First, I appreciate that you're not on Steemit merely for money, as you wouldn't make this post if you were. Good on 'ya!

Second, @berniesanders has actual supporters, because a lot of the things that set him off are actually undesirable. Whales are just as cowardly as the weakest krill, and they are usually quite focused on money, which is why they have it.

For them, it is a poor business decision to spend their time - and particularly their treasure - trying to defend against such abuses. As you can see from the extensive lack of comments on this post, even those that have much to gain from it, who have been where you are now, aren't backing you up either.

@berniesanders has been a whale since there has been Steem, because he mined it from the get go. I'll point out that most of the Steem in existence today was mined initially, even though there hasn't been any mining for over a year now. He has a fuckton of SP (or is it a metric fucktonne?) and trying to impose external controls on him creates no profits, causes losses, and creates mechanisms that affect the rest of the whales - not something they want, generally.

So, he does some stuff they like, and don't wanna do themselves. Fucking with him is inconvenient and unprofitable, at best. Whatever they do to him will be available to be done to them, which they don't want to promote.

Third, while he is easily characterizable as mercurial, he isn't psychopathic. There are plenty of posts that have mentioned @berniesanders that he hasn't flagged, even when they are critical of him. While it's of no import statistically, my own experience shows this, during discussions in which I learned of Steem's genesis.

Lastly, I think changes are afoot that will make even @berniesanders reign in his less acceptable practices. When SMT are pimped, the market will have to consider Steem, and Steemit is the pool of evidence of how well the blockchain works.

The weighting of VP by SP gives whales their power, including @berniesanders, and either that is gonna change, a lot, soon, or more, like free speech itself, is gonna change on Steemit. If the VP weighting scheme of each SMT can be other than the way it is on Steemit (which I seem to recall, vaguely, is the case) then the fact that witness votes are thusly weighted still remains a threat to the blockchain integrity.

While it is of great import to you (and those others who have been where you are, who I will not drag into this by naming them) that @berniesanders can flag you into oblivion, when the changes that make the witnesses no longer vulnerable to concentration of wealth occur (which is prolly gonna happen before SMT are issued, because such control of the blockchain has got to be considered by any reasonable potential adopter of SMT as minimal due diligence) then the problem @berniesanders represents to you will probably be solved as a side effect.

There are very few ways to secure the witnesses from simply being bought, and the only one I can conceive of is changing VP weighting, whether simply for witnesses, or all of Steemit.