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Add an EventThe Escalating Class War Against Bernie Sanders
More than ever, Bernie Sanders is public enemy number one for power elites that thrive on economic injustice. The Bernie 2020 campaign is a direct threat to the undemocratic leverage that extremely wealthy individuals and huge corporations constantly exert on the political process. No wonder we’re now seeing so much anti-Bernie rage from leading corporate Democrats -- eagerly amplified by corporate media.
In American politics, hell hath no fury like corporate power scorned.
Flagrant media biases against Sanders are routine in a wide range of mainstream outlets. (The media watch group FAIR has long documented the problem, illuminated by one piece after another after another after another just this month.) In sharp contrast, positivity toward Sanders in mass media spheres is scarce.
The pattern is enmeshed with the corporatism that the Sanders campaign seeks to replace with genuine democracy -- disempowering great wealth and corporate heft while empowering everyday people to participate in a truly democratic process.
Big media are continually amplifying the voices of well-paid reporters and pundits whose jobs involve acceptance of corporate power, including the prerogatives of corporate owners and sponsors. And, in news coverage of politics, there’s an inexhaustible supply of former Democratic officeholders and appointees who’ve been lucratively feeding from corporate troughs as lobbyists, consultants and PR operatives. Their corporate ties usually go unmentioned.
An important media headquarters for hostility toward the Sanders campaign is MSNBC, owned by Comcast -- a notoriously anti-labor and anti-consumer corporation. “People need to remember,” I pointed out on Democracy Now! last week, “that if you, for instance, don’t trust Comcast, why would you trust a network that is owned by Comcast? These are class interests being worked out where the top strata of ownership and investors hires the CEO, hires the managing editors, hires the reporters. And so, what we’re seeing, and not to be rhetorical about it, but we really are seeing a class war underway.”
Routinely, the talking heads and go-to sources for mainline news outlets are far removed from the economic pressures besetting so many Americans. And so, media professionals with the most clout and largest megaphones are quite distant from the Sanders base.
Voting patterns in the New Hampshire primary reflected whose economic interests the Sanders campaign is promising to serve. With 10 active candidates on the Democratic ballot, Sanders “won 4 in 10 of voters with household incomes under $50,000 and nearly 3 in 10 with incomes between $50,00 and $99,000,” the Washington Post reported .
Meanwhile, a trio of researchers associated with the Institute for New Economic Thinking -- Thomas Ferguson, Jie Chen and Paul Jorgensen -- found that “the higher the town’s income, the fewer votes cast” for Sanders. “Lower income towns in New Hampshire voted heavily for Sanders; richer towns did the opposite.”
The researchers saw in the data “further dramatic evidence of a point we have made before: that the Democratic Party is now sharply divided by social class.”
It’s a reality with media implications that are hidden in plain sight. The often-vitriolic and sometimes preposterous attacks on Sanders via powerful national media outlets are almost always coming from affluent or outright wealthy people. Meanwhile, low-income Americans have virtually zero access to the TV studios (other than providing after-hours janitorial services).
With very few exceptions, the loudest voices to be heard from mass media are coming from individuals with wealth far above the financial vicinity of average Americans. Virtually none of the most widely read, seen and heard journalists are on the low end of the nation’s extreme income inequality. Viewed in that light -- and keeping in mind that corporate ownership and advertising dominate mainstream media -- it shouldn’t be surprising that few prominent journalists have much good to say about a presidential campaign fiercely aligned with the working class.
“If there is going to be class warfare in this country,” Bernie Sanders told the Iowa AFL-CIO convention last summer, “it’s time that the working class of this country won that war and not just the corporate elite.”
To the corporate elite, goals like that are unacceptable.
______________________________
Norman Solomon is cofounder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Solomon is the author of a dozen books including
War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.Break With Two-Party Capitalist Duopoly! by Jeff Mackler, 2/20/20,
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/20/break-with-two-party-capitalist-duopoly/
Pertinent paragraphs:
“Glory hallelujah! If the Lord’s “terrible swift sword” had descended from the heavens to witness the Democratic Party’s congressional delegation’s standing ovation in response to Donald Trump’s State of Union introduction of his despicably appointed Venezuelan presidential pretender Juan Guaidó, the Democrats would be dead in the water.”
“Bernie Sanders’ pledge of Democratic Party unity at the outset of his campaign, dramatically repeated to cheering supporters following his primary victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, informs us that Bernie’s “revolution” and “democratic socialism” notwithstanding, nothing will change should he beat the odds to advance as the Democrats’ candidate—or even if he emerges victorious in the November presidential elections. Capitalism will remain intact, unless and until the mass independent power of the working class is brought to bear to smash it—from its foundations to its superstructure.”
“The bi-partisan ovation for Juan Guaidó, the right-wing U.S.-chosen agent of Trump’s CIA-orchestrated coup in Venezuela, gave proof that the warmongering Democrats are indistinguishable from their Republican counterparts. Indeed, the Democratic Party-controlled House of Representatives upped Trump’s proposed military budget by some $40 billion. Similarly, the Democrats’ failed Trump impeachment effort was based on the proposition that the Democrats favored arming the Ukrainian government that was brought into being by the U.S.-backed fascist coup of 2014.”
“After voting throughout his congressional career for nearly every military budget before him, Sanders today claims that he might seek to trim that budget somewhere down the line.”
“Trump’s new plan for “peace” between Israel and Palestine, a peace without Palestinians, is a virtual duplicate of the bi-partisan U.S. policy that has rendered what remains of historic Palestine a tiny, isolated, Israeli military-patrolled, economically unviable Bantustan akin to the racist policies of apartheid South Africa in decades past. Trump merely seeks to formalize what has been U.S. policy under every administration since Israel’s illegitimate colonial-settler state formation in 1947. Not a hint of opposition from the Democrats, who, like Trump, prioritize Israel funding to the tune of $3 billion annually – a sum that exceeds “foreign aid” to any other nation.””
“It is in this context that an honest evaluation of Bernie Sanders and his Democratic Party primary contenders must be made. “How will you fund your Medicare for All proposal?” Sanders is repeatedly asked, as if the costs were prohibitive in today’s economy. Sanders has been repeatedly vague on this critical issue, but not because he seeks to back off on advocating for a proposal that is the norm in most industrialized nations. Sanders, whose “radical” proposals to tax the wealth of the nations’ billionaire at a rate of 2 or 3 percent after their first $50 million and then increase the rate progressively until the wealth of billionaires is subjected to tax rates of a few points higher, is incapable of uttering the simple response, “I would tax the corporate elite down to the nails in the shoes on their feet.”
“The same with Sanders’ Green New Deal, where he proposes a ten-year, $17 trillion program to end the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels without a full and immediate government takeover of the entire multi- trillion dollar fossil fuel industry and its rapid conversion to a safe and sustainable energy system with all workers fully protected in the transition. Sanders’ Green New Deal, in truth and in the context of its co-existence with the capitalist system itself, amounts to rhetorical election campaign bluster and bluff. The same with his utterances regarding unspecified cuts in the military and any other proposals that effectively challenges capitalist prerogatives. To do so would necessarily challenge the legitimacy of the rapacious capitalist system itself, a move that all of Sanders’ leading team insists would undermine his “electability.””
“While Sanders rails at the billionaire candidates he confronts, his repeated assertions that he will be a loyal supporter of whomever emerges from the current pack, as he did in 2016 after losing to Hillary Clinton, constitutes his unquestioned allegiance to the capitalist system of perpetual war, racism, sexism, LGBTQI discrimination, exploitation, poverty and environmental catastrophe.”
We have Peace & Freedom Party and the Green Party on the ballot in California both of which have serious programs in favor of the workingclass.
See
http://www.peaceandfreedom.org/home/
http://www.cagreens.org/
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