by Jesse
“The reform impulse just keeps short-circuiting every time the Democrats try to switch it on. They talk about healthcare – and immediately have to say things like this about Obamacare: ‘It’s a heck of a lot better than starting from scratch.’ They talk about getting college tuition under control – and everyone remembers that the problem is decades old and that the Dems have done virtually nothing about it all those years. What was without a doubt the worst moment of them all came at the Democratic convention back in July, when Senator Elizabeth Warren pronounced on the current state of middle America as follows:
Look around. Americans bust their tails, some working two or three jobs, but wages stay flat. Meanwhile, the basic costs of making it from month to month keep going up. Housing, healthcare, child care – costs are out of sight. Young people are getting crushed by student loans. Working people are in debt. Seniors can’t stretch a social security check to cover the basics.
It was a powerful indictment of what Warren called a ‘rigged’ system – except for one thing: that system is presided over by Barack Obama, a man that same Democratic convention was determined to apotheosize as one of the greatest politicians of all times.”
Thomas Frank, October 6, 2016
“Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.”
Upton Sinclair
The problem with the Democratic Party Establishment is their addiction to Big Money and power— and the Clintons and their stooges are the pushers and enablers of that addiction.
Jimmy Dore is angry, and lets it ‘all hang out’ in this critique of the mainstream corporate media. I would not speak like this about individuals, as it is not my style. But I understand it. People are not complete fools, despite what those who have isolated themselves from them might think.
The neo-con and neo-liberal establishment plays their games of identity politics and social divisions in order to deflect from their blatant selling out their working class base. They run from the economic issues and injustices and repackage them so as not to offend their corporate paymasters.
It is hard to not conclude that their number one priority is getting paid, and not the consequences to their traditional base. Their base is the professional class and the money that it represents. They use social issues and selective opposition to oppression like a wolf might use the costume of a sheep. They wish to divide and conquer the great bulk of the working people.
Certainly the GOP has become almost repulsive, totally in thrall to the one percent, and seemingly beyond repair. But remember— the lesser of two evils is still evil, and insures the continuation of a dirty, corrupted system. And in the end, that is the objective from those who prey on the public.
We are caught in a credibility trap, wherein the channels of change have been compromised by the long term corruption of the system by the money of the corporate interests. Those with platforms provided by this system dare not speak for change, because it would imperil their exceedingly comfortable paychecks.
It is an old story; and it generally resolves itself in various forms of disruptive change, gradual and organic change being long denied.
The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.
The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman.
The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the ‘last thing standing’ between us and the end of the world.
It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue.”
Thomas Frank, December 2016
This message will not be accepted easily within the intellectually-gated Beltway mentality. It will be and has been heretofore rejected with the usual slogans, dodges and deflections. They cannot accept it, because it undermines their credibility, the credentialed mantle of their power. And they have served mammon for many years, and have come to love their master with their hearts and minds..
Caution on language.