and it is another reason the path being laid before us now foreshadows gloom for those who are paving it.

The Diatribe

I am of two minds today and so I will write both of my stories.  I am angry and sad as so many of us are.  Already in print articles and on NPR this morning I have heard theories for why and how this happened and I have my own ideas about those too, but I am not interested in those right now.  I know exactly who to blame for this outcome. 

First, The Diatribe.

Every dumbass motherfucker who voted for Donald Trump is responsible for this outcome.  Humans are consistent and predictable and as the saying goes, opinions are like assholes.  Everyone has one and most of them stink.  If you voted for Donald Trump however, you are a special breed of asshole.  First, you think you know.  You have it all worked out.  You trust your judgment more than anyone else’s.  You are wrapped up in your world and your experience and you’re selfish.  Second, you do not empathize with others.  You don’t care about the reputation of your country.  You don’t care about how your behavior as an adult is seen by your children. You are not open and your values around education and reading are likely not conducive to recognizing the truth or seeking it out. 

I don’t care that republicans have effectively gutted the voting rights act over the last 10 years.  I don’t care that Citizens United has allowed the wealthy class to exert undue influence on our political process.  You allowed this to happen. You made this happen.  

You voted for a guy who joked that he liked to walk up to women and grab them by the pussy adding that as a celebrity, he could get away with that behavior.  Did that sound like a joke to you?  I know his spin on it, locker room talk and all that, but did you buy it?  I didn’t.  (Then again, maybe you did buy it?  If so your judgment is pathetic.)  How do you reconcile that with your children?  This is a serious question.  Are you telling them that it was okay because it was a joke?  Are you telling them he was wrong to say such a thing but it's forgivable, his judgment is still good enough to be President of the United States?  President of the United States?!

About Hillary all that she is corrupt stuff is bullshit. I'm sorry you feel marginalized. Perhaps you really are a low information voter  Maybe the only information you take in is from Fox News or even the mainstream corporate outlets?  Hillary is as corrupt as the majority of our politicians today.  She is adept at playing a corrupt game.  That you think she is somehow a trillion times more corrupt than everyone else on the face of the earth is a testament to your inability to discern the truth from whatever someone or some entity is selling you.  If Citizens United allowed foreign governments or the Koch Brothers to spend millions of dollars through so called think tanks, (propaganda machines,) to  influence you it doesn’t change the fact you are responsible for succumbing to all that. More, in a straight up comparison of the two, Hillary never said she walked up to people and grabbed them by the genitalia.

What is wrong with you?  How could you do this?  We will all feel the pain of this Presidency but you should feel it more and I don’t know how that happens beyond sane people who had the good sense not to vote for him telling you how irresponsible and pathetic you have been.  This is not a one-time thing, either.  Like, whoops, I voted for Trump.  No, you allowed yourself to be here.  You were the one who did not focus in school, who did not embrace reading, who chose to nurture a short attention span rather than instilling some self-discipline in yourself.  We get the democracy we deserve and what we deserve presently is because of you.  How embarrassing for all of us.  (And if you are successful or well off, by odds you likely lack roundness and the balance of a gentleman and your financial success in no way represents your overall value as a member of society.  On that you have spoken-loud and clear.)

You voted for someone who as a candidate offered no real ideas or plans.  Instead he said, trust me.  And you did.  You voted for a guy who as a candidate refused to let the people, (as in, “We the people,”) see his tax returns.  It is not a law that candidates have to show the public their taxes, rather it has just been considered proper and it was thought the American people would never vote for someone who refused to reveal their financial behavior.  You proved that wrong.  You voted for him anyway.  Apparently you do not believe in accountability.  You are inclined to trust Donald Trump.  He has never behaved in any way like a statesman or a sage and yet, you...  the-fuck?!

You did it ostensibly because Hillary Clinton is connected to Bill Clinton who runs the Clinton Foundation who accepted money from a multitude of entities around the world to engage in charitable endeavors.  As an example the Clinton Foundation accepted $1 million from the little principality that is Qatar.  This transaction  occurred while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.  It was her duty based on her word to report this transaction to the Department of State and in this regard she failed.  There is room to parse this.  She promised to report any new or increased contributions and we do not know what Qatar may have donated in previous years, only that they did donate.  Still, she erred on this to avoid even the air of wrongdoing.  Of course there is so much more but this is as substantive or as egregious a thing as I can find against Hillary.  There are email issues that pale in comparison to what occurred in the Bush administration so I dismiss those out of hand based on the FBI concluding there was nothing to prosecute there.  There are far-fetched rumors of murder and worse I suppose but of course, that’s all bullshit.  A cursory analysis typically debunks those stories. 

By the way, you should google performance ratings for charitable organizations and check on the clinton foundation.  Charitywatch, charitynavigator, they all say the same thing.  

From factcheck.org: "Daniel Borochoff, president and founder of CharityWatch, told us by phone that its analysis of the finances of the Clinton Foundation and its affiliates found that about 89 percent of the foundation budget is spent on programming (or “charity”), higher than the 75 percent considered the industry standard."

Amazing.  Right?  Right?!  That's 14% higher at the rarefied top of the margin.

Am I a big fan of HRC?  No.  Bernie best represented my values.  Hillary, however, was in the mold of prior Presidents.  Presidents like Obama, Clinton, George HW Bush, Reagan, Carter and so on.  Yes, they were products of a monied system, (an increasingly monied system.) but in terms of education level and decorum, grace, if you will, they were Presidential.  I failed to mention George W Bush because yes, the two are similar.  They were both privileged, wealthy children who as a class, often do not adopt some of our most basic values of goodness and kindness. 

What Bernie Sanders accomplished as a candidate was beyond simply being unprecedented.  It had looked like a grass roots campaign could never compete in this system.  No doubt powers are at work trying to figure out creative ways of stopping the masses from being so influential in the future.  To raise the money needed to compete in this utterly corrupt system through small, individual donations, (yes, averaging $27,) was very much like a miracle.  I had such high hopes.  

Bot no, you did not get on board with Bernie by and large because you were sold all this bullshit about high taxes and the debt, (Of course the bogeymen changes seasonally and you're stuck on buy.)  You think you are going to be rich one day.  You blame people who receive welfare benefits for why you are not already rich, because you're such a hard worker and you're so brilliant of course.  The military budget does not bother you but there's a good reason for that.  You don't understand how exorbitant it is relative to every other country on the planet, or how much overkill it really is, (pardon the pun.)  

We can point out the evidence, show you how tax rates were following the great depression and the new deal, in the 50's for example.  We can illustrate the direct correlation between those tax rates and the wealth and prosperity that followed.  We can point out basic truths about how big business had behaved when unchecked in the past and what it took to rein them in, a strong adversary.  We can draw the through line for you right to a strong federal government but you still buy the propaganda the wealthy class, republicans and the right sells you about "states rights," and how the federal government should be weakened in favor of power distribution.  Who will protect our children from being forced into the work force, uneducated and prematurely?  Who will protect miners?  Who will protect workers in the work place?  Donald Trump?  Donald fucking Trump?!  Wake the fuck up.  

I can't blame ignorance anymore, as if it is a faceless nameless condition.  I can't empathize with you anymore after what you have done.  I want so much more for my children.  Fuck you.

I have heard this criticism of people who make Hitler comparisons on social media.  And yet, everytime we see societies bring someone like Trump to power bad things happen.