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0 of 3 Premium Clicks used this month SUBSCRIBE Print + Online Subscriber Activation | Register x Forgot Password | Need an Account? subscribe | newsletter | deals Classifieds Jobs Autos Real Estate FEATURED » NEWS NOW Inner Peace: Getting grounded at North Mountain Park ... Woman files sexual harassment lawsuit against Ashland Elks ... As It Was: America Butler's diary a window into 'women's work' ... Inner Peace: Getting grounded at North Mountain Park ... Woman files sexual harassment lawsuit against Ashland Elks ... As It Was: America Butler's diary a window into 'women's work' ... GUEST OPINION Guest Opinion: Time for a new New Deal Comment By Andy Seles DailyTidings.com By Andy Seles Posted Apr. 9, 2016 at 12:01 AM By Andy Seles Posted Apr. 9, 2016 at 12:01 AM » Social News I am dumbfounded by people who insist upon voting against their own interests. I’ve had many conversations with individuals across the political spectrum; however, there is one type of voter that refuses to consider my candidate, Bernie Sanders. This voter accepts Bernie’s outrage at wealth inequality and his plan to break up the big banks and reform Wall Street. They support ending bad trade deals and creating decent paying jobs here at home. Like Bernie, they want to overturn Citizens United and reform campaign financing. They want to retool the National Defense Authorization Act and its militarization of our police forces. If you've decided am speaking of my conservative brethren, you would be wrong. The people I am talking about are mostly baby-boomer liberals who, like my friend Beth Coye in her recent guest opinion, display a cognitive dissonance when it comes to the economy. This is ironic because it was James Carville who famously intoned in Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign: “It’s the economy, Stupid.” Clinton’s dysfunctional answer was to go global, supporting NAFTA and shipping thousands of factories and hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas. Clinton’s removal of Glass-Steagall, which had provided a firewall between commercial and investment banking, turned Wall Street into a global casino of mortgage derivatives. The icing on the cake for the new Democratic establishment was a cozy, revolving-door relationship with prominent Wall Streeters, people from the health care industry, big banks, big agriculture and big pharma, people who deliver big money to their campaigns. Progressive political pundits, including Robert Reich and Thomas Frank, are calling out the new (now old) establishment Democrats, challenging their global economic agenda. The crown jewel of this dystopian agenda is Obama’s Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, something Clinton only recently changed her mind on — or so she says. The deal belies a corporate, global grab for power that threatens our national sovereignty because it includes “investor-state dispute settlement,” international tribunals that can decide if a multi-national corporation’s profits are being adversely impacted by a nation’s laws. When confronted with establishment Democrat’s love affair with Wall Street, many boomers instinctively close ranks with the existing order. Ironically, the phrase “political revolution” frightens many of them who hit the streets in the '60s. Now “older and wiser,” they passively, if not cynically, choose the failed economic policies of the last 30 years. Inevitably, they rationalize their choice of HRC, not on specific policy issues, rather with worn-out platitudes: “She’s had so much experience in so many offices, she’s done a lot for the party, she’s tough and resilient, she’s a strong woman and we need a woman president.” Ryan Whitaker (decisiondata.org) did an in-depth study with the intention to “kill some conspiracy theories about the media.” What he found instead was strong evidence of media bias: “Our analysis shows Bernie Sanders is being ignored by the mainstream media to a shocking degree. If covered at the average rate we’d have seen about 61,500 more stories including Sanders in the last 6 months.” Television incorrigibly provides us with 24/7 TMZ-like coverage of the Trump reality-TV roadshow and its unconscionable appeal to the worst in us. This same “liberal media” promotes Hillary Clinton, the natural heir to her husband’s and Barack Obama’s neoliberal tryst with Wall Street, consistently referring to the establishment’s anointed one as “the frontrunner.” Any acknowledgement of the Sanders campaign has been fraught with smug condescension. Sanders’ recent winning five of the last six caucuses by margins of 40 percent gets little network television attention. Not surprisingly, we can trace the roots of the television networks’ failure to the 1996 Telecommunications Act signed by — drum roll please — William Jefferson Clinton. It is hypocritical that so many from a generation that enjoyed the blessings of the New Deal economy of FDR and that fought establishment politics in the '60s cannot now pass the torch to a new generation of Americans. A USA Today poll shows Sanders leading Clinton among younger voters by 54 percent to 37 percent with millennial women backing Sanders “by a jaw-dropping 61 percent-30 percent.” These millennials know that Sanders and his new New Deal will restore the middle class. Andy Seles lives in Ashland. By Andy Seles DailyTidings.com By Andy Seles Posted Apr. 9, 2016 at 12:01 AM » Comment or view comments Reader Reaction » STAY INFORMED Email NewsLetter Sign Up Today Sign up for our newsletter and have the top headlines from your community delivered right to your inbox. Southern Oregon Directory Featured Businesses Loading... 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