Memo for the Public: Most of You Agree with Bernie Sanders' Message

[cal04]

The mainstream media, despite a fixation with Republican Donald Trump's rising candidacy, have started to notice that Bernie Sanders is closing in on longtime Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. Even so, these reports have missed the big story: that most Americans agree with Sanders' mantra against economic inequality. Instead, his position is routinely characterize as simply located on the left.

Now, with the presidential race heating up, it is more crucial than ever for voters to know that in fact most of them support Sanders' signature issue. Just look at this summer's polls, as with the New York Times surveys reporting that 57 percent of respondents want the government to do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, while a whopping 84 percent percent think that money has too much influence in political campaigns.

Even those who cheer Trump's seemingly racist immigration-restriction rhetoric often add that they support him because, as a billionaire, he is not beholden to wealthy donors. All of this of course echoes the populism of the first Gilded Age, a mass movement that also contained elements of the right as well as the left -- but, then too, with the general public mostly supporting the latter's efforts to limit the growing concentration of wealth and political power. The successful campaigns for constitutional amendments establishing graduated income tax and the direct election of senators are echoed today in such initiatives as the push for an amendment to overturn the Supreme Court rulings that have facilitated the outsize influence on our electoral system of big donors.

Meantime the major media outlets tend to focus on Sanders' identity as a democratic socialist, as with a recent New York Times Magazine interview that harped on that theme to the exclusion of policy questions. Sanders' political label does not, however, explain these journalists ignoring the widespread popularity of his message, for public officials with no such tag -- e.g. Elizabeth Warren -- find their own critiques of economic inequality similarly mischaracterized as located on the left side of the political spectrum.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-leininger-pycior/memo-for-the-general-publ_b_8094098.html

[merrily]

1. Oh, please. No one missed it. They are not trying to report the news, but to shape it, to try to

keep America moving rightward, with incessant propaganda.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12777036 (Let's talk polls.)

If I quickly found that info, just to do a message board post, am I really supposed to believe that it is a secret to professional journalists and professional pundits?

The entire political "community" and the entire community of what passes these day for journalistic (ish) have an agenda. We have to stop excusing these two groups--which have been morphing into one--with words like "chicken," "spineless," "clueless," etc. None of those apply. Substitute words like "calculated," "disingenuous," "hypocritical" "kabuki theater" and I bet the deed to my home that you will come a lot closer to the reality.

I know reality is not as soothing. I mean, who the hell wants to see an over-indulged, out of shape emperor starkers? However, we are sunk if we keep fooling ourselves that we who post on a message board as a pastime are so much more knowledgeable and sophisticated than the professionals.

[PatrickforO]

3. I like your second paragraph, and have saved the link.

I believe this particular election is the most important of our lives, because we are only a step away from an oligarchic police state. If we want this country to be what it can be, as opposed to what it is, then we must realize that WE are all who stand between corporate owned mass media and an Orwellian nightmare.

[merrily]

4. Thank you, Patrick. I am flattered. "There is nothing a great country cannot do." Bernie Sanders.

I share your belief that this is a critical primary. IMO, it is the most critical primary of my lifetime. If Bernie loses, I don't know what it's going to take for me to get over it. I don't know if I will be able to remain engaged. Oh, I'll continue to vote. But, I will be disengaged.

[daleanime]

5. +1

[Enthusiast]

6. +1 a huge bunch! Very well said.

I am tired of their act, their playing dumb. It does not fly. I now recognize when I am being played. Hear that DWS?

[PatrickforO]

2. We knew this would happen, because this is what the corporate owners of the MSM want.

But we have an increasingly large network of people who don't rely on the MSM to get the word out, and our vehicle is social media. The upcoming primary caucuses and primaries, and subsequent general election will tell whether or not a huge social media presence is sufficient to overcome MSM hysteria and misinformation.

But maybe the MSM will learn first hand that "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." (Abraham Lincoln)

Here are three other apropos quotes by Abraham Lincoln:

-My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.

-We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

-America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

So the kind of America we leave for our grandchildren is up to us!