Good for Norman Solomon, and, of course, Bernie Sanders.
It's always been a class struggle. It certainly was not the Working
Class that taught us that we lived in a Classless Society. From the
first day I entered school at Seattle's John Hay Grade School, I
understood the Class Mentality. Our teachers, for the most part
underpaid middle aged white women, fawned over the children of the
wealthy families.
We elected class officers...never really learning just what their
duties were...always from the "favored" children. Great importance
was placed on "Bank Day". Each Tuesday our Second Grade teacher would
report on how many in the class brought money for their savings
accounts. Usually I could not find so much as a thin dime to bank.
Our teacher would say, "Carl, stand up so the class can see who kept
us from 100%".
Our governor was a very conservative Republican named Arthur B.
Langley. His nephew was one of my classmates. Hap Langley. I never
did know his real first name. But his father owned the city's largest
sporting goods store.
Hap Langley came close to being the School Mascot. And yet, with all
of the examples of class favoritism around us, our lesson books
continued to teach us that we lived in a Classless Society.
That early childhood conditioning is hard to get beyond. I wonder
just how many Americans will vote against their best interests, and
cast their vote for Michael Bloomberg. After all, it was a good
feeling to know that our scool's student president was the son of the
richest family on Queen Anne Hill.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/18/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Escalating Class War Against Bernie Sanders
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
18 February 20
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.
