Bernie Sanders – 2016 Presidential Election
2016-03-28 Intellectual Noam Chomsky endorses Bernie Sanders for President https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgTt2ieMC2o
2015-10-13 Bernie and Hillary Duel as Democrats Debate https://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/10/14/bernie-and-hillary-duel-democrats-debate
2015-10-13 CNN Democratic presidential debate Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2015, in Las Vegas.
Politico reports that the Sanders campaign “is touting the debate as a victory expected to expand his audience, boost fundraising, and, most important, peel off Clinton supporters to his cause.
While mainstream media pundits fell in line this week to declare Hillary Clinton the winner of Tuesday’s Democratic primary debate, signs suggest otherwise!
Not only did the U.S. senator from Vermont have “the biggest soundbite of the night,” as Sanders’ senior adviser Tad Devine told Politico—referring, of course, to the “damn emails” line—but he also raked in post-debate donations, won several online polls and focus groups, and dominated the internet and social media over the course of the evening.
“According to Google Trends, Bernie Sanders won the debate,” said Lindsey Cook for US News. “He was the most-Googled candidate post-debate in every state and led Google Search results into [Wednesday] morning. Sanders was also the most-discussed candidate on Facebook.
To the extent online polls have any value, Bernie Sanders won 68% in the MSNBC.com poll; Bernie Sanders won 55% in the Daily Kos poll; Bernie Sanders won 54% in the Time.com poll; and Bernie Sanders overwhelmingly won CNN’s own Facebook poll, not that you would know it from what the pundits were saying on CNN itself. CNN’s own focus group also said that Bernie Sanders won, and Fusion’s focus group said that Bernie Sanders won, and Fox News’ focus group said that Bernie Sanders won.
Corporate media, however, ignored Sanders’ success and clear resonance with voters, choosing instead to push a pro-Clinton storyline.
“Professional political reporters pride themselves on knowing what is really happening,” Gawker‘s Hamilton Nolan argued. “It would be more accurate, though, to say that they establish what is really happening, by creating the narrative that defines our messy political process in the public mind.”
However, Common Dreams reported, it is largely due to Sanders’ candidacy that the White House hopefuls were forced to debate the merits of capitalism on a national stage.
“The winner had to move the issues and set the tone for the evening, which is what Bernie Sanders did on Tuesday,” wrote columnist H.A. Goodman on Wednesday. “Because of his ability to lead on the biggest issues, from the environment to wars in the Middle East, Bernie Sanders is on his way to the Democratic nomination and the first debate was a major stepping-stone. He won the debate, and he’ll win the nomination because only one candidate is setting the agenda for ideas and discussion within the Democratic Party.” Indeed, as Ruth Conniff argued at The Progressive, “the most significant win of the evening was for those millions of people in the Sanders revolution, who continue be inspired by a candidate who speaks seriously and credibly about building a movement to retake our democracy.”
Breaking the usual parameters of election season discourse, Democratic presidential hopefuls Tuesday night debated the merits of capitalism on the national stage—a development that many attribute to the candidacy of self-described socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and rising inequality and discontent.
When CNN‘s Anderson Cooper asked Sanders whether he considers himself a capitalist, the Vermont Senator replied: “Do I consider myself part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little, by which Wall Street’s greed and recklessness wrecked this economy? No, I don’t.”
“I believe in a society where all people do well,” he continued, “not just a handful of billionaires.”
During the debate, Sanders also offered a definition of what he means when he calls himself a democratic socialist: “And what democratic socialism is about is saying that it is immoral and wrong that the top one-tenth of one percent in this country own almost 90 percent—almost—own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. That it is wrong, today, in a rigged economy, that 57 percent of all new income is going to the top one percent.”
Some critics of capitalism who do not share Sanders’ specific political vision argue that there is value in openly discussing alternative systems. “Even if it’s not the definition of socialism that I’d prefer, in this country, with its history, it still feels significant,” wrote labor reporter Sarah Jaffe in the wake of Tuesday night’s debate.
While direct criticism of capitalism in mainstream politics is not unheard of in U.S. history, it is unusual for modern times.
“From the late 1970s to fairly recently, this was certainly outside the norm as a combination of Cold War politics and Reaganomics and other dynamics made it taboo to criticize capitalism, especially on the national stage of presidential politics,” Marjorie Wood, senior economic policy associate at the Institute for Policy Studies and managing editor of Inequality.org, told Common Dreams.
A key reason that the US has so many wars is that big US media have a strong pro-war, pro-Empire bias. You rarely see big US media badgering a politician for supporting a war that turned out to be a catastrophe. But it’s commonplace for big US media to badger politicians for opposing wars, even catastrophic ones.
CNN journalist Anderson Cooper is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Here’s Anderson Cooper, badgering Bernie Sanders at the first Democratic debate for opposing the CIA’s illegal war on Nicaragua in the 1980s and you supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Interestingly, during this period, Anderson Cooper was working for the CIA.
Millions of Americans “supported the Sandinistas in Nicaragua” in the 1980s. In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the US government-installed Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, promising to address Nicaragua’s extreme poverty and the lack of basic government services like education and health care for the majority of the population. In 1982, Nicaragua was recognized by the World Health Organization as the third world country that had made the most progress in health care.
Under the Reagan Administration, the CIA organized a terrorist army (the “Contras”) to attack the Nicaraguan government. Millions of Americans participated in a solidarity movement to oppose US military intervention in Nicaragua, including public radio host Ira Glass, actors Ed Asner, Mike Farrell and Diane Ladd, civil rights leader Julian Bond and engineer Ben Linder, who was killed in a terrorist attack by the CIA’s army. The US-Nicaragua solidarity movement succeeded in passing the Boland Amendment in Congress, cutting off US funding to the CIA’s terrorist army, which led the Reagan Administration to try to fund the Contras illegally through arms sales to Iran. When these illegal activities were exposed, it became the Iran-Contra scandal.
.
,
progressiveissuesblog 