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 byRon 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.
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