To paraphrase Yogi Berra, ‘It’s 2016 déjà vu all over again…’: Corporate Media’s Trashing of Bernie Sanders Starts Anew

Economic hit-men Antony Davies and James Harrigan and their target, Bernie Sanders

By Dave Lindorff

In 2016, we learned that the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton Campaign, even before the primary season began, conspired to sabotage the campaign of her leading opponent for the presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).  The conspiracy, that ranged from obtaining campaign debate questions in advance for Clinton and front-loading primaries in states where she could pile up an imposing lead to getting a complicit liberal media to count pledged but unelected and legally uncommitted “super delegates” as being already in Clinton’s delegate total (making the Sanders campaign appear quixotic) and also to plant ill-documented and speciously argued hit pieces in news media (including the NY Times and Washington Post) willing to support the effort.

Now, as Sanders’ campaign appears to be steadily gaining on the favored establishment candidates, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, this corrupt effort to sabotage the Democrats’ most progressive and most electable candidate, Sanders, is starting up again.

Case in point: an opinion article by Antony Davies and James R Harrigan that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s opinion section todayunder the headline “Wage hypocrisy by Sanders?”   The gist of the two author’s argument is that Sanders, who is calling on the campaign trail for a $15/hour federal minimum wage, is a “hypocrite” because he’s only paying his own campaign staff a minimum salary of…$36,000 a year. Now that might seem pretty decent compensation for people many of whom would probably be doing their campaign jobs for free if need be (as many do on such campaigns), but Davies and Harrigan, while calculating accurately that for a 40-hour workweek such a salary works out to $17/hr, add, “as is common for campaign workers, and salaried employees more generally, these workers almost always work more than 40 hours per week.” They add, with no evidence to prove people are doing it, “For a campaign worker who clocks 50 to 60 hours, $36,000 a year hits between $11 and $13 per hour.”

Gee. That sounds terrible, except for the fact that this is a political campaign, not a grinding, demoralizing desk job in a windowless office of some corporate hive. But more importantly and to the point, most Americans who slave away at salaried jobs simply don’t get overtime, and under federal employment law such as it is, have no right to claim it.

But here’s the real problem with this article: The authors don’t identify themselves as libertarian ideologues engaged in a long-term obsessive attack on Sanders and other self-described socialists. As a pair, they have a long back-list of articles going back over a year specifically targeting Sanders’ progressive economic ideas with headlines like: “Paying Teachers What They are Worth”“The Real Story Behind Amazon’s Taxes” and “The Billionaires versus the Politicians”

 

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, seven-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/the-liberal-media-trashing-of-bernie-sanders-starts-anew/

 

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