Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters calls out epic Bernie Sanders fail on Venezuela

Roger Waters vs Bernie Sanders on Venezuela
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Bernie Sanders has disappointed many people on the left with his latest tweet on Venezuela. The self-proclaimed ‘democratic socialist’ has historically had a mixed record on foreign policy, which not all of his supporters have been willing to face. But this time, Pink Floyd legend Roger Waters had no problem taking Sanders to task.

Sanders on Venezuela

The big mistake Sanders made was to play into the propaganda of the US regime-change machine – particularly regarding the smokescreen of ‘humanitarian aid‘:

Unfortunately, this is not Sanders’ first fail on Venezuela.

Read on...

Roger Waters was on hand to hold him to account on this occasion, though, saying:

Waters has also called out billionaire Richard Branson for his ‘Live-Aid-ish’ PR stunt.

Investigative journalist Abby Martin also pushed back:

Others raised some legitimate questions with Sanders:

The replies kept coming in:

With some unavoidable critiques:

One of Sanders’ strongest public supporters in the past also blasted him for his apparent inability to comprehend the Washington’s role in destroying Venezuela. Commentator and comedian Jimmy Dore pulled no punches during his live broadcast on 23 February:

Venezuela is experiencing an ongoing US-backed coup attempt. And US sanctions are designed to “make the economy scream”, according to establishment experts. This fact wasn’t lost on Dore, who was visibly upset over Sanders’ foreign policy failure. He lamented that it is “too bad that this is the best we can get”:

Push them ‘to the left’

Dore would later say that he was:

the one keeping the flame going [for Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential elections].

Dore also explained that he wants to:

push Bernie left to make him a better candidate on foreign policy.

Hold them to account

Sanders has taken many principled stances over the years. Most recently, he vocally opposed the US- and UK-backed Saudi destruction of Yemen. The reason why so many people support politicians like Sanders is because of the principled policies they promote; not because they are sycophants or lemmings. That means that even some of Sanders’ staunchest supporters are willing to call him out for his weakness on imperialism.

We must do the same with all of our politicians; regardless of who they are.

Featured image via Roger Waters/Facebook and Bernie Sanders/YouTube

Get involved

  • In the US: write to your Congressperson and demand that they oppose the coup and end the crippling US sanctions that are exacerbating the humanitarian situation (be sure to be polite and concise in order to be effective).
  • In the UK: write to your MP and ask them to oppose the coup, the sanctions, and return Venezuela’s gold to the Maduro government, to help alleviate the suffering of Venezuela’s people (be sure to be polite and concise in order to be effective).

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    1. The supposedly anti-establishment/anti-war Bernie Sanders:

      1. Voted in favor of use of force (euphemism for bombing) 8 sovereign nations that never represented a threat to the U.S.:
      1) Afghanistan.
      2) Lebanon.
      3) Libya.
      4) Palestine.
      5) Syria.
      7) Yugoslavia
      8) Iraq

      2. Has accepted campaign money from Defense contractor Raytheon, a defense contractor, he continues his undying support of the $1.5 trillion F-35 industry and said that predator drones “have done some very good things”. Sanders has always voted in favor of awarding more corporate welfare for the military industrial complex – and even if he says he’s against a particular war he ends up voting in favor of funding it. Sanders praised Trump’s Syria missiles that raised Raytheon’s stock by $5 billion

      3. Routinely backs appropriations for imperial wars, the corporate scam of Obamacare, wholesale surveillance and bloated defense budgets. He loves to bluster about corporate welfare and big banks but he voted for funding the Commodity Futures “Modernization” Act which deregulated commercial banks and created an “unregulated market in derivatives and swaps” which was the major contributor to the 2007 economic crisis.

      4. Regardless of calling himself an “independent” Sanders is a member of the Democratic caucus and votes 98% of the time with the Democrats and votes in the exact same way as war criminal Hillary Clinton 93% of the time. Sanders campaigned for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race and again in 1996—after Clinton had rammed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), vastly expanded the system of mass incarceration and destroyed welfare.

      5. The sheepdog is a card the Democratic Party plays when there’s no White House Democrat running for re-election. The sheepdog is a presidential candidate running ostensibly to the left of the establishment Democrat to whom the billionaires will award the nomination. Sheepdogs are herders,…. charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic Party, either staying home. In 2004 he called on Ralph Nader to abandon his presidential campaign.

      The Democratic Party has played this “sheepdog” card at least 7-8 times in the past utilizing collaborators such as Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, Jerry Brown in 1992, Al Sharpton in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, Dennis Kucinich in 2008 and in 2016 was Bernie Sanders’ turn.

      6. Regardless of calling himself a “socialist”, he labeled the late Hugo Chávez, architect of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela responsible for lifting millions of lives out of poverty “a dead communist dictator.” Then he saddled up for a photo op with Evo Morales at the Vatican and also voted to extradite former Black Panther member, Assata Shakur.

      7. He referred to warmonger extraordinaire, John McCain as “my friend and a very, very decent person.”

      8. Routinely parrots the DNC lines: “the Russians hacked our elections” despite lack of evidence of such hacking, but lowered his head and tucked tail when the DNC actually rigged the primary elections against him, proving he is more loyal to the Democratic (war) Party than to the millions of people who supported him and donated to his fraudulent campaign.

      9. He expressed staunch support for the aid of violently right-wing separatist forces such as the self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army, whose members were trained as Mujahideen, during Clinton’s 100-day bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo in 1999. He refused to even object to the use of depleted uranium with it’s long term toxicity in both Iraq and Yugoslavia. He has an extensive record of supporting jihadist proxies for the overthrow of sovereign governments in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

      10. Supported Bill Clinton’s sanctions against Iraq, sanctions that prohibited medicines for infants and children…more than 500,000 innocents killed for no other reason than that they were Iraqi. He has also supported criminal sanctions againts Iran and Libya resulting in the suffering and deaths of thousands of civilians.

      11. Voted yes to the Clinton-era Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which expanded the death penalty to cover 60 offenses. So he is obviously pro-death penalty.

      12. Bernie championed in Congress the dumping of Vermont’s nuclear waste near Sierra Blanca, Texas, a low income
      border community with a mostly Latino population that is overwhelmingly opposed to the dump project. Environmental racism and classism seem not to bother him.

      13. Voted in support of the referendum to move the U.S.’ Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. A long-time proponent of non-violent protests rejects Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is against equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians alike and equal citizenship as he claimed: “That would be the end of the state of Israel and I support Israel’s right to exist.”. Sanders formed part of the “unanimous consent” to a resolution to support Israel in its “Operation Protective Edge) a genocidal attack to Gaza that destroyed Gaza’s entire infrastructure and resulted in 2,200 innocent Palestinian killed (one third of them children).

      14. Voted in favor of NICA Act which enforces sanctions to increase the suffering of the Nicaraguan civil society while funding dissident groups to destabilize the nation

      15. On the motion to close the Guantanamo Bay torture camp Bernie said it’s “Too Complicated” and voted No

      16. In the 2016 elections, he betrayed millions of people that believed in him when after making the central point of his campaign the fight against Wall Street he instructed his followers to vote for Wall Street’s candidate, war criminal/corporate criminal Hillary Clinton.

      You cannot be committed to “fight Wall Street” and abruptly endorse the Wall Street candidate.

      If you were to do this with a car transmission, you’d strip your gears – this is why it baffles me when people speak of him in tones of reverence and awe.

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