Why Bernie Sanders’ problems with black voters go much deeper than him just blaming the media

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

131. Just?

I've had it for a couple of years now. If I said something that seemed to imply I just got it, I spoke inartfully.

As to Bernie's potential, I really don't know what it is, but I don't think anyone else does, either. Everyone has been operating off the conventional wisdom, and I think that's misled a lot of folks. By the conventional wisdom, a self-avowed 'Democratic Socialist' should be as low in the polls as Kucinich ever was in his Presidential run - even Webb should be ahead of Bernie. He's another old white guy when the country is fed up with old white guys running the place.

But a lot of folks never really felt like they recovered from what Bush did to the country. Obama helped a little, but never finished the job. Many of the dispossessed from Katrina are still dispossessed. Millions who lost jobs have simply dropped out of the workforce entirely - job gains have merely kept up with population growth, if that, so while measured unemployment is down again, the labour participation rate is at it's worst in a half century. People have less money, they see no future, and so Bernie comes along and tells them the truth - that wealth redistribution is real, and it's been FROM them and their families TO the richest of the rich - folks like the Clintons, the Bushes, the Trumps and Fiorinas. That 'the recovery', even under a supposed champion of the people as Obama, has passed them by and gone almost exclusively to the powerful and connected.

And they're pissed off. They're being killed by agents of the state, police, who seem to be beyond the law, who can do whatever they want as long as they keep the 'lower classes' in line and protect the possessions and persons of the elite. They're seeing their water poisoned by companies owned by those elite, their food being ever more monopolized by giant 'agribusinesses'. Nature being destroyed around them, the climate becoming unpredictable, even deadly.

They don't just 'hope' for 'change', they NEED it to survive. Because the path the neocons and neolibs have us on is going to leave most of us dead, and the rest merely as servants to the elite.