DESPITE What Corporate Media TELLS YOU, Bernie Sanders’ POSITIONS ARE MAINSTREAM
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the presidential candidate for the Democratic nomination, has trouble being taken seriously by the corporate media, what with him being a democratic socialist and all. If you go to Google News and put in his name, you get headlines about him being nothing more than a protest candidate, or having “odd views,” or promoting “dark age economics.” But Sanders’s positions are quite mainstream from the point of view of the stances of the American public in general. Of course, the 1 percent, for whom and by whom most mainstream media report, are appalled and would like to depict him as an outlier. Sanders is scathing on the increasing wealth gap, whereby the rich have scooped up most of the increase in our national wealth in the past 20 years. The average wage of the average worker in real terms is only a little better than in 1970; the poor are actually poorer; but the wealth of the top earners has increased several times over.
Some 63 percent of Americans agree that the current distribution of wealth is unfair. And in a Gallup poll done earlier this month, a majority, 52 percent, think that government taxation on the rich should be used to reduce the wealth gap. This percentage is historically high, having been only 45 percent in 1998. But there seems to be a shift going on, because Gallup got the 52 percent proportion in answer to the question on taxing the rich both in April and again in May of this year. Bernie Sanders’ position is that of a majority of Americans in the most recent polling! Even Socialism is coming up in the world. Some 36 percent of Millennial youth (born in the 1980s and 1990s) have a favorable view of Socialism, compared to 26 percent of the general population. Sanders wants to get big money out of politics.
A majority of Americans oppose the Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, one of a number of such rulings that have increased the ability of the super-wealthy to influence politics. A good half of Americans support federally financed political campaigns so as to level the playing field. On this issue, Bernie Sanders is the most mainstream of all the candidates. The others are in a part of the political spectrum that by the polling represents a tiny lunatic fringe, in opposing significant campaign finance reform. Sanders is very concerned about student debt and wants to do something practical to combat this problem. Some 79 percent of Americans believe that education beyond high school is not affordable for everyone. And some 57 percent of people under 30 believe student debt is a problem for youth. Bernie Sanders’s hair is on fire about the dangers of global warming and the need to take practical steps to combat it. According to a very recent Yale/Gallup poll, some 71 percent of Americans believe global warming is occurring, and 57 percent are sure that human activity (emitting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide) is causing it, while another 12 percent think the warming is at least partly human-caused. That’s 69 percent who blame human beings wholly or in part.
cont'
http://billmoyers.com/2015/06/01/mainstream-bernie-sanders/
= new reply since forum marked as read
of Bernie being interviewed by Katie Couric.
I just watched the live stream on Yahoo News.
It is one of his best !!!!!!!!!!!!! 
I didn't think it was possible to like him any
better then I already do, but I was wrong.
5 or 10 minutes.
Hope you enjoyed it as well. 
On that I always remember mainstream Democrats were running around pushing a payroll tax cut for the third year in a row because it makes Republicans look like hypocrites on tax cuts during elections which Obama himself used for rhetoric Bernie Sanders was talking about "lifting the cap" which used to be a traditional Democratic policy and Bernie Sanders seems to be one of the fewer traditional Democrats still around.
The coward strategy or hiding from the truth isn't helpful while liberal policies won the midterms but there is always a drop-off a turnout when the Presidency isn't at stake and will only get worse with Republicans finding creative ways to decrease turnout while Democrats scold those who didn't turnout while Bernie Sanders could inspire turnout.
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Who turns out to vote and why is of much more than academic interest. In an era of increasingly polarized politics, campaign strategists must decide how much effort to put into persuading independent-minded voters to come out and support their candidate without antagonizing their party’s core supporters, who are more likely to vote anyway. Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were largely due to his campaign’s success in expanding the electorate — inspiring new voters and increasing turnout among blacks.
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Though political scientists long have noted the midterm dropoff, they don’t agree on precisely what it means. In an influential 1987 article, James E. Campbell theorized that “the surge of interest and information in presidential elections” typically works to the advantage of one party or the other; that party’s partisans become more likely to vote, while those of the disadvantaged party are more likely to stay home during presidential elections. Independents, “lacking a standing partisan commitment…should divide disproportionately in favor of the advantaged party.” Midterm elections lack that “wow” factor, according to Campbell, and turnout among both partisans and independents return to more normal levels and patterns.
A recent paper by Brown University researcher Brian Knight seeks to evaluate that surge-and-decline theory, as well as two competing explanations of why the president’s party nearly always loses seats at the midterms: a “presidential penalty,” or general preference among midterm voters for expressing dissatisfaction with the president’s performance or ensuring that his party doesn’t control all the levers of government, and recurring shifts in voter ideology between presidential and midterm elections. Knight concluded that while all three factors contribute to what he calls the “midterm gap,” the presidential penalty has the most impact.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/24/voter-turnout-always-drops-off-for-midterm-elections-but-why/
It is interesting what people "identify as" but on the issues Americans are solidly liberal -- Republicans use a lot of disinformation & propaganda BS the sit by the radio Rush listeners and Fox News viewed as "most trusted" by the most people out of 24/7 news channels and big 3 stations if they told the truth and they're so desperately clinging to the "tax and spend liberal" label.
Record Number of Americans identify as liberal in 2014
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2015/01/09/3609934/more-americans-liberal-2/
I'm interested in probability, numbers, polls, etc as a side hobby so I do see Bernie Sanders as the most mainstream candidate but the media are going to push relentlessly he isn't for so long he wasn't even worth mentioning by the media as a candidate it was always the Bidens or O'Malleys or somebody treated more seriously.
not Wall Street.
K&R
of a socialist president it's kind of lost it's impact.
