A serious contender has entered into the one horse race for the Democratic nomination for President, and independents, liberals, and progressives now have no excuse for voting for the status quo of the predicted dynasty showdown between another Bush and another Clinton.  Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent Senator from Vermont, has announced his intentions to challenge Hillary Clinton and seek the Democratic nomination.  Mr. Sanders faces an uphill battle, as anyone going against the multi-billion dollar sponsored oligarchy will face.  Giant money is not the only challenge though; the corporate owned mainstream media is maintaining a constant mantra of the inevitability of Jeb or Hillary.  It is up to voters to prove them wrong.

Mr. Sanders is a blunt and articulate speaker.  By bluntness, I don’t mean abrasive, arrogant and rude like Governor Chris Christie; by articulate, I mean honest and sincere and easy to comprehend, not feel good rhetoric that Obama is the master of, or insincere, rehearsed and heavily polled lines like Hillary Clinton puts forth as dryly as possible, or deceptively slick, like Bill Clinton.  Senator Sanders has a way of framing issues that most Americans agree on, whether or not they are from different political parties.

Mr. Sanders says he has spent the past year traveling the country and speaking to everyday people.  Of course, all politicians say that, and Mr.s Clinton opened her boring campaign announcement video with images of everyday working people, to show you she cares.  The difference is in what they stand for, and what Americans stand for.  Sanders explained that when you ask ordinary citizens if they think it is right to give more tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires while cutting social services like Social Security and Medicare, the overwhelming answer is no.  Amazingly, although most Americans support Social Security and depend on it, almost half voted for Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan, who had made attacking Social Security and Medicare, and cutting more taxes for the rich, one of their main policy goals.  Perhaps one explanation to that, though it is a weak one, is that President Obama had already offered to make cuts to Social Security in the hopes of securing a “grand bargain” with Republicans. Mr. Sanders, like Elizabeth Warren, is in favor of strengthening Social Security, not weakening it.

Mr. Sanders also makes wage inequality, the largest it’s been in the United States since before the Great Depression, a major issue.  He favors raising the minimum wage to a livable wage.  He favors spending more money on the infrastructure, educational system, and social services within the United States for its citizens, as opposed to spending trillions of dollars on wars of aggression that leave the United States more vulnerable to terrorism instead of safer.

What’s not to like and agree with?  The right wing pundits will undoubtedly make much to do about Bernie Sander’s label as a “socialist.”  This label comes from Mr. Sanders winning the mayorship of Burlington, Vermont in 1981 as a democratic-socialist.  The word “socialist” in recent years has replaced the tired label and smear of being a “communist” by right wing conservatives.  Obama may be labeled a Kenyan, Muslim dictator by the more comical figures in conservative and republican circles, but in the more mainstream conservative republican circles, he is merely called a socialist.  The term is used to inflame more reactionary and uneducated voters whenever a politician or policy proposal comes along that would most likely help the reactionary and uneducated voters.  Want union representation at your job to protect you from the greed of the trans-national corporations that you work for?  Communist! Socialist!  Part of the language of the American propaganda system that keeps people voting against their own best interest.  As articulate as Mr. Sanders is, he easily handles this trick question about his label as a socialist by explaining that he does believe America would be better off with a single payer healthcare system, more income equality and a stronger middle class like other European countries.  The label is not the kiss of death for Bernie that similar labels have been for more cowardly democratic candidates in the past, who ran from the word “liberal” when republicans attacked them with it, refusing to explain the real definition of liberalism and allowing conservatives to continue to use it in an undeserving negative light.

Bernie Sanders is also very outspoken against the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), the latest and perhaps largest so-called free trade agreement that President Obama is attempting to bully Democrats into supporting.  It is being reported that every single union in the country is against the TPP, as well as the majority of Americans who are familiar at all with “free trade,” understandably so.  When candidate Bill Clinton ran against President George H.W. Bush, he complained about the jobs that had been sent overseas.  As President Clinton, he and his Vice President Al Gore waged a monumental propaganda campaign to pass NAFTA, the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada that proved Ross Perot’s prediction of “a giant sucking sound going south” of American manufacturing jobs.  Since NAFTA and other “free trade deals” that have been passed since, the United States has seen the closing of 50,000 factories, and millions of middle and high paying jobs to other countries with cheap labor forces, little or no environment standards impeding corporations from polluting the air and water, no labor rights, human rights abuses and child labor practices.

Candidate Obama was a critic of NAFTA, and said if President he would not sign any bad trade deals like it.  Like Clinton before him, he has completely reversed this position and become a cheerleader for the corporate interests and their lobbyists that have been writing the TPP in secret.  Mr. Obama assures us that since he has a proven track record of supporting the middle class (a weak record) we should accept his good intentions and trust his judgement that this trade deal is different, and give him “fast track” authority, meaning when his corporate sponsors and their lobbyist are finished writing this trade deal, he can present it to Congress for an up or down vote, without allowing for amendments.

Why is Mr. Obama asking us to just trust him?  Because he knows, and every Republican and big corporate interest knows that  another trade deal that benefits them by driving down wages to the bottom and erodes national sovereignty, would not have any public support.  So they keep it secret.  So secret in fact, that members of Congress who will be voting on the final toxic agreement, are only allowed to view the bill in a secure room, not take any notes, and not speak of any of the details of the agreement because they have been classified – you know, like military secrets.  What we do know about the TPP comes from leaks that were given to WikiLeaks, and so far it appears to be another carbon copy of NAFTA and other free trade deals before it.

Hillary Clinton has been before cameras as Secretary of State, wholeheartedly supporting the TPP.  Now, with House and Senate Democrats as well as Tea Party Republicans fighting the deal, and progressive pundits calling on her to take a stand, she has danced around the issue and refused to give a straight answer.  At first, she carefully said she favored trade deals that promote American jobs- generic non-sense.  Most recently, one of her campaign spokespersons answered a reporter’s question about her position with a joke of “can’t we just make it go away?”

There is nothing surprising in Mrs. Clinton’s dodging of the question of which she gave a solid answer about as Secretary of State, before it became a political hot button.  She wants to run a generic campaign full of empty talk and flattery to the middle class and working poor she pretends to care about.  She doesn’t want to be pinned down on policy positions, because if she is she would not be an attractive candidate.  Her deliberate dodging of questions and bullshitting of voters and the public is sometimes openly admitted by her in comfortable company. In 2014, Hillary was the star speaker at a Biotechnology Industry Organization convention in San Diego supporting Monsanto and other corporations genetically modifying foods, patenting seeds, and fighting mandatory labeling, and offered this advice to her corporate sponsors:

“‘Genetically modified’ sounds Frankensteinish. ‘Drought resistance’ sounds really – something you want. So how do you create a different vocabulary to talk about what it is you’re trying to help people do. . ”

You bullshit them of course, and she’s an expert. Here’s a link to her full speech at that convention, if you really want to know who’s side she’s own and how she encourages them to find more clever ways to lie to the American public:

In an interview by Jeffery Goldberg in the Atlantic in 2014, responding to world wide criticism of Israel’s latest murderous assault in Gaza, Hillary explained that pictures and videos of the slaughter in Gaza by the U.S. backed Israeli military as :

“What you see is largely what Hamas invites and permits Western journalists to report on from Gaza. It’s the old PR problem that Israel has. Yes, there are substantive, deep levels of antagonism or anti-Semitism towards Israel, because it’s a powerful state, a really effective military.”

Yes, it’s the “old PR problem,” that Hillary Clinton is an expert at addressing,  in this case explaining how to properly frame the brutal suppression and mass murder of helpless civilians as nothing more than resentment to “a powerful state, a really effective military” and anti-Semitism.

(http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/hillary-clinton-failure-to-help-syrian-rebels-led-to-the-rise-of-isis/375832/?single_page=true)

Now Mrs. Clinton has an “old PR problem” with progressives.  She began her campaign by trying to adopt some of Elizabeth Warren’s rhetoric.  The problem for progressives is, that she is backed by Wall Street, and does not support policy changes that Elizabeth Warren fights for, instead of merely talking about.  Pundits called this “moving to the left” and generally supported her change in rhetoric about popular causes.  Now her campaign wants demands of her to take a stance on the TPP to “go away” and still refuses to take a stance on the Keystone Pipeline.

Contrast her carefully crafted messages that hide her true intentions with the straight talk of Bernie Sanders.  Shockingly, President Obama had planned a trip to a Nike headquarters in Oregon today to rally support for the TPP!  Nike, the absolute epitome, and perhaps the most memorable poster child for sweat shop operators in Third World countries, is the platform Obama for some reason thought would quell fears about more outsourcing of American jobs.  Or it was a stunt by Mr. Obama to see how flagrantly he could disregard the people and labor unions that voted him into office and still get away it, a sort of testing of the boundaries to see how easily we could be herded as sheep as long as the shepherd was a Democrat or charismatic speaker.  Nike is a well documented global sweat shop operator who is fighting for the TPP, and the best known.  The absurdity of this did no go unchallenged by  Mr. Sanders wrote the President, telling him this and encouraging him not to go.  Mrs. Clinton won’t answer, because she already did with a resounding yes as Secretary of State and is hoping we don’t remember,

With regard to Mrs. Clinton’s messaging (lying) on her crusade to the White House, a good deal of liberal pundits welcome Mr. Sander’s entry into the race as good for the Democrats, because it will force Hillary more to the left.  Really? How does changing one’s rhetoric to tell people what she thinks they want to hear, moving her to the left on issues?  It doesn’t take a cynic to know the answer to that question:  it doesn’t.

It is time for voters to take a stand and support the candidates who actually mean what the say and say what they mean, and not just thank them for forcing Hillary to clean up her “old PR problem” so that we may feel about ourselves if we again elect another corporate, Wall Street sponsored puppet.  Bernie Sanders offers us a real choice, and if progressives, independents, liberals, and ordinary Americans who understand the problems of corruption in our government, chose to obey the media’s prophetic encouragement of either putting another Bush or Clinton in the White House, then we will have no one to blame but ourselves, and should stop pretending that we really want a democracy that represents us.