Bernie Sanders loves the idea of greedy, corrupt institutions. He just wants to run them.
Tickets to see Bernie Sanders in “It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism” are available on Ticketmaster for only $95 to anyone who wants front row seats. Members of the oppressed working classes willing to settle for Seat 208 in Row C can get away with paying as little as $35.
That’s in a city where the black median household income is $45,000 a year.
The event at D.C. Anthem theater promises to be a “progressive takedown of the uber-capitalist status quo.” The co-owner of the theater pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution when he told a massage therapist that he would give her a higher tip “if she were ‘willing to go a little higher’”. He’s also a donor to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. No word on how high she’s been willing to go.
Bernie’s prostitution career is more glamorous with a theater event promoting his book, but the difference between him and the theater’s massage therapist is he’s always willing to go higher.
“It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism”, Bernie’s latest book, which sells for $30 on Amazon, is being published by German ex-Nazi woke publisher Bertelsmann. At $95 for the seat and $30 for the book, that’s a $125 denunciation of the wickedness of capitalism. (Plus another $27 for the t-shirt.) Truly, as Bernie calls it, “a system that is fueled by uncontrolled greed.”
When there aren’t enough suckers walking the streets of D.C., the Bernie book tour goes international with an appearance at London’s Royal Festival Hall where tickets are going for £52. A socialist denouncing capitalism on behalf of capitalists at a royal hall defies satire. But Bernie’s wealth is built on getting his followers to pay millions to corporations to read his denunciations of corporations which he can’t abolish as long as they’re paying him his cut.
Bernie’s greed has churned out a series of books with disclosed and undisclosed collaborators who probably did most of the writing, and made him a millionaire with three homes.
After being challenged over his wealth, Bernie Sanders snapped, “I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”
“It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism” claims that “unfettered capitalism is to blame for an unprecedented level of income and wealth inequality”. Unless it makes you a millionaire.
How do you become a radical millionaire author? It helps to start with millions in campaign funds. As critics noted, “Sanders spent almost $445,000 of his donors’ campaign funds with Verso Books, the publisher of Outsider in the White House.”
Bernie Sanders has written quite a few books. “Our Revolution”, available in print and audiobook, narrated by Mark Ruffalo, netted him a $795,000 advance. That book and “Where We Go from Here: Two Years in the Resistance” were written for an American subsidiary of Germany’s Holtzbrinck Group. After Holtzbrinck made him a millionaire, he turned to another German megacorporation, Bertelsmann, to make him even richer by bashing capitalism.
But it’s okay for Bernie Sanders to have three houses. It’s okay for him to make millions from German companies. But it’s not okay for you to make money. And it’s okay for his supporters, who are putting money in the pockets of a multinational ex-Nazi company to be angry at you.
Bernie has a plan to replace capitalism and a habit of dealing with some of the most abusive companies around. Ticketmaster was recently the subject of Senate hearings and it took Department of Justice anti-trust intervention to keep Bertelsmann from gobbling up what’s left of American publishing. The socialist politician could go with smaller companies, independent presses and ticket sale venues, but instead he’s getting as much money as he can while hurting small business, writers and musicians by getting into bed with monopolies. And then attacking those same monopolies as if he weren’t enabling them for his own personal gain.
The promo for Bernie’s claim that he “takes on the 1% and speaks blunt truths about a system that is fuelled by uncontrolled greed, and rigged against ordinary people.” But he is the 1%. His greed is not only uncontrolled, but it’s completely detached from any kind of productive labor.
The blunt truth is that Bernie Sanders is a fraud. And always has been.
The co-author of “It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism”, John Harrison Nichols, a hack for The Nation, likely did the actual writing while Bernie posed for a black-and-white cover shot that shows him fussily rolling up one sleeve to do the work that he didn’t actually do.
Despite doing nothing, there’s a massive infrastructure of organizations around Bernie.
Take the Sanders Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, funded by the Sanders campaign, whose fellows include his wife, AOC, Robert Reich, white BLM leader Shaun King, and antisemitic 9/11 truther Cornel West. Its executive director is David Driscoll, Bernie’s stepson. His stepdaughter, Carina Driscoll, tried to run for mayor of Burlington, his old job, with the backing of his political operation.
Bernie Sanders has turned politics into a personal grift for his family in the classic dynastic style. And he’s managed to get very rich denouncing capitalism. Actually putting his name on a book about how much capitalism sucks on behalf of a multinational ex-Nazi corporation that faced anti-trust action perfectly captures every rotten thing that he represents.
It’s okay to loathe, revile, despise and be angry about Bernie Sanders. But Bernie is just characteristic of socialism. Out front are the promises of a brave new utopia, just pay the man. Socialists enable the worst behavior of capitalists and then claim to offer a better answer. Their better answer eventually involves taking all the money, locking it in a box and shooting anyone it used to belong to. All of Bernie’s tantrums about capitalism come down to this simple fact.
Bernie Sanders loves the idea of giant unaccountable institutions robbing people blind. He just wants to be in charge of them. And that’s the corrupt hypocrisy of socialism in a nutshell.
There’s no more liberation here than paying 95 bucks to listen to Bernie ramble about evil corporations like the ones who are helping him pay for a fourth house or whatever he wants.
It’s okay to be angry about socialism. Capitalism has its flaws, but for outright corruption, thievery, greed and megalomania, there’s nothing like socialism. Socialism has killed more people in one year than capitalism has killed in a century. And, as Benie’s entire existence reminds us, it can never be anything other than a parasite living off productive people.
