Given the insidious power of the corporate media to create and then shape election narratives that will directly boost profitability for their shareholders or use their kingmaker ability to destroy or boost candidates according to whose upper operatives' play golf at the same country clubs as the networks CEO's or both, it's prudent not to put too much into the MSM's Ascendant Bernie pieces that are everywhere these past couple of weeks. They have a clear and verifiable track record of being much too predictable in their flavor-of-the-week rollouts (from Beto to Harris to Warren to Buttegeig to Klobuchar). Meanwhile "frontrunner" Biden is really "the human jalopy of the race, whose engine has been squealing, parts have been flying off...and his ideology is jangly as hell too," as Maximillian Alvarez said recently on The Rising. And as he also points out, voters aren't dumb. When it really gets down to it there's no comparison in the candidates.

However, it does really appear that Bernie’s legitimately taking off now.

And the latest piece in Buzzfeed really captures what appears to be a unique and pivotal moment, an epiphany or refocusing, in this campaign on a precipice of yet another breakthrough to a new style of politics. Reading it I thought it was a natural discovery for the campaign to make because it had already been playing out for some time. Essentially it's about harnessing the power of the voters' stories and giving them the platform of a public airing. Bernie intuitively and deeply has understood and been explaining the malfeasance of the media for decades. It's a natural evolution to now have set up his own branch of media too.

With this now Bernie's done two things that are revolutionary in changing the course of politics going forward. First, he's refused to grovel to corporate donors for what is essentially bribery money, and turned the old guard ways on their heads with a double whammy: he showed campaigns can be well-funded without Wall St/Corporate America, and by only accepting small donations from individual donors he's earned the respect and support of the citizenry to such a degree that he continues to out-raise everyone in the race. Secondly, he's recognized the great void that is the corporate media not telling the stories of regular people, who invariably look to the news and not see their own lives reflected back to them. There's tons of very real shared pain across the country with respect to a large swath of the 99% living with serious economic deprivation as it relates to cut wages, longer hours, higher healthcare costs, overwhelming student/medical/consumer/college debt, etc that are not being shown by the media. This, more than anything on a subconscious level I think, has led to a fundamental mistrust of the media. Worse still, it's led to people feeling alone, self-blaming and responsible for these systemic-driven woes. By encouraging the sharing of these stories Bernie's at once striking back at the media for not doing their jobs while also galvanizing a gigantic electorate who perhaps for the first time in years to see themselves in these (their own) stories rather than the candidate's. This is how movements flourish. Goodbye to identity politics, hello to collectivized political action.

I've been of the mind for years now, that these two aspects, refusing corporate money and becoming the media, are essential and unavoidable for any campaign I'd ever be aligned with again and that this combination is absolutely the winning ticket. It's also of the best ways to wrest control from a dying, dysfunctional system keeping the Duopoly in place. That's why this piece was so encouraging to me (it's long but is one of the best on the breadth and imagination of the movement Bernie's trying to build):

From Ruby Cramer at Buzzfeed,
You
Don’t
Know
Bernie.

He doesn’t bother explaining why he’s here.

This is early on, late May, a few months into the race, but he is already of the belief that he is doing something extraordinary with his presidential campaign — something that’s never been done before. The trouble is describing it. There’s no word for this in modern politics. It is, he believes, “a new way to communicate with the American people” — though he won’t say this until later, and only when asked. Even now, long after he’s put this work at the center of his campaign — at his events, in ads, on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — he won’t talk about it much. He isn’t sure it’ll work, or if people are “picking up on what we’re trying to do here.” The media, he believes, has always believed, can’t fathom what’s at the heart of this.

So when he arrives at the house, a small mobile home 40 miles outside Montgomery, Alabama, over the Lowndes County line, in one of the poorest places in the country, with five reporters and his own camera crew, he steps through the front door, greets his host, and begins with no clear mention of what he hopes to accomplish here or how it will help him become president.

Pamela Rush, a 49-year-old mother of two, is showing him the problems with her home: the floor tilting visibly to one side, the sheets of plaster peeling off the wall, the broken pipes, the broken cabinetry. He stops in the room where her daughter sleeps. “Do you guys wanna…?” He motions for everyone to come closer. His videographer shuffles forward. On the bedside table, there’s a ventilation machine, the kind used for sleep apnea. A tube of ribbed plastic connects the device to a mask resting on the bedspread, which is patterned cheerily with tiny elephants. Because of mold in the house, Pamela’s daughter needs the device to breathe in her sleep. “How old is she?” the candidate asks. She’s 10. Pamela holds up the mask so he can see up close.

“Show them, not me,” he says, gesturing toward the camera.

She shows the camera the mask.

The visit continues like this. “Show them,” he keeps saying. “Show them.” He speaks only to ask questions, prompting Pamela to “explain” this or that, pointing her to an unseen audience on the other end of his camera lens. It’s like he’s directing his own video — except the video isn’t about him or his campaign or his policy agenda. He is, it seems, somewhere offscreen, an omniscient narrator, felt maybe, but not seen or heard. This is not a public event. There is no crowd. There is no podium, no speech. Mostly, there is silence. The leader of the political revolution — a man who has spent 50 years of his life trying to talk about his ideas — is not saying much at all.

Bernie Sanders is sorry for your troubles, but that’s not the reason he’s asking you to talk about them — which he is, everywhere he goes. He wants you to talk about your medical bill — the one you can’t pay. He wants you to talk about losing your house because you got sick. He wants you to talk about the payday loans you took out to keep your kid in school. About the six-figure student debt that’s always on your mind. About living off credit cards, or losing your pension, or working multiple jobs for wages that won’t be enough to support your family.

He would like you to talk about this publicly, in detail, and on camera. He will ask you to do this in front of reporters, or in a room full of strangers at one of his town halls. Of course, the Bernie Digital Team will be there — they are always there — taping your story on camera, or streaming it in real-time to his own mass broadcast system on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. On any given day, he is capable of reaching millions of people.

“Who wants to share their story?” he’ll say. “Don’t be embarrassed. Millions of people are in your boat.”

He has, it turns out, built an entire presidential campaign around an open invitation to speak — to talk plainly about the “reality of life” in this country — to be “loud so everyone can hear.”

His suggestion, by asking you to speak up about your private anxieties, many of them financial, is that you and the millions of people in the proverbial audience will begin to see your struggles not as personal failings, but systemic ones. He is less interested in explicitly presenting solutions than naming the problem — that “we have millions of people in the richest country in the history of the world who are struggling every single day,” which is a phrase he repeats daily, almost like an exhortation, as if to grab the American working class by its shoulders. He doesn’t deal in pity or reassurance. Yes, he’ll give hugs — one arm, from the side, other hand still clutching the mic. But mostly he’ll just listen and nod, gaze lowered. Or he’ll shake his head at the crowd, like can you believe this? And then, from the gut, a clipped scoff, like of course you can believe it. That’s the point. He has heard your story before, because it’s all part of the same story: a broken system, driven by profit and greed, built to reinforce the notion that if you’re bright enough, if you work hard enough, then you can travel the path to the middle class. And if you don’t make it there…well, maybe you’re the problem. And who wants to talk about that?

He believes his presidential campaign can, he says, help people “feel less alone.”

And then the Wall St Journal had this, Bernie Sanders’s Loyal Voters Could Keep Him in Race for Months:
Polls show Vermont senator’s base is more dedicated than that of any other 2020 Democrat .

According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll from October, Mr. Sanders’s supporters are the most sure that they will vote for their favored candidate. Some 57% of his backers say they will definitely stick with him. By comparison, half of former Vice President Joe Biden’s supporters and one-third of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s supporters say they will stick with their current top choice.

Both Mr. Biden and Ms. Warren had more support nationwide from Democratic primary voters than Mr. Sanders in the October poll. Polling averages from early-voting states currently don’t show the Vermont senator leading, according to RealClearPolitics data.

Still, Mr. Sanders could collect delegates out of primaries and caucuses even if he doesn’t win them outright. That is because to qualify for delegates, a candidate needs to cross a 15% threshold at the congressional and/or statewide level. Mr. Sanders hits or exceeds that in the majority of early state polls...

“He’s the only legitimate person, all the others are full of s---,” said Milton J. Espinoza, 72, a pharmacist from Queens, N.Y.

If Mr. Sanders isn’t the nominee, “I will go out in the streets, and I will protest, I will quit my job. And I will say something until he’s the nominee,” said Tracey Taeger, 30, a grocery-store employee from Clinton Township, Mich.

“There’s no future because the planet is going to, you know, become really uninhabitable,” she said, referring to Mr. Sanders’s $16.3 trillion plan to combat climate change.

Despite their openness to a fight in Milwaukee, none of the voters the Journal spoke to at campaign events around the country was willing to vote for President Trump in a general election if Mr. Sanders wasn’t the nominee. A handful, including Mr. Espinoza and Ms. Taeger, said they might stay home or vote for a third-party candidate, but most said they would back the Democrats’ pick.

Mr. Sanders has said he would vote for the Democratic nominee in a general election if it isn’t him.

Alexis Huscko, a 26-year-old stay-at-home parent from Muscatine, Iowa, has been to several rallies with her family. She said her 2-year-old daughter sometimes breaks into a frequent rally chant: “Hey, hey, ho, ho corporate greed has got to go.”

Ms. Huscko said she voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016 after Mr. Sanders lost the nomination. But she said she wouldn’t vote for a third-party candidate again.

“We absolutely have to get Donald Trump out of there,” Ms. Huscko said.

I think in some ways one can interpret the selection of quotes in this piece is to again paint Sanders' supporters as too rigid and fanatical. On the other hand it's this kind of passion and commitment that wins elections.

Fox News poll finds a wealth tax is far more popular than Trump's wall

Poll respondents were asked if they strongly or somewhat favored or opposed several proposals that 2020 candidates on both sides of the aisle are supporting. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) wealth tax got the biggest backing, with 68 percent of poll-takers saying they favored the proposal, 45 percent of them strongly. Trump's promise to build a wall along the U.S.–Mexico border meanwhile got 44 percent support, with 52 percent voicing their opposition.

In fact, the only thing less popular than the wall was replacing all private health insurance with a government-run program, which Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and other Democrats are championing as Medicare-for-all. It got just 41 percent of respondents to say they favored the program, with 53 percent saying they were opposed.

Two positive Murdoch pieces that got through? Or is it part of the aforementioned ploy in this age of deep financial dependence on stopping at nothing to drive ratings in order to keep advertisers happy? Or is it another trick in the digital, the scroll-the-headlines-but-not-read-the-story, but in the reverse this time, as the editors play with the language and select quotes to give the desired effect on the reader of things, which in this case is to make the voter wary the single-mindedness of Bernie's rabid supporters behind a veil of saluting Bernie's omnipotent strength.

And the whole "Warren's wealth tax plan" is another typical corporate media trick to make it seem like it was her idea alone, ignoring Bernie has been for such legislation for decades. And then combined with a favorable stat for her while Bernie's M4A doesn't do as well (the heavy insurance company propaganda about the "choice" lie of which is explained just ahead in Wendell Potter's tweets and the Intercepted podcast) is purposeful in making it seem to readers that Bernie isn't doing as well.

Former Cigna VP turned whistleblower Wendell Potter takes on Petey Boy's corporate, insurance industry-generated criticism of M4A and the insidiousness of marketers to distort the language to manipulate voters, in this case framing it as "choice":

When I worked in the insurance industry, we were instructed to talk about “choice,” based on focus groups and people like Frank Luntz (who wrote the book on how the GOP should communicate with Americans). I used it all the time as an industry flack. But there was a problem. 2/11

— Wendell Potter (@wendellpotter) December 16, 2019

As industry insiders, we also knew most Americans have very little choice of their plan. Your company chooses an insurance provider and you get to pick from a few different plans offered by that one insurer, usually either a high deductible plan or a higher deductible plan 4/11

— Wendell Potter (@wendellpotter) December 16, 2019

Knowing we were losing the "choice" argument, my pals in the insurance industry spent millions on lobbying, ads and spin doctors -- all designed to gaslight Americans into thinking that reforming the status quo would somehow give them “less choice.” 6/11

— Wendell Potter (@wendellpotter) December 16, 2019

This isn't the only time the industry made “choice” a big talking point in its scheme to fight health reform. Soon after Obamacare was passed, it created a front group called the Choice and Competition Coalition, to scare states away from creating exchanges with better plans 8/11

— Wendell Potter (@wendellpotter) December 16, 2019

So if a politician tells you they oppose reforming the current healthcare system because they want to preserve "choice," either they don't know what they're talking about - or they're willfully ignoring the truth. I assure you, the insurance industry is delighted either way 11/11

— Wendell Potter (@wendellpotter) December 16, 2019

If what for-profit healthcare offers most is choice, the choice Americans are making is a complete indictment of the system. https://t.co/GXHZ47Gm0R

— Tuxedo Mask (@TheLoveBel0w) December 16, 2019

More here with Jeremy Scahill interviewing Potter and also another one with an author who wrote a book on McKinsey, "Capitalism’s Consigliere: McKinsey’s Work for Insurance Companies, ICE, Drug Manufacturers, and Despots"

Of the many aspects of my experience with Occupy that effected me deeply, I still love the really great slogans chanted and paraded on signs. There's not a soul in the world now it seems who doesn't implicitly know what the 1% is (even Business Insider spouts, "The mainstreaming of Occupy Wall Street: How rethinking American capitalism became the most important debate of the 2010s," though they give too much credit to business leaders who just co-opt the language and then integrate into their own plans to mitigate the backlash).

You. Are. Not. Alone.
You. Are. Not. A. Loan.

We Are Unstoppable
Another World Is Possible.

Bernie is speaking very clearly about the fundamental way this system of unbridled capitalism drives despair, self-blame abuse and loneliness. It's a gamble. Because for a desensitized, overly stimulated and overly-ironic population it is predicated on people first acknowledging the grasp of this systemic monster, then stepping away from it, to be able to look at it anew in order to see clearly the real enemy to all of us.

To do that he's relying on appeals to the most basic human instincts, empathy and compassion, which require the selflessness and higher calling of being able to recognize one's self in any other. His campaign has tapped into the deep reservoir of economic discontent and are focused on sharing these stories. I think he wins big on this revolutionary challenge.

(NYC lost an Occupy Brother yesterday. Rest in Power, Kitty...)

Kitty’s streets! pic.twitter.com/aMQUSEUpjn

— NYC Shut It Down (@NYC_ShutItDown) December 17, 2019

FUCK!! https://t.co/2XJcO1FO8e

— NYC Shut It Down (@NYC_ShutItDown) December 17, 2019

Kitty and Shari together again pic.twitter.com/aBjKaJTJJ9

— Issa Ratchet Abolitionist (@CopwatchK) December 17, 2019

Here's a glorious shot of Kitty in the James Baldwin doc "I Am Not Your Negro." I hit up Kitty when I saw him on the big screen. He was nonplussed.

It's from May Day 2015. Kitty was arrested just as the march stepped out of Union Sq. He rejoined the march before it ended. pic.twitter.com/JPgg8ppsFt

— M.J. Williams (@_mjwilliams_) December 18, 2019

All power to the people.