Propaganda and marketing often obscure the truth and win out. Most marketing campaigns are geared to create a more appealing brand and walk right up to the edge of the limits on acceptable false advertising to entice someone to buy their product. The relative merits of their product verses the competing product hardly enter into the equation.

The Hillary campaign is little more then a corporate-funded marketing campaign. Using its success as evidence of poor marketing or a poor campaign by Sanders and his supporters is like saying might makes right, not buying that crap, ever.

She has vast financial resources from the worst aspects of ur society, who will call the shots after she is elected. Most of our so-called Democratic Party is in bed with the same forces, and they are not the types to speak truth to power, they got into power by sucking up to it, not by fighting it.

You really need to learn the history of third way politicians, who funds them, what they support, and why the solutions the people need are ALWAYS off the table.

It isn't our fault the deck is stacked against Bernie and against us, and we're doing our damnedest to elect an honest un-owned candidate who fights hardest for the least of us, not for the wealthy elites. Sorry you don't understand that.

such as parliamentary systems rather than strict two party like we have

Also their political races aren't, to my knowledge, so dependent on corporate money

Another rarely articulated part of the dynamic is that because the U.S. military is being used as the global strong arm to insure corporations access to cheap labor and physical resources, the corporations keep much tighter control over our elections, they are dependent on our military for their global industries and won't tolerate our own people having much say over things for that reason.

I didn't understand your point about unions stopping offshoring, though I tried. How many offshorings of factories have ever been stopped by a union? Using what leverage? I'm sure it has happened a few times, but I don't see any real power unions have when the owners can take their ball and play in another country. Labor has not been able to globalize the same way capital has. Foreign labor leaders are often assassinated by proxy forces of the U.S. government, this has been well documented in a great many cases.

Also with our politicians being owned by corporations, they make it easy to and even provide tax incentives for corporations to move elsewhere, instead of protecting U.S. labor interests.

Hillary is fully onboard with that whole dynamic, no matter what she claims, not that this was about Hillary, but I think it's important to point out.

anyway I just don't buy the approach of blaming U.S. labor, or white American males who vote Republican, for the massive transfer of wealth to the corporate overlords. We live in a Deep State, with captured regulatory agencies, and both parties have done their utmost to bring this about, starting in the late 70s and continuing to this day.

I've watched Bernie for a long time now (many years), he is incredibly skillful in finding some way to reach out to the opposition to get some thing done that benefits the people. Since he was a congressman and senator, this came mostly in the form of amendments. As POTUS he would still have influence on proposed amendments (through proxies in congress) plus he will have other mechanisms specific to the presidency.

Saying who each Republican is owned by sounds more like someone else's job, I can't see Bernie doing that, and if he did, I can't see him limiting it to Republicans (and he should not limit it to them, IMO). NGO's are great at this, maybe he could partner with them.

He would certainly use his loud megaphone and stir up popular support for proposals, daring owned politicians to oppose the will of the people, with the threat of being voted out of office hanging over their heads. Some of them are so secure in their districts that this would have little effect, others are more susceptible to leverage.

I've always thought he would be able to turn congress blue again. Democrats, when they are Democrats, own congress.

We lost congress when the corporate triangulators took over our party, and the people just decided they're all crooks, hence the huge number of people who don't claim to belong to either party anymore, the low voter turnout, and the incredibly low congressional approval rating. The system is completely broken by corporate money, and the people know it, when they aren't being distracted by fear and wedge issues.

If we learn to elect Democrats without corporate money, everything will change. it really will. I hope Bernie will attempt to make eschewing corporate money a membership requirement of the Progressive Caucus (which he co-founded).

But in the meantime, before elections can change things, we'll have to more aggressively influence the process, through direct action of some sort, and I'm looking for Bernie to spell this out in some more detail, if he thinks he can speak openly about it.

He has stayed away from this for the most part, using some vague statements about millions of people rising up. I think it would be helpful for him to be more specific about this.

In today's college tour thing with Chris Matthews, he used an example of Mitch McConnell looking outside his window to see a million kids demanding no tuition, and he also mentioned emails.

Let's go deep on this aspect. I trust that Bernie is 100% sincere. But it isn't enough to just say we'll rise up. In what way? Mobilizing to vote out uncooperative politicians? Hitting the streets in protest? General strike? Emails, petitions and phone calls? Probably some of all of the above, but I'd like for him to articulate his vision of how it will work.

The powers that be have already demonstrated their willingness to ignore our demands. We need to focus on tools of leverage. With a leader who actually wants us to use our leverage to assist him in wresting concessions from power (we haven't had that, IMHO), it could be effective, I'm sure Bernie will hold up his end, but as he says, it won't be enough, nobody can do it alone.

Not only would I like to see him articulate this in more detail,, but it's a major line of attack by people who support the status quo, they say he's making empty promises, or he will just be blocked like Obama (I don't think Obama ever fought for much of anything I wanted him to). So it would go a long way towards getting voters on his side if he could flesh out the tasks, tools, and techniques he wants us to implement to bring about the changes he and so many of us so desperately want and need.

I live in California so my vote rarely matters, we vote so late, and it is safely blue for POTUS. So I'm not too worried about the TOS. I won't advocate for anyone to not vote for Dems, which as far as I can tell should keep me on the right side of the admins enough to let me post here.

But I fully agree, and I've also been a Democrat for a long long time. I kept thinking the party wanted to do better but didn't have better candidates, or couldn't do better because of Republicans.

Now it is way too obvious to ignore. It's about the money. The party is addicted to and entirely consumed by corporate money and the interests that come with it. That does not represent me.

Where do we go from here? I'm still working to get this party to elect candidates who refuse corporate money, but the rise of Bernie has shown exactly to what degree the party will go to oppose this, it seems they'll do anything to stop him. They work for their donors, not for us. And in my own very progressive district, same story, amazing progressive candidate lost to a so-so corporate-funded candidate in the Democratic primary.

Can it be fixed? We'll see. I doubt it but for the moment I will continue to work to reform the Democratic Party rather than work on starting something new.

I actually envision something like the congressional progressive caucus, but one that has a rule that its members swear off corporate funding, and provides alternative clean funding mechanisms (crowd funding) to allow them and their ideas to comepete with the corporatists. We have to defeat corporate Democrats in primaries to get anywhere, not easliy done when the party establishment is dead set against it.

And why did she go to all the trouble to petition the Univeristy of Chicago archives to change the name from Bernie to Rappaport to Sanders, then somehow magically the Times, and Capehart and WaPo, are all over it?

This lie went around the world about a humdred times over the last day or two. It cannot be walked back in any proportional way (well technically it could be, but we all know the MSM won't do that). That's how the game is being played, and it absolutely sucks. They need to fight Bernie on policy, not with lies.

I have no idea how we prevail against this kind of thing. It''s great that the pushback got to the bottom of it, still, I have to think it was "mission accomplished" for the Clintons. Capehart's husband (or live-in, don't know if they're married) is a paid Hillary staffer. This didn't just happen organically.

They don't much care what we think. They serve their own agendas, and through system control, they make sure we don't have serious alternative leaders available to us at election time.

So I'd say the powers that be love authoritarianism.

We're also a highly militarized warrior culture, and a large percentage of our citizens go through military training, which is nothing but authoritarian indoctrination, brought to us by the powers that be.

I agree we should turn the tables and put ourselves back in charge of our government. Easier said than done, of course.

We live in a Deep State that uses the vast resources of this nation in service of global corporate goals, and the viewpoint of the owners of the Deep State is injected into virtually every aspect of our lives.

A small segment of any population is equipped to intellectually break out of the programming it is presented with. The rest generally go along to get along, seeking a good place for themselves in the existing system rather than calling it out for illegitimacy, if they are even willing to do the analysis to see the illegitimacy. Systemic analysis and criticism often comes with a great personal price, few are willing to pay that price.

People are waking up, to some degree, and some better leaders are making some progress, so I am actually more hopeful than usual.

Intelligence, being articulate, and command of the issues can be found on different sides of the same issues. I think Hillary has all of those attributes, in spades.

Intelligent articulate people should have their grounding and motivations carefully evaluated. They are able to convince people of anything.

Is there any correlation between intelligence and wisdom? I'm pretty cynical about that. I've seen so many brilliant minds use their intelligence to convince people of things that should not be believed. I have a profound distrust of intelligent people who are persuasive and have highly developed communication skills.

Buyer beware.

I have long been blown away how so many people on this site don't understand the difference in results between not being able to pass something because of Republicans and DINOS, and not ever fighting for them.

When we fight for our issues, it changes everything. The entire media zeitgeist is altered by a strong individual (such as Warren or Sanders) standing up strong for our issues, or a strong group (Occupy). Without that, everything is based on Republican terms and policies.

We won't get our changes right away. There are a few things Bernie will be able to do in the short-term, but the reality is we will get our soul back as a party, we will get Congress back, the vast disaffected independent bloc will come to Democrats when we are fighting for their interests instead of being sell-outs, progressive issues will be front-and-center in the national course of debate, and Republicans will be exposed as the corporate shills that they are (they aren't exposed as this now because our own party is guilty of the same).

Electing Bernie will change everything. We'll have a huge fight on our hands even then, but it's the fight many of us have been waiting all our lives to wage. Bring it.

which is that we should pay our elected politicians about 10 times (I mean this literally) what we pay them now, they are very important jobs. As part of the massive pay raise, we should include language that forbids them to profit from their connections.

How to do this? The actual language and details would be critical, and I'm not smart enough to know. One possibility is a huge endless retiirement annuity, but forbidding them to make money from anyone else.

People scream that they aren't worth it, or that it would be too expensive. I say it is far more expensive to have them working for corporate interests, they need to do our business and nobody else's business. And if we get corporate money out of them, they will magically be worth the money we give them.

The money we pay them, even multiplied 10-fold, is a pittance compared to the huge sums of money their funders are making from sponsoring them, and their funders largely make that money at our expense.