Medicare4All March (The allegedly left politicians ignore it.)
TYT Attacks Grassroots Healthcare Activists (The allegedly left media sneers at it.)
Mr. Dore is a rabble rouser.
But if you’re rabble, and I definitely am, that’s not a slam, but a good thing.
Color me roused.
Okay … overheated, maybe even.
***
In one of the videos I’ll post below, a smart woman tells us that the current unrest and splintering in what passes for the far left has its roots in the failure of the Sanders campaigns. Hope blossomed briefly and then was cut down harshly … a recipe for bitterness and anger.
I think that’s right. It goes a long way toward explaining why the Medicare For All marches were so poorly covered and attended, as in the first video above. No one with any power promoted or even mentioned them.
The second video is again wide-ranging and broad, but the preacher-fire is directed at the ‘independent’ media enablers.
From there let’s start at the far corporate Dem end. Here’s what Nancy is up to these days
Pelosi Kills Student Debt Relief With Right-Wing Talking Points!
She’s not even trying to make sense. She doesn’t care and she doesn’t have to.
My favorite factoid about student debt is that it the President doesn’t even need Congress to wipe out 100% of it. It’s in easy range of a single executive action.
But Biden and Pelosi are of a single hive mind here. Better that millions of students should be chained to the debt wheel for life, than that a few bankers be inconvenienced, or go a little soft in the profit.
Fucking disgusting. As with “health care”, or health “insurance”, America stands alone in the modernized world. If you’ve got the brains and the stamina, your college is free in the civilized world. You go on to become a doctor or a scientist and give back. Everyone wins.
If good jobs now require college degrees, why is higher education not free like K-12 anyway? You know why. Colleges, like pharmaceutical and oil companies, are big profit centers for the elites. They’re a part of the gravy train that only flows upward. The kids pay to play, and IF they’re lucky, they get to stay in line and keep paying, once they’ve got to be highly qualified drones to staff the lower echelons of the machine.
From there we upgrade a half-notch to my own dear Senator Sinema, seen here sticking a big fat knife in an already gutted ‘bipartisan’ bill on infrastructure. Our newsreader mentions in passing the other senator from these parts. He’s a bit behind, picking out his dagger still. Fuck you both. And thanks, Bernie, for trying and failing uselessly again, anyway.
Here’s Sanders STILL refusing to say one bad thing about good friend Joe, and taking offense to the suggestion that there could be any other way to see him.
This clip is interesting from the media angle too. Just as there are hopeless cases among the politicians, like Mama Bear Pelosi and the turncoat Sinema, there are plenty of ‘leftist’ content creators where hope is dead too. The whole TYT network. The large idiot Vaush. The degraded new version of David Doel. In print, the Dave Weigels and Ryan Grims of the world. All of whom sometimes say the right things, and all of whom are deeply committed (judging by their words and actions) to stifling real dissent and upholding business as usual. By which mechanism they too keep themselves lavishly fed.
Just as Bernie is as far left a figure as can be countenanced politically (because they know he’ll be a good boy in the end, no matter how unjustly they beat his ass), so too Krystal Ball is as far left a media figure as can be taken seriously by respectable people. I like her. I even like her substantially flimsier sometime-cohost Kyle Kulinski. But Kyle has proven repeatedly, and Krystal alas proves here too … they’ll let the supposed best of the powerful off the hook when it comes right down to it. That was a softball interview, dressed up with a splash of maternal toughness, but … no real threat, to entrenched oligarchy. Inoffensive, to the point of irrelevance.
In Bernie’s vicinity, sometimes, there’s the “Justice Democrats”, the “Squad”. There’s enough about them woven into the videos above, and the one to come, to suffice, but if you really must …
Finally. For those of us let down by old Bern, for those of us revolted by the class treason of AOC and her new wave coven, the great non-white hope of the day is one Sister Nina Turner, currently running for an open seat in a district centered on Columbus, Ohio.
And Here is my new favorite video, by my new favorite voice in left-space, explaining why it might be wise to exercise a good measure of caution to temper that hope. And a whole lot more besides, featuring the aforementioned Krystal and Kyle, and the sincerely endearing softly sung protests of Briahna Joy Gray, bringing the spectrum to clarity on both the media and politics halves of the equation.
And the video creator’s name alone:
Unapologetic
I think that’s a standard we could all be proud to adhere to. I certainly intend to keep trying.