I’ve just started to get involved with the Bernie Sanders campaign. I live in a mostly West Indian neighborhood in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. We don’t have any white picket fences here, and I haven’t yet seen any evidence of a white picket fence American Dream mentality in anything that I have learned so far about Bernie Sanders. I was also just in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where some people actually do own houses with white picket fences. I was at the Ann Arbor, July 29th event that was part of the 100,000 people gathering for Bernie across the country and I did not detect a “white picket fence” mentality. I spoke with a long time friend of mine, an African American, who is the head of the local Democratic Party and others who see Bernie addressing the institutional wrongs that enable racism. The Clintons supported the mass incarceration that has done so much damage to the African American community. Hillary has supported the Trans Pacific Partnership that will further erode opportunity for American workers. Hillary is now changing what she says as a result of Bernie’s campaign. But, look at what she has done over the years, not what her well paid speech writers are crafting, to help her pivot now. Bernie, like FDR, would create jobs for people to fix our ailing infrastructure. The US has the wealth to create those jobs, but we need someone like Bernie, who has spent a lifetime standing up to the greedy billionaires who want it all for themselves. It is time to say “enough is enough” and they can’t have it all.

Search YouTube for Sanders and “Black Lives Matter” and you’ll find the most disgusting racists comments about how Bernie is Dr. Frankenstein and “Black Lives Matter” is the monster he created. We need to come to grips with what a terrible tactical decision it was to have done what happened in Seattle. I’m old enough to have protested during the Panther 21 trial in NYC. I’m old enough to have seen the left destroy itself in the 1960's and early 70's with internecine fighting. So, it was really painful for me to watch Marissa Janae Johnson and Mara Jacqeline Willaford. They actually call themselves “outside agitators.” I remember outside agitators during anti-Vietnam War resistance and the struggle of the Black Panther Party, who were actually working for the FBI. I wondered if Marissa and Mara had been paid by Hillary supporters or some right wing group. Were they a new version of agent provocateurs I’ve seen in the past, working for the FBI? I’d like to see some investigative journalism into their backgrounds. I came across an alleged high school photo of Marissa Janae with text about her having a Sarah Palin button on her backpack. Is this true, or fabricated?

Inclusion in the dream of the white picket fence is not a goal to strive for, as we’ve seen in the housing bubble, where banks set people up for failure and then came to the American taxpayer for relief. Hispanics, who had “risen” into the middle class through home ownership suffered the greatest losses of equity during the collapse of the housing bubble, because they did not have savings outside of the equity they had built in their homes.

During the early history of the United States, wealth was certainly built on the evils of slavery. If you look at the value (sales price) of slaves in 1860, it is easy to see that the “value” of slaves was an enormous part of the Gross National Product.

The white picket fence dream was built on the exploitation of others, from slavery in America to the exploitation of Bangladeshi garment workers so Americans can buy cheap clothing at Walmart, causing the oceans and air to polluted by the cargo ships that transport those goods.

Don’t ask to be included in the white picket fence dream. Tear down that fence. The United States is the wealthiest country in the world, yet we have the highest rate of child poverty among the industrialized nations. We need major institutional changes. I recommend that readers of this article learn from Richard Wolff’s GRITtv interview “On Bernie Sanders and Socialism” see: https://youtu.be/IhH-PWjR3b0