Bernie Sanders has received nearly $100,000 from the defense industry this election cycle. Here’s what his supporters can do about it.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be one of those “I used to feel the Bern but then I came my senses” pieces that seem to pop up on social media in inverse proportion to the number of voters switching from Clinton to Sanders in actual primaries. Instead, I’m going to propose that we help Bernie help himself. But first we need face the unpleasant fact that Bernie Sanders is not as pure as he implies when it comes to who’s funding his campaign. According to OpenSecrets.org, he ranks third among Presidential Candidates in campaign contributions from defense corporations. At nearly $100,000 so far in the 2016 cycle, he has over half of Clinton’s first place total of $187k and nearly two-thirds of Cruz’s $156k. Sanders more than doubles Marco Rubio’s military industrial love, though I’m sure that would change if Rubio suddenly became viable.
Whether you support Hillary or Bernie, the fact that the defense industry is giving them money like they’re a couple of Republicans is probably disappointing. Sanders supporters are probably not surprised to see Clinton at the top of the list, but may be shocked to see that he has received over half of what Clinton has. I was. That number has been going up recently, more for Sanders than Clinton. That number should be zero.
In the 2008 Democratic primaries, I felt genuine enthusiasm for an electable Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in my life. Inspired by the message of Hope and Change, I went door to door in Obama friendly Boulder, Colorado. I trusted Obama would reverse the trend that we’ve witnessed since 1980, in which both major parties move further and further to the right, leaving progressives and liberals voting against the Republicans rather then for anyone. I thought I had no illusions; I was aware that Obama took some money from banks and defense contractors, but I also knew that Clinton took more. The key distinction that made me believe in Obama rather than Clinton was that his war chest had a much higher percentage of small donations than Clinton’s or McCain’s. I trusted his character more than I trusted hers, and it was important to me that he spoke out against the invasion of Iraq in 2002, even if he wasn’t yet in the Senate to vote against it. The Iraq war vote remains an important point of distinction between Clinton and Sanders as well.
I still respect and admire Barack Obama. In many ways he has been a great president, particularly considering the unprecedented obstruction and racially motivated malevolence he has endured from Republicans. But in other ways, he has betrayed those of us who trusted that he would be better than Clinton on foreign and economic policy. The first sign of that betrayal occurred when he selected his first cabinet: he retained Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and chose as his Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, formerly of Goldman Sachs and heir apparent to Bush’s Henry Paulson.
What I learned throughout the last eight years is that no matter what the character of the President as a human being is, if the President owes debts to special interests, those debts will be repaid, and often it won’t be good for the rest of us. It’s not good for the rest of us when bankers who commit crimes with millions of victims don’t go to jail. It’s also not good for the rest of us when terrorists are created faster than they’re killed by foreign policy too reliant on bombings, drone strikes, and alliances with brutal dictatorships. Surely many of Obama’s most infatuated supporters in ’08 had Hoped for far more Change than they have seen during the Obama Administration. And as rotten as the Republicans have been, it wasn’t always entirely their fault.
The point here is not to detail my disillusionment with the Obama Administration, so I won’t go into what to me is a despondently long list of disappointments here. My point here is about Bernie, and I want to tell him that what I learned from my experience with Obama means that I “can’t get fooled again.” So when I looked up Bernie Sanders on OpenSecrets.org and saw that he was very much on the take from the military industrial complex, I began to suspect I understood why he wasn’t proposing to fund his boldly progressive social programs with substantial cuts in military spending. I began to suspect that his support for the lavishly wasteful F-35 fighter might be about more than just jobs for Vermonters. I hope my suspicions are wrong. Here’s how I propose to find out.
I have created a petition at change.org which offers Bernie a deal:
“I promise to personally donate $100 to Bernie Sanders’ campaign if he returns all the defense industry money he has received in the 2016 election, or gives it to charity, and he promises not to accept any more donations from the military industrial complex.”
If 1,000 other people make the same pledge, he would have $100,000, making up for the $100k he has received from the war machine this election cycle. He may need more than $100,000 to feel like he can make the promise, particularly if he improbably but not impossibly becomes the Democratic party nominee in the general election, in which case he would need a lot more cash.
In signing the petition, people can promise to pledge any amount they wish by writing another amount in the “I’m signing because” box. I chose $100 because it’s an amount that I personally feel comfortable pledging and because getting 1,000 people to do the same seems attainable, if the idea catches on.
In 2016, I don’t think we can expect a viable presidential candidate to be completely pure in terms of campaign finance, so I’m not asking Sanders to give back all his corporate money. But if we could get a candidate like Sanders, who is clearly running on being the financially purer of the Democratic candidates, to renounce just one particularly nefarious source of influence, one that President Eisenhower warned us against in 1961, we would demonstrate an effective model for further democratizing political influence, and hopefully get a more humane and intelligent foreign policy, not to mention more money for progressive social reforms as well.
Nobody who signs the pledge owes Bernie anything unless Bernie takes the momentous step of giving the money back and renouncing military industrial complex funding. I have no doubt that there are thousands of Bernie fans willing to pay something to see that happen.
This only works if people sign the petition and share the links. So if you think it’s at least worth a try and 2 minutes of your effort, share what you’ve just read, or follow and share the link below.
