A lot of people are pessimistic about the chances of Bernie Sanders to become president. There are good reasons for that. The first is that the corporate media have blacked him out. In the worst case, since the beginning of the year, ABC World News has given 81 minutes of air time to Trump, only 20 seconds to Bernie, in spite of the fact that they both have about the same level of support. Another is that the Democratic National Committee, which is charged with electing Democrats and has the responsibility for arranging the primary debates, is trying its best to scuttle his chances by holding the debates at times when the fewest people are likely to tune in. Like in Iowa when there was a big football game happening, or on Saturday night before Christmas. They want to minimize his exposure to benefit Clinton.
A third is the sheer audacity of thinking an old Jewish socialist can be elected president. Really, can that be possible? Lastly Hillary has a commanding lead in nationwide polling. However, she has the same lead over Sanders at this point in the campaign as she did over Obama back in 2007 and we all know how that worked out. And who would’ve thought back in 2006, two years before the 2008 election, that a half-black man would be elected president? Impossible to imagine. And yet, unimaginable things do happen in politics sometimes.
Nationwide polling shows that Bernie beats every Repug and is ahead of Trump by 13 points, a veritable landslide. Not only that but he’s ahead of every Repug by a wider margin than Hillary; 6 points ahead of her against Trump. Her problem is that a large sector of voters don’t trust her. You can expect that of Repugs, but it’s also true of independents, who are now a larger group than people who identify with individual parties.
The Repug clown show are all pretty much batshit crazy, with the Trumpster leading the pack: a godsend for the Dems since no matter how much he is loved by regressive Repugs, he could never win over the majority of voters. Especially after alienating so many minority voters. Like it or not, minority voters are an increasing share of the American electorate. Elections cannot be won strictly on middle class, middle American or southern Americans. Of course there’s always fraud. Obama won his two contests by a wide enough margin to overcome dishonest counting. That’s the challenge of any Dem campaign.
Meanwhile Sanders draws the largest crowds of any candidate on either side and has recently broken a record in the number of individual contributors. He doesn’t take corporate money, nor does he need it as long as he can maintain his momentum through social media and personal experience. He also speaks to the majority of voters when he advocates single-payer health care and free tuition in public higher education, for instance.
Polls have consistently shown that Americans as a whole like single-payer by a wide margin and Dems like it by about 90%. It isn’t pie-in-the-sky, as suggested by one of Obama’s flacks, as long as the president is willing to take on the insurance industry. And who could be against free higher ed when the cost is a trifling $62b, one tenth of the military budget. As mentioned in a recent post, a small number of America’s wealthiest people could cover that cost for a decade and they’d still have billions and billions to play with, more than any human being could ever really need or have use for. Meanwhile every American who’s shut out of higher education because of the cost or fear of assuming immense student loan debts, is a loss to the society.
Hillary is starting to get nervous, she’s been shunted aside before. As a result, in the last debate she turned hard right to denounce those two proposals claiming they will cost trillions of dollars, trillions I tell you! Technically she’s right about single-payer since there’d need to be a new tax to pay for it, and she’s talking about the ten year cost, but in reality it’s a lie and obfuscation since the overall cost to society would be reduced by about $400 billion per year. That’s because a very large proportion of hospital costs involves filling out insurance forms. Also 15 to 20% of health care costs go for insurance company profits while the administrative cost of Medicare – single-payer for seniors – is down around 3%.
Finally it’s an absolute travesty of justice and fairness that the Repugs in congress have prohibited Medicare from negotiating with the Pharmas for cheaper drugs. They can charge whatever they want, like the supreme asshole hedge fund dickhead who raised the price of one dose of a life-saving drug from $13.50 to $750 and later, to enshrine his magnificent greed in infamy, said he should have raised it more. He did back down and now is being pursued by the government for stock fraud… couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow.
Single-payer is more than just hassle free, debt free health care; it also allows people to change jobs easily since many Americans are stuck in jobs they dislike because they’re afraid to lose their insurance. And with so many Americans working in the part time/on call economy they’d at least not have to worry about health care. Hillary, thus, has come down hard on the side of the insurance industry. Even with Obamacare the majority of people filing for bankruptcy do so because of health care costs, and a majority of those actually had health insurance but couldn’t afford the co-pays. Obamacare is only incrementally better than the previous setup. It’s a bastardized, half-assed patchwork of most people getting minimal coverage and some still getting nothing at all. It needs to die a speedy death and replaced with a system designed for the benefit of all the people as opposed to the industry, and only Bernie and a Democratic congress can do that.
The health care industry is one of her biggest backers along with the big banksters. She’s against reinstating the Glass-Stiegal law from the 1930s which separated retail banking – individual deposits and such – from investment banking which should more correctly be called casino banking. That 30s law was a direct outcome of the banking crash of 1929 and stayed in place and worked until Bill Clinton axed it in the late 90s, which then directly led to the 2007 crash.
Bernie is in favor of taxing the wealthy, which is long overdue, and placing a tax on stock transactions. In most American states you pay a tax when you buy a pencil, but you can buy millions of dollars of stocks and not pay a penny. That lack of a tax has spawned an industry centered around using super fast computers to buy and sell stocks in milliseconds, skimming off profits for the banksters at the expense of everyone else.
The most important reason to have a Sanders as president is his incorruptibility. Not just the unlikelihood that he’d ever decide issues based on personal gain or seek to enrich himself through the office but also the certainty that he’ll do or try to do exactly as he says, not like Obama who spend his whole political career in favor of single-payer but then once in office admitted that was just campaigning, and then went on to squelch any possibility that it could be part of the discourse. Obama campaigned on renegotiating NAFTA and other trade deals and since has become their greatest advocate. Not long ago he said people were lying when they said the latest trade deals would supersede US law. So just a couple weeks ago a US law that required meats be labeled with the country of origin was declared against trade rules and in no time at all congress axed the law. Now there’s no way of telling where the meat comes from. Meat from China? You’re not allowed to know because it goes against trade treaties.
Let me finish with a little anecdote from my past. Back in 1960 during the Kennedy-Nixon campaign I worked for an investment bank on Wall Street, in the lowliest job in the lowest pay category: $48 per week. One of the perks was free lunch; it would’ve been hard to survive without that. We were served by waitresses and assigned seats, thus I had the chance to relate to a range of people I ordinarily wouldn’t come across. One was a middle aged, life-long rock-ribbed Republican. At one point he got to talking about the Truman-Dewey election in 1948. Dewey was ahead in all the polls and considered a shoe-in, so much so that a Chicago newspaper declared Dewey the winner way before the polls closed, much to their later embarrassment. This fellow told how he was on Dewey’s side all through the campaign and took every opportunity to talk him up, but when he got into the poll booth he voted for Truman.
So take heart, don’t give up yet, stranger things have happened than a Bernie Sanders presidency.
Cambostan 