Bernie Sanders nails the vileness of Republican and Democratic elites in just one tweet

On 30 August, US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders nailed the big problem with both Republicans and establishment Democrats. And he did it in just one tweet:

If the environment were a bank it would have been saved already.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) August 30, 2019

Remember when Bush and Obama used taxpayers’ money to bail out the banks, but not ordinary people?

In 2008, in the midst of the capitalist crash, Barack Obama backed George W Bush’s $700bn bank bailout. And he continued it when he became president. He even gave Wall Street insiders (i.e. the very people behind the crisis) prominent roles in his administration. Millions of people, meanwhile, lost their homes and/or jobs. But Obama’s support for them was pitiful in comparison to the bank bailout.

In short, Democratic bigwigs failed to bail out working-class Americans, pandering to financial elites instead. (Note: they’re still doing it today.) Obama, meanwhile, proved to be very far from a ‘progressive champion’. And the lack of any meaningful challenge to establishment interests paved the way for Donald Trump.

Between the Bush/Obama bailout and Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, Common Dreams wrote in 2018, the five largest US banks “have raked in more than $583 billion in combined profits over the past decade”.

Iceland, meanwhile, took a different path. As Truthdig explained:

In 2008, they jailed the bankers, let the banks fail without taking on their debt and put controls in place to protect the economy. They recovered more quickly than other countries and with less pain.

So there was always an alternative. Republicans and Democratic elites just chose to side with the rich and powerful. And it’s the same story when it comes to the climate crisis:

NEW: The DNC, which voted yesterday against holding a climate debate, has taken at least $60,750 from fossil fuel executives since the beginning of the year. https://t.co/VKrI1WNGcL

— Sludge (@Sludge) August 23, 2019

Of course the US can afford a Green New Deal. But it’s a matter of political will.

The bold progressive idea of a ‘Green New Deal’ (GND) looks to boost the economy and job growth by building up environmentally friendly infrastructure; it would tax emissions, encourage renewable energy projects, and end fossil-fuel subsidies. Polls show that around 60% of US voters support a GND.

As key GND champion Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Grist in 2018:

The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II…

It will require the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs.

Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, was the first presidential hopeful to back the GND. And he has pledged to fund it with $16.3tn of public money. At the start of his comprehensive plan, he says:

The climate crisis is not only the single greatest challenge facing our country; it is also our single greatest opportunity to build a more just and equitable future, but we must act immediately.

That's true. But if we continue to allow fracking and fossil fuel exports, the planet will never recover.

We don't have time for a middle ground approach. We need a Green New Deal. https://t.co/Z1y5chWNR9

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) August 30, 2019

Sanders clearly believes that, if the US government can afford to bail out powerful private institutions like banks, it can also afford to launch a profoundly transformational project to save the planet and create well-paid jobs in the process. And while Republican and Democratic elites may disagree, it looks like it’s a very popular idea among voters.

Featured image via Gage Skidmore

Tags: climate crisis

Comments 4

nobodylicksme says:

7 years ago

Like somebody said a few years ago, soon those ‘too big to fail’ banks will become too big to save.

There just isn’t that kind of money in existence, not even if they print it off like rolls of wallpaper, not even if they pass the debt forward onto people born over the next two hundred years. The next Crash will end the west as a political and economic power. It will be the end of an epoch. (And maybe it’ll end most wars.)

- Shaolin12 says:
  
  7 years ago
  
  Are you sure there isn’t enough money in existence?
  
  Harvard University alone, has more money than 139 nations combined, and that’s not even counting other elite universities, or the large banking families like the Rothschilds who incidentally were and are so rich, that during the days of Empire under Queen Victoria, it was they who bankrolled the protection of the North Passage into India (at the time the Jewel in The Crown). The Empire simply could no longer afford to defend it. I’ll say it again…
  
  …The British Empire could not afford to protect it’s most valued asset, but the Rothschilds could …. and did.
  
  If you think there isn’t enough money, you really don’t have a clue as to just how much wealth there is, or just how much (even now) of public money is being funnelled straight into the pockets of the ultra-rich.
  
  Think on this too…just 3 people in the USA hold as much wealth as the entirety of America’s poor and struggling (and they themselves do not hold anywhere near the largest purse bags on Earth).
  
  The more you look into it, the more you should appreciate that there is more money than you ever dreamed possible, and if they want, they can indeed make more in the form of virtual gold, virtual cash etc.
  
  All they have to do is print it, and force everyone else to accept their rationales. Money is illusory, the power behind it isn’t, it comes from us in the form of our abdication of power. We are taught from birth to abdicate our power into the hands of those we don’t know, for the purpose of enslaving us to an idea, which many, many people have been willing to die for.
  
  That is real power, the power to control people, the power to tell people to destroy themselves, the power to tell people what to believe. Money is the illusory carrot which the powerful use to ensure compliance with their plans, and it can be increased or decreased on a whim …. just not on our whim.
  
  BTW … they DO print it off like rolls of wallpaper, and its value is decided by them, not us, if they wanted to shower us with cash, they could, and they could make it work, all by lying to us as they have done for centuries and longer.
  
  In a world where virtual gold and currencies (among many such financial schemes) are a thing, anything is possible, its just unlikely that it will benefit us, unless we actually make our nation truly democratic, by embracing real democracy, which is to say, if WE stop abdicating our power to others through our fake democracy.
  
jeff3 says:

7 years ago

The banksters are still at it robbing us but austerity wasn’t for the rich only those who pays their taxes the rich having offshore accounts failing to pay theirs attacking the workers taxes pension funds and the like it never change untill we have honest people in the house of I’ll repute while alot will be discussing climate change this lot will be attacking the poorest in society by denying them their benefits culling the stock through benefits denial they never get to discuss climate change jeff3.

- Shaolin12 says:
  
  7 years ago
  
  I agree with you, until we have honest people in the house of ill-repute (Westminster I assume), things will not change for the better.
  
  However, we also need to be brutally honest with ourselves, because if we keep seeing things the way we have been programmed to do from birth, there never will be honest people, at least nowhere near enough, to change our society and the way in which we behave.
  
  We need to take back our power from those who rule us like dictators, and realize that this country has never had democracy, just the illusion of it. Britain, like every other nation on Earth, has an Oligarchy. Democracy is NOT about voting in dictators, or any who sit above us, untouchable, and without responsibility, protected by a corrupted law.