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Sanders and Socialism

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Screen Shot 2016-01-26 at 11.43.16 AMAdam Johnson in “45 Million Americans Live in Poverty, but You Wouldn’t Know It From Watching 2016 Coverage” notes that: “Of the five Republican debates and of the three Democratic debates, not one moderator has asked a question involving the words ‘poverty’ or ‘poor.'” See: “Sanders Consoles Crying Woman Struggling To Live Off Minimum Wage.”

RICHARD WOLFF, rdwolff at att.net, @profwolff
Wolff is visiting professor at the New School University, New York and professor of economics emeritus, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

He said today: “Bernie offers hope and change. Hope for something better than the capitalism we have and its worsening inequality, instability and endless warfare, environmental outrages, and basic injustice. Bernie’s “democratic socialism” is a change from all that to another New Deal. No real surprise that after Obama’s promise of hope and change proved an illusion, something further left would take up the cry, respond to the need. And here’s a thought: if Bernie is denied or blocked from delivering on his promises, movements further left will similarly emerge to respond to the need.

“The World Economic Forum in Davos obsessed, and rightly, over a global capitalism deeply mired in the iceberg of debt used to cope with the 2008 crash. The great fear is that the debt will cut off growth, produce deflation, and thereby increase the burden debt places on the system. Capitalism — the system — is in trouble. Of course, socialisms then arise; they always were among the alternatives to consider when people find it urgent to ‘do better than capitalism.'”

See Wolff’s “Socialism For Dummies” talk.