The ONLY reason I want Sanders to win is seeing the suffering of humans here and worldwide diminished.
I’ve sat with people who have been suffering in agony very directly due to our lack of a single payer system for health care in this country. I’ve had tears streaming down my face looking at a young woman who lost all her money for the fucking crime of getting sick and not being able to afford all the co-pays, etc. - I gave all the money I had, but it was too late. I watched her fucking die in agony because she wasn’t “viable” in a corporatist system.
Oh, and her suffering and death was completely avoidable with proper preventative treatment. If she had been in any other industrialized country she would’ve suffered very little and would be alive today.
I want Sanders to win because I’ve personally sat with Iraq War vets who are homeless and fucked in the head after seeing kids get their legs blown off in the name of corporatist agendas. I want Bernie to win because kids get their legs blown off in senseless, endless (profitable) war.
Those reasons above are just the tip of the iceberg in regards to human rights.
If past experience tells me anything, the naysayers won’t learn a fucking thing if Bernie Sanders wins. They’ll just move the goal posts to naysaying his administration and the millions of grassroots supporters that are here to change things for the better.
I have listened to her, repeatedly, and read her book too (and needless to say, fully agree with her).
And yes, I know a lot of black people are for Sanders (you left out Brother West).
The issue isn’t so much black people being turned off by white people trying to tell them how to vote (although that is a problem when it happens), and it’s also not that no one who’s black supports Sanders (some obviously do).
The bigger issue is why the overwhelming majority have been voting for Clinton – what has your work taught you about why that’s so?
I was responding to a comment that said black people were voting against their interests, so it was kind of topical. White people have a tendency to talk down to black people. I think the media acts like this is some kind of Sanders problem instead of a white people problem. I mean, Clintons’ “C.P. Time” joke with de Blasio was just unreal, and that wasn’t some asshole Clinton supporter, that was Clinton in a planned comedy skit thinking, “Yeah, this joke is fine.”
And rightly so! Sanders should win because he’s going to be an important step in solving real problems that are making people suffer.
It’s the same reason that many people over 45 years old are still slow to support Bernie today - it’s mostly about access. If one has ready access (and established habits) of utilizing reliable online sources for news and other information, that person is more likely to support Bernie. Casual access doesn’t cut it, they need to learn to properly navigate outside of the corporate media online sources as well.
If one’s overwhelming source for information is traditional, corporate news sources on television, newspapers and radio (which is much more accessible for disenfranchised communities and lazy, rich white people), you’re much more likely to support Hillary and/or Republicans.
When POC acquire more access to more complex, factual info (and the time to process it) they tend to support Bernie Sanders just like any other group of people do. The odds are stacked against that in disenfranchised communities for a lot of obvious reasons.
I think politics is fundamentally about constituents trusting representatives to concretely deliver what constituents want, esp. from the economic system.
“Consent of the governed” implies trust and rapport that bonds communities and their representatives.
So . . . we dem socialists cannot listen too much, esp. to people who aren’t voting for our programs yet.
My Facebook feed, as well as other places, are full of complaints about Bernie supporters who say they won’t vote for Hillary if she wins the nomination.
Guess what Hillary supporters were saying in 2008?
I wonder what percentage of them actually stuck by it?
I also wonder what percentage of Bernie supporters say they would actually vote for Trump or Cruz or Kasich against Clinton, as opposed to staying home, or writing in Bernie or Jill Stein or Elizabeth Warren or Vermin Supreme or Deadpool or whoever.
Well, the issue is that those Clinton supporters are people who vote every time. They think its a duty or something. A lot of Sanders support comes from young people, and young people often just don’t vote. These aren’t people who would spite Clinton because she beat Sanders, these are people who would not have voted Clinton if Sanders was never a choice. By contrast, the Clinton supporters would vote D regardless of who it was.
…
Clinton’s eight-year term in the Senate produced bills to regulate video game violence and flag burning, both of which died in committee.
Bill Clinton’s eight-year term in the White House gave us an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit and a small children’s health insurance program — but also NAFTA, the 1994 crime bill, welfare reform, the Defense of Marriage Act, financial deregulation, and a grand bargain to gut Social Security that was only thwarted by a timely sex scandal.
The pragmatic, piecemeal, and irreproachably moderate achievements of Jimmy Carter are still more dispiriting. Even judged by the charitable standards of American liberalism, the forty-year balance sheet of “incremental progress” is decidedly negative.
Beltway pundits scoff at Sanders’s model of change …
They naturally fail to mention that as a matter of historical record, the Sanders model happened to produce Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Well, the thread title question is moot for me now…Feeling the Bern at 7am is a good way to start the day (and, it’s worth noting, at least in my neck of the woods, a good way to skip the lines…)
Nice little roundtable on Sanders. I don’t like it when people gush over politicians, but it was tolerable and the substance of the discussion really encompasses the “why” of whether or not to vote for Sanders.
That was always going to happen. Hopefully in a few weeks, once Clinton has lost, we can move on.
I am not enjoying the needling that’s going on here on the political threads. I do feel as if we’re being trolled to an extent (but hey, it’s their website, free ice cream etc). I think I may need to avoid them. But it’s so hard!
