This article is a breath of fresh air in a
political landscape where the Republicans take delight at removing health care
from the working poor. On the other side, the Democratic Party is ignoring the
healthcare issue altogether to go for their "Jobs and good
government" style of corporate
politics that offers most voters nothing at all.
Bernie Sanders and those who either support him or have taken inspiration from
him, represent the only positive high lights of the Democratic Party. With out
him and his allies on the Democratic Party, the up coming elections offer
little for voters to get exited about. In Kansas we have James Thompson who does not call himself a
democratic socialist, but he is a Sanders ally. He is working hard to flip the
fourth district representative seat, now held by Ron
Estes, to blue- Democratic. If he wins it
will mean a real change.
-SJ Otto
So we are glad to
see this:
From
In
These Times:
The democratic socialist senator’s town hall on universal
healthcare marks a new phase in the political revolution.
The revolution will not be televised , but it might be live-streamed.
“It ain’t gonna
be on CBS, it ain’t gonna be on NBC,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said on Tuesday
evening, near the end of a “Medicare for All Town Hall” that was streamed to an
estimated audience of more than a million people over three social media
outlets—Now This, Attn: and The Young Turks Network (YTN). Sanders was
referring specifically to serious debate about our healthcare system, but his
words spoke to more than that.
Sanders’ town hall
showed the senator—currently the most popular politician in the United
States—freed from the confines of traditional mainstream media and able to dig
in to issues ranging from healthcare to campaign financing to the corruption of
our political system.
Earlier on Tuesday, CNN released a poll showing
Sanders with a 57 percent favorability rating. Among Democrats that number was
82 percent. It also showed that Sanders would defeat Donald Trump in a
hypothetical presidential race, winning 55 percent of the vote.
The democratic socialist senator took
advantage of this popularity to spread his message directly to viewers without,
as Sanders’ pointed out, the interruption of ads from pharmaceutical and insurance companies . And in the process, he planted
four distinct flags.
One flag was in
the media landscape. Sanders’ cry for “political revolution” has always been
more about process than specific policy—multiplying and opening up the channels
of information and fostering robust democratic engagement.
On Tuesday,
Sanders noted that the event was the first nationally broadcast town hall
taking place outside the corporate media. “This is, I think, kind of
revolutionary, is it not?” he said to YTN host Ana Kasparian in a pre-town hall
interview. “This could be the very first step in bringing millions of people
into serious discussion about the serious issues facing our country.”
It’s a common lament that the Right has
been brilliant at creating an alternative media ecosystem—through Fox News,
Breitbart, conservative radio shows and Donald Trump’s Twitter
account—while the Left has struggled to get its message into the mainstream
media or to develop alternative outlets.
The Medicare for
All town hall may have been but a small step, yet it confirmed that Sanders—who
has about 7.5 million Facebook followers, hosts a podcast, and regularly
creates polished and shareable video content—recognizes the promise of the
burgeoning new media infrastructure and is moving quickly to take advantage of
it. Which is a wise move if you say you want a revolution. YTN has nearly 3.6
million YouTube subscribers. Attn: has nearly 5.6 million Facebook followers.
Now This has about 13 million Facebook followers.
By engaging these
audiences directly, Sanders is reaching a large pool of potential voters who
seek their news outside of traditional outlets.
Sanders’ second
flag was planted in the single-payer debate.
For the rest click
here.
No comments:
Post a Comment