More and more this primary has distilled down to one thing for me:

[polly7]

41. Then why does ANYONE enter politics?

The whole idea of entering politics is presumably to advocate for what the people paying you need and try to get enough to come around to pass bills for the changes needed. Is any politician magically able to change laws and pass bills on their own? I've never seen it - anywhere.

Clinton must be one of those magicians with all those things she's going to be able to put in place instantly. But then, the people/corporations paying her aren't the same as those paying Bernie and all of those who actually spend years working for real people.

Democratic Socialism and the 2016 US Presidential Election

Bernie Sanders, Democratic Socialism, and the Other America (Part Two of a Five Part Series)

by Edward Martin and Mateo Pimentel / February 18th, 2016

Fast forward to 2016.

As a result of the Great Recession in 2008, most Americans today have literally struggled for their economic lives in one way or another. The manifestations have been felt painfully in wage-reductions, job loss, depleted 401K accounts, raided pensions, short sales on homes, foreclosures on homes, survival credit card debt, financial bankruptcy, healthcare bankruptcy, family financial stress, repossessions, economic and emotional scars of the phony war in the Middle East, soldier deaths, wounded veterans, etc. At the same time, billionaires and the 1% have been doing better than ever with record economic growth, publicly funded bailouts of corporations, and multibillion dollar tax breaks to boot. In contrast, the pain that everyday people have experienced is real. But the only political candidate today that seems to have identified this devastation and translated it into real political issues of substance is Bernie Sanders. He has tapped into this pain and has thus been able to pound away on some of the most pressing policy issues of our time. Sanders has continually repeated the chorus of injustices that people have experienced as a direct result of the billionaire conquest of our democratic society and the financial destruction of the middle class. Suffice it to say, the poor and underclass in America have almost completely slipped under the radar. The result of this has been that two different Americas have re-emerged, and the use of the term “re-emerged” is intentional here because this has all happened before in the history of the US.

Not a single-issue candidate.

In addition to the class conflict-warfare theme underlying Bernie Sanders political campaign (which is really what Citizens United and campaign finance reform is all about) are several other related issues. Bernie Sanders opposed the Iraq War Authorization, Wall Street Bailout (TARP), Patriot Act 2001, Patriot Act Reauthorization 2006, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Death Penalty, Keystone XL Pipeline, Border Fence Legislation 2006, and Offshore Oil Drilling. He supports: breaking up big banks; reauthorizing Glass-Steagall; and rescinding Citizens United and the corporate takeover of democracy in the US. He opposed the Brady bill simply because it made owners of gun shops criminally liable for guns they sold to non-criminals. But the key point is this: Sanders understands the human economic tragedy suffered as a result of the 1%. Bernie Sanders has a movement going that will not be stopped, regardless of whether or not the media provide a shallow analysis of his campaign. Even if he is not elected president of the United States, his influence will carry on because the issues are like raw wounds, compounded by Citizens United undermining of legitimate democratic governance. What constitutes illegitimate governance is corporate money paid to congressmen, congresswomen, and senators, in order to do the business of big business as a priority, not the people’s business. See some of the relevant research published by Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Guilded Age, Princeton University Press, 2008; Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs, Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality, University of Chicago Press, 2009; Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics, 2014, 564-581; and Edward Martin, “Oligarchy, Anarchy, and Social Justice,” Contemporary Justice Review, 2015, 55-67.

What the establishment elites and media want desperately to avoid is the class conflict-warfare theme underlying all of this. Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie mentioned at a recent Republican debate, February 8, 2016, that raising taxes on millionaires is “a failed idea and a failed policy; it’s class warfare.” Imagine that! The rich are now being oppressed! So the establishment plays victim and wants to avoid any historical narrative of actual life-and-death struggles that took place throughout the history of the United States, resulting from class conflict-warfare, and tragically, to which the United States is reverting. This narrative is becoming uncomfortably reminiscent. Big business, government, military, bureaucracy, and the money media (military-industrial-bureaucratic-media complex) do not want a systematic analysis of the economic issues and the underlying causes of poverty and inequality taking place in the United States. After all, why would they jeopardize their profit margins?

Their bottom line is profits, and they want to make sure their profit margins are steadily increasing. They do not want a systemic analysis of stagnant wages by American workers over the past forty years or trade deals leveraged on developing countries and fast-tracked fascist style through Congress as is the TPP. Yet, imagine if The Other America, “war on poverty” safety nets were missing when the Great Recession hit. Robert Reich has argued that the reason it was a Great Recession, and not another Great Depression, was precisely because The Other America, “war on poverty” “socialist” public policies were in place. Absent these socialist strategies, the economic damage would have been catastrophic. Other economists, such as Richard Wolff, Stephen Resnick, and John Roemer, argue that the safety net might already be a thing of the past. The ironic tragedy is that this has a boomerang effect on the rich themselves if workers themselves are unable to purchase or consume. Henry Ford understood this effect. Workers need to spend. If not he would soon be out of business. Hauntingly, Marx and Engels’ prediction in the Communist Manifesto has become increasingly significant in that the bourgeoisie produces “its own gravediggers.”

http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/02/democratic-socialism-and-the-2016-us-presidential-election/