Plutocratic Panic Is Palpable

They're triple-peeing themselves, and I don't mean in the way that neoliberals have been selling the odious acronym PPP for the past 40 years. Since the "public- private partnerships" which socialize all the costs and privatize all the profits have been duly exposed as scams literally condemning Americans to premature deaths, the plutocratic perps are now resorting to bald-faced lies.

The Paper of Record is only too happy to help. With only seven Democrats on the latest debate stage, Bernie Sanders actually threatened to get noticed and take away precious speaking time from low-polling "moderate" Amy Klobuchar and billionaire Tom Steyer. The Anti-Bernie campaign will thus begin in earnest.

The New York Times' role in destroying Sanders for a second time is beginning with some blatant monkeying-around with public opinion through use of an online marketing tool aptly called SurveyMonkey.

"When Offered Options, Democratic Voters Prefer a Moderate Path" is the since-changed headline of a piece by Ben Casselman, who writes

Only one in four Democratic voters says they would favr eliminating private health insurance and replacing it with a government-run plan — the centerpiece of the “Medicare for all” proposals put forward by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. And only one in three favors making public college tuition free for all Americans regardless of income, another idea shared by the two leading progressives in the race.Those results, from a survey conducted this month for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey, are striking because past polls, including those from The Times, have shown broad-based support for progressive ideas among Democrats. Last month, 81 percent of Democrats said they approved of Medicare for all; in July, 82 percent said they supported making public colleges free for all.

A SurveyMonkey "research scientist" feebly explains away the glaring inconsistency that these same Democratic respondents trust Bernie Sanders more than any other candidate to "handle health care" by claiming that you can be very fond of a politician without ever agreeing with his or her policies. 

Casselman himself sought out other regular folk until he found a few willing to echo corporate Democratic and insurance industry talking points. They agree with Medicare For All in principle, but don't think the time is right to make a change. A political party's fortunes are more important than people's health.

 Meanwhile, the methodology of the survey is iffy at best, with SurveyMonkey explaining:

This SurveyMonkey online poll was conducted December 2 through 8, 2019 among a national sample of 4,093 adults. Respondents for this survey were selected from the more than 2 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. Data were weighted for age, race, sex, education, and geography using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to reflect the demographic composition of the United States.

Who did the selecting? Did they cherry-pick among the two million people to find the "moderate" public opinion with which the ruling class so desperately wants to gaslight the public?

Although the Wikipedia entry for SurveyMonkey has been flagged due to suspicions that it is nothing but a paid advertisement and thereby in violation of the site's terms of use, it does contain several disturbing facts, such as the firm's Wall Street and private equity financing and leadership. Another massive infusion of oligarchic cash boosted its market share price by a whopping 60 percent just in the last year. Its board of directors includes the billionaire widow, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, of its first leader. To add the necessary sheen of  gender and racial diversity, tennis star Serena Williams was recently added to the roster of super-capitalists invested in carefully measuring,if not outright creating or even falsifying, public opinion. Not for nothing does the board also include Facebook alumnus David Ebersman, who now runs Lyra Health, a "frictionless" technocratic mental health service provider to the disgruntled and oppressed workers of America.

Employers naturally have a stake in this as they want their employees to stay health, (sic) but the goal is to offer a sort of safe space where users can benefit from years of growth in pattern matching and data to help them figure out where to start. The company said it has raised $45 million in a new financing round including Tenaya Capital, Glynn Capital Partners, Crown Ventures, and Casdin Capital. Existing investors that include Greylock Partners, Venrock, and Providence Ventures also participated in the funding round.

 As one satisfied customer gushed in a testimonial on the Lyra website, getting mental health treatment from private equity is just like getting an upgrade to business class!

Judging from some other results of the New York Times-commissioned survey revealing there are millions more "moderates" than even they thought, I wonder whether SurveyMonkey picked some of the respondents from among the happy workplace clients of Lyra. Survey Monkey certainly appears to have picked and chosen its respondents from among the financially comfortable minority rather than from the precarious majority. More than a third of respondents reported being better off financially than they were a year ago, with another 41 percent thinking that they'll be even better off next year. Half the respondents think that the United States will be doing just fine in the next five years. More than a third are so flush with disposable income that they think that now is the perfect time to buy major household items.

 Even more preposterously, more than half proclaim themselves to be extremely concerned about the government budget deficit while a third are "somewhat" concerned about it, resulting in a shocking 80 percent of allegedly typical Americans worried about the deficit while life actually is pretty good for them, personally.

So my money is on the panicked plutocratic cherry-picking rather than on life being a big fat bowl of luscious cherries for concerned liberals having the time, the computers, the internet connections and probably lots of mind-altering drugs to fill out online SurveyMonkey questionnaires commissioned by the New York Times.

Of course, I could be nothing but a conspiracy theorist whose brain has been infiltrated by Putin. I am probably in dire need of some frictionless psychotherapy from the private equity shrinks at Lyra and SurveyMonkey, which are striving mightily to get the huddled masses to see the error of their radical life-sustaining thought processes.

Resistance (as opposed to approved #Resistance, Inc.) may be futile, but I think I'll give it a try anyway. I hope that millions of my fellow immoderates will join me in the new decade.

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