https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/indepth/opinion/surprise-bernie-sanders-200409101837191.html
What a surprise, Bernie Sanders was right all along
A political and economic apparatus rigged to enrich the few at the expense of the many was always destined to collapse.
Excerpt:
Confronted by an economy-killing pandemic, remarkably, a bunch of frantic politicians in the West have found lots of money to try to resuscitate their suddenly on-life-support, market-driven balance sheets.
Taken together, they have injected trillions of dollars to the frenetic effort; money they have always insisted they did not have and could not spend to help people they claim - with varying degrees of sincerity - they are now determined to help.
Today, these rebar-hard capitalists turned quasi-socialists have become grudging facsimiles of Bernie Sanders - whether they are prepared to admit it or not.
The indefatigable Vermont senator has always known the money was there to help people who need help and he has always been prepared to spend it to help people who need help - long before a lethal virus began obliterating United States' Ponzi-scheme-like economy with tornado-like ferocity.
Sanders and his humane designs to begin the long-overdue overhaul of the existing political and economic infrastructure to help people who need help were dismissed by the neo-liberal industrial complex as the fantastical musings of a socialist cuckoo who kept peddling the impossible.
Well, the impossible has miraculously turned possible. The fantasy has, in part, turned real. The cock-sure pundits and politicians who make up the neo-liberal industrial complex and who told us that spending lots of money to help people who need help was "crazy, crazy, crazy" have lately been shouting "spend, spend, spend" like the democratic socialist "cuckoos" they once derided.
Sanders may have dropped out of the race to become president but the plain, transformative prescription that has defined his political career and his two improbable, invigorating campaigns for president - that government must use its wealth to help people who need help - has not only been embraced by the neo-liberal industrial complex, it will, I suspect, become the defining governing principle for the foreseeable future.
Surely, Sanders can take a good measure of credit for that - whether or not smug and catastrophically wrong neo-liberals acknowledge that their disagreeably stubborn ideological nemesis has been right on this seminal score all along.
Failing that, Sanders will, no doubt, be applauded by the we-and-the-"free"-market-know-best pundits for belatedly recognising that "his path" to the Democratic nomination had "closed" and, as a result, for finally doing the right thing, for the right reasons, at the right time.
Others may even offer up the usual bromides to describe his decision to concede, in effect, the nomination to that other card-carrying member of the neo-liberal industrial complex, Joe Biden, as "gracious" or "dignified".
Do not be fooled by the hollow expressions of magnanimity. These are, remember, mostly the same naysayers who have spent so much vitriolic time and space on TV and in columns painting a preposterous caricature of Sanders as an angry, obdurate old man who posed an existential threat to US's "thriving" economy.
Four years ago, Hillary Clinton was the predictable choice of the neo-liberal industrial complex. She was more than palatable since she was content simply to recycle the tired, standard line to "address" the "nagging" inequalities rife in the US.
Clinton was the status quo candidate at a time when the status quo was being emphatically rejected by so many Americans who were being left adrift. Sanders understood this zeitgeist. Clinton did not, and paid for it.
In the end, despite the incessant whining of centrist-hugging "progressives", Clinton could not even beat an inept narcissist where and when it counted - in the electoral college on November 8, 2016.
