Paying a lot of attention to campaign promises (of Bernie Sanders or Trump or anybody else), other than as a gauge of what the public wants, reflects a failure to understand the actual cause and effect relationship that operates in the world. We need to understand how things work. What Congress and the President do or do not do has virtually nothing to do with the supposed political views of the people in Congress or the person in the  Oval Office. Nixon was a big conservative. And yet his administration behaved like a very liberal one, in fact it was one of the MOST liberal administrations. Nixon pushed for Affirmative Action, for a better social safety net, for a detente with Communist China. Why? Because during his administration people were rebelling in the streets, forcing the ruling class to respond in a manner it thought necessary to prevent the growth of an even more dangerously revolutionary movement. The ruling class response was not determined by Richard Nixon's political beliefs or persona; it was determined by the "people in the street"--by what they were doing, by the level of popular resistance and its explicit aims. Do you think Nixon decided to withdraw troops ignominiously from Vietnam in 1975 because he had mysteriously turned from a hawk to a dove? No! It was because his generals had informed him that American GIs could no longer be counted on to fight the Viet Cong, that GIs were massively refusing to fight by 1975. Nixon could have been Genghis Khan and he would still have withdrawn troops from Vietnam. We need to understand what is cause and what is effect.

How come every American politician now says they are very concerned about economic inequality and have a plan to reduce it, but a decade ago nary a single one said such a thing? Is it because all of a sudden American politicians became better people? No! It is because of Occupy Wall Street, which at one point according to a Time Magazine poll had the support of a majority of Americans. The ruling class was afraid of where the Occupy movement might lead, and so it used cops to drag the occupiers off the places where they were camped, and the state and city politicians--no matter what their political stripes, be it conservative or liberal--ordered the police to carry out the required violence or threat of violence to clear out the occupiers. And these politicians did what they were told. Do you think that if we had only elected more liberal governors and mayors then the occupiers would have been left in peace to build a movement that might have grown larger and more explicitly revolutionary?

As Naomi Wolf documented the FBI and bankers and other private-sector security groups worked together to suppress the Occupy Movement. The ruling class uses  both governmental and private institutions it controls (such as the CIA) to do what they want, and if a sitting president doesn't go along they will assassinate that president, as Allen Dulles, with a wink and a nod from the billionaires, orchestrated the assassination of JFK after JFK fired him as Director of the CIA. The CIA obeyed Allen Dulles (who was a retired person with no formal authority, whose office was his private residence), not JFK's new appointed "CIA Director" because the CIA people knew that Dulles had the backing of the real power in the United States. Bernie Sanders surely understands this full well already, and if not he would be informed of his real status in the hierarchy of power as soon as he entered the Oval Office. A president Bernie Sanders, if he is elected, will get the approval of the plutocracy if he keeps Americans thinking that they don't have to make a revolution because "Bernie's working on getting you what you want--just gotta be patient you know." And Bernie can probably to this for the plutocracy very skillfully, because he has mastered the ability to make these promises.

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John Spritzler, editor