Bernie Sanders; How to defeat a party that represents 1% of the electorate

xray s

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Fri Sep-12-03 11:15 PM
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Bernie Sanders; How to defeat a party that represents 1% of the electorate

This is a great piece by Bernie...definately worth pondering.

http://www.fightingbob.com/article.cfm?articleID=109

here is a snippet

Now, given the fact this administration is composed of millionaires and that they work day and night in the best interests of the rich and the large corporations, how do they get elected? How does it happen that George Bush is president, that right wing Republicans control the Senate and the House, as well as governors' chairs and state legislatures from one end of the country to the other?

In a nutshell, the goal of the right wing leadership of the Republican Party is fairly simple. In order for them to win elections and to have tens of millions of Americans voting against their own best economic interests, it is necessary for them to create wedge issues and to divide Americans up on the basis of gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, whether they are native-born or immigrant, or whether they live in rural or urban communities. The Republican right wing and their pollsters spend millions of dollars a year trying to figure out how they can play off the fears and anxieties of the American people so that they will turn on each other, rather than focusing on the real causes of our problems and how we, as a people, can come together and solve them.

(snip)

The United States is the only industrialized nation on earth that does not have a national health care system guaranteeing health care to its people. More than 41 million people are uninsured, tens of millions are underinsured, and we pay the highest prices in the world - by far � for prescription drugs. And in the midst of all this, we spend twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation.

And while our health care system disintegrates even further with huge increase in health insurance premiums, while elderly people die because they cannot afford the cost of prescriptions, the Republican Party's answer to this crisis is a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages.

The men and women who have served this nation in the armed services and who have come back wounded in body or spirit find themselves increasingly abandoned by the federal government. The promises made in terms of health care and other benefits have been abandoned. And what is the Republican Party's answer to the unconscionable way our veterans are treated? Of course, it is a Constitutional amendment to protect the flag.

And on it goes. On issue after issue, the Republicans have no real answer. At best they ignore the problems facing working families. More often, however, they are making them worse and doing their best, with millions of dollars in corporate money and a compliant corporate media, to focus the American people's attention on distractions. It is a well-funded, divide-and-conquer strategy that is all too often successful.

What progressives need to do to beat them is to take the opposite approach. Because we actually do represent the interests of the vast majority of Americans, we need to keep the focus on the real issues confronting our nation: the need for a national health care system, a trade policy that exports products not jobs, a sane environmental program, affordable and quality education at every level.

We need to build a movement of the great majority of Americans around a message of economic justice. Granted, in a pluralistic society there may be some differences among us on social or other issues. But we cannot let those differences tear our coalition apart because that is exactly what the Republicans want and need if they are to stay in power. Our job is to keep our eye on the prize of creating an America that guarantees every man, woman, and child a decent standard of living. In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, that is not too much to ask.