I have long believed that capitalism is probably the best economic  system but one that has been corrupted by the rich to their advantage and to the disadvantage of everyone else. This leads me to believe that with the right sort of regulation it could be de-corrupted and then more fairly serve people as a whole. Good luck on that but it is certainly worth persuing. Sanders seems to agree. As it is though, capitalism is an organizing force, a driving force, and also a  tool, of subjugation and extraction from the less powerful to the lopsided benefit of the more powerful. I believe, along I think with Street, that capitalism as it exists now in our country is ultimately doomed to implode even if it doesn’t first push the world to explode.

Maybe Sanders will be effective in moving Hillary’s rhetoric somewhat to the left and that would seem to have some value, as you suggest. But,I do not believe that there is any substantive issue which Hillary as President would act upon after her election in any way differently because of some campaign position she had mouthed in response to to Sanders campaign. Sander’s effect will be to help elect a person he claims to fundamentally disagree with on major issues and he then promises to support after she is elected and Street indicates that even if Sanders was to become President that his  voting history shows there would probably be little difference in his policies regarding the greatest and most imminent threats we, as a country, face and in those areas the neocons [Aptly called “the crazies’] are very comfortable with  Hillary. I say that in the belief that our aggressive militaristic policies are helping create the situations of hardship and depredation both at home and abroad and the resulting counter-productive feedback loop in which relatively small wars will eventually bankrupt us even if none of them explode into a major war which actually becomes an existential threat and in which case would be much different than any previous war. The closer we are to going broke the more aggressive I expect us to become. We will not go down easy. We will try to bully our way out of bankruptcy. Our end, if and when it happens, may be with a whimper but it will be after a hard fight if that is what it comes to. We will use whatever weapons we have in the war we get. We should realize that in that sense we are definitely not “exceptional”, there is a world chock full of people at least as willing to fight when pushed hard enough as we are to send our neighbors kid to fight based on largely unexamined stories we are told.  I do not see a happy ending without a sea-change in in our national conscience. Street’s criticism of Sanders on this issue is what I see as most important and most instructive in what he has to say. 

I am not ‘against’ Sanders but I believe he is overrated and that any great hope of his pushing the Democrats to the left based on his candidacy is misplaced. At the same time, I hope his views do get wide coverage just like I was happy to see some of Ron and Rand Paul's issues injected into the national conversation for due consideration.