Yesterday, Bernie Sanders joined Joe Biden in an uncomfortably staged endorsement of Biden’s presidential run. The senator from Vermont urged all Democrats, Independents, and Republicans to come together to defeat Donald Trump, the man he claimed is “the most dangerous President in modern history”. As Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young famously crooned in their 1970 protest classic, Ohio, “We’re finally on our own”. Today, the progressives of this country are finally on our own.

We can officially break away from Bernie Sanders and thwart his attempt to shepherd us progressives into the corporate-owned machine they call the Democratic Party. As is unfortunately becoming his modus operandi, Bernie Sanders capitulated without using his leverage to secure any legitimate policy changes. He could not be more inept at wielding political currency to bend the will of those in power. Frederick Douglass said that “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”.

The only issue that Bernie had at his disposal to urge voters to back Biden, was the weak and trite argument that Trump is the biggest threat that we face. Nothing was given to the base voters to energize them, nor offer them assurances that their most popular issues such as Medicare For All and A Green New Deal would be part of Biden’s platform. Conversely, Bernie fell back on the lesser of two evils fallacy that has crippled the country for decades and has cemented a two-party monopoly, whose sole purpose is to protect the interest of the oligarchs.

By endorsing a man who has a documented history of lying about civil rights support, writing the most draconian and disproportionally racist crime bill in modern history, pushing and supporting the Iraq War, and repealing Glass-Steagal, Bernie Sanders attempted to make fools out of all the supporters who have given their time and money to support him.

In fairness to Joe Biden, it is not entirely accurate to say that he offered the progressives nothing at all. He did make the laughable and insulting overture to support lowering the Medicare eligibility age from sixty-five to sixty. Biden and his corporate overlords foolishly believe the same irrational argument that Hillary Clinton believed in 2016, that he is owed our vote and merely has to invoke Trump’s name to voter-shame us into supporting him.

Joe Biden has gone on the record, (DURING A JOB-ENDING PANDEMIC), to admit that he would veto a Medicare For All bill. His mental acuity is dwindling by the day. Finishing a sentence in a coherent manner is the exception to the rule for Biden in recent weeks. The spring of 2020 Joe Biden, makes George W. Bush seem like a master orator. More importantly, Joe Biden is not merely a has been. He is a never was. As evidenced by the policy stances that I mentioned earlier, he has always been on the wrong end of almost all of the issues that progressives hold dearly. Bernie has given us no legitimate reason to support this incompetent man and is insulting all of his supporters by even pretending that Biden has a chance to unseat Trump.

The painfully obvious and ironic point is that this theory is not a hypothesis. It was attempted in 2016 and it miserably failed. Why they think it will work again with a weaker and worse-positioned candidate, is maddening. Bernie got Hillary to concede nothing, campaigned for her, and got most of his supporters to vote for her in 2016. What he received in return was Clinton’s loss to a former game show host named Donald Trump, along with the ire of Hillary’s media surrogates for supposedly ruining her.

In a cowardly attempt to avoid the unsubstantiated blame he received in 2016, Bernie failed to fight for anything in this campaign that would necessitate fighting the corporate-left media, his fellow bought-and-paid-for-candidates, or the corrupt DNC. He allowed voter fraud in Iowa, unfair media attacks, and a coalescing of power aimed at impeding the ever-increasing support for his core policies.

Now, in his final and most astonishingly insulting capitulation, Bernie Sanders has endorsed Joe Biden in the absence of any substantial concessions on Biden’s part. He actually believes that his credibility will remain intact after this sell-out to a war-mongering, corruptly nepotistic, and allegedly sexually predatory man.

Bernie Sanders has taken a priceless and energetic grass roots movement, made up of a diverse mixture of working and middle class progressives, and sold it for the bargain-basement price of maintaining his tenuous acceptance within the Democratic Party machine.

As progressives, we will not be gas-lighted by Bernie Sanders into voting for the supposedly lesser of two evils. He has horribly squandered his political capital and gotten nothing for the people from the powerful elite. Ironically, he has simultaneously squandered his capital with us, the supporters. We will take some of his greatest policies and add to them to create a new and more progressive platform. We will achieve this in a more deliberate and aggressive manner than he ever did. His leadership is no longer desired and will no longer be observed.

Bye Bye Bernie. We are FINALLY on our own…

Greg Baez, Firefighter

04/14/2020