Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Red Cortez

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July 7, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

15:46

Red Cortez

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	Bernie Sanders is not a socialist, although one might be forgiven for thinking that he is, given the fact that he calls himself a socialist so damn often.
	Bernie Sanders is, in fact, an idiot.
	There was an excellent article published in The Atlantic in 2016 called Bernie is not socialist and America is not capitalist.
	I can't say I agree with the latter half of that statement, but the former half is certainly true.
	And as they accurately point out in this article, Bernie Sanders is not a socialist, he is a social democrat.
	But Bernie does not seem to understand the difference between a social democrat and a democratic socialist.
	And given the terms, I suppose you can hardly blame him.
	To put it simply, a socialist is someone who wants collective control of the means of production, usually through the government.
	Whereas a social democrat is someone who wishes to have private industry, private enterprise, and a market system, but have high tax and high regulation in order to redistribute some of the wealth from the top earners to offset the poverty of the lowest earners.
	Bernie does not understand this difference.
	Or if he does, he for some reason refuses to demonstrate this publicly.
	Which is why in 2015, the Prime Minister of Denmark told Bernie Sanders that he had had enough of his quote socialist slurs.
	Because as the Prime Minister said, Denmark is a market economy.
	Denmark is not a socialist country, and no socialist worth their salt would claim that it is.
	Denmark is a social democracy.
	Don't take my word from it.
	You can take it from Noam Chomsky, a man who you would think surely would know what a real socialist is.
	And according to him, Bernie Sanders isn't even a radical.
	So when an ex-Bernie organizer wins a minor election in New York...
	All these news stories say you're a socialist, a democratic socialist, a member of the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America.
	Are you a Democrat?
	Yeah, I'm a Democrat.
	In fact, I started off this race as part of a coalition Justice Democrats.
	We have to ask ourselves what it means because she actually does call herself a Democratic socialist, not a social democrat.
	And she appears to be a person who accurately represents the term democratic socialist rather than the term social democrat.
	As Vox reports, she's a former Bernie Sanders presidential campaign organizer and ran on a platform of Medicare for All, universal jobs guarantee, abolishing immigration and customs enforcement, free public university and trade school and campaign finance reform.
	And she beat one of the Democrats' legacy incumbents.
	And so the question becomes: does her victory signal an earthquake in democratic politics?
	And the answer is, without a doubt, yes.
	After losing the election to Trump, the Clinton camp have lost all credibility in the Democratic Party.
	And this has allowed far-left activists to start making serious ground.
	And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was part of the Justice Democrats initiative.
	Now, Jake, tell me what you announced this week, the Justice Democrats.
	And you put together an organization to get corporate money out of politics.
	Yes.
	Am I right?
	Am I good so far?
	Okay, so it's a strong progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
	So some of you might have seen some blog posts that I wrote 18 years ago that some people happen to find online.
	The genes of women are flawed.
	They are poorly designed creatures who do not want to have sex nearly as often as needed for the human race to get along peaceably and fruitfully.
	So if any of you have already read it, I certainly apologize to the people who are offended by it because you are right to be offended.
	And I hope that for those folks, again, who are rightfully offended, that being on the road to progress and justice, never fully arriving.
	Recently, he also is showing the same mindset that he showed back when he wrote these blogs in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
	But being on that road is a good thing, and that it's a positive note that we have gone through this journey together.
	The overwhelming majority of them said, basically, look, it's him or us.
	So either he steps down as a face of the movement, because a face of the movement should have said these things about women under no circumstances.
	So it's either him or us.
	Either, you know, he stays, in which case you need an entire new staff to do all the difficult infrastructure work.
	Or he goes as a public face in the movement and the staff stays and we continue doing all the infrastructure work and all the work necessary to move forward.
	And they have the singular goal of replacing the corporate Democrats within the party.
	This means that the Democratic Party is going to skew heavily to the left.
	And honestly, that's a good thing for everyone who isn't in the Democratic Party.
	As Ro Khana, the only member of Congress to endorse Orcasio-Cortez said, she is the harbinger of a new progressive movement.
	Orcasio-Cortez has been endorsed by various socialist publications, including Jacobin, which builds itself as a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture.
	They believe that she had a transformational vision based around a bold, clear message of class politics.
	On June 26, 2018, everything changed for the socialist movement in the United States.
	Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a candidate in the NY14 Democratic primary, not only won her insurgent race against long-standing corporate-moneyed incumbent, but catapulted the politics of Democratic socialism onto the national stage.
	The significance of this event for the socialist movement, for the Democratic Party, and for U.S. politics as a whole, should not be understated.
	Establishment Democrats are lurching to the left, trying to catch the ground that shifted beneath them.
	Senator Kirsten Gillibrand quickly announced that she, like Cortez, supports abolishing ICE.
	On Facebook this past weekend, Senator Kamala Harris posted an article about the minimum wage with commentary calling for tuition-free college, a policy championed by Cortez, that two years ago, leading Democrats from Hillary Clinton to John Conyers declared was both impossible and undesirable.
	Jacobin believed that the explosion of grassroots interest in her and the Democratic Socialists of America is a result of her class politics and the democratic socialism at the center of her campaign.
	And so what does it mean to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be a member of the Democratic Socialists of America?
	Well, they describe themselves as socialists.
	Like most socialist organizations, DSA believes in the abolition of capitalism in favor of an economy run by either the workers or the state, though the exact specifics of abolishing capitalism are fiercely debated by socialists, as in, they don't know, and they can't agree, and there will never be an agreement on this.
	In practice, that means that DSA members advocate ending private ownership of a wide range of industries whose products are viewed as necessities, which they say should not be left to those seeking to turn a profit.
	According to the DSA's current mission statement, the government should ensure that all citizens receive adequate food, housing, healthcare, childcare, and education.
	DSA also believes that the government should democratize private businesses, i.e. force owners to give workers control to them to the greatest extent possible.
	And this is reflected in Cortez's desire to give everyone a job working for the government if they can't find one for themselves, which becomes increasingly likely if the government starts seizing the means of production.
	The DSA members also say that overthrowing capitalism must include the eradication of hierarchical systems that lie beyond the market as well.
	As a result, DSA supports the missions of Black Lives Matter, gay and lesbian rights, and environmentalism as integral parts of this broader anti-capitalist program.
	And does Orcasio-Cortez believe that the world is run by a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that is undoubtedly highly misogynistic?
	Of course she does.
	I've seen on Twitter quite a bit talking about misogyny being a problem within the party and within politics in general.
	Did you experience sexism during this campaign?
	Duh.
	Of course.
	Socialism is about democratizing the family to get rid of patriarchal relations, democratizing the political sphere to get genuine participatory democracy, democratizing the schools by challenging the hierarchical relationship between the teachers of the school and the students of the school.
	And socialism is the democratization of all areas of life, including but not limited to the economy.
	Intersectional socialism, if you will.
	And this is an organization, though not a political party, that Orcasio-Cortez is a part of.
	Now, naturally, her platform is not as radical as this, but this is the goal that she is working towards.
	I don't compromise my values, but I'm certainly willing to compromise to get things done.
	You know, if I have to make compromises to improve in the direction of improving our healthcare, I'm happy to.
	If I have to make compromises in terms of improving our educational system, I'm happy to do those things.
	But I will not compromise on a vision, and I will not compromise on the goal, and I think I will not, and I will not compromise on the future that I think is best for this country.
	And in case you feel that for some reason, Vox would be misrepresenting the democratic socialists of America, this is from their own website.
	Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives, publicly owned enterprises managed by workers, and consumer representatives.
	Democratic socialists favor as much decentralization as possible, while the large concentrations of capital in industry such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership.
	Many consumer goods industries might best be run as cooperatives.
	And of course, there are no models of democratic socialism, at least none that they are willing to claim, although they will claim Sweden's welfare state, Canada's national healthcare system, and France's nationwide childcare program, despite all of these being capitalist countries and a best social democracies.
	There is, of course, a democratic socialist country that they've left off of this list, perhaps because in this country, the price of coffee has reached 1 million bolivars per cup, and that is, of course, Venezuela.
	Venezuela is a fantastic model of what will happen to a country with democratic socialism, because capitalism requires a strong market economy and strong property rights.
	The purpose of democratic socialism is to, little by little, start appropriating property, violating the property rights of the owners, and annexing this property to the state under the mistaken impression that the businesses requisitioned will remain as productive as they are in private hands.
	I'll leave a link in the description to a video I've done about Venezuela that goes into this in great detail.
	Put simply, it won't, and it will encourage all manner of corruption.
	And yes, as Vladimir Lenin said, the goal of socialism is communism, which is why the democratic socialists of America happen to think that communism is a good idea.
	It should come as no surprise.
	And so you may be asking yourself: well, what happened to Bernie Sanders then?
	What happened to his more moderate social democrat vision for America instead of the far left's democratic socialist view of the United States?
	Well, put simply, the abolish ICE movement happened.
	What began as a tweet has snowballed into a movement supported by major democratic politicians now to abolish immigrations and customs enforcement because these people are, broadly speaking, anti-borders, which is precisely what The Hill has recognized when they cry abolish ICE.
	They do not want border patrols.
	If you do not have a border, you do not have a country.
	No Trump!
	No war!
	No USA at all!
	No Trump!
	No war!
	No USA at all!
	No Trump!
	No war!
	No USA at all!
	No Trump!
	No war!
	No USA at all!
	Pape and black, black and white!
	Workers of the world unite!
	Workers of the world unite!
	Fake and black!
	Black and white!
	Workers of the world unite!
	And Bernie Sanders just isn't that radical.
	He isn't actually a socialist.
	Although I do honestly believe that you can describe the Democratic Socialists of America as a proto-communist movement, and that's only because they don't believe they can achieve full communism yet.
	And this means that Bernie is being chewed out by left-wing activists for not being radical enough.
	The movement that he fathered is turning on him.
	This is what he gets by attracting and indoctrinating young people into an ideology he doesn't understand.
	But this radical movement is his fault.
	This is a movement so radicalized and pathologically opposed to border control that when ICE are breaking up a child sex trafficking ring, these idiots will actually go out there and try and stop them from doing their jobs.
	First of all, immigration is not a problem.
	And one of the really serious issues is that that narrative and that mythology has really just been hijacked and perpetuated in the United States.
	The idea that immigration is somehow a negative thing.
	You know, my congressional district included, we're half-immigrant and people are so proud to be part of a community like that because it's awesome.
	It's awesome.
	It really is awesome.
	Like, love immigrants.
	They're awesome.
	I'm of the opinion when the Democratic Party shifts even further towards the radical left than it already is, and it will because the radicals are currently in the process of taking control of the Democratic Party, that they will not be a viable political force, especially challenging Trump in 2020.
	I'm a Democrat.
	And there's only two teams.
	If you're a conservative, aren't you really Team Trump?
	See, I don't even know what the Republican beliefs are.
	Well, it depends on what.
	So what I've called myself is sometimes Trump.
	Okay, people have said there's never Trump and then there's always Trump.
	Sometimes Trump, meaning that when he does something that I like, I cheer.
	And when he does something that I hate, which happens, then I boo.
	So my advice would be to help them help you.
	Get them to expose the things they believe and the reasons that they believe them.
	Get them to radicalize.
	Make them demand the abolition of private property.
	Make them demand the abolition of borders and the USA.
	Give their most radical activists the platform and the moral force within their own movement to shame and deride people who are not extremists themselves.
	Let them become as radical as they want to be so socialism can finally die and we can return to dealing with our problems from a liberal viewpoint and not a bloody Marxist one.
	Okay, so you would not vote for a Democrat under any circumstance or some circumstance?

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