"People Are Furious About It"

"I start off, Thomas, from the position that we need a political revolution in this country and that's not just rhetoric.  What I mean by that is that we need--and a president certainly can play a very, very important role in this--we need a massive change in citizen participation and in participation consciousness.  There was a poll that just came out I think yesterday.  Gallup tells us that... I believe it is 63 percent of the American people cannot name which parties control the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.  So you have consciousness so low, a significant majority of the American people who are very concerned about what's going on for themselves and their kids, they don't know who controls the House and the Senate.  They can't name which party controls both bodies.  You have what the political scientists tell us is a situation where in this coming election, 60 percent of the American people will not bother to vote.  That means 70-to-80 percent of low-income workers and young people will not vote.  So before you can talk about changing America, you have to change the political consciousness and the way that people relate to the political process. 
"Now, there is a group that relates very strongly to the political process, [and] that is the billionaire class that is now prepared to spend many hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates to represent their interests."


Thomas Frank talks with Bernie Sanders in Salon.