Monday, March 23, 2020

Editorial: Bernie is the choice

Corporate media says Joe Biden is the choice for America.  Joe Biden is never the choice for anything but an erratic drive that sideswipes many cars and threatens anyone walking on the street.

We're in the midst of a pandemic, the coronavirus, and we're close to a national panic.

Bernie Sanders is speaking to the issues, Bernie is addressing the coronavirus.

Joe?  It's Hiding With Biden time.

How would he lead next year, if elected, when he can't even lead now?

Joe is not up for the job.

And not only is he not up to leadership, his positions are wrong.

The coronavirus is a rejection of Joe and every other corporate tool in this country who insists that we don't need Medicare For All.  As David Sirota points out:


We’re 9 days away from millions of American workers & small businesses not being able to pay their extortion premiums to health insurers in order to get basic medical care. That’s going to happen. How many people have to die before we expand Medicare to cover everyone?


 That's a serious point.

It's a shame we can't have serious conversations.

Ralph Nader is one of the reasons we can't have serious conversations. If you missed it, Ralph's answer and call in the current climate is . . . Donald Trump resign.  Could you be more stupid, Ralph? In about eight months, we'll have an election to determine who is the next president.  We don't need anyone to resign right now.  If Donald resigns, Mike Pence would have to immediately step up to the presidency.  How does that help anyone?

Press Donald, demand Donald do things, yes.  But this nonsense of resign?

Ralph's ridiculous.  Hey, Ralph, maybe write another one of the weak ass columns where you say we'll all be saved by getting a rich sugar daddy to fund the movement?  Those are ludicrous but they're not as insane as calling for Donald to resign.

He's just wasting our time.

Contrast this nonsense with Bernie Sanders speaking tonight:


And right now we are seeing in this country and around the world, medical professionals getting sick because of their exposure to the coronavirus.  And this is not only a tragedy for the doctors and the nurses and the other medical profession, it is a very frightening for our whole country because if our front line doctors and nurses go down and are unable to provide the care we desperately need at this moment, who's going to be there to protect the millions of people who are sick?  So what we have got to do right now is to understand that at this moment the president of the United States has got to fully utilize in an extremely aggressive way the Defense Production Act.   And what the Defense Production Act states is that the president has the right to tell a private company: 'You know what? Instead of manufacturing T-shirts or underwear or socks -- not exactly what we need right now in the midst of this crisis -- you will start production in terms of masks, in terms of gowns, in terms of gloves, in terms of the other equipment that our medical professionals need.'  Now the good news is that some in the private sector, some private companies, are already making that transformation and I applaud them.  And these companies deserve to be adequately compensated for the work that they are doing.  But what we need is, at a time when experts estimate that the United States alone -- I'm not talking about the rest of the world -- our country alone, may need a minimum of hundreds of millions of masks because they are disposable -- you don't reuse them, you should not reuse them -- of masks and gloves and gowns in order to get through this pandemic [for] the president of the United States to tell various countries that you're going to stop producing what you're producing today, we need you to produce the products that our doctors and nurses and medical personnel needs.




 That's leadership and that's dialogue that matters.

 Bernie is the choice.

Joe is failing.  Joe Biden is a failure.  We're in the midst of a pandemic and he's off hiding.  And we're supposed to believe that he'd be doing differently if he were president?