Thursday, October 01, 2015

Bernie is legit. [UPDATE - NY Times reporting, "Bernie Sanders’s Campaign, Hitting Fund-Raising Milestone, Broadens Focus," By PATRICK HEALY, OCT. 1, 2015]

WaPo, Oct. 1, 2015:

Clinton held 58 fundraising events to raise her total; Sanders held seven. As of the end of September, Sanders had brought in 1.3 million total donations from 650,000 individuals since he began running. Clinton's campaign did not release how many total donors she has. And Sanders ended September with $25 million in the bank; Clinton did not release how much money her campaign had on hand.

Read between the lines, and you get this: Sanders is drawing huge amounts of small-dollar donations via the Web. That means two important things: (1) Sanders has been able to concentrate on meeting and greeting potential voters rather than spending his time courting donors, and (2) He has been able to conserve money because he isn't spending cash on lavish events for donors.

Why do the small donors flock to Sanders? Because he offers a break from the steady pattern of GHW Bush, the Clintons, GW Bush, Obama, which were all close shades of neoliberal corporatism favoring moneyed interests, Wall Street and banks primarily prospering, as well as giant multinational corporations where top executives extract intemperate, indeed obscene amounts of wealth from shareholders without any real checks and balances. Bernie offers CHANGE. The real thing. Not small change. And not small hope.

______________UPDATE_______________
This link, for item noted in this post's headlining.