Brother is a staunch Bernie Sanders supporter. I talked with him today. I questioned him about what Bernie plans to do about the debt, what he thinks about the Federal Reserve, and whether or not Bernie is devoted to bringing all the troops home from all our overseas bases.
My brother gave shifty or at least ignorant answers to all of these things, and somehow thought it was sufficient to emphasize to me that Bernie "marched with blacks during civil rights" and "supported equality for gays before everyone." I literally don't care about such superfluous things. Our country's currency is probably already worthless and only sustainable given our massive foreign presence and bullying the rest of the world into private central banking system. We are the world's villain, and sooner or later more and more people are going to recognize this and demand that we withdraw our troops from foreign wars. At that point, other countries will declare our currency system as not credible and demand we repay our debt, which of course we cannot do. It's not like we can just make more money out of thin air from the Federal Reserve, because people won't accept it as tender.
Bernie Sanders doesn't address this. He's interested in a sort of Marxist struggle against the rich, which is great, except I'm not seeing any checks he has in place to prevent them from taking all their assets away and re-establishing themselves elsewhere. The rest of his proposals sound too utopic to be realistic: how does Bernie plan to negotiate with gridlocked congress in order to enact his FDR-like sweeping reforms of the nation? I'd be surprised if he accomplishes even a fifth of what he plans.
In Bernie Sanders I simply don't see the leader capable of remedying our present ills. I see an almost naive, unprepared idealist who doesn't have the skills to overcome partisan divisions. The fact that he doesn't seem committed, from what I have read, to bringing home all our troops, stopping unique aid to Israel, etc, just indicates to me that he, just like the other candidates, will inadvertently turn out to be George W Bush Mk. III.