2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumBernie Sanders: The Quiet Revolt
In 2003 I wrote in my The New Ruthless Economy that one of the great imponderables of the twenty-first century was how long it would take for the deteriorating economic circumstances of most Americans to become a dominant political issue. It has taken over ten years but it is now happening, and its most dramatic manifestation to date is the rise of Bernie Sanders. While many political commentators seem to have concluded that Hillary Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee, polls taken as recently as the third week of December show Sanders to be ahead by more than ten points in New Hampshire and within single-figure striking distance of her in Iowa, the other early primary state.
Though he continues to receive far less attention in the national media than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Sanders is posing a powerful challenge not only to the Democratic establishment aligned with Hillary Clinton, but also the school of thought that assumes that the Democrats need an establishment candidate like Clinton to run a viable campaign for president. Why this should be happening right now is a mystery for historians to unravel. It could be the delayed effect of the Great Recession of 2007-2008, or of economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s unmasking of the vast concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent and the 0.1 percent of Americans, or just the cumulative effect of years of disappointment for many American workers.
Such mass progressive awakenings have happened before. I remember taking part in antiwar demonstrations on the East and West coasts in the Fall and Winter of 1967–1968. I noticed that significant numbers of solid middle-class citizens were joining in, sometimes with strollers, children, and dogs in tow. I felt at the time that this was the writing on the wall for Lyndon Johnson, as indeed it turned out to be. We may yet see such a shift away from Hillary Clinton, despite her strong performance in the recent debates and her recent recovery in the polls.
If it happens, it will owe in large part to Sanders’s unusual, if not unique, political identity. Consider the mix of political labels being attached to him, some by Sanders himself: liberal, left-liberal, progressive, pragmatist, radical, independent, socialist, and democratic socialist. Sanders’s straight talk about the growing inequalities of income and wealth in America has been much written about, notably in a long profile of him in The New Yorker in October. But most of this writing has been of the campaign trail genre, and has not gotten very far in sorting out the strands of radicalism that have come together in Sanders’s run for the presidency and that have attracted large numbers of Americans dissatisfied with their deteriorating economic circumstances and with the politics that has helped create them.
Sanders is unusual because he brings together three kinds of radicalism, each with very different roots. First is Sanders’s commitment to bringing the progressive ideas of Scandinavian social democracy to the United States, including free and universal health care, free higher education at state colleges and universities, mandatory maternity and sick leave benefits, and higher taxes on higher incomes. In American political history you have to go back to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society or even to the early New Deal to find anything comparable.
The second strand of Sanders’s radicalism is his excoriating account of contemporary American capitalism, and with this he neither looks nor sounds like a consensus-minded Scandinavian social democrat. Here Sanders is willing to name and denounce the new economic royalists—what he calls collectively the “billionaire class”—in a way that Hillary Clinton, who has relied heavily on their financial backing, has not. These include the leading Wall Street banks and their lobbyists; the energy, health care, pharmaceutical, and defense industries; and the actual billionaires deploying their wealth on behalf of the far right, foremost among them the Koch brothers, the Walton family of Walmart, and the real estate tycoon Sheldon Adelson.
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http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/12/23/bernie-sanders-quiet-revolt/
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ViseGrip
(3,133 posts)Sheldon is in the papers again today, for buying out the newspaper, so he can influence the people for his own interest.
Too familiar, the jig is up. The media works in concert with our corporations. This is exactly what Bernie is trying to change. The power of the corporations in this country, eroding our citizen's way of life in the U.S.
This must stop.
The U.S. needs Bernie now.
cali
(114,904 posts)bjobotts
(9,141 posts)
CorporatistNation
(2,546 posts)Michael Moore has a New Movie that is gonna be a REAL Barn Burner... Introduced via Bus Tour Rock Star Style... Just the kinda thing to Fuck Up The Hillary/Debbie Coronation... In A BIGGG Way! 
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)
haikugal
(6,476 posts)A very good read.
K&R....
SandersDem
(592 posts)
CharlotteVale
(2,717 posts)
chervilant
(8,267 posts)I started researching what I call radical income inequity back in the days when several members of this very forum poo-pooed me and my results: in short, less than 400 people owning and controlling nearly half of the planet's resources, including human resources. I got called many things, most of them not nice, as I struggled to make others aware of the corporate megalomaniacs who've usurped our media, our politics, AND our global economy.
Then, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" came out. I became aware that many more of us than I knew are researching and documenting radical income inequity.
Now, not so many of us are naysayers about this radical income inequity, and Bernie is spot on when he discusses how detrimental is this amassing of wealth and power in the hands of a very few, most of whom care not a whit what happens to the vast Hoi Polloi.
Well, Bernie cares. And, he has my vote, and the votes of all my democratic friends save one.
Good read.
Uncle Joe
(58,389 posts)Thanks for the thread, cali. 
senz
(11,945 posts)Looking forward to the author's second article:
cali
(114,904 posts)mountain grammy
(26,642 posts)and thank you.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)farleftlib
(2,125 posts)Great read. K & R. They can't keep a good revolution down, no matter how hard they try.
jwirr
(39,215 posts)if Bernie loses that he has started something and it will not go away. I agree with him. We have set the issues into the memory of the people and we will work on them until we get some change.
BeanMusical
(4,389 posts)Great post.
Indydem
(2,642 posts)Bernie: I will give you a free college education, free healthcare, extra vacation at work, a $15 minimum wage, and a unicorn!"
Voters: "Yay!" <--- End of discussion for Bernouts
Discerning voter: "How are you going to get this through a divided congress or pay for it?"
Bernie: "That's not important. All you need to know is that rich people are really bad and I'm going to give you free stuff!"
Discerning voter: "Uh. That's not an answer." <--- Hillary supporter is created.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)is talking about.
That is Bernie's strength.
Those of us who actually attended his rallies know that his message is not at all as presented in your post.
Bernie is not telling us he will give us those things.
He is telling us that he wants to form a movement through which WE must work to demand those things, to elect a Congress that will enact social legislation.
Bernie is no fool. He has years and years of experience as the mayor of Burlington and as a member of Congress both in the House and the Senate. He is a realist.
Bernie is not promising to magically provide free college or universal healthcare, etc. He is asking us to work with him to get his programs enacted in Congress.
In contrast with Bernie, Hillary has no proven record of getting much of anything done.
Even her management of the State Department will be a problem in her campaign.
Have you read Seymour Hersh's article on the rat line between Libya and Syrian rebels including extremists and how that rat line ties into the Benghazi story.
Here it is for your reading pleasure.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n08/seymour-m-hersh/the-red-line-and-the-rat-line
If you cannot read the article, Google and you will find reviews of it. There is also an interview of Seymour Hersh about the article on Democracy Now.
The representation of Bernie's campaign in your post is simply false. Bernie supporters know that Bernie does not promise free college or anything else. He simply says he will fight for those things and asks us to join him and push Congress to enact his agenda.
Please. Listen to Bernie and then post about what he is saying.
Thank you.
seekthetruth
(504 posts)All you have to do is check out who Clinton's major donors are to see who she is heavily influenced by...
Uh. This problem needs fixing.
JunkyardAngel83
(72 posts)Karma13612
(4,553 posts)
beam me up scottie
(57,349 posts)
Akamai
(1,779 posts)From: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces-compassion/ of 4-10-12
"Who is more likely to lie, cheat, and steal—the poor person or the rich one? It’s temping to think that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to act fairly. After all, if you already have enough for yourself, it’s easier to think about what others may need. But research suggests the opposite is true: as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline.
"Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner ran several studies looking at whether social class (as measured by wealth, occupational prestige, and education) influences how much we care about the feelings of others. In one study, Piff and his colleagues discreetly observed the behavior of drivers at a busy four-way intersection. They found that luxury car drivers were more likely to cut off other motorists instead of waiting for their turn at the intersection. This was true for both men and women upper-class drivers, regardless of the time of day or the amount of traffic at the intersection. In a different study they found that luxury car drivers were also more likely to speed past a pedestrian trying to use a crosswalk, even after making eye contact with the pedestrian."
Related research, is the finding that making a sudden big gain -- e.g., winning the lottery -- tends to make people more conservative. See: http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/feb/06/winning-lottery-makes-you-more-conservative
"Forget tax breaks or middle-class welfare. Right Wing political parties’ best chance of rapidly winning over voters could be via the lottery, according to new research.
"A joint Australian and British study has found that lottery winners tend to switch their political allegiances to rightwing parties after their windfalls. They also appear to become less egalitarian and less concerned by the challenges faced by people on low incomes.
"The research analysed more than 4,000 British citizens who won up to £200,000 ($365,000) on the country’s national lottery. Most of these wins were of relatively small amounts, with only 541 people winning over £500 ($910). In all, there were around 11,000 observations of winners, due to the fact that many people won money more than once.
"Even among those who won small amounts of money, researchers found a clear trend of lottery winners switching support from the Labour party, traditionally a leftwing party, to the rightwing Conservatives."
Of course, the above articles do not say that the wealthy are always uncaring, etc., but that they tend to be less caring than the less wealthy. That's sure one reason I would not like to have a billionaire (like Trump, or a half billionaire, like Romney) in the Whit House, or a faux compassionate like Paul Ryan (who posed before cameras at a soup kitchen and pretended to clean pots and pans that had already been cleaned).
To live in the lap of luxury means one does not associate with average needs and wants, leads to underestimating the needs of others and certainly an incredible reluctance to give up even a little bit the wealth one has. There are some wealthy people who realize this -- e.g., some of the wealthy people supporting Bernie -- but they are clearly less numerous than the wealthy who just want to hold on to their wealth or increase it, and the devil take the rest! (I sure remember the howls from the wealthy when Obama tried to raise taxes closer to where the taxes should be. There were comparisons to the Nazi holocaust then.)
beam me up scottie
(57,349 posts)And the longer they've been wealthy the worse it gets.
How can they possibly understand what it's like to go without food or medicine because the rent's due? Or to watch your kids go without?
They call poor people lazy, accuse them of wanting a handout. No one I know wants a free ride, just a light at the end of the tunnel.
cali
(114,904 posts)Indydem
(2,642 posts)It's becoming all you Bernie folks have. No explanations. No information. No dose of reality. Just insults.
RiverLover
(7,830 posts)Bernie's popularity isn't about "free stuff" as you RWrs say, its about a govt that is purchased stock & barrel by moneyed interests and the GREAT need to change it so our govt is working for its citizens again.
Privatized everything, thanks largely to Clinton1, monopolized everything, thanks largely to Clinton1, IT & manufacturing jobs going overseas, largely thanks to Clinton1, unregulated banks gambling with our money, largely thanks to Clinton1...Our current unending war for oil, nothing to do with Clinton1 but Clinton2 sure helped it along....
The list goes on & on, and you expect us to want a Clinton2, or its we want "free stuff."
Third Way, rethug, w/ev you want to call it has been BAD for the country. We want the change Obama was to bring us, but didn't.
Until then, a spade is a spade, and what you're saying IS republican BS.
Indydem
(2,642 posts)Users are constantly posting how progressive Bernie is because he is fighting for:
$15 Minimum Wage
Free College
Single Payer Healthcare
Paid Family Leave
All of which are free things that are being proposed by Bernie with no firm plan on how to pay for it. In the end, what the plan is, is to raise taxes.
If you think that a Scanadanavia type tax structure is so super, you should probably do some research. Do you know how much the average Scanadanavian pays in taxes? Do you know what their bottom tax bracket is? Do you understand what their payroll tax is, on both the employer and employee?
I'm no right winger, but the way the DU has shifted lately, you might get that impression. I represent the JFK/FDR/Carter/Clinton/Obama portion of the party. If you want to throw stones at them, and myself in the process, I will gladly stand with them. If you want to actually have a discussion about what a Bernie Sanders presidency means for our party, and our nation, then let's have that.
Otherwise, keep your bs insults to yourself.
Kermitt Gribble
(1,855 posts)Used right here on DU - by a so-called "Democrat", Hillary supporter. Way to go... 
Indydem
(2,642 posts)When the President proposed the ACA, did he just say he was going to do it, or did he have an actual proposal?
Bernie has nothing. His "proposals" are undeliverable promises.
If that's a right wing attack, to ask for some actual specifics, then I guess I'm right wing.
But I suppose that's what it's coming to around here. If you don't blindly follow Bernard into the battle on your unicorn, armed with the strong power of his rhetoric and promises, you are clearly a Trump supporter.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)In the 1960s, the draft was the coalescing issue that grew out of the Vietnam War, helped those who opposed the war form a movement and then, when that movement was ignored by the Democratic Party, split and immobilize for all practical purposes the Democratic Party.
I would say that until Obama and now Sanders, the Democratic Party never recovered from its rejection of the progressive wing of the Party.
The Bernie candidacy is a test for the DNC. Will the DNC, as it did in 1968, choose to reject a progressive revolution calling the Party to deal with the truly relevant issues of the time and lose this election. (Nominating Hillary will be the result of that choice.)
Or will the DNC learn from past mistakes and embrace Bernie's ideas and Bernie as the candidate. So far it is not looking good for the Party. They seem to be intent on repeating the error made in 1968.
Today, the issue coalescing a revolution among young Democrats is student debt. The burdens of starting families, paying off student debt and trying to build a life that is financially viable, that will end at retirement with a house on which no money is owed and at least some retirement savings while still supporting Social Security, paying for-profit intermediary companies for health insurance, educating your children and supporting our military -- are just too heavy.
Well educated, hardworking young professionals and young working people are losing hope in larger and larger numbers.
The truth about student loans. These numbers are from 2013:
The federal government made enough money on student loans over the last year that, if it wanted, it could provide maximum-level Pell Grants of $5,645 to 7.3 million college students.
The $41.3 billion profit for the 2013 fiscal year is down $3.6 billion from the previous year but it's a higher profit level than all but two companies in the world: Exxon Mobil cleared $44.9 billion in 2012, and Apple cleared $41.7 billion.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/25/federal-student-loan-profit/3696009/
That $41.3 billion is paid out of the paychecks of young people for the most part. Young people starting their families, trying to pay bills including for costly day care and their childrens' educations.
That is an impossible burden on our young people. It discourages many of our brightest, most talented young people from entering public service professions. A doctor can finish medical school owing as much as $250,000 dollars. It will take a lawyer even on a good salary years and years to pay off the often over $100,000 he or she owes when law school is finished.
Let's don't even talk about teachers who borrow to go to college. They may owe less when they graduate, but teachers earn less. So the burden of repaying their loans will hit them, in many cases, just as hard as repaying larger loans will hit those who enter professions that demand more education.
Student loans are crushing our young people. We have to fund college in state schools for everyone. And the cost of Pell grants and other things that are now funded by student loan interest has to be covered by some other kind of tax. Bernie's idea of a tax on Wall Street trades to cover education at state colleges and community colleges for all who are eligible is excellent in my opinion.
This is just one of Bernie's proposals that fulfills a compelling need.
cali
(114,904 posts)Bohunk68
(1,364 posts)You have made very clear the enormity of the issue.
Akamai
(1,779 posts)What an onerous burden to impose on students, on their families, and on society.
Money lenders are too often willing and eager (because it makes their threats more effective) to ruin young lives. The Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to reduce real pain and real inequity. Too bad the MSM didn't cover it better and politicians didn't speak out more -- with the notable exceptions of Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, and a number of progress.
Oldtimeralso
(1,937 posts)zentrum
(9,865 posts)
Live and Learn
(12,769 posts)Karma13612
(4,553 posts)Betty Karlson
(7,231 posts)Sanders brings together three kinds of radicalism. He has combined them to meke them work for America. That is his greatest contribution to his country.
cali
(114,904 posts)A tip of the hat to MeNMyVolt for the heads-up.