PSA to NPR:
Dear NPR:
I am a --- --- --- {one you'd think likely to support Hillary}, and a decades-long supporter of my local public radio/tv outlet, ---; and I am working for the Bernie Sanders campaign.
I like and respect Hillary Clinton – no one knows better than {a} --- --- how hard it can be to succeed in {sorry, trying to preserve a shred of privacy here} – but I do not understand what has seemed to be the media's incredulity toward Sanders' viability.
I don't have time for a long essay, but for anyone who understands the financial challenges we face either on a personal or a theoretical level and who has spent much time actually looking at what particular politicians say and do, Bernie's appeal is obvious. Obama's response to the economic downturn following the 2008 crash was to keep Goldman Sachs in charge of economic policy and double down on the policies that caused the crash. Dodd-Frank was an economic band-aid that has already been eroded unto near meaninglessness. The so-called "recovery" has done little or nothing for the vast majority of US citizens. Hillary would do nothing to change this course.
On another front, I'm grateful for Obamacare, but it too falls far short of what's needed, and it's hard to trust that it was the best we could do, when Obama took both single-payer and the public option completely off the table before even sitting down to negotiate (as any transactional lawyer knows, a fatal mistake). I could go on.
The fact is, the people of this country and the world need big changes soon – we need Glass-Steagall restored, we need unproductive securities speculation curbed, we need to break up big financial institutions and big media, and we need to reverse the corporatization of education, which has made it more expensive without improving it, among other things. And above all, we need campaign finance reform.
As you know, in Sanders' victory speech following the NH primary, he reminded us that whatever happens, Democrats must come together in the fall to defeat the Republican candidate. Your reporters seemed to leap to the conclusion that he was acknowledging that Hillary will be the Dem. nominee – as if it's utterly inconceivable that that it might be Bernie. I hope they're going to be able to get over that attitude.
For decades, our Democrat-in-name-only leaders have failed miserably in communicating the kinds of ideas Sanders propounds, presumably at least in part because they are owned. Bernie knows that the kinds of reform we need are not going to happen without disrupting the power accumulated by the 1%.
So for the first time in decades, Bernie is reaching the people with the truths that the 1% don't want us to hear; and he's doing it with the kind of passion, coherence, and eloquence that only happens when one is not trying to serve two masters, but has devoted and continues to devote all of their energies to serving the good of the people as a whole.
When Sanders is heard, people who never expected to agree with him find themselves realizing, this guy is focussing on the things that are really affecting me, and what he's saying about them makes a lot of sense . . . maybe he's right about some other things.
It is not "Hillary's turn." It's the people's turn. And guess, what, maybe that could be a good thing.
Thank you for your very valuable work.
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