Jeffrey St. Clair - Bernie & The Sandernistas: Field Notes From a Failed Revolution

Praise for Jeffrey St. Clair and Bernie & the Sandernistas

A brilliant exposition of how Bernie led his Sandernistas up a garden path to nowhere. A blistering, infuriating, and totally engrossing read.

Andrew Cockburn, author Kill Chain

Jeffrey St. Clair dissects the rotting, sold-out Democrats like no one since Hunter Thompson, with encyclopedic insights and memory, and a sharp surgical instrument that keeps the blood flowing. He pegged the progressive Saint Bernie Sanders (and his Our Revolution schtick) as a paltry poser and Hillary loyalist from day one, unlike the mans army of delusionary worshippers. St. Clairs blow by blow coverage of the Democrats insanely orchestrated four day coronation of Wall Street Queen Hillary is by itself worth the price of admission. Fear and Loathing on The Campaign Trail thrives; buy the book, take the ride.

John Stauber, author Toxic Sludge Is Good For You

Caught between a vulgar talking yam and a vanquished Political Revolution, Jeffrey St. Clair slices through the muck and hype of the 2016 election with unique precision, skewering Donald Trump for his wrecking-ball racism as much as he lacerates Bernie Sanders for bending knee at the Democratic Party altar of Wall Street and war. St. Clair takes readers on a boisterous romp through the political wreckage of the indispensable nation, leaving shattered illusions in his wake, but always aiming toward a principled populism as the only antidote to the spectacle suffocating the American imagination.

Arun Gupta, investigative journalist

Movement reporting on a par with Mailers Armies of the Night.

Peter Linebaugh, author of Magna Carta Manifesto & Stop Thief!

The Democrats are now the war party, as Jeffrey St. Clair makes clear.

Oliver Stone, director Snowden

The Upton Sinclair of Oregon City.

Jeff Baker, The Oregonian

Jeffrey St. Clair is the Seymour Hersh of environmental journalism.

Joshua Frank, author and journalist

Also by Jeffrey St. Clair

Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press

(with Alexander Cockburn)

A Guide to Environmental Bad Guys

(with James Ridgeway)

Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me

Al Gore: a Users Manual

(with Alexander Cockburn)

Five Days That Shook the World

(with Alexander Cockburn)

Imperial Crusades: Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq

(with Alexander Cockburn)

Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Corruption in the War on Terror

Red State Rebels

(with Joshua Frank)

Born Under a Bad Sky: Notes From the Dark Side of the Earth

Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion

(with Joshua Frank)

Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence

(with JoAnn Wypijewski and Kevin Alexander Gray)

First published by CounterPunch 2016

Copyright 2016 Jeffrey St. Clair

All Rights Reserved.

CounterPunch
PO Box 228
Petrolia, CA 95558

Digital ISBN: 978-0-9982292-0-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016955102

Designed by Tiffany Wardle

Table of Contents

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION, WELL, YOU KNOW.

That Magic Feeling

Out of college, money spent
See no future, pay no rent
All the moneys gone, nowhere to go
Any jobber got the sack
Monday morning, turning back
Yellow lorry slow, nowhere to go
But oh, that magic feeling
Lennon and McCartney, You Never Give Me Your Money

Bernie Sanders had come home. Home to New York. Home to the city that fit his accent. Home to the borough that suited his cranky demeanor, his Jewish heritage, his gritty politics. Bernie Sanders wasnt Clean Gene McCarthy. Sanders is tightly wound. He could be petulant, moody, combustive. A little bit of Brooklyn was still hardwired into his character. Frankly, Sanders always seemed like an interloper in Vermont. Too prickly, urban and disputatious for that verdant and mountainous sliver of WASPish New England. If more of the Brooklyn Bernie had leaked out during the campaign, things might have ended differently.

On a cool night in early April, Bernie stood on the stage in Prospect Park, facing more than 28,000 adoring fans, the largest gathering of the campaign. As he worked his way through his speech, Sanders hit all of the familiar noteson the minimum wage, single payer health care, free college tuition, the corrosiveness of Super PACSbut he stood a little taller, his voice sounded a little friskier, he seemed fueled by the sense that he just might win the New York primary.

Could New York really be in play? Could Sanders upend the once invulnerable Hillary Clinton in her own adopted state, sending shockwaves through the System? What once seemed impossible now seemed to many Sandernistas tantalizingly within grasp.

This was, of course, the season of the improbable, the rare warping of political time when the odds were being defied week after startling week. This was a primary season in which aliens and the alienated finally featured in guest-starring roles. The mood of the country, sour and aggravated, seemed primed to embrace, for the first time in decades, a real outsider candidate, not so much because they found either of the two self-identified outsiders especially alluring, but because the electorate saw themselves as outsiders, exiles from a political system run by and for a remote and untouchable cabal of corporations, militarists and financial elites.

Nearly all agreed the system was rigged, programmed like some political malware to replicate the same results over and over again, generating torrents of booty into fewer and fewer hands, while leaving the rest of the Republic mired in debt and endless war.

Indeed, war has become the nations permanent condition. There seems to be a new one every few months. Few can keep up. And who goes off to fight them? Not many of us, or even people that we know. A new warrior class seemed to have taken root. We noticed them mainly from the decals on their trucks or from their wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs, rarely encountered in the check out line at Safeway.

More and more, machines were doing the wars wetwork, killing nameless people in nameless regions on the far side of the world, hundreds of miles from any known base of operations. War has become background noise, the ambient soundtrack of our time.

It is one of the great failures of the Sanders campaign that he didnt try to puncture some of the comforting illusions about American foreign policy. As cruelly as we treat our own citizens, Americans like to believe, in fact must believe, that our country remains a force of light and goodness in the most troubled precincts of the world. We are reluctant warriors, heroes for humanity. Sanders had a rare chance to expose Americas savage imprint on the world to his followers. With more than 800 military bases sprawling across the globe, the American military machine keeps the unruly living under a constant state of nuclear terror, each transgression against the imperial order disciplined and punished by SEAL team assassins, cruise missiles and drone strikes out of the clear blue skies.

The financial condition of the country also seems mired in a mysterious contradiction. The number of billionaires doubles every year, while everyone else is working harder yet falling behind month by month. In fact, the economy, chronically ailing for so long, finally seems to have turned malignant. Everybody knows this. Even the looters. Especially them. And the government is useless. Worse than useless. It exists not to contain the spread of economic disease or to alleviate the suffering, but to repress any minor revolt of the afflicted cells of the Republic. The evidence is all around. In homeless shelters, tent cities, food banks, and unemployment offices. Or under lock and key. One in 31 adults in America are rotting in prison or jail, or living circumscribed lives on probation or parole. Twenty-five years ago, this rate was only 1 in 77. Police are killing a citizen somewhere on the streets of America every 12 hours or so, and every 18 hours that citizen is a black male. In fact, in the first six months of 2016, police had killed 585 people, up from the previous years total of 491 killed through June of 2015.