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The Official 2020 Presidential Endorsement Withdrawal and Reassignment, of Karla Mazov
Karla Mazov is officially withdrawing endorsement for Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary.
I’ll wait for the gasps of shock, cheers, and angrily shouted slurs to subside before explaining.
Waiting.
Still waiting.
…
Several months ago, when the Primary was getting underway, with its excess of mostly homogeneously-minded neoliberal contenders, its disappointingly conservative selection of women and people of color, and a glut of wholly unremarkable male crackers, it was a different time. A simpler time. The world was a different place. I believed then that Warren was both the best and most likely hope that our corrupt, undemocratic, and asinine political system of two-party monopoly could produce.
As you’ll recall, dear reader, despite my preference for Bernie Sanders’ proposed policies and record, I gave in somewhat to the defeatist, anti-progressive rhetoric that he was too much of a long-shot. That he’s too old, too crotchety, too divisive, that his career lacks examples of successfully penned and pushed legislation, that socialism is still too misunderstood and slandered a word, and that it would prove too difficult for him, if he won, to win consensus from either side in the Senate and the House to pass the progressive legislation he proposes. I saw Warren as more “electable” (goddamn, how I despise that word and its connotations), and decided the best route was for her to run for president with him as her vice-president.
But I say today, dear reader, fuck all that.
Bernie Sanders for president.
This change in position comes in part from a perhaps unwarranted feeling of optimism, and a rejection of premature comprise. Sanders has been pulling ahead in the polls and gaining popularity. Many people, like my contritionary self, who’ve liked Sanders from the start, have come around to the idea that he has a real shot. He’s been building his list of consequential endorsements, however divisive some of them may be (I’m not personally a fan of Joe Rogan, but millions of other people are; don’t shit on a gift horse because it has a history of flaunting its ignorant white hetero cis male horseness).
Warren’s campaign has meanwhile stalled, and I’ve taken some time to better examine her record and consider what implications it carries for how a Warren presidency would play out.
While Warren’s record in domestic politics is generally good, acting on behalf of people, or consumers (as we’re often called, despicably), over corporations, for instance in her opposition to the 2005 bankruptcy bill, which Joe Biden, that heap of garbage, championed, and that was a major gift to banks and creditors at the expense of regular people, and which helped lead to the 2009 financial crisis.
However, she’s had bad foreign policy positions.
She’s supported economically sanctioning countries that don’t comply with Washington’s and Wall Street’s will, including recently Venezuela and Iran. While preferable to full-on violent war, sanctions do kill people. People starve or succumb to preventable or treatable diseases because of sanctions making food or medicine too expensive or wholly inaccessible. As in war, it is hardly ever a government or the wealthy leading class of a nation that suffers under sanctions; it is the poor and average citizens.
She’s supported Israel to the point of defending its bombing of Palestinian schools and hospitals with the tired and sickening excuse that it is the fault of armed Palestinian groups for locating their bases and weapons caches near hospitals and schools.
While she has at times diverged from the Demotratic establishment’s militaristic stance, more so in recent days, there is little indication that she’d be that different from previous Democratic administrations, or even Republican ones. She has not been a leader against US military imperialism, and too many times has aided it.
Sanders’ foreign policy record is imperfect as well, but not as much so. Sanders, more than any other candidate of any prominence or a snowball’s chance, has shown himself inclined to pull back from existing wars and to oppose new ones.
For better and worse, the president’s powers rest far more in foreign than domestic policy, anyway. Warren would be better in a position where she can push meaningful progressive reforms domestically. Considering how morbidly US military expansion and global imperialism has spread, what we really need is someone far more doveish than exists in mainstream US politics.
Lacking that, we need Sanders.
If Warren beats the odds and comes out the candidate, fine. Better her than Biden or Buttigieg.
But all of our support should and must be behind Sanders. However much the DNC and the corporate media work to sabotage and disregard him, we need Sanders and we need to fight for him.
Failing that, revolution.
Sanders
Someone Who's Not a War-Mongering Douche
2020
