Yves here. Paul R flagged this post by Norman Solomon, noting: “Nothing new, and really a bit understated, but shows it’s becoming fashionable to say this stuff.” While Corporate Democrats indeed should be beaten early and often, trying to pin the tail of their spectacular sellout of ordinary Americans as late as Hillary is all wet. Just look at the timeline. Trump was first elected right after Obama left office, FFS. If his time in office had been good for typical Americans, voters might have eaten the Hillary dog food out of a desire to more-or-less continue current policies rather than bet on a grievance-voicing political novice like Trump.
So the question is when the Democrats when irredeemably bad on their slower-motion betrayal of lower and middle class voters. It started started with Carter and got traction with Bill Clinton, witness NAFTA and the super-predators bill. But the big inflection point occurred with the sainted Obama, who still appears to be above reproach in way too many quarters. Amazing what being a well-spoken minority-looking but culturally white sellout of your pretend-class interests will get you.
To get a better sense of what Obama was always about, please read the 2012 post, Exclusive: How Obama’s Early Career Success Was Built on Fronting for Chicago Real Estate and Finance. Its opening:
Barack Obama remains an icon to many on what passes for the left in America despite incontrovertible evidence that he does not represent their interests. There are many contributing factors, including his considerable skills as a speaker and his programmatic effort to neuter liberal critics by getting their funding cut.
A central component of the seemingly impenetrable Obama mythology is his personal history: a black man, son of a broken home, who nevertheless got on the fast track to financial success by becoming editor of the Harvard Law Review, but turned instead to working with and later representing a particularly disadvantaged community, the South Side of Chicago.
Even so, this story does not quite add up. Why did Obama not follow the usual, well greased path of becoming a Supreme Court clerk, and seeking to exert influence through the Washington doors that would have opened up to him after that stint?
A remarkable speech by Robert Fitch puts Obama’s early career in a new perspective that explains the man we see now in the Oval Office: one who pretends to befriend ordinary people but sells them out again and again to wealthy, powerful interests – the banks, big Pharma and health insurers, and lately, the fracking-industrial complex.
Fitch, who died last year, was an academic and journalist, well regarded for his forensic and archival work, as described by Doug Henwood in an obituary in the Nation. He is best known for his book Solidarity for Sale, which chronicled corruption in American unions, but his work that is germane to his analysis of Obama is Assassination of New York. In that, he documented the concerted efforts by powerful real estate and financial interests to drive manufacturing and low-income renters out of Manhattan so they could turn it over to office and residential space for high income professionals.
Fitch gave his eye-opening speech before an unlikely audience at an unlikely time: the Harlem Tenants Association in November 2008, hard on the heels of Obama’s electrifying presidential win. The first part contains his prescient prediction: that Obama’s Third Way stance, that we all need to put our differences aside and get along, was tantamount to advocating the interests of the wealthy, since they seldom give anything to the have-nots without a fight.
That discussion alone is reason to read the piece. But the important part is his description of the role that Obama played in the redevelopment of the near South Side of Chicago, and how he and other middle class blacks, including Valerie Jarrett and his wife Michelle, advanced at the expense of poor blacks by aligning themselves with what Fitch calls “friendly FIRE”: powerful real estate players like the Pritzkers and the Crown family, major banks, the University of Chicago, as well as non-profit community developers and real estate reverends.
Don’t take my word for it. Download the speech and read it. And then circulate it widely. And thank Michael Hudson, Fitch’s friend for over 30 years, for making this document available.
You can find the speech as an embedded document here.
Let’s provide some updates to the Obama rap sheet from his presidency:
Obama campaigned with Paul Volcker, giving the strong signal that he would use the feared, no-bullshit Volcker as Treasury Secretary to get tough with financiers. Instead he kicked Volcker upstairs to an inconsequential post and picked the toady Timothy Geithner.
The Bush Administration courteously left $75 billion of the $750 billion of the TARP to the Obama Administration for foreclosure relief. Nothing of the sort was done. Instead, we later got HAMP, which Geithner admitted was not actually to help homeowners, but to “foam the runway” for banks by attenuating foreclosures. I have the image of homeowners lying on runways and banks-as-landing-airplanes reducing them to bloody pulp.
Obama promised to increase the Federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. It is still at $7.25.
Obama chose health industry lobbyists to draft the Affordable Care Act. Drug and health insurer stocks traded up when it was passed.
Obama tried “reforming” Social Security and Medicare. Luckily his Grand Bargain did not get done.
There may be better ways to cut the data, but this chart illustrates how friendly the Obama years were to the top wealthy:
And remember, Biden’s nomination would have been impossible without the Obama-orchestrated weekend of the long knives, which succeeded in its big aim of knocking out Sanders. And please do not tell me Sanders could have carried on. Key staffers pressed him to quit then. They would have left or continued with little enthusiasm. You cannot carry on a campaign when you are hemorrhaging personnel.
We’ll now turn to the bill of particulars against Team Dem under Hillary’s and Biden’s nominal stewardship.
By Norman Solomon, the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. Originally published at Common Dreams
Ten years after Donald Trump first ran for president, he stands at the helm of Titanic America. How did this happen?
No factors were more pivotal than the outlooks and actions of the Democratic Party leadership. Scrutinizing them now is vital not only for clarity about the past. It also makes possible a clear focus on ways to prevent further catastrophe.
Here’s the actual history that corporate Democrats pretend didn’t happen:
2016: Hillary Clinton offers more of the status quo. Her allies in the Democratic Party pull out all the stops so she can win the party’s presidential nomination. With a big assist from the Democratic National Committee, she prevails over the strong primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, but her campaign trail goes downhill from there. After rallying behind Sanders’s genuine progressive populism, many young people don’t trust the pseudo-populism of Clinton’s campaign. She has earned a millennial problem, and it prevents her from becoming president.
2017: Democratic Party leaders can hardly blame themselves or their nominee for the virtually unbelievable circumstance of the Trump presidency. A critical focus on Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street won’t do. Neither will critiquing her thinly veiled contempt for the progressive wing of the party. But blaming Trump’s victory on Russia becomes an obsessive theme.
2018: The Democratic leadership is mapping out a battle plan for the midterm elections in November. At the same time, a key priority is to thwart the inside threat posed by progressive forces. Establishment Democrats are keeping a watchful eye and political guns trained on Bernie Sanders.
2019: Democrats take control of the House, and a large cast of political characters is off and running for the party’s presidential nomination. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren are at the left edge, while more than a dozen others jostle for media attention. For elites determined to retain undemocratic power, seeing either Sanders or Warren in the Oval Office would be the worst possible outcome.
2020: Early in the year, the economic populism of the Sanders campaign continues to catch fire, while many forces team up to function as fire extinguishers. The Democratic Party establishment acts to smother the grassroots blaze. After Joe Biden’s fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary puts his campaign on life-support, rescue comes eighteen days later from South Carolina, where Biden wins a landslide primary victory—and then several corporate-friendly contenders quickly drop out of the race and effusively endorse him. When Biden clinches the nomination, progressives largely close ranks behind him to defeat Trump. Biden squeaks through.
2021: President Biden’s first year includes backing and signing legislation with real benefits for tens of millions of Americans. But his resolve dissipates. Before the end of the year, he abandons Build Back Better legislation that would have been transformational. Notably, Biden withdraws all US troops from Afghanistan in late summer—but overall he opts to fuel militarism, with ever-higher Pentagon spending instead of devoting adequate resources to meet human needs and protect nature. The president goes full speed ahead with “modernization” plans for ever more dangerous nuclear weapons that already have a pre-overrun price tag of $1.7 trillion.
2022: Biden relapses into his customary “moderate” political mode, while his capacity to speak coherently weakens. Party discipline, internalized by Democrats in Congress, precludes independent-minded leadership as they begin to proclaim that Biden should run for re-election. Conformity of groupthink and fear of retribution from the White House keep people quiet.
2023: A real-life Shakespearean tragedy unfolds as Biden throws down a gauntlet to run for re-election even while his mental frailty becomes more evident. Enablers ignore the party’s base, with polls continuing to show that most Democrats don’t want him to be the next nominee (including 94 percent of Democrats under 30). A common canard—pushed by Biden’s coterie of sycophants—contends that because he defeated Trump once, he’s the best person to do it again; the claim ignores the fact that Trump 2020 represented an unpopular status quo, and Biden 2024 would represent an even more unpopular status quo, as “right track / wrong track” polling makes crystal clear. Soon after Hamasattacks Israel on October 7 and the Israeli military starts its siege of Gaza, Biden begins to further alienate many of his party’s usual voters by massively boosting US military aid as the slaughter of Palestinian civilians escalates.
2024: Among top Democrats, denial about Biden’s evident cognitive infirmity grows along with the infirmity itself. Even after Biden’s disastrous debate performance in late June, the political reflex of dissembling prevents him from bowing out for another 28 days. That leaves 107 days for the newly installed nominee Kamala Harris to pick up the pieces before Election Day. At first it seems that she might find ways to depart from coming across as Biden’s yes-woman, but there is no such departure. Nothing epitomizes the Harris campaign’s moral collapse more than her insistence on echoing the Biden line about Gaza while the US continues to arm Israel’s military as it methodically kills Palestinian civilians. In the process, Harris chooses to ignore both human decency and polls showing that far more voters would be likely to cast their ballots for her if she were to come out against sending more armaments to Israel. Electoral disaster ensues.
Last month, two events showed the huge contradiction between the potential for true progressive change and the dire reality of feckless Democratic Party leaders. When socialist Zohran Mamdani won election as mayor of New York after running as a Democrat, he said: “If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump; it’s how we stop the next one.” A week later, eight members of the Senate’s Democratic caucus surrendered to Trump, betraying efforts to defend Obamacare and a healthcare status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured. The capitulation meant that the nation’s healthcare crisis would get even worse.
Craven and conformist Democratic Party leadership—coloring inside corporate lines while enmeshed with rich backers—hardly offers a plausible way to defeat the Trump forces, much less advance a humane political agenda. Saving the country from autocracy requires recognizing and overcoming the chokehold that Democratic leaders have on the party.
The timeline above is drawn from my new book about the 10-year political descent into the current inferno, The Blue Road to Trump Hell, which is free as an e-book or PDF at BlueRoad.info.
Whilst Biden went “full speed ahead with “modernization” plans for ever more dangerous nuclear weapons”, it was Obama who initiated this program :
https://www.armscontrol.org/issue-briefs/2017-08/trillion-half-dollar-triad .
This was despite his 2009 Prague speech where he outlined a goal of “a world without nuclear weapons.”
It is notable that this Obama program was probably the only one that Trump has not at least attempted to reverse.
Throw in Obama/Clinton’s “pivot to Asia”… aka the “answer” to the Thucydides Trap is to contain China.
IMO, Maidan-putsch Ukraine : Russia is to “pivot to Asia” : China—-crossing the Rubicon that the US can’t be trusted to treat you like a peer
Obama care, aka Romney care, aka the HEART act was always a right wing idea. The fact that the Democrats picked it up and ran with it, instead of pushing a single payer system, says it all. They have been Market liberals for a long time
Yeah, Liberals made such a big deal about Heritage Foundation’s project 2025 and how Trump was going to follow it verbatim, when Obama had already done that 15 years earlier with his “health” plan.
Obama Care for benefit of health and pharma.
Clinton pivot in late 1990s for benefit of investment bankers.
Both pissing on Americans and telling them it is raining.
Surprise, good for industries and horrible for consumers. /:
Check your insurance and pharma price increases. And enshittification, and claim denials.
Then check the donor lists of your so-called representatives and senators.
Just a few examples of their contempt and phoniness.
“Barack Obama remains an icon to many on what passes for the left in America…”
No real leftist American considers Obama a leftist icon. That is just fake news. He’s a corporate liberalist Democrat that made leftist campaign gesture and then promptly sold out the left once in office.
I hate how so many liberals claim to be leftists when they wouldn’t even know a leftist idea if it slapped them in the face.
I admit I haven’t talked much to people since the election, but one of the things that stood out to me for most of the time since Obama was first inaugurated is how much of a disconnect there is between recognizing the actual policies and actions versus the PR narrative. The right left narrative is all bombast regardless of the source, the media is as much a uniparty as our political candidates are. Call it time, call it disinformation, but I have come to believe that many times people are not faux leftists but ill-informed. And that is intentional.
As many have pointed out Sanders’ dreaded socialist policies were popular with people if the policy itself became the discussion. It has taken many of my friends a decade and a half to realize that the ACA was as bad as I said it was AND that the Democrats never had any intention of fixing its problems. And that is only because they keep getting hit with things I told them would happen.
The meme out there right now that makes me crazy is that if Kamala were President the person would be enjoying eggnog and pumpkin muffins rather than being incensed about Trump’s destruction of XY And Z. Not because it isn’t true, it probably is very accurate, but because I know that that would be possible only because they wouldn’t really know what a Harris administration was doing. (Sure they probably wouldn’t be double tapping survivors from a boat they blew up, but I can see them misbehaving with Venezuela and South America on behalf of Conoco.) Whatever their trusted source is would either ignore or downplay the reality while cheerleading bull and pointing out predetermined villians Republican and Democrat thwarting any desired change
“how much of a disconnect there is between recognizing the actual policies and actions versus the PR narrative.”
!!!!
(Europe, I am looking at you)
p.s. There is enough substance to the fear that Dems under Harris would have escalated in Ukraine.
Which was the one single most important reason for many sane in Europe to at least rhetorically support non-Dem votes / Trump. Ulrike Guérot said just that only 3 weeks ago.
Piccante~! “Amazing what being a well-spoken minority-looking but culturally white sellout of your pretend-class interests will get you.”
All that one needs to know.
Yet I am here to bury Hillary Clinton, not to praise her. Yes, Jimmy Carter started messing up the Democrats with the first deregulation as well as by dragging his religious beliefs into politics. But Clinton in 1979 — yes, seems like ancient history — was already first lady of Arkansas, building that enviable record of influence peddling, grift, dodgy financial transactions, and plain ole buncombe that marks her career.
Hillary Clinton in many ways represents what the Democrats glommed onto when Jimmy Carter decided to start dismantling the New Deal and Great Society. Then Bill&Hill went whole hog, as “moderate” Democrats of the New South. Forty-five years later…
Now, we are witnessing a remarkable mess, especially on YTbe and other video outlets: Hillary Clinton went to Doha and pretty much repeated the talking points of the vile Sarah Hurwitz (and the doltish Van Jones) with regard to social media, genocide denialism, and the general unwillingness of the public to accept more propaganda.
We are a long way from Lyndon Johnson. Undoubtedly, Obama is a pivot point, being a Reagan Republican masquerading as the new lifestyle choice. Yet the long careers of Hillary, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Steny Hoyer (still infesting the House), and Joe Biden show clearly the degradation of the Democratic Party into malignity.
The Donkey Show strikes me as having more of 6-7 year plan.
Some might say it started with Truman or even FDR who some socialists at the time accused of saving capitalism from itself.
And some of us would contend that these “isms” are imperfect models of human behavior and that is the real issue to be dealt with. The people who started the country did understand the need to keep absolute, irrational power in check but couldn’t compromise their way to a smoothly working solution. And so Jefferson said more revolutions would be needed. Easier said than done.
Still, step one must surely be acknowledgement of the falsity of the Democrats. Thanks for the post.
Going back before FDR…how far?
Many Democrats today wouldn’t vote for those f’ers.
So the FDR administration, for whatever reasons, may have actually an outlier.
“may have actually been”
Missing that caffeine connection.
This is a good piece, but far from comprehensive. And, as Yves suggested, it’s actually too kind to Democrats. They’re constantly being given 2nd and 3rd chances by voters and constantly refusing to change. Norman Solomon shows a blind spot by omitting the war in Ukraine from the list. Recall, Biden threw endless cash and weapons and huge amounts of political capital behind this war-effort (it was Tony Blinken’s full time job to fly around the world scraping together caches of old Soviet-era weapons to send to Ukraine) at the same time his administration did deals to cut food stamps and let the child tax credit expire.
The working class shifted to Trump after the 2022 midterms when they saw Biden shoveling money to Israel and Ukraine and doubling child poverty at the same time. We used to get $600 a month from the government. It was a big help to a lot of people. DC political class HATED that and stopped it as soon as possible. Showing that the government could help, and then taking away that help left a bitter taste in people’s mouths.
Also, the crazy refugee policy fueled Trump’s anti-immigrant argument. The Democrats literally just dumped people all over cities and states with no plan and they did it in the middle of a housing crisis while no one could afford to buy or rent a house.
Also, the Powell rate hikes were widely endorsed by Biden’s administration as the ‘solution’ to inflation. Those rate hikes did no such thing and just crushed the job market when workers were finally starting to get real raises. I got the biggest raise in 2 decades from my employer at the start of 2023. The Democrats made sure I never got another one like that again.
I think we’re also too kind to the purported progressives in congress and in the media sphere. They are so starved for legitimacy that they’re quick to heap praise the instant someone speaks kindly toward doing anything vaguely left-sounding. They immediately compromise the instant some moderate, corporate owned hack offers some campaign promise that they clearly intend to break the instant they’re (re-)elected. Biden and the min wage promise was the clearest example.
As a lead-up to this phase of the war in Ukraine, don’t forget Russiagate, whereby #McResistance liberals and Democrats simultaneously defanged early opposition to Trump – contrast actual disruptive direct action, i.e. airport protests against Trump’s early Muslim ban, with magical thinking and endless news cycles about pee tapes, false leaks from spooks, and Lawfare – while propagandizing those same people and prepping them to accept war with Russia. Half of them still think Putin put Trump in office in 2016. They’re hopeless, wanting the benefits of Empire while morally primping about Trump.
Oh, and on a related contemporary note: while I’m still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for a while, I get a really bad feeling with Mamdani actively seeking to quash a primary run against Hakeem Jeffries, as in, Here We Go Again.
There’s also nothing in here about the huge boost for the right after we had a black man in the White House.
Or the distrust from many Dems based on the same racism.
More enthusiasm for Republicans, less enthusiasm from Dems.
I’m sorry, blaming racism doesn’t pass the smell test. Did Americans suddenly get MORE racist between 2008 and 2016?
Obama’s approval rating fell throughout his term because he went back on the core promise of hope and change. He delivered neither. He endorsed endless bailouts and accommodations for banks, didn’t throw a single rich criminal in jail, delivered a crappy healthcare plan, and told Americans to work in gig economy jobs with no benefits and that the economy was actually awesome.
He only squeaked by in 2012 in the rust belt because he saved the automakers…barely…
The biggest prompt for Obama’s re-election was the alleged killing of Osama bin Laden. Obama had managed what Bush couldn’t accomplish in 7+ years of his War on Terror. I’m not sure Obama would’ve gotten a second term if not for that. Killing bin Laden let Obama wrap himself in the flag.
Nobody cares about race. People voted for the fake obama in ’08, and started to hold their noses in ’12. Kamala lost on policy, not race. Obama, while wrapped in the identity, at his core is the same old same old.
The right was boosted not by racism, but by the left walking away from the sandbox. I would say that through his policies, obama was a boost to the right, not a contradiction to it.
The proof is in the pudding.
Tegnost wrote: “Nobody cares about race..”
You could not be more wrong. Where I live here in Wisconsin, I know many people (mostly men) who would never ever vote for a Black person. White women tend to be more flexible, but will not vote for any Woman. These people are not a majority, but in a close election they are enough to tip the scales.
Back in 2008 Obama campaigned here on the issue of health care. He did not fix the issue, but he talked about fixing it, and that was enough to put him into the winner’s circle.
I wouldn’t say that no one cares about race. Racism and misogyny exist among some groups in the U.S. Racism and misogyny may have marginal impacts or more than marginal, but they do have some impact.
Racism, regardless of propaganda to the contrary, is systemic and repressive, at least in many parts of the U.S., certainly enough to have marginal or more pronounced effects.
As unpopular as it was, if true, when it came out that Bernie may have said he didn’t think a woman could win the Presidency, so far that statement has been true. It certainly was for the election during which the accusation against him came out. Crime-bill Sleepy Joe won the contest over women who would have at least been more vigorous and vital choices for the job. At least one of these women was virtually indistinguishable in terms of policy from Old Joe.
“The Democrats literally just dumped people all over cities and states with no plan and they did it in the middle of a housing crisis while no one could afford to buy or rent a house.”
Aye. And the numbers were huge. This chart from the US Census shows that population growth rates during the Biden years were very high, with growth from immigration accounting for about 80% of the increase. Without all that immigration, it would have been much easier for housing supply to catch up with demand.
Bernie spoke in 2016 about how open borders was a Republican /Chamber of Commerce policy, and was promptly chastised by the Identitarian wing of the Democrats, which then piled on with lies about how he was insufficiently anti-racist… followed up with the Bernie Bro roll-out, whereby his young male supporters were slandered and demonized. He was largely silent about it in 2020, which helped enlarge the opening Trump took advantage of.
Liberals and D’s still cannot talk honestly about immigration, which is first and last about labor markets. Putting a “No Human Being Is Illegal” bumper sticker on your car might make you a nice person, but it’s not a politics… or perhaps better to say it’s a faux politics of moral vanity and unacknowledged advantage.
They can’t talk about immigration as a labor issue because they can’t talk seriously about labor.
Harsh environment, partly due to Biden wide-open borders.
Self-deporting, or with, uh, assistance, would reduce labor supply.
Now enforce documentation for employers as they have to pay more!
That would be a good start toward better labor policy. More needed.
Think of that as a type of echo from the Black Death, when labor shortages led to real wage increases after centuries of stasis. Brutal. Thanks, Joe. /:
If the powers that be in both parties were really interested in shutting down un-documented immigration, they would send employers to alligator alley. Business shut down — no employment available. Immigration slows because no employer will risk hiring an un-documented immigrant. Lots cheaper than what’s going on now — there are fewer employers than immigrants, I’ll bet, by far.
Time to remember once again this Golden Oldie in The Village Voice from Adolph Reed Jr, thirty years ago next month:
In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.
It got a lot worse…
Yep! That was my intro to Adolph Reed, thanks to this wonderful family blog!
Thanks Yves. This quote (Yves, 2012),
…that Obama’s Third Way stance, that we all need to put our differences aside and get along, was tantamount to advocating the interests of the wealthy,..
Indeed, Noam Chomsky would agree and Obama’s actions confirm.
US democracy jumped the shark back In November ‘08, this by way of the election of the ultimate candidate to deliver justice and equality across our fair land, and then that candidate/now president being revealed as just another proxy for the elite. This is one reason we have Trump.
And yet the benevolent sage of Lexington told us all to vote Democrat each time.
There was also O’s (and Rahm’s) low-level class/ethnic cleansing of South Side real estate by shipping public housing recipients out of Chicago and into the hinterlands (Dubuque, Rockford, Pontiac IL). Then they could of course call the hinterlanders Racists for objecting–to a fait accompli.
Maybe it wouldn´t be bad to regularly use not only the term “why we have Trump” (as if he were an aberration) but also “why we had Biden/Obama etc.”
Interesting how little Bush Jr. is being talked about by now.
There were times when classic Dems (who most likely voted for Obama I) were ashamed of Bush.
Calling him all the things the world calls Trump today.
I do guess without that Bush “shock” votes for and “legacy” of Obama wouldn´t have had this scale and long-term impact.
Case in point: While Yves mentions Bush above the original piece by Solomon does not.
Stunning considering how much of an anti-Bush platform Z Network once was where Solomon was a major contributor. This is now 20+ years ago.
Amazing/scary how time flies by and nothing changes or only is getting worse.
p.s. Back in 2000 I held the view that structurally not much would have been different with Al Gore beign sworn in.
🙄
In Europe at least the per design scaremongering over Reps vs. idolizing Dems was an automatism that you had a view regardless of realities on the ground. This eventually became self-defeating.
I used to be a huge fan of Daily Show with Jon Stewart -v1- and normally stuck around for the following which for a while was a panel show with Larry Wilmore. I stopped watching immediately the night he repeated several times that given the opportunity he would vote for Obama a 3rd time if he could – because he’s black.
It’s that kind of stupidity and ignorance that has allowed the dems to become the sad part of the bad cop/psycho cop drama we have today.
Another who was on to Obama early was former Harper’s Magazine editor Roger Hodge, who came out with The Mendacity of Hope way back in 2010.
Pick up a Festivus copy for all your liberal friends – they’ll love you for it ;)
#TYVM
Surprised that more here at NC aren’t talking about how Norman Solomon is whitewashing a broken system.
USA political system is rigged. So why do smart observers get drawn into discussions that pretend otherwise?
Solomon pretends that Bernie was a real candidate that establishment Democrats had to conspire against.
Bernie was never a real candidate. He was rightfully flagged as a “sheepdog” and he has consistently played that role.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-and-aoc-sheepdog-democrats
Solomon: “…many young people don’t trust the pseudo-populism of Clinton’s campaign. She has earned a millennial problem, and it prevents her from becoming president.”
No. Hillary Clinton deliberately alienated progressives, blacks, and whites. Then she refused to campaign in the three states SHE KNEW would decide the election.
From a political realist POV, she threw the election to her family-friend Donald Trump (after Bernie threw the Primary to his old pal Hillary).
Solomon: “But his resolve dissipates. Before the end of the year, he abandons Build Back Better legislation …”
This is gaslighting. Biden’s agenda was seemingly undermined by a single Senator (Joe Manchin) LOL. That demonstrates how little Biden cared to pass his transformative progressive agenda. Anyone with some political savvy can see that Biden’s progressive agenda was bullshit. He never had the “resolve” to pass it. If he did, he would’ve used the bully pulpit.
Solomon: 2022: Biden relapses into his customary “moderate” political mode, while his capacity to speak coherently weakens. Party discipline, internalized by Democrats in Congress, precludes independent-minded leadership as they begin to proclaim that Biden should run for re-election. Conformity of groupthink and fear of retribution from the White House keep people quiet.
This is bullshit. Biden was always an establishment Democrat and, as a Centrist, he has always been a “conservative” Democrat. Pretending that he was actually interested in his proposed progressive spending is not honest IMHO.
Biden’s mental health issues have been exaggerated. Yeah, he had age-related cognitive difficulties but otherwise, he always seemed cogent to me. But the establishment needed an excuse for why Biden would fail his base – as (it seems) was always the plan.
“Party discipline”? I think we can right ask if it was actually AIPAC (Deep State) discipline that “precludes independent-minded leadership”.
Solomon: “2023: A real-life Shakespearean tragedy unfolds as Biden throws down a gauntlet to run for re-election even while his mental frailty becomes more evident… Electoral disaster ensues.
The only tragedy is that people are actually buying this bullcrap.
The thought that NO ONE in the Democratic Party could stop the train wreck until the last minute when Kamala HAD TO BE the nominee is just incomprehensible.
The Democrats, it appears, once again deliberately lost to Trump.
Just as they would go on to deliberately lose to Trump by ending the government shutdown.
= =
Virtually unlimited money in USA politics has made USA democracy a joke. “USA politics” has become an electoral show that pretends to be democracy. We shouldn’t fall for the spin of pundits like Norman Soloman.
Why aren’t we talking about how many conservatives feel betrayed by Trump? How the Democrats have failed SO COMPLETELY that it’s hard to believe that it’s not deliberate? Why aren’t we talking about how USA “populists” (Trump, Bernie, Obama) always cave to the establishment? Why aren’t we talking about how COLD WAR imperatives have impacted establishment thinking and their political concerns?
🛎️ 🛎️ 🛎️
I would maintain that it was Bill Clinton’s presidency that made Saint Obama possible.
Or even the Bill Clinton candidacy – or, rather, the 1992 Democratic primary, where, if memory serves, the main candidates were trying to outdo one another as to who could sprint to the right faster. Jerry Brown, ostensibly the “left wing” candidate, literally wanted a flat tax and to abolish the Department of Education. Tsongas was a “fiscal conservative” and a fan of Reaganomics. Jesse Jackson did not run, and Clinton’s whole “Sister Souljah moment” was really about distancing from him (which the newspapers roundly praised Clinton for; David Broder at the Washington Post might have had a literal rapture). It’s as if the entire party did not even try – and it worked.
And then we had Clinton in the White House. Two rounds of Wall Street deregulation plus the attempt to privatize Social Security (with the help of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, I guess one of the original “Wall Street Democrats”) by themselves should basically pin the tail on this donkey, but there was more, so much more. Welfare block grants, which is exactly what the Republicans tried to do to Medicaid under Trump I, if I recall. Even Hillarycare was basically an “everyone buys private insurance” plan, though to be fair, there was still a shade of the “Old Democrat” element in there via the state-level “health alliances” that would ostensibly cap insurance premiums and doctor fees.
So the whole thing was basically a test drive of both the electoral strategy and the governance regime. And since “nothing bad” happened, Saint Obama could go bigger and better on all the same things. Further to the right, I mean.
To be sure, one could start the timeline even earlier. I recently stumbled on a John Kenneth Galbraith article from 1972 (!!!) where he deplored the Democrat politicians of his day for having abandoned Keynesian economics and the associated policies…
Clinton was also an Iran-Contra cast member, all those cocaine planes landing in his Arkansas at state police airstrips. But such things were not as important to our newspaper spoonfeeders than his appetites and saxophonix.
Captain of the Titanic. So apt as the fundamental changes needed are politically impossible. Worth borrowing.
Thanks for re-posting the 2012 piece presenting Robert Fitch’s speech to the Harlem Tenants’ Union. That post and Charles Ferguson’s 2012 book (and talk) Predator Nation; Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America were formative for my current views — along with Sheldon Wollin’s 2010 book-form essay Democracy, Incorporated.
Norman Solomon is full of it — he glosses over the structural problem that Obama bankrupted the Democratic National Committee and the Clintons bought it out of bankruptcy and handed it over to 4 or 5 corporate lobbyists to use as a tool for personal enrichment by shaking down the billionaires for cash to shut out progressive candidates.
I refuse to see Sanders as a “sheepdog” — he’s simply old and a realist about his ability to access the ballot as an independent. I’m disgusted to see his name used by Solomon in the same sentence with that quisling Elizabeth Warren, a false-flag lapsed Republican whose phony accusations of misogyny showed her true colors. The Democrats are beyond redemption at the national level.
I’m with you on all points, except the impossibility of a meaningful ’16 third-party run. In ’20, it seemed to me that “old” Bernie shrunk from the moment. The day after Clyburn’s machine of “real estate reverends” (what a great phrase) held it for Biden, who had been begged by Scarborough a few days earlier get out of Bloomberg’s way, Bernie had a speech on a cold day in Boston Common. Covid hung over the nation like a Godzilla, and Trump was calling it a hoax to save the stock market until…? At this pivotal moment, in the face of a clear plot by the democratic elite to box him out, with Super Tuesday having been changed fundamentally, Bernie gave his standard stump. I took it and his later failure to go hard at Biden in their debate as the result of his personal conclusion that he was not big enough for the times. That he could imagine Biden was that person might confirm Bernie’s view of his own limitations. He felt more comfortable as critic, better the mad prophet of the Senate, than General Pickett leading the charge up Cemetery Ridge against the Deep State and the “billionaires” as Bernie used to say it.
You have to go back minimally to the “Stop Wallace” movement that brought us Harry Truman instead of Henry Wallace as FDR’s last VP.
Or minimally all the ‘Democrats’ who crossed the aisle to help override Truman’s veto of Taft-Hartley in 1947.
It was clear the Democrats would never allow anyone to follow in FDR’s footsteps and the eventual erasure of the New Deal had begun. And after they eviscerated the union movement the Democratic party’s guiding principle was to never allow any truly organized opposition to the business lobby again.
I know Wallace is a sort of white martyr to a certain range of American new dealers and lefties but his political views weren’t his only liability. He was kind of a, shall we say, Marianne Williamson, perhaps a wee bit kooky.
He was certainly portrayed as such by the very conservative national press. Most of his domestic political views would be considered unremarkable today and influenced much of what we identify as the most progressive and effective elements of the New Deal.
His views early on ending our demonization of the Soviet Union and opposition to the idea of NATO as a military alliance that would only continue what would eventually become the Cold War didn’t help him with the anti communist elements in the country either.
Also his openness to non mainstream religious ideas (theosophism, mysticism, Buddhism etc) were also used to portray him as ‘out of step’.
Personally I think the country would be better off today if more of the progressives from the New Deal, those with practical experience in building effective national programs had had more influence post war.
What is most fascinating to me is that a historian/social analyst like Emmanuel Todd (from France) has one of the best predictive records about major macro-events over the past 60 years. His formal training appears to center around the study of family systems. He recently stated that when he looks at social systems he does not initially see economic structures, state ideologies, or the history of political parties; rather, he first sees different personal mentalities derived from growing up in different types of family systems that exist throughout the world.
This man predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union (see his book “The Final Fall” where he focuses on much more than the failures of the Soviet economic structure). A key indicator of the collapse (from his perspective) was the falling birth rate in the Soviet Union. A key indicator for the re-rise of Russia at the end of the 1990s was what he calls the existence of a more communitarian family structure (compared to the nuclear family structure in the U.S) which had existed in Russian culture for centuries. He also sees this type of family structure as one of the key reasons for why Russia was open to the development of communism in 1917.
Continuing to look at things from this angle, one could argue that a Putin-type figure was significantly produced by the nature of Russian culture, particularly its anthropological family structure.
And I would submit that it may just be that our nuclear family structure bears a significant responsibility for creating and producing the mentality of Donald Trump.
This brief synopsis leaves out entirely Todd’s latest 3-stage secularization perspective which, to me, may help explain the present nihilism of the West–including the present nihilism of the U.S. left.
All good bringing Todd to the fore, here. I think the indicator of civilizational decline Todd used was a rise in infant mortality rather than a fall in the birth rate, though perhaps he cited both.
From 2017:
The MSNBC page that had this is dead now, as is Matt Bruenig’s tweet. Above is from https://viewpointmag.com/2017/03/16/identity-crisis/ which is interesting in itself, about how idpol started and how the Dems co-opted it.
Thanks for rejecting the ten year time frame and showing the problems with the Democratic Party began back in the 1970s under Carter.
Still, I think the most important historical event was the global financial crisis, and the government response to it. Obama had a historical opportunity, with widespread public anger at Wall Street and the financial establishment, to reverse the conservative reactionaries’ shift of economic power from labor to capital. That was a historical opportunity that rhymed with the early 1930s, which Franklin Roosevelt seized to create the New Deal.
But Obama instead chose to save the increasingly predatory banking and financial system, and even did nothing to stop the criminally fraudulent home ownership documentation that was used to foreclose and take the homes of nearly 10 million Americans.
I’ve been thinking the past few days of formulating a question to ask Democrats, that might steer them to seeing this:
What if Obama had actually punished Wall Street and the bankers in 2009, and 10 million Americans had not lost their homes – what do you think the political situation would look like today?
Thanks. That’s exactly how I see it too. Obama was where the American voters did their job. He was given a majority in Congress and a super majority in the Senate. He was handed a country where it was obvious that de-regulation had failed, and had foreign wars that had done nothing to make America safe. And he doubled down on all of it.
But I also think that this time period will be marked as when America lost it’s technological edge, lost it’s blue collar middle class advantage, and had a fork stuck in the American dream. It was all there just at the point where it could have been saved, and he flushed it all.
The honest re-telling of American history is not going to treat this guy well at all.
It goes way further back than this. I would argue that it goes back to the Congressional class of 1974, and fully took control of the party when Carter became President.
The Obama Presidential Center is located on Chicago’s South Side. Fitch: “In fact, as Obama knows very well, for most of the last two decades in Chicago there’s been in place a very specific economic development plan. The plan was to make the South Side like the North Side.”
Mission accomplished!