A year ago, from the protected confines of their gated mansions, the wealthy found themselves cheering on essential heroes, the people they had previously referred to as low skilled workers, as they literally died to keep the wealthy’s food and Amazon packaged delivered without delay. A year later they are trying to cut the little aid they have to make them go back to starvation wages to serve their whims.
How much did we listen to the corporate media drone on and on in their phony piousness about how all the poor, desperate people dying in the pandemic were “heroes” only to now spend all day bringing on extremists like John Kasich to spew his hate about how a $15 minimum wage is far too generous. Turn the channel and watch a panel of millionaires on Morning Joe who sincerely argue that the miniscule aid the poor have received should be revoked so their “heroes” can get back to working their miserable, starvation wage job.
The good news is the people aren’t buying it. As one cheap business owner after another proudly goes on tv to proclaim he pays less than welfare it only exposes the reality of what life really is like for most people. I realize the millionaires in the media assumed people would feel bad for these horrible owners not being able to hire anyone, but it appears as though right, left and center agree that these people are not sympathy worthy. In fact, they are the problem as almost half the United States workers make starvation wages.
As stories roll out about businesses raising their rates to $15 an hour, it has been having mixed results. This hiring problem comes down to as much about wages as it does decency. A local ice cream store gets thousands of applicants when it raises rates, while a corporate franchise still gets crickets. People have had over a year to reassess their lives. With two people working, how much do your really net after paying for daycare, gas, and everything associated with that second job?
Is it worth being subjected to the humiliation it requires to be hired by these corporate behemoths to get a low paying, high stress job? Drug testing needs to go. It is none of McDonald’s or Walmart’s business what their employees do in their private life. How about checking your credit score for a low wage job? Does that seem like how you treat heroes in need? You want to know if they have a felony too? All this for terrible benefits, low wages and the ability to be fired at any time without cause or compensation.
So, why are these wonderful companies having so much trouble finding these essential people? The truest thing ever said is “actions speak louder than words” and their actions prove they don’t see these people as heroes at all. The people understand that. The people learned during the pandemic that the rich have nothing without the workers. The low wage workers are very much essential and you can either treat them like that, or continue to go on cable news looking like a clown about how good the people on welfare have it. Good luck.
I know the corporate media is cheering the recently revealed infrastructure plan by the Democrats as progressive as landmark and transformative, but it is nothing more than a further push into feudalism. This plan is no different than their Covid relief bill where instead of giving us enough money to actually survive a pandemic, the Democrats will give your family $9,000 for your funeral if you die in the noble deed of serving their rich donors while a pandemic rages.
I am all in favor of paid family leave, paid vacation, free childcare and other workers’ rights. However, the Democrats are playing a cynical game here.
How? Because in order to critique this bill they make you attack something as common sense and popular as childcare. They realize this too.
Why this is cynical is they only give these rights to the poorest among us, when not only do these programs rely on universality to survive, but even more craven and most importantly is it just means we are subsidizing the worst of the large corporations who pay starvation wages. This is essentially the taxpayer now subsiding Amazon, McDonalds and Walmart daycare centers. Having free daycare for poor people getting paid starvation wages is like having UBI without cost controls. It isn’t woke or progressive, but just another backhanded way of funneling money to the rich. Making sure workers aren’t being paid starvation wages so their families can not be in poverty should be the obvious goal, not alleviating the childcare dilemma the exploited and poverty stricken workers have.
In this case instead of actually giving every worker a living wage with free childcare, or… *gasp*, the freedom to even have one parent raise the kids instead of having to work 2 or 3 jobs each that would tremendously change their lives, they just subsidize corporate daycare centers so they will get rich and the poor will still work multiple jobs making starvation wages.
However, in maybe the most Orwellian aspect, the government will pay a corporation to raise your kids so their donors can keep exploiting you for massive profits, instead of just paying you to raise your own kid. Of course part of those profits will funnel back to the politician in bribes disguised as family “jobs”, book deals, paid speeches, Netflix production deals, “charitable foundations” and bundled political donations. On a side note, I’ve always imagined the pharma lobby has a warehouse that rivals the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark except nothing but politician’s books they have been forced to buy over the years.
Is this where they keep all the politician’s books they have to buy?
In a sane situation, before trickle down, tax money would be used by the government to create massive public works projects. The government would directly pay the people and then in turn the workers would go to the businesses and spend their money. That is a bottom up approach that has worked for all of history. Now, Democrats are using businesses as the conduit, and as usual the people will just hope that this will trickle down and not disappear in “consulting fees” and other typical donor grift like Obama’s high speed rails and national smart grid that disappeared into consulting fees for their donors. If based on previous plans like this, expect very little infrastructure and a lot of talk about money spent in consulting.
From the electric car chargers to daycare, it all seems like a guise to pretend they are helping the voter, but instead it is just a gigantic giveaway to the corporations to build stuff they would have built anyways. To me it appears this benefits the super rich a lot more than the poor. A lot more. How much faith do you have in corporate trickle down over the last 4 decades? I’m sure there are lots of donors hoping to be the next Solyndra.
If this gets through the senate and it ends up being a true government spending bill, I will admit I was wrong. However, the way this looks now is it is clear this is going to be the government giving private corporations lots of money to do stuff the government could do a lot more efficiently and with much higher wages offered. Don’t hold your breath for anything other than the Democrats subsidizing Walmart’s bottom line by paying for their exploited workers’ daycare and ignore the reason they have to do that is because they can’t afford to raise their own kids on a single Walmart salary. Besides, you want the ultimate proof this is a bad deal? Look how much corporate media is on board. If this was 5 trillion that actually benefited the people first, they would be trashing this every chance they got, like the minimum wage. This is going to benefit the Wall Street, and they all know it.
You often hear the media and politicians talk in puzzled bewilderment at how come so many people became anti vaxxers in this country and how to convert them. Like so many problems we face today, the very people who were responsible for the problems are the last to understand.
I’m not an anti vaxxer at all. I believe in science above all else. I was also 50/50 if I was going to take this vaccine. Not because I didn’t trust vaccines. Not because I didn’t trust science. Not because I am a conspiracy theorist. I was hesitant to take the vaccine because I have been alive for the last 4 decades and have witnessed the depravity of the ruling class and the corporate lapdog media that enables them. I lived through 2020 and the ruling class either through incredible incompetence or cruelty, most likely both, decide to not pay us during a pandemic, but once again transfer trillions in wealth to their richest donors and put the economy first in a sick attempt to keep their donors’ profits rolling, while they pretended to blame the other side as if we are that stupid. Same exact thing, crisis after crisis when we are most in need. Just fatten up their billionaire donors. Hundreds of thousands of American lives sacrificed by our politicians and media and now they sit back and complain that not enough of are working to serve them food during a pandemic for starvation wages.
That is why the vast majority of the public doesn’t trust the vaccine. If you don’t understand, look in the mirror, you are probably part of the problem. The public 100% knows that the people in power don’t care at all about them. AT ALL. Nothing. Lying politicians, lying corporations, and lying media. They are literally the boy who cried wolf at this point trying to convince people to put something in their arm. For example, why would ANYONE trust the pharmaceutical companies at this point? Why? Nobody can give a legitimate reason. Now that would be actually stupid to trust Pharma. Decades and decades of abuse, ruthless killing and unbridled greed is not a trustworthy trait.
The government will literally will pay your family $9000 if you die in the noble effort of serving them fast food, but only $3200 to try to keep you alive over a multi year pandemic. Do the math. You selfishly want to live, politicians and businesses only care about what businesses want. That is the disconnect. People understand that when a majority of the country wants things like socialized healthcare, wealth tax, term limits, money out of politics, but the majority of our congress does not, decade after decade. We understand that isn’t representation. We understand they aren’t serving us. We understand the corporate media will never act in our interest. They serve to distract. Year after year after year after year healthcare is either the number 1 or 2 issue in every poll done. How often does our corporate media actually talk about healthcare policy and the policies the people want. How come they never discuss the disconnect between what we want and what congress does? They know our politicians are all bribed. They aren’t that stupid. They just play the game and get their money.
Decades of eroded trust, as our politicians and media continue to serve the interests of the rich has led us to this moment. Understand when you watch cable news you are watching millionaires interviewing millionaires. There is absolutely zero wealth diversity on those channels. Just rich people talking about what is good for rich people.
I took the vaccine, and would recommend others do too for the sake of humanity, but only because my belief in science is that strong. I am just crossing my fingers that our ruling class didn’t find a new way to kill or maim us and then discard us after their mistake. That would be more in line with how things go in this country. That is where the hesitancy comes from. The recklessness and greed of our politicians, wealthy and media are responsible for this.
Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg, Peter Buxton and all whistleblowers are on the right side of history as far as I am concerned. Even in cases that I might not generally agree with, I think exposing government and corporate corruption in general is always good.
Anyone who knows me, knows I have called out the fabricated Russia story from the very earliest days. Here is an article I wrote before Trump was even in office outlining what was about to come with the Russia distraction. Due to that, I can say this is a cause that I don’t necessarily align 100% with Reality Winner’s cause as I do with Assange or Snowden, but like them I believe she should be released, paid full restitution plus damages for false imprisonment and offered her job back at a minimum. What has been done to her is an injustice, and even more so by the Democrats who caused her imprisonment and have now left her to rot. I can safely say had Hillary Clinton lost with any kind of grace, Reality Winner would not be in prison right now.
Reality Winner’s actions were clearly motivated by the dubious Russiagate narrative drummed up by the Democrats to cover for the establishment’s humiliating defeat to Donald Trump. In that sense, she was a pawn of the Democrats and mainstream media for buying into the Resistance narrative. Her only crime was thinking she was saving American democracy because that is what the Democrats made her believe. For those that don’t know, Reality Winner leaked a document that the Trump administration clearly didn’t want people to see because it played into the Russia meddling narrative. The extent to which they meddled is up to debate and her leaked documents never really gave an answer either. You know how I feel, but that isn’t what I am writing about. I’m here to shine a light on people being used and discarded by a party with zero loyalty to its most loyal supporters.
Anyone who is on twitter is probably used to seeing tweets by Reality Winner’s mom and family pleading Joe Biden and the Democrats for why her daughter is still in prison for helping to expose Trump. I think it was considered a given by many of The Resistance circles that Reality Winner would be pardoned as soon as Trump was out of office. Yet, here we are and things are eerily silent among the Resistance. I have recently seen major media outlets like the Washington Post start to beat the drum, but by mid May and zero response from elected Democrats, and especially the Biden administration it doesn’t look good.
While there are still admittedly people in the Russiagate circle who are still committed to her release, unfortunately for Reality Winner she is discovering most of the Resistance and their powerful Hollywood supporters loudly demanding her release under Trump have given her the quick abandonment treatment that the kids in cages are now experiencing that the Democrats are back in power. It appears as though most of the Never Trump crowd she risked her life to help are nowhere to be found and currently Reality Winner’s most ardent supporters are just her family, dedicated Russiagaters and anti establishment types, who never believed in Russiagate, but in general believe in protecting whistleblowers.
Again, I’m not here to debate what Reality Winner did. This isn’t to debate Russian meddling. This article isn’t to debate whistleblowers. This is simply pointing out that if you put your faith and trust into the Democrats, let Reality Winner be an example of the loyalty they will show you. She will now rot in prison after the Democrats essentially entrapped her into leaking information, making her believe the future of our country was at stake because we had a Russian asset trying to dismantle us from the inside as president. Now they pretend like she doesn’t exist. The good news for both Reality Winner and the kids in cages is someday the Democrats will be out of office and they will need pawns again to exploit for political gain, so maybe they might be highlighted again.
How is it the corporate media and the people in charge are the only ones who don’t get that the people who refuse to get the vaccine don’t require any incentive to do so, because they were the exact same people who were never following the health guidelines to begin with? It is mind numbing watching these ultra liberal over educated millionaires go on tv and espouse that if people realize if they get vaccinated they won’t have to wear a mask anymore, when those are the people who never wore masks to begin with. They don’t care what you or the CDC says.
Even the vaccine card is a gloried index card. If this is required for travel, entertainment venues and retail stores I can assure you this will be the most forged document in the history of the world. I’m sure the Walmart greeter or minimum wage worker is going to question some dude strapped with guns if his vaccine card is legitimate. One pharmacist was already arrested for putting it online, and just google Covid vaccine form scam and you will see it is already a problem. So don’t expect this to stay secure, because it was never secure to begin with. Watching them fill in by hand a black & white printed paper postcard that looks like it was made on Microsoft Publisher is not a real assurance of security. Anyone who believes they are in a completely vaccinated arena, stadium, workplace, airplane, etc this summer is an absolute fool and should immediately apply for a job as a health expert for MSNBC and CNN. The world if full of selfish people, don’t expect that to change.
Yet we have all these geniuses who we are supposed to completely trust with our lives who sincerely believe that the people who won’t get vaccinated have been following CDC guidelines. It makes you wonder if they have ever left their gated Georgetown communities? I honestly don’t know what world they are living in. This latest poll done by Axios/IPSOS is exactly the problem we face, which our experts don’t seem to understand.
As you can see, the people who aren’t socially distancing are the ones who should be. This shouldn’t be a hard concept to fathom, but for our brightest it is. Are they IQ stupid? Probably not. Are they completely sheltered and isolated in their elitist bubble? I think it is obvious. The idea that you couldn’t get 70% of the country to wear a little mask, but you were going to get 80% or more of the country to take a vaccine is some of the most out of touch thinking I’ve ever heard. I have been saying this from the beginning of the pandemic. After decades of abuse and abandonment, the people not only distrust the government but they viscerally hate almost every institution that props them up. You can pay people to stay home for 2 months and end this, or this will just be a giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies to give booster shots for the next 30 years until the next generation achieves herd immunity. I’m not shocked at all the choice we made, but what should be eye opening is just how little the so called “elites” actually understand what is going on in this country.
The post election split is nothing new. Might seem hard to believe but The Daily Kos used to be considered an important leftist blog during the George W. Bush years. Leading up to the 2004 defeat of John Kerry and reelection of GWB, it grew to become one of the bigger online voices for leftists.
As a community they worked to elect and support many (what they believed to be) progressives like Sherrod Brown and Dennis Kucinich, or put progressives in places of power like Elizabeth Warren and Howard Dean. And of course getting Barack Obama elected as president. At the time, it looked like the left was making inroads.
However, reality began to set in for many of us after the Democrats assumed power. We saw the progressive politicians abandon their fighting personas and adopt a baffling insiders game. Even Dennis Kucinich, who I would argue was the most legitimate out of that group, embarrassingly tacked way to the center during his terribly advised, short lived presidential run.
I think it speaks for itself how the rest of that group of progressives turned out playing the insiders game.
However, the issue I am getting to at here is there was a segment of the online left, including the owner of The Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas (Kos), refused to see what was coming even though it was clear. Some eventually came around at the end of Obama’s term, but others, like Markos, blindly stood with the group of progressives he and others worked so hard to elect and put so much faith in. That was the birth of the Warren Democrat. Not because they stood for anything, but because they followed Warren blindly and she dragged them right to the establishment Democrats.
The entire time they never realized their circle was increasingly more liberals and centrist, which should lead them to believe they were the ones who had changed, they believed they were staying consistent. More troubling, they started to attack the left and allies (who would mostly go on to become Bernie 2016 supporters) for being too left. Basically they were mad at the left for not coming with them and Warren when we saw all the flashing red lights. This is the Daily Kos you have known for the last decade.
What is happening now is no different. Leftists will also peel off to the right eventually too, like Cassandra Fairbanks or Shirtless Pundit did in 16. You can see that happening right now. Most of us will grow and evolve our positions but stay anti-establishment left, which I believe is the consistent position through all of this. The FTV more or less sped up the sifting process. Some will eventually realize they were mislead and were attacking the wrong people, but others will blindly support certain politicians until the end, no matter how obvious it is they aren’t heading in the right direction and they need drastic pushing.
The truces that have been talked about are nice and I agree the fighting absolutely needs to end as we have more in common than not. However, becoming allies is a stretch. The main problem is one side, from as diverse as Cornell West and Susan Sarandon, believe the progressives in congress are not using their power. The other side has a problem with the progressives getting criticized. They are squarely in the “give them time” or “they can’t do anything” or “they are doing great” camps. So while we should agree to be civil, the idea that we are going to be able to work in unison is highly unlikely. This is an inside vs outside debate that can’t be worked around. Like I said, some will figure it out but others are going blindly into the light of the insider’s game.
You are witnessing the birth of the new Warren Democrats, just insert a new name. This is exactly the same. It will happen again. Personal politics evolve over time, it’s just life. How to know if you changed or they changed? If you look around and 80% of the people and social media accounts you see and interact with are still there, you didn’t change. If you look around and realize you have lost a lot of people in your circle and are now retweeting people who were in a different circle last election it should be fairly obvious. Nothing wrong with change, just don’t attack people for not going in the direction you decided to, and vice versa.
Let’s get that straight, but nothing contributes more to the immoral healthcare system our politicians are bribed to force upon us than two of the least discussed monstrosities in our health care system, the deductible and in-network/out of network restrictions.
Today I am talking about the deductible.
Politicians want to talk all day about premiums but never want to talk about deductibles (or co-pays) because they know those are the true death panels in American health care. For those not familiar with American health care, a deductible is the amount you must pay before your insurance pays for anything. The premium is your monthly dues, but the deductible is beyond that. Imagine is Spotify offered an individual plan for $500 a month for access to their music. Then they charged you $50 per song until your got to $10,000 out of your own pocket and then every song after that is “free” as long as you keep paying your $500 subscription a month. Reset that every year and that is how the American healthcare deductible works.
Different insurance companies handle these differently but in most cases that is what you can expect. So if you have $10,000 (plus premiums. Family plans would be much larger) in your bank that you can spend on healthcare then insurance pays for everything. If you don’t have $10,000 in your bank you stay at home and bask in the knowledge that the Democrats will proudly go on tv to cite you as a statistic to how many people they have “covered” with what is basically useless insurance. Just window dressing so the politicians can brag and the rich can feel less guilt over their greed and cruelty.
However, that is not what most people hear as millionaires go on tv and wax poetically about what an improvement the ACA is over what we had. It is for them, and the health insurance industry. For the rest of the country we went from having lifetime limits and preexisting condition restrictions, but almost non existing deductibles, to having zero access to actual care, althoug rich people assure us it is great.
What Democrats claim the ACA does:
1. The government subsidizes the insurance monopolies by giving them money to cover more people. 2. Insurance companies in exchange for this huge growth in free business will remove the preexisting conditions and lifetime caps barriers.
What Democrats don’t tell you about the ACA:
3. Insurance companies, while now giving out cheap to free insurance premiums, now have sky high deductibles as one of the barriers to prevent the bottom 90% from using their healthcare. Yes, they have coverage, but they can’t afford to use it. I never thought I would miss “only” having high premiums, but that was a better system for most of us. If anything it was more egalitarian as the rich had to live under the same barbaric rules. Now they just narrowly focused on who the death panel is targeted at. So more people are covered, statistically, but even less people than before the ACA can actually see a doctor.
4. The extra subsidized healthcare industry makes unprecedented profits. Rich people get even better healthcare than before. Everybody else gets a piece of paper with an insurance logo on it.
So the death panel has already been set and it no surprisingly has set against the middle class and poor. Instead of having medical professionals decide if a terminal 90 year old receives 3 more days of life or a 3 day old get 90 more years of life, we let a wallet decide. One of the cruelest and barbaric health care systems in the world, and we have the Democrats to thank for it. Actually the Republicans, but the Democrats are so insistence the ACA isn’t Romneycare then I’ll give them all the credit they crave on this one. Kind of like the business owner proudly proclaiming on tv that he pays less than welfare, and unbelievably thinks he’ll be viewed as the victim. Have at it Democrats. Take full credit for this abomination.
George Bush stole the election. Barack Obama wasn’t born in America. Donald Trump is a Russian plant.
Notice a pattern?
Keep in mind that over the last 5 months, mostly thanks to Wikileaks, we became aware of the following:
Congress received monetary kickbacks from the taxpayer funded TARP bailout in proportion to what the banks received.
The Chair of the FCC and the head of Homeland Security, among other positions, were essentially sold to the highest bidder.
The Democrats have a spreadsheet called “Pay to Play” where their biggest donors, the amount of the donations and what positions those donors wanted were recorded.
President Obama’s cabinet in 2009 was, in effect, chosen by Citigroup
Democrats had little interest in helping unions or minorities in private, but outwardly still pushed that narrative.
The media was VERY involved in wanting Clinton to win from the offset. This included consulting with her campaign on tactics to use against her opponents and in some cases rigging debates.
And that is just a sampling. In perhaps the most telling example of the ruling elite’s cold indifference to the public we learned that the Clinton campaign purposely pushed Trump to run and asked for the media to give him credibility, only so she would have an easier path in the general. If she lost? Well, we were just going to be stuck with Trump. They knew that the rich and powerful will be fine either way, but the rest of us? Sorry, peons.
Make no mistake, if you think the same illegal and unethical behavior isn’t going on in the RNC and all levels of the so called elite, you really aren’t paying attention. The corruption rotting our government, media and the ruling class, is pervasive at all levels of our society, but none more obvious than the corporate media. Almost all the media you watch, 90% of it is owned by 6 corporations. Ask yourself why, after an election that literally blew the doors off of the systemic corruption of our ruling class, are we dedicating most of our time talking about something as ridiculous as our president being a Russian agent? Why, after the biggest financial collapse in our lifetimes when many wealthy and politically connected people committed global crimes against humanity, did we spend years arguing over the ridiculous premise whether our president’s birth certificate was long or short form?
The simple answer is the main job of the corporate media is to keep us distracted. That is it. It isn’t to enlighten us or inform us. If politicians are the elites’ policy arm, the corporate media is their messaging/propaganda arm. Polls have shown people are more informed watching comedy shows than corporate news. Some channels actually left viewers less informed than if they had just watched nothing at all. Think about that, somebody who is just winging it, just literally guessing, knows more about what is going on in the world than somebody who watches a cable news channel.
Obviously after a while most people would get tired of just being mislead, unless of course they mixed in something divisive with an intoxicating amount of self congratulatory rage , like, say… politics. If it seem as if there is a “right” media and a “left” media, it wasn’t done by mistake. Its the perfect foil. When a Democrat wins, the “right wing” corporate media screams some completely moronic, inflammatory accusation and when the Republicans win the “left” media returns the favor. Whenever there is a major, serious discussion that needs to be had the media steers us back into tribalism. That is their job. Keep us herded up and divided.
At a time we should be demanding ethics reform, investigations into the entire government and likely prosecutions, we are hyperventilating about crowd sizes and if our President is a Russian spy. Seriously. First there is a Muslim Manchurian Candidate, now its a Russian Manchurian Candidate. Come on people… We have got to see through this by now. I am not going to argue whether you think Bush stole the election, Obama isn’t legitimate, or Trump is a Russian puppet, although I think I could point out some major discrepancies in all those narratives, I am only asking if those really are the pressing issues of our time?
Our jobs are being outsourced or automated, while our ruling class has no answers except to accelerate the transfer of wealth from the working class to the global elite with their disastrous policies. The national debt is spiraling to a point of no return which will cripple the future of every worker in this country, with only the pessimistic understanding of more tax cuts and wasteful defense spending from our political class. The media is owned by a small handful of corporations, with new mergers being proposed almost every time you read the news, continually shrinking our choices for who decides what we hear. We are living on a rock hurling millions of miles an hour through space protected by a razor thin atmosphere and we are allowing it to be destroyed, damning the survival of humanity itself, just to narrowly improve quarterly profits for a few. As we circle the drain we continue to be baited by hucksters and/or useful tools in corporate news who are used to fuel the ignorance, instead of facing the real issues facing our lives and planet.
Don’t make the mistake that the corporate media has any interest in actually diagnosing the real problems. Far from it. Corporate news is essentially disguised, to varying degrees, as informative. In reality it is partisan propaganda with divisive, and often combative discussions on everyday current events. They will take an everyday event and make it a political argument. They want to distract you not only to entertain you, but more importantly, to guide your anger away from where it should be directed. When was the last time one of these “serious” Sunday shows had a transparent talk about the corrupting influence of corporate money in journalism? Ever? How about the danger of media collusion and concentration? Certainly not on those self congratulating Sunday “media watchdog” shows. How many shows discuss real campaign finance reform that includes matching funds or other innovative reforms?
The list goes on and on from debt reduction to a realistic discussion not including corporate funded shills about why our healthcare system keeps constantly failing us. On the slow days, if you aren’t getting the distraction du jour, all you will get is political gossip. How is this politician going to get this vote through or who will block this procedure, scripted “surrogates” repeating the tired right or left corporate talking points and the incessantly mind dulling poll discussions. Basically, corporate journalism is a gigantic lie spun to you by a handful of billionaires who don’t want you to think they are to blame for the absolute corruption they perpetuate in our government.
So here we are after another election, left with a bevy of unanswered question and out of nowhere… Russia rigged the election. Really? Maybe it would come off as a tad bit more serious if President Obama and Hillary Clinton weren’t running around all of October mercilessly ridiculing and mocking Donald Trump for suggesting the election could be rigged. Maybe it would come off as a little bit more legitimate if Hillary Clinton wasn’t attending the inaugural. How in any way is that part of #TheResistance by legitimizing his win by attending Putin’s puppet’s inaugural? Do you really think our past heads of state, and the so called victim of this heinous crime, would attend an inaugural by somebody widely known and confirmed as the Manchurian Candidate? Of course they wouldn’t. Maybe it would come off as a bit more believable if we were given a shred of real tangible evidence besides trust the guys who lied to you about the NSA, Libya, Iraq, Vietnam and on and on to push their ulterior agenda. If you can’t trust an espionage agency, who can you trust, right?
Even if it is true, and despite no real evidence it very well could be, and again I am not here to try an change your mind, but is this really the issue we need to be talking about? Should we have been talking about President Obama’s birth certificate in 2009? Was that the most pressing thing in our lives? Was it in yours? As ridiculous as that may sound to some of you, after being drummed up by the “right wing” corporate media, people on the right believed just as passionately that the president was a great danger to the country and held on to the foolish hope that he could somehow be found ineligible. Sound familiar with the “left wing” corporate media counterpart this time? In the grand scheme of things, it was a giant waste of time. Its nothing more than fool’s gold to distract you from the real problems. People should be angry at the state of affairs in this country, but you have to know who your real enemy is.
Although somewhat irrelevant to the point I am trying to make, but for all the hysteria did it even have an effect on the outcome? Seems pretty clear the general election polls over sampled Democratic voters thinking Clinton had locked up the Obama coalition. If they were paying attention going back to the early stages of the race in 2015 and early 2016 all the polls showed that Hillary Clinton did terrible with independents, the largest voting block. She did terrible with independents in the primaries and she did even worse with independents in general election, according to polling during the primaries. Again, this is the largest voting block in America that decides the elections. Russia changed nothing. James Comey changed nothing. During the primaries, the polls showed unfavorable head to heads with all of the GOP candidates before these revelations were revealed. These polls were even more jarring when every one showed Bernie Sanders beating each GOP candidate by a large, and even a blowout margin in many cases. It was obvious she did not do well with a general audience. Democrats loved her, everybody else? Not so much and this wasn’t a secret in 2016, or 2015 either.
This is precisely why they decided to elevate Donald Trump. To hold the American public hostage. Vote for Hillary, who you clearly don’t like, or get this lunatic. Why isn’t that interference into our election being discussed more? Doesn’t that have more of a direct affect on your life? That the media agreeably put Trump on nightly, even would run live feeds of his empty podiums while other much more qualified candidates spoke. Bernie Sanders, who was the only candidate drawing the crowds that Trump was, doesn’t even make a blip in mentions until July 2016, right after he dropped out. In fact he received almost the exact same amount of mentions in the few weeks after he dropped out then all of 2016 previous to that, while the election was at its peak. Wikileaks shows the corporate media had clear favoritism towards the Clinton campaign and colluded in many ways. The elevation of chosen candidates and the blackouts of others is just one of the ways the ruling class attempt to steer the election. As of now, we have no tangible proof with Russia interfering, but we do have 100% verified proof that our own government, media and ruling class colluded to deceive us and in effect try to rig an election for their unpopular, but corporate friendly, candidate in order to get their desired results. Those results, and like so many others from our nepotism addled elite
The results from this election shouldn’t be a surprise. Sure, the corporate media talking heads and pundits dramatically fan themselves and feign disbelief at who could have seen it, when basically every single poll in the primaries showed she was going to most likely lose. Not only did the early polls forecast it, so did most people who were paying attention. It seemed as if every time these Sunday shows would bring
Regardless of how the corporate media tries to frame it, it wasn’t exactly rocket science for the rest of us. They missed what was going on, not everybody as they claim, mostly just them. The rest of us clearly saw the Clinton campaign was ignoring massive segments of the population, not connecting to the real economic anxiety so many Americans are feeling, and overall employing a deeply flawed strategy. However, now none of that, nor does the actual contents of the leaks, the rampant government corruption, job sapping trade deals, our cruel criminal justice policies, the for profit foreign policy, disastrous environmental policies, or anything truly substantive matters because… it was Russia. in somebody not plugged into the D.C. echo chamber, like Cenk Uygur or Michael Moore they would predict Trump would win, to the jaw agape, stunned gaze of the bubble dwelling permanent rotation guests. And it wasn’t just predicting a Trump win, many commentators like Nina Turner, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Thomas Frank, David Sirota, Glenn Greenwald, Nomiki Konst, David Shuster, Jonathan Tasini and others warned of a Trump win throughout the primaries and general election..It shouldn’t be surprising based on the polls cited above that it seems the people least connected to the corporate media were more clued into what was actually going on.class, disastrously backfired and now we have to live with the results, be it nuclear war, uninhabitable air or whatever comes, yet some still choose to get mad at Russia…
The right and left corporate media will keep on going at it endlessly, like those social media chat bots, hoping to keep you paying attention at the entertaining back and forth. Only in this case it isn’t to amuse you, but to keep you from focusing on the real forces raining hell down upon your life. The more serious the problems, the more heightened the new distraction is. The corporate media serves only to distract and channel our rightful anger away from them and onto our fellow working class Americans. The purpose of the corporate media to control the populace, and unless we wake up and realize who is doing this to us, then they do control us.
Use your head. Unplug from the tv for a second. Look around your life. Russia didn’t cause this. The reality is we all know who caused this but some of us refuse to believe it. If we are going to get the change we need to solve these problems, the change we can achieve if we direct our energy in the right direction, then its time to wake up
Listen, Superdelegates! What the Corporate Media and Mainstream “Experts” Refuse to Acknowledge: Bernie is vastly more popular with voters than Hillary
In July the superdelegates will determine who will be the Democratic Party nominee for president. If present patterns continue, expect Bernie Sanders to win most of the remaining primaries and caucuses, and, as in West Virginia, to do so in convincing fashion.
In theory, these superdelegates are supposed to overrule the voters if they think the leader is a poor candidate in November and would damage the party’s chances not only for the White House, but also downticket. It is the rationale for having such a decidedly anti-democratic intervention by party insiders and former officials who are now almost all corporate lobbyists on K Street.
If they do their job, a strong case can be made that Bernie Sanders is by far the best choice for the Democratic Party. If they dismiss or ignore this evidence, they do so at their peril. It is more than the fact that Bernie Sanders routinely and often dramatically outperforms Hillary Clinton in national and state-by-state match-ups with Donald Trump. It is also that her performance in the Democratic primaries has been far from convincing. In what follows I will explain.
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Hillary Clinton is a singularly unpopular candidate, whose unpopularity is such that she may do what was once thought to be impossible: get Donald Trump elected president even though a high percentage of Americans detest Donald Trump.
[graphiq id=”9FD3b1HSm2N” title=”Sanders vs. Clinton: Honest and Trustworthy” width=”600″ height=”587″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/9FD3b1HSm2N” link=”http://presidential-candidates.insidegov.com” link_text=”Sanders vs. Clinton: Honest and Trustworthy | InsideGov” ]
She has negatives in polling far beyond any successful presidential candidate since such polls began 50 years ago. Her only consolation is that Trump has similarly dismal scores.
People know her and it is all but impossible for her negatives to shrink at this stage of her career.
And despite what her followers claim about Bernie Sanders, Bernie has hardly attacked her at all this primary season. He has refused to discuss the email investigation, or the shady links between her conduct as Secretary of State and the large donations made to the Clinton Foundation. He has talked about the Goldman Sachs speeches and demanded the transcripts, but has never mentioned that Hillary did around 90 such talks between 2013 and 2015 that put $21 million into her bank account. No other active politician planning a run for president has ever done anything remotely close to a corporate shakedown tour like this before.
Wait until Donald Trump starts in on her, backed by $1.5 billion in SuperPAC money. Think the news media will continue to avoid ignore and discount her various scandals once The Donald starts in on them? Hardly. Trump plays the corporate news media/NPR like the first violinist in the Cleveland Symphony plays a Stradivarius.
There is a good chance her negatives therefore will go higher. And she will return fire with fire and her Wall Street-backed SuperPACs will run a barrage of their own ads on what a complete schmuck Donald Trump is. There is plenty of material to work with. This type of mutually assured destruction will give the fall campaign the stench of the jockstrap bin in an NFL locker-room after a game played in 90 degree weather and all but guarantee a low voter turnout, which means younger and poorer Americans don’t vote. And that spells disaster for the Democrats up and down the ticket.
Why do I assert there is little popular enthusiasm for Hillary? She cannot do public rallies, because the turnout would be embarrassing. So she is reduced to staged events with invited and controlled small audiences. These look like real events when MSDNC and CNN show clips, but they are Potemkin Villages compared to Bernie’s thriving metropolis.
There is little evidence that active campaigning by Hillary does much to improve her support among voters. The more people see her, it seems the less they like her. She has wisely opted to sprinkle occasional controlled media events among her endless private fundraisers with the billionaire/millionaire crowd, and let the brave journalists at MSDNC, CNN, NPR, the New York Times, AP and the Washington Post advance her campaign aggressively. They comprise her true firewall. That approach may win her the nomination, but it depends upon Donald Trump imploding to be a route to success in November. It is drawing to the proverbial inside straight.
Here is one question her corporate media shills never have asked: Why has Hillary fared so poorly in the caucuses after her “landslide” victories in Iowa and Nevada? Many of these caucuses—all of which were victories for Bernie, generally massive blowout landslides—had unexpected enormous turnouts for caucuses with people overflowing from the venues. But Hillary’s supporters apparently are so unenthused they are not even willing to spend an hour or two showing their support. Better to let Sanders win than to waste more than a few minutes supporting Hillary? That says a lot, doesn’t it? Think those same people who sit out the caucuses are going to volunteer to canvas in September and October? Think again.
Bernie has an army of millions of volunteers ready to devote their lives to his November success and do whatever they can. And they will bring millions to the polls who will vote Democratic down ticket.
Yes, there are her many victories in the 2016 primaries. But how impressive are they, really? Recall that Hillary had a 40 or 50 point lead in virtually every state one year ago, except for Vermont and maybe one or two other states. She began the campaign as perhaps the single most famous active politician in the United States aside from Barack Obama. In large parts of the nation, especially the South, Sanders was mostly unknown. From that lofty perch, her numbers have simply gone down everywhere. And her actual campaigning has not done much to arrest the process.
She has won states in three general categories.
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First are those states that were early in the schedule and clumped together so it was virtually impossible for Bernie to campaign in each of them and raise his profile. These were not only the numerous Southern states that Hillary swept on the first Super Tuesday on March 1, but also important swing states like Ohio, Florida, Missouri and North Carolina that came up two weeks later.
What was striking was that the turnout in all of these races was generally 30-50 percent lower than the turnout in 2008, the last year for a competitive race on the Democratic side. This was an unprecedented collapse in turnout in most of these states that was nothing short of shocking. The average age of the voters was high, relative to the average age in other primaries and certainly in the general election, especially if the Democrats hope to win. In the swath of southern states that came early in the process polling suggested many of the voters had no idea who Sanders even was, and how would they, given the remarkable lack of media attention his campaign generated.
Very low turnouts worked for Hillary. Most new voters coming to the polls were voting for Bernie, so no reason to to sound alarm bells to get more people out to the polls. The DNC, under the indefatigable Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, seemingly internalized this approach, as, by all appearances, there was precious little effort by the party to aggressively register new voters. That will have to wait until Hillary has secured the nomination, when Democrats, by most accounts, will need to get a high turnout to win. Good luck with that, Debbie.
These mega-low-turnout and mega-low-enthusiasm states account for the majority of Hillary’s elected delegates. Most of these states are deep southern states that have not voted for a Democrat for president this century, and only rarely in the past 40 years. And right now, she would be in a stiff battle to win a single one of the swing states like Ohio, Florida, Missouri and North Carolina in November, based on the most recent polling.
So if Hillary gets the nomination it will be built upon a foundation of delegates won in extreme-low-turnout races in states the Republicans will win nearly all of come November.
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The second group of states Hillary has won is those states which had closed primaries so only registered Democrats would vote in them. This eliminated independents, arguably the largest and certainly the most important voting group in the nation, and the sector that will certainly determine who wins the November election. It also eliminated disproportionate numbers of prospective first-time voters, who are generally younger and poorer than those already registered to voter. These, too, are crucial constituencies for a Democratic victory in November.
Closed primaries are a residue of machine politics and indefensible. Political parties should be using primaries to attract and encourage new voters to join their ranks, not to establish a members-only club where party officials have whip-hand control. Not if they are serious about winning general elections.
These closed primary states all came at the end of April, as Bernie was on a long winning streak of landslide victories, topped by a crushing win in Wisconsin on April 5.
As fate has it, Bernie Sanders is the most popular candidate with independent voters in the race in either party. He is also the most popular candidate with voters under 30, perhaps 40 or 45, in either party. Scratch these voters from a primary and Bernie is going to have a very hard time winning. Especially in states like New York where voters had to switch their registration to Democratic fully six months before the primary to vote in the 2016 primary.
Bernie’s appeal to independents is something that does not compute for corporate media/NPR types, so they simply gloss over it. In the group think of the corporate media experts and people like Nate Silver, people on the left are Democrats, people on the right are Republicans, and independents are people wedged between them, often liberal on social issues but fiscally conservative.
By this unquestioned logic, one would expect the democratic socialist Bernie to dominate closed primaries as only lefty Democrats would vote, while poor pro-business, pro-military Hillary would not have all her centrist independent supporters able to vote for her. She wouldn’t have a prayer. She would be much stronger in a general election than in the activist-dominated Democratic primaries.
But this obviously has not been the case. Independents are only rarely wedged in the narrow space between Hillary Clinton and John McCain. They tend to be all over the place, and very often well to the left of both parties on numerous issues. That is why they tend to adore Bernie Sanders and have his entire career. They have a strong distaste for corruption and conventional political bullshit, and that is why Hillary finds herself decidedly unpopular with them.
So closed primaries are manna from heaven for Hillary. Too bad for her the general election is not restricted to registered Democrats, preferably over the age of 45.
To put this is context, Bernie won Wisconsin on April 5 with a massive 57-43 landslide. This was a crucial win for him, because history shows that no Democrat has won the White House since 1948 who did not win the Wisconsin primary. In fact, Wisconsin has voted for the Democratic Party nominee every year since 1960, except for the wild year of 1968, when Hubert Humphrey was not in the race or on the ballot. Wisconsin has always played the role, coming in early April, of deciding between the two finalists and picking the winner.
Wisconsin assumes that role because it is an open primary with same-day voter registration. Someone can walk up to the polls, register, and then pick whichever party they wish to vote in that day. This means Wisconsin voters, after having a few months to size up the field, tend to make smart informed choices. They engage. Wisconsin tends to have one of the highest turnout rates for primaries in the nation. And, by the way, they do not always pick the more liberal option; Wisconsin went for Kerry over Edwards, Clinton over Brown, Dukakis over Jackson and Carter over Kennedy.
But if Wisconsin had been a closed primary, and did not have same-day registration, Bernie would have had a difficult time winning Wisconsin, despite being immensely popular in the state. This would have been doubly true if Wisconsin had the sort of shenanigans that were commonplace in New York that barred legitimate voters from the polls.
That is the effect of closed primaries. In New York, Hillary Clinton’s home state, Bernie should never have had a chance on paper. After all, in his home state of Vermont Bernie clobbered Hillary with 86 percent of the vote! In 2008 in New York Hillary demolished Obama in New York by an even larger margin than she beat Bernie in 2016. But his enormous crowds at rallies across the state fueled speculation that he might do the impossible and defeat Hillary on her own turf. It now looks like some, perhaps many, of the people at those rallies were ineligible to vote. Had New York been an open primary with same day registration, Bernie may well have won New York. He certainly would have made it close. The same is true for Pennsylvania and he would have won Connecticut going away.
The fact is, Bernie has not won a single primary yet that has been closed.
So closed primaries that restrict same day registration are very good news for Hillary.
The bad news for Hillary is that the general election is not a closed primary, and all the other voters who could not pass through the turnstiles at a closed primary but can vote in November are far from enthusiastic about her.
Three closed primaries remain on the Democratic schedule in 2016, in Oregon, Kentucky and New Mexico. If Bernie wins any of them it can be seen as a sign that Hillary is continuing to weaken.
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The third type of primaries (and caucuses) that Hillary has won is the five states that were virtual ties—Iowa, Nevada, Massachusetts, Missouri and Illinois. Bernie had one of these virtual tie states in Michigan. In all these states the delegates were split almost evenly. In Nevada and Iowa, as well as the other Hillary “victory” states, the local Democratic Parties were moving heaven and earth to get her victory, and these are not parties that are necessarily known for their commitment to the ethics of the Marquess of Queensberry.
Regrettably, except for some superb local journalism, Hillary’s corporate media/NPR firewall had no interest in examining the nature of these elections, or simply calling them ties, even in absurd cases like Iowa and possibly Missouri where Bernie may well have won the popular vote. Instead these were presented as unequivocal and decisive Clinton victories. This is important because each of these states came at crucial times in the narrative and allowed Hillary’s media firewall to cast the election as one where Hillary had won enormous and crucial victories, and in every case these “victories” were presented as being clear evidence that Sanders had little hope to win the nomination.
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So that is the roster of victories Hillary has secured in the 2016 primary/caucus season. She can only win the nomination thanks to the unelected delegates in Philadelphia. If these superdelegates do their job honestly—a Grand Canyon sized “if”—Bernie will get a fair hearing and real evidence will be considered about who will do best by the party come November, and long into the future.
In that case the evidence is clear: the superdelegates would vote for Bernie and recognize that he is the future of the party and the country. He is returning the party to its New Deal past with unprecedented support from Americans under the age of 30, and powerful support from Americans under the age of 45. (If Hillary Clinton had youth support like Bernie has, the corporate news media would be beside itself assessing the incredible phenomenon. Live coverage of her massive rallies would be de rigueur. Because it is Bernie, this issue gets brief mention and is then skipped over. Few Americans know that almost anywhere in the country, several times a week, Bernie gets a crowd from 7,000-20,000 on less than 72 hours notice.)
But if the superdelegates do hand the nomination to Hillary, they should not assume that Bernie’s supporters are sheep who can be herded by corporate media jawboning into supporting her campaign. They are “beyond your command,” as the sage once sang. There is going to be a sense of outrage to what many will regard as an illegitimate outcome of a rigged system. Many Bernie supporters will in fact end up voting for Hillary, and, as an old-timer living in a swing state, I will likely be one of them. That depends upon how it plays out in the next few months.
But one suspects countless others will possibly pull the lever for Trump or, more likely, simply tune out electoral politics altogether. And if they do, it will be for understandable reasons. The Democrats Party will have lost a generation in 2016, and perhaps forever. If the superdelegates go to Philadelphia convinced Bernie was a fluke and that all will return to business-as-usual come August, they have been paying too much attention to their pals in the corporate media and far too little to what is happening on the ground in this country.
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