Afterword

After devoting eight years of nearly daily campaigning for Bernie Sanders’s presidential bids and being there in late 2015 when he explored a run, personally encouraging him to run at the LA Musicians Union Hall, I have two central conclusions as to why Bernie Sanders was defeated. They may piss you off. That’s of course not my intention.

I have two premises.

1. Bernie never wanted to be President. Not really. His hero was MLK more so than LBJ. He wanted to push American politics to the left to help the poor/working-class & start a political revolution to attack the greedy rich people as he repeatedly recounted memories of made the lives of his own parents very difficult living in a rent-controlled apartment & others like them. He came alive on stage to tens of thousands of people chanting Bernie! Bernie! or in a union hall to hundreds doing the same.

So ultimately and perhaps subconsciously he sabotaged his own campaign by very publically threatening the wealth of the most powerful and dangerous people & organizations in the country & the world including Wall Street banks, big pharma, health insurance corporations the very dangerous US military with its defense contractor industries & every other rich industrialist causing them to conspire using all levers of power like neoliberal centrist friend of Wall St. Barrack Obama & Jeff Zucker’s NBC & later CNN, the DNC with corporate centrists like Rep. Clyburn & others to crush Bernie’s campaigns.