Posted on 02/24/2020 8:38:59 AM PST by Kaslin
Like Trump, Sanders is tapping into a seething discontent in American life over who has power and who doesn’t.
AUSTIN, Texas — At a massive Bernie Sanders rally like the one held downtown here on Sunday evening, you get the sense that a huge swath of the Democratic voter base is deeply unhappy with everything in America, and has been for a while.
The immediate object of their ire might be Donald Trump, but their discontent goes further back than the last election, and it encompasses more than politics as usual. They want everything Sanders promises: Medicare for all, free college, free child care, a massive increase in the minimum wage, the Green New Deal, all of it.
But they also want something more, something harder to define. Justice, maybe, or a reckoning with the powers that be. They’d like to wield that power, and they seem ready to sweep away the social and economic order to get it. There’s something positively Trumpian about their fervor, in their belief that they can overcome the political establishment and corporate media elite and usher in a new era. You could almost say they want to make America great—as they define it.
At the very least, they’re ready for what Sanders promised the crowd of nearly 13,000 fired-up Austinites on Sunday night: a transformation of American politics
Some perspective on crowd size at Bernie Sanders rally in Austin TX. Set to start in about 30 min. pic.twitter.com/RbQ53En63c
— John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) February 23, 2020
What’s behind this? Why such seething discontent? The media wasn’t much interested in answering that question about Trump voters in 2016, but maybe now that Sanders is poised to run away with the Democratic nomination, they’ll get curious.
If they do, it might begin to dawn on them who helped set the stage for this kind of populism. It wasn’t Donald Trump, it was Barack Obama. The failure of Obamacare, the failure to hold Wall Street accountable for the housing crash and the recession, the sluggish recovery, the Bush wars extended for another eight years, the unfulfilled promise of hope and change. Then, after all those disappointments, they were asked to vote for Hillary Clinton.
In other words, the same forces that propelled Trump to the White House in 2016 are propelling Sanders to the top of the Democratic ticket now. And if the failures of the Obama administration and the concurrent collapse of trust in our institutions weren’t enough, Obama has made things worse for the anti-Sanders Democratic establishment by refusing to engage on behalf of any candidate, not even his own vice president.
You’d think Obama would have enough of a vested interest in his own legacy either to tell Joe Biden not to run or to jump in and effectively campaign with him. He had two choices, and chose neither.
In the meantime, many of his erstwhile supporters have moved on, and Bernie’s their man now. Like Trump, he has big plans for America. Also like Trump, he has a penchant for hyperbole.
“We’re tired of seeing workers across Texas and the country work for starvation wages!” he thundered to the adoring crowd in Austin, a not-quite-fitting venue for Sanders’ doomsaying rhetoric. This city’s unemployment rate is 2.5 percent and the average hourly wage here is two-and-a-half dollars more than the rest of the country.
It’s also not all tech bros driving the growth. Working people in Austin are on average doing pretty well, especially construction workers. Sanders might have noticed the multitude of construction cranes looming over the downtown, well within his line-of-sight from the stage Sunday night.
But the disconnect from some aspects of reality is part of what’s driving Sanders’s campaign. He’s tapping into something that goes beyond the plain facts of jobs and wage growth, beyond the palpable wealth and prosperity of cities like Austin. He’s putting his finger on an exposed nerve in American life, namely, the desire to wrest power from the elites and return it to the people.
That was more or less Trump’s message in 2016—and his explicit message in his inauguration speech. Only the villains have changed, slightly, in Sanders’s telling. Instead of corrupt Washington politicians, it’s corrupt Wall Street billionaires. Instead of Obama’s failure to drain the DC swamp, it’s Obama’s failure to take on corporate special interests and drug companies. In both cases, the message is clear: the people have been cheated by the elites, and we’re going to bring them down. Our time is now.
This isn’t the sort of message that resonates in societies with a health civic culture and high levels of public trust. It’s also worlds away from Obama’s positive message of hope and change and post-partisan politics.
But this isn’t Obama’s America anymore. This is the America of Trump and Sanders, and if you’re upset with the ways things are going, with who has power and who doesn’t and how you might be able to get some, then they have a message just for you.
LOL the candidate of the Chicago Mob...
People pumping out these article are amazingly stupid.
Yup. Ignorant, arrogant
“Obama’s positive message of hope and change and post-partisan politics.”
Post-partisan politics? Obama never advocated that. He said get in your enemy’s face.
Obama did help bring out the ‘Bernies’ in out culture, yes, this is true. But the fault cannot be laid only with Obama.
How did we get here, where millions of Americans are knowingly and enthusiastically choosing to vote for an avowed Socialist? What best facilitated this phenomena?
One phrase explains it best: Pubic Schools.
Public Schools have spent the last 40 years teaching kids to either hate America or look at our history with disgust and shame. This started decades ago with demonizing as many national holidays as could be done, starting with Columbus Day. This is not to say that all Charter or private schools are better. No. But many are better than the government run schools. This is even more the case since the LGBT fever has infected so many school districts.
I would argue the dynamic making Trump and Sanders goes well beyond Obama back to GHW Bush.
This column tries to draw some congruity between Trump’s and Sanders’ movements. There is zero congruity. They are poles apart. One is right and one is wrong. One is truth and the other a lie. One is light and one is darkness. One movement respects God, the other reviles Him. One movement disdains the Constitution, the other loves and protects it. Good grief.
Don’t underestimate the similarities between the two in terms of their political appeal. There is a lot of overlap among their supporters — and this was a big reason why Trump won in 2016.
Obama voted “present”, as usual...
AUG. 29, 2018 (FLASHBACK) In late June, New York governor Andrew Cuomo quietly ordered the suspension of an ongoing investigation into whether the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had mishandled sexual-assault allegations made against Harvey Weinstein in March of 2015. As it turns out, this decision came just a few days after Weinstein’s former lawyer’s firm donated $25,000 to Cuomo’s reelection campaign, according to an illuminating new report.
According to the report, which was published on Capital & Main, Cuomo’s campaign received a $25,000 donation from Weinstein’s former laywer David Boies’s firm on June 20. On June 26, Cuomo ordered the investigation into the DA’s handling of the Weinstein case to be halted for six months — an investigation, notably, that stemmed from the fact that Boies had donated $10,000 to District Attorney Cy Vance before Vance’s office dropped the Weinstein case. (Per a letter obtained by “Page Six,” Cuomo’s justification for halting the probe was that it could potentially obstruct the criminal case against Weinstein.) A spokesperson for Boies, Schiller & Flexner also denied any sort of arrangement between the governor and Boies, telling Capital & Main in a statement that, since 2009, the law firm has donated more than $245,000 to Cuomo’s gubernatorial campaigns.
“Neither Mr. Boies, nor anyone from his firm, ever discussed Harvey Weinstein or Mr. Vance with Mr. Cuomo, or anyone from his office, at any time,” the spokesperson said. “Mr. Boies is a longtime supporter of Mr. Cuomo and his contribution in June was consistent with his contributions to Mr. Cuomo over years past.”
Update, August 30: In a statement to the Cut, Cuomo’s press secretary Dani Lever stressed that “no contribution of any size influences any government action.” (Excerpt) Read more at thecut.com …
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Betcha Andy-boy knows PLENTY about the Albany-based sex cult operating in his backyard.
==================================
AND THIS---- From 2001-2005 there was an ongoing investigation into the Clinton Foundation. A Grand Jury had been empanelled. Governments from around the world had donated to the “Clinton Charity”. Yet, from 2001 to 2003 none of those “Donations” to the Clinton Foundation were declared.
nypost.com
Then-State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman gave the Clinton Foundation a pass on identifying foreign donors in its charitable filings — making it impossible to know if it got any special favors while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, according to a Scripps News report.
Scripps News found that the foundation and its subsidiary, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, took in $225 million in government donations between 2010 and 2014. New York’s charity law clearly states: “Organizations that received a contribution or grant from a government agency during the reporting period shall include the name of each agency from which contributions were received and the amount of each contribution.”
But both the foundation and the CHAI failed to do that, and Schneiderman, a member of Clinton’s “leadership council” in New York and a fierce critic of Donald Trump, did nothing about it.
Other charities complied, including the George W. Bush foundation, which reported receiving $5 million from Saudi Arabia and $500,000 from Kuwait.
On its website, the Clinton Foundation reveals its foreign donors, but using only broad ranges, such as $5 million to $10 million, without any time frames. The IRS doesn’t require such disclosures.
SOURCE https://nypost.com/2016/09/06/schneiderman-let-clinton-foundation-skip-identifying-foreign-donors/https://nypost.com/2016/09/06/schneiderman-let-clinton-foundation-skip-identifying-foreign-donors/
Hillary and smirking suck-up, Eric Schneiderman (right).
Schneiderman was recently ousted from office after women
came forward saying he spat at, slapped, and choked
women he was intimate with.
Some names on the list of Weinstein Co. creditors are not unexpected, given the company’s business dealings over the years: Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, Dame Judi Dench. But some of the thousands of names on the 394-page list of people owed money by the bankrupt company jump off the page, among them David Bowie, Michael Bay, Malia Obama, Boris Becker, Ryan Coogler, Daniel Radcliffe, Robert De Niro and Darlene Love.
Other creditors are less boldfaced but still eye-catching, including the film and television academies, the New York Fire Department and the Los Angeles Police Department. One of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers, the model-turned-actress Zoe Brock, is listed, as is YouTuber Casey Niestat.
Many former employees appear, with their address noted as the Weinstein Co.’s main office, 99 Hudson St. (Obama worked at the company as an intern last year, to the surprise of some given the prevalence of reports about Weinstein’s behavior, though very few grasped the full extent of it.) Numerous companies are there, from Amazon Studios to Netflix, ABC, CBS and NBC, as are many film exhibitors. There is a wide range of charities, including the American Cancer Society, the American Fund for AIDS Research and Autism Speaks.
Much of the list is taken up by businesses who make up the day-to-day mechanics of entertainment–scores of florists, trailer houses, publicists and party venues, plus critics groups, film festivals and trade organizations. An Office Depot in Cincinnati. An exterminator in Brooklyn.
The Weinstein Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last night, with a 363 process minimizing the number of bidders. Lantern Asset Management has already come forward with a bid of $310 million in cash, plus $125 million in assumed liabilities and $15 million in fees for current projects. The 363 process will be unfolding over the next few weeks in a Delaware bankruptcy court.
> SOURCE https://deadline.com/2018/03/bankruptcy-weinstein-company-creditors-david-bowie-michael-bay-malia-obama-1202349414/
Austin... sure. Bernie can draw 13,000 there. Trump will go there and outdraw him as he has done in other Democrat cities. Let’s see Bernie go to Dallas or Charleston, SC and pull that many. My guess is he wouldn’t even think to go there.
When people who are taught to believe this rubbish find out that the real world doesn't work this way at all, naturally most of them will end up angry, bitter, and miserable.
Come to think of it, I did too, though I never watched his show.
AMEN!
Obama was the absolute most inept politician to EVER sit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue... certainly during my lifetime, and that include Carter... Equally the most inept of the post war era as a whole.
History will not be kind to that one... and rightfully so... but for now, in the moment we have to deal with all the fools who will not admit the obvious truth... their melaninated messaiah had no clothes.
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