Yves here. Even though the object of study is the feckless Democrats, the collapse of Labour in the UK suggests that there is multinational problem of former working-class parties selling out their bases but succeeding in running on brand fumes for a very long time, much to the career and financial advantage of insiders and hanger-on.
It is hard of a piece of this length to do the problem justice. One issue is that the author takes as a given that campaigning is monstrously expensive. It is in the US due to the cost of TV ads and now Citizens United allowing for messaging saturation. I don’t see how we escape this mess in the US ex an actual revolution, but other countries allow candidates for major offices a set amount of free TV time if they pass a certain threshold (like reaching 5% popularity in a recognized poll) and no more than that.
This claim has been repeatedly debunked:
This point is exquisitely exemplified by the first couple of years of the Obama administration, when they held the federal trifecta and still managed to privilege the kleptocratic banksters of the housing crisis and the war criminal gangsters of the W. Bush regime
Matt Stoller saw through Obama from the get-go, when he made his first big appearance at the 2004 national Democrat convention. Stoller was going to be thrown out for the sin of merely writing a mildly skeptical post about the [even then sainted] Obama (I forget the details but the controversy fast became such a bad look that Stoller was allowed to remain). There were tons of op-eds in mainstream publications between the election and Obama’s inauguration advocating for him to make the sort of transformative changes that that the crisis made possible.
From our 2010 post, The Empire Continues to Strike Back: Team Obama Propaganda Campaign Reaches Fever Pitch:
Recall how we got here. Early in 2009, the banking industry was on the ropes. Both the stock and the credit default swaps markets said that many of the big players were at serious risk of failure. Commentators debated whether to nationalize Citibank, Bank of America, and other large, floundering institutions.
The case for bold action was sound. The history of financial crises showed that the least costly approach is to resolve mortally wounded organizations, install new management, set strict guidelines, and separate out the bad loans and investments in order to restructure and sell them. An IMF study of 124 banking crises concluded that regulatory forbearance, the term of art for letting impaired banks soldier on, found:
The typical result of forbearance is a deeper hole in the net worth of banks, crippling tax burdens to finance bank bailouts, and even more severe credit supply contraction and economic decline than would have occurred…
Shuttering sick banks is hardly a radical idea; the FDIC does it on a routine basis. So the difference here was not in the nature of the exercise, but its operational complexity.
This juncture was a crucial window of opportunity. The financial services industry had become systematically predatory. Its victims now extended well beyond precarious, clueless, and sometimes undisciplined consumers who took on too much debt via credit cards with gotcha features that successfully enticed into a treadmill of chronic debt, or now infamous subprime and option-ARM mortgages.
Over twenty years of malfeasance, from the savings and loan crisis (where fraud was a leading cause of bank failures) to a catastrophic set of blow-ups in over the counter derivatives in 1994, which produced total losses of $1.5 trillion, the biggest wipeout since the 1929 crash, through a 1990s subprime meltdown, dot com chicanery, Enron and other accounting scandals, and now the global financial crisis, the industry each time had been able to beat neuter meaningful reform. But this time, the scale of the damage was so great that it extended beyond investors to hapless bystanders, ordinary citizens who were also paying via their taxes and job losses. And unlike the past, where news of financial blow-ups was largely confined to the business section, the public could not miss the scale of the damage and how it came about, and was outraged.
The widespread, vocal opposition to the TARP was evidence that a once complacent populace had been roused. Reform, if proposed with energy and confidence, wasn’t a risk; not only was it badly needed, it was just what voters wanted.
But incoming president Obama failed to act. Whether he failed to see the opportunity, didn’t understand it, or was simply not interested is moot. Rather than bring vested banking interests to heel, the Obama administration instead chose to reconstitute, as much as possible, the very same industry whose reckless pursuit of profit had thrown the world economy off the cliff. There would be no Nixon goes to China moment from the architects of the policies that created the crisis, namely Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers.
And only later did readers of this humble blog learn why. From a 2012 post, Exclusive: How Obama’s Early Career Success Was Built on Fronting for Chicago Real Estate and Finance:
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.
Now to the main event.
By Marv Waterstone, professor emeritus in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment at the University of Arizona, and the coauthor most recently with Noam Chomsky of Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance. Originally published at Common Dreams
“The Republicans go for the jugular; the Democrats go for the capillaries,”—Kevin Phillips
With the recent release of the long-withheld, but little anticipated Democratic National Committee “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential electoral loss, we’re back to the perennial questions of which issues should receive priority; how should messaging and narrative around those issues be crafted; which wing(s) of the party should be amputated before their rot infects the entire organism, suburban soccer moms or inner city youth; and on and on. All good questions, but ultimately, in present circumstances, unanswerable except in the most platitudinous, hand-waving ways. The most fundamental dilemma resides in the Faustian bargain the party entered beginning in the 1970s, and the result of that bargain is neatly captured in Sheldon Wolin’s 2010 coinage “the inauthentic opposition”:
While the transformed Republican Party reveals what a “party of government” might look like under inverted totalitarianism, the Democrats reveal the fate of opposition politics under inverted totalitarianism. The Democrats’ politics might be described as inauthentic opposition in the era of Superpower [i.e., the US after the fall of the Soviet Union]. Having fended off its reformist elements and disclaimed the label of liberal, it is trapped by new rules of the game which dictate that a party exists to win elections rather than to promote a vision of the good society… Accordingly, the party competes for an apolitical segment of the electorate, “the undecided,” and puzzles how best to woo religious zealots. Should Democrats somehow be elected, corporate sponsors make it politically impossible for the new officeholders to alter significantly the direction of society. [This point is exquisitely exemplified by the first couple of years of the Obama administration, when they held the federal trifecta and still managed to privilege the kleptocratic banksters of the housing crisis and the war criminal gangsters of the W. Bush regime.] The timidity of a Democratic Party mesmerized by centrist precepts points to the crucial fact that, for the poor, minorities, the working class, anticorporatists, pro-environmentalists, and anti-imperialists, there is no opposition party working actively on their behalf.
The origins of this current malaise date back to the mid 1970s, and followed the actions taken by business class elites responding to the exhortations contained in the now-famous Powell Memorandum. This was a secret 1971 memo from then-corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to the Secretary of the US Chamber of Commerce. The memo wasn’t revealed to the public until well after Powell had been appointed to the Supreme Court, where he continued to wage his ideological battle in defense of capitalism and corporate power (including, of course, free speech rights articulated in cash). In the memo Powell argued that:
The US Chamber of Commerce should lead an assault upon the major institutions, universities, schools, the media, publishing, the courts, in order to change how individuals think about the corporation, the law, culture, and the individual.
US businesses, Powell suggested, did not lack the resources for such an effort, particularly if they were pooled. That is, if people started to think together as a class rather than as individual firms and corporations. The US Chamber of Commerce took up this challenge in a very dramatic way. It expanded its base from around 60,000 firms in 1972 to about a quarter of a million just a decade later. Other elite organizational forms also began to coalesce around this core following the advice of the memo. These included think tanks (e.g., the Heritage Foundation, established 1973 by Adolph Coors), as well as corporate money pumps to operationalize the memo’s chief objectives.
One of the most prominent of these organizations was the Business Roundtable, founded in 1972, and comprising CEOs whose corporations at the time accounted for about half of the US gross national product. During this period, through political action committees, the Roundtable was spending about $900 million annually on political matters, a very significant sum at the time. These newly emerging entities provided a mechanism for corporations to contribute substantial funds to political campaigns and candidates, authorized in large measure through a number of Supreme Court rulings, several written by Powell himself.
These PACs, which were just beginning to have a political presence (there were 89 PACs in 1974, and around 1,500 by 1982) gave to both parties largely in equal measure in the 70s, but began leaning heavily toward the Republicans, who had little difficulty aligning their platforms with capital corporate interests. This was also the moment that the traditional political base of the Republican Party began to merge with the Christian Right and with white working classes, who were persuaded that they had been left behind by affirmative action and other “illegitimate” policies (now, of course, cloaked as DEI and “wokeness”).
The problem for anyone struggling to get by, as this alliance portrayed it, was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of the society and economy. The real problem was liberals, who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups. The prevalent narrative, more pertinent now than ever, was the idea of unworthy “others” cutting in line ahead of worthy citizens: “You’ve worked hard. You’ve played by the rules. You’re not getting ahead. Well, it’s not that the system is stacked against you. It’s that these people, who are undeserving, are getting more advantages than you get.” The Republican political base (and now most particularly MAGAnites) could be energized through positive mobilizations of things like religion and cultural nationalism, but it could also be turned out through very negative, though coded, though I would say increasingly less coded if not blatant, racism (e.g., President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”), xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-feminism.
Democrats, seemingly, were more conflicted, at least at that time, between support for their base and the need to pursue big money. That ambivalence, at least within the ranks of the Democratic Party establishment in its current manifestation, has now all but disappeared and constitutes the irreconcilable contradiction that plagues the party now. To return for a moment to Wolin:
By ignoring dissent and by assuming that the dissenters have no alternative, the party serves an important, if ironical, stabilizing function and in effect marginalizes any possible threat to the corporate allies of the Republicans.
According to critical geographer David Harvey, the structure that emerged out of this political realignment was as simple as it was predictable and durable. The Republican Party could, and still can, marshal massive financial resources and mobilize its popular base to vote against its own material interests on cultural or religious grounds, while simultaneously advancing the capital accumulation policies (ongoing war and arms sales, lowered taxation, massive deregulation, privatization of public goods and services) of their elite masters.
The Democratic Party, conversely, could not, and still cannot, afford to attend to the material needs (e.g., a national healthcare system, affordable housing, environmental and consumer protection, financial and anti-trust regulation, a peace dividend) of its traditional popular base because it was and is terrified of offending its donor class. Given the asymmetry, the political hegemony of the Republican Party became more sure over this period, and has relegated the Democrats, even when in power, to their current position of inauthenticity. If and until this most fundamental contradiction can be resolved, the policies and messaging will remain flaccid, impotent, and unsatisfying. Under these circumstances we can aptly paraphrase Phillips, to wit: So now the Democrats also go for the jugular. Unfortunately, it’s too often their own.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane to the glory days of nakedcap that saw right through obama and won me over for…well, for life, as a reader!!!
Never was I so hopeful as when Obama got elected . He could have done so much. But instead, as we found out, he was just another tool of the elite and their intelligence agencies. Do you remember the Shovel Ready promises of jobs programs for the unemployed? And what came out of that? Bailouts for the financial elite on the taxpayers dime. I think maybe one man was prosecuted for financial crimes. What a friggin joke.
OP: The Democratic Party, conversely, could not, and still cannot, afford to attend to … a national healthcare system
6 Dec 2025 — The Government of Mexico pledges universal access to quality healthcare for all people, without financial hardship or discrimination
https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/0273f33ab6ee48c5d842108b9b55c789-0140022025/related/National-Health-Compact-Mexico.pdf
The New Deal was just a historical blip. The US isn’t a country, it’s a business — a plantation, specifically, founded by plantation owners like Washington and Jefferson to be that after their royalist families were thrown out of England by the revolution there.
People think that the FDR era is the Democrat party. That’s an outlier, and the party had returned to is roots. Andrew Jackson, Franklin Pierce, etc.
Well, yes. Gerhard Schröder springs to mind.
However I have been telling at least my acquaintances that the left as a poltiical power in the West (EU for sure) is dead for 2 reasons – both of which are post-Schröder:
-immigration split
-not understanding Russia´s war as a necessity which there is no alternative for
Both points have led to a new historic schism which will need decades to heal. And will prevent unified strength.
Even after Schröder we had – as response – WASG, PDS (surge in the East), merging to DIE LINKE.
p.s. that does not say Schröder was not a major nail in the coffin, I was furious then…but there was still hope in the idea of fighting for a left entity. I have lost that one with the establishment´s sabotage of BSW.
(er… confused …late PDS of the 2000s was stronger in the West methinks…)
PDS was stronger in eastern Germany. It got 20%+ of the votes in the eastern states, and 1% or less in the western states, with one important exception, Bremen 2007 (8%), during the transition to Die Linke.
WASG was rooted in the western states, and got about 2% or so in one election (it existed for two to three years). That’s relatively high for a left party in the western states, and absolutely nothing.
“The left” is dead as a political power in Europe – because there is no “the left”. Even if one leaves out immigration and Russia, there are many differences between them. There is almost no common ground on relations outside of left. Some left parties (mostly small ones) try for pure goals, others try to open themselves for other themes.
It can’t be different for small parties with so different electoral systems in place.
The failure of BSW i attribute to ego and a total lack of wisdom. Too bad.
That’s a very funny play on words. 😅
Especially delightful to see a Portuguese speaker notice! ;)
In the late 1970s, I think, the Dems decided to drop their focus on labor unions and minorities and focus more on the professional classes and suburban women. I remember reading a memo they wrote (they didn’t just speak the silent part, they put it on paper). The argument they made regarding labor and minorities was “Where where else are they going to go?” Now we know.
I think Walter Mondale was the last Democrat presidential nominee who still had partial loyalty to the New Deal ideals, even if he was no flaming leftist. And he got crushed by Reagan. Carter (for whom he was VP) was the first Democrat for whom deregulation and privatization were positive goals, Dukakis (although it’s often forgotten now) sold himself as the “business-friendly” governor responsible for the “Massachusetts miracle” (the short-lived minicomputer boom), and Clinton and his successors were all “national security Democrats” (pro-war) and for letting the private sector solve all of the public’s problems. So the 1984 election was probably the last gasp of the old-line Democrats who remembered why Roosevelt had won four consecutive big victories.
Yep. That’s how it’s unfolded.
I don’t remember the rap on Mondale, but I do remember that in 1982 I escorted a gubernatorial candidate to a labor dinner Mondale was speaking at. Before going in, she told me in no uncertain terms that if Mondale offered me his hand to shake I would shake it.
Still don’t remember why I was mad at him (other than continued anger at Carter) but I do remember reluctantly agreeing then watching Mondale work the other side of the aisle as he got to us.
The Obama cluestick for me was that his campaign won a prize for best PR.
He won a Nobel Prize for showing up, the Participation Peace Prize.
St. O was the biggest bank whore in history. Somehow on 8 years of a president’s salary he can own 4 homes. How can that happen? How many people did he sell out while sweet talking his way to riches?
My vote blue no matter who friends think he was the greatest president EVER, wishes he could run again, and since he can’t, wish and beg Michelle would. They are just as delusional as the MAGA cult.
While you’re no doubt correct about his corruption, Obama made a great deal of money from his books, especially his memoir. Perhaps he even made enough to afford his first mansion… everything after that was icing on the gravy, courtesy of the Overclass.
“Writing a book” is the most common means to legalized bribery for an American politician, though. (Poor Jim Wright!)
So did Hitler.
Yes, but, curiously, Hitler told the truth, from his point of view naturally, in “Mein Kampf.” Anyone who read that tome through would have had a pretty good appreciation of the world view and future policy of any government that Hitler would have formed.
“Modern” political screeds are generally vacuous and content light exercises in masturbatory maundering. They are also object lessons in plausible deniability in the political bribery racket.
America needed another Huey Long. Instead we got Dagwood Bumstead.
Stay strong in the Big Easy.
Hitler said years after “Mein Kampf” was published that if he realized how wide spread and how well read that book was going to be, that he would never had written all his ideas and plans in it.
Obama instilled such a whirlwind of optimism and faith amongst the grassroots and was a beloved leader to emulate for the mass of people that during his two terms in office, the Democrats lost a net total of 948 state legislative seats, 12 U.S. Senate seats, 63 U.S. House seats, and 13 governorships. The power of the MSM’s propaganda and an absence of class struggle independent politics emanating from weak company style unions helped cement a disillusioned, disorganized and confused working class that is easily manipulated and controlled by the ruling class today.
yep
it is a tragedy
if one thinks about what it really meant
for us
not them on the top
Marcetic for JACOBIN
May 27th
The Democrats Are Determined Not to Learn From Their Failure
The Democrats’ botched 2024 autopsy doesn’t just leave out Gaza. It also simply pretends the left-populist upsurge embodied by Zohran Mamdani isn’t happening, while coveting its achievements.
https://jacobin.com/2026/05/democrats-2024-report-left-populism
The Republican political base (and now most particularly MAGAnites) could be energized through positive mobilizations of things like religion and cultural nationalism, but it could also be turned out through very negative, though coded, though I would say increasingly less coded if not blatant, racism (e.g., President Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”), xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-feminism.
The Democratic Party and the Republican party (Nixon established affirmative action) have created a system of incentives to prioritize hiring and college admissions in favor of (non-Asian) racial/ethnic minorities and females. They have simultaneously subordinated Christianity and Christina symbolism from the public square and public schools (and I’m not interested in the Constitutional dimension here), which effectively indicates a shift in status and preferences for historic American culture. Not to mention, the Democratic and Republican Party opened the border, which has lead to a rapid cultural change.
It is obviously in the self-interest of whites and Asians to oppose racial preferences which harm them and their children. It is also in the self-interest of these groups to support racial preferences in their favor. The same holds for males versus females. Also, you de-prioritize Christians, you offend them and create a backlash. Its fine to call this racism, sexism, bigotry, homophobia, whatever, but the reality is that voters are going to tend to vote in their perceived self-interest, and if there is a social-stigma attached to racism, they will call it something else like fiscal conservatism. [I would point out that because of racial differences in longevity, the “popular” entitlement social security effectively redistributes money from Blacks to whites, in contrast to Medicaid.] When you abandon class-based politics, as the American duopoly has done, what you are left with racial/ethnic struggle for power. Furthermore, if the current political/economic consensus of elites remains in place, I would predict it will become more explicit, and the taboo value of calling people racist or sexist will continue to decline. In sum, what we are witnessing in the rise of Trumpism is a feature, not a bug, of neoliberalism, and the future looks something like the Time Machine, an apartheid state with an opulent minority in gated communities or underground bunkers, and a mass of people in favelas with mass surveillance and robot dogs to keep them in line, while the Senators or the First Consul cluck on about liberty.
As a working class zero let me tell you why. They left the left. I saw this happening as far back as teh Iraq war where I confronted David Price (NC-D) of the house face to face in a town hall and call him a war monger and a disgrace to his “theology degree” and I was literately booed out of the auditorium by college kids.(!)
I saw this “polite class” invade all aspect of what was once my was very far left town more and more (Google Richard Florida) and then Obama, an obvious shill for the upper upper middle class who killed the Occupy movement.
The Democrats are Lucy with the football and we are all Charlie Brown. And they continue to ask “Why won’t Charlie Brown try to kick the football anymore?”
We all know what the Democrats need to do. The Democrat establishments knows what they need to do, they just refuse to do it. They need to offer concrete benefits and focus on action instead of marketing. Granted there are a lot of specificities underlying that generalization, but he mission statement is very clear.
However, they continue to treat it as a marketing problem (e.g. “We need better messaging to young men.”) because that is the grift. It requires consultants, focus groups, ad agencies, etc. Ka-ching!. Despite their blazen corruption, the Maga’s are actually delivering concrete results — crackdowns on immigration, reversals of long-established progressive Supreme Court decisions, abolishment of DEI initiatives, etc. When Obama got power, all the progressives got was a Heritage Foundation insurance scheme.
It is impossible to overstate the pathetic reality of the democratic party of today .
From senior members like Elizabeth Warren, who seem to have nothing better at all to do other than have someone create ads for them, in which they claim that if only we would send them money, they would then be able to fight the monster that is donald trump. Nevermind that they are in office NOW. And could actually DO something, SAY something EVERYDAY… commit political suicide. LEAK FILES about the crimes committed. Hell she was a dean of harvard LAW…. yet where is she in this post constitutional era being endorsed by both parties?
Instead, I suppose in her mind, if only she can fund a new campaign next time… she would do something then?
Or shining stars like AOC….. who seemed like she wasn’t going to be a shill for the corporate oligarchy that the country is run for…. for a minute…. then she realized pelosi was leaving… and if she were to just bide her time…. she could move right in… what genocide. .. until someone said that was a wrong answer.. then… ok genocide bad… but business as usual is the best medicine…whoopee..
Or
The virginia gov… a democrat. (republican/national security state plant) campaigns on decriminalizing marijuana (in there somewhere), and though the voters have been passing legalization bills since before she got in office, and passed another one…. she then vetoes it. Not only not helpful, but actively a traitor to the voters. Not to mention the arm length list of new taxes the democrats in the state of VA are proposing.
The democrats were the party in power that was there for the beginning of the current genocide.
since the koch bros in the 90’s paid for the democratic revival and creation of the DCCC and the corporate democratic party to get NAFTA through… and in comes slick willie and his wife.. and the rest is history.
( after all when one of the brothers ran for governor of michigan,it was as a democrat)
When I moved to the american south in the early 90’s… the republicans were just beginning to take over. Sure they were all reagan republicans in the reagan army..voting for republicans.. cheering on the clownshow gingrich and hastert were running in congress… but they all prefaced their criticism of the democratic party with “I’m a democrat and my daddy was a democrat….”but… because the fact that the democrats lost the south because of the civil rights act, it took a few decades to see the trend. just like before that the republicans lost the south for freeing the slaves. It took a hundred years and the civil rights act to allow them to be republican again.
The reality seems more like the democratic and republican party have really been the same since at least WW1.Both were morgan/rockefeller controlled with the help of the bluebloods and captains of industry(so called).
After the creation of groups like the council on foreign relations in 1919, where up and comers were groomed to lead… it became evident that after WW2 you could look at the make up both the democratic and republican administrations and see if not a majority of council members in positions of power/secretaries for each administration from truman to clinton/bush 2… pretty darn close to it. The major voices in media,tv/newspapers.. was also members.
They may have played good cop bad cop… but they really all had to be “acceptable”…for the greater cause…
And while it always seemed like a totalitarian state was coming, there wasn’t the technology and ability to control the masses like there is today.. now we have AI, cars /phones/computers tracking us constantly. Digital money Will be the end for people. The “borg” will win….. And right now trump has his hand up the borgs butt,who knows who will next time.
All they have ever wanted was for us not to be in control.
right now the democrats problem is that they are in the corporate oligarchs monkey trap. They have their hand in the money jar. Now their hand is stuck because they won’t let go of the money. If they just let go of the corporate money and did the right thing… people would vote for them. But they won’t. The people who have made it through the process… wouldn’t know the right thing to do if everyone they ever talked to told them what it was…
Only the democratic party can NOT; make the republicans LOOK bad…
Why people don’t vote green party… at least not to feel dirty… I don’t know.
We could pick people out of phone books randomly.. and have better leaders than we do now.
We could pick people out of phone books randomly.. and have better leaders than we do now.
I’ve said that for years. These people, all of them, are awful. But…
The rot runs clear down to little burgs like I live in. It’s all inside baseball and controlled by the local machine and parties. My partner was the secretary of the county dem party. Her and the treasurer quit because of all the corruption locally, and the state level. We can’t beat the system even if we try.
Besides, who with a sane mind wants to get wrapped up in the shit show known as politics anyway. Begging people for votes and money isn’t for everyone, and then you find out how corrupt the system is. You go along to get along, or you get out.
FUBAR
I live in Texas and this hits home regarding Talarico’s campaign. Always begging for money. “Just send me $27!” But can’t be bothered to even address specific issues, let alone actually DO anything. The only thing he’s actively doing is begging for money.
Gary Stevenson (an English economist) predicted a year back that both Trump and the Labour Party in the UK will fail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCnImxVWbvc
His general themes have been:
Ignoring Inequality: Stevenson argues that Labour focuses too much on traditional macroeconomic indicators like GDP and growth, while failing to address the massive surge in wealth inequality that occurred during and after the pandemic.
Falling Living Standards: Because the rich hold the bulk of the assets, ordinary workers face being “squeezed out” where they cannot compete for resources (houses,, educations), leading to declining living standards and economic hardship.
Reluctance to Tax Wealth: He believes Labour is too hesitant to implement aggressive wealth taxes. He has frequently stated that a tax system where billionaires pay lower effective rates than cleaners or working-class citizens is unsustainable and will lead to societal collapse if left uncorrected.
Gary Stevenson is brilliant!
Where is his equivalent in America? 🤷♂️
There will be no progress in this country until the Democratic Party is utterly disavowed by the working class.
Stop playing capitalist duopoly. So what if the Repugs win the next, what difference will it make?
None that we’ve seen in decades.
This is the answer. But the Democrats use fear to corral the hopeless. They know people have no other choice. Unfortunately, people aren’t willing to accept that the Republicans control politics. The only time the Democrats win is when they adopt Republican positions. The opposite never happens.
People are concerned about the abortion issue and healthcare. So they are unlikely to abandon the Democrats and write in candidates rather than supporting a party that doesn’t defend their interests.
The Democrats are happy to lose major elections. When they win, they defend donor interests only. If they win in Texas, it won’t matter much. Talarico will disappoint voters and lose his seat in one term.
It’s a two-party dictatorship. Accelerationism is the only thing that can cause a real change. The Republicans have to be allowed to destroy the country before any Democrats with an alternative vision will step up and buck capital.
The No Kings party sponsored “protest” (without demands) proves that people are gungho to maintain the status quo…
Cheers to watching it all play out!
This piece should cite the title of Sheldon Wolin’s 2010 book-length essay from which it extensively quotes and essentially lifts its premise: Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. https://griffinbaybook.com/book/9780691178486
Thanks. Here is Chris Hedges interviewing Sheldon Wolin on The Real News. From 11 years ago. utube. Long interview.
Chris Hedges and Sheldon Wolin: Can Capitalism and Democracy Coexist? Full Version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGc8DMHMyi8
“If and until this most fundamental contradiction can be resolved…” There exists a bourgeois modifier for the “donor class”. It is the Move to Amend constitutional amendment to end corporate rule. With a couple of serious torch-bearers it could gain national prominence. Corporations are not people and money is not speech. What’s not to like?
“move to amend”. Be very careful, and read the fine print. From 9 years ago.
https://billmoyers.com/story/kochs-to-rewrite-constitution/
If Move to Amend puts forth a single amendment, that’s one thing. If it becomes a Constitutional Convention to reconsider the Constitution as written – a Koch Brothers dream – you open the door to already written wishes ready to go from the big business, anti-tax, libertarian right. They’ve been planning this for a long time. Model legislation, model Constitution amendments. etc.
I did look at the opening of the proposed Amendment. I understand and agree with the intent. But it is, imo, poorly written. If they want to say that the Bill of Rights extends to natural human persons, not to corporations, fine. Say that.
Plainly. Up front.
Most of the Constitution is about property rights and business rights and legal responsibilities anyway, and what the fed gov may and may not do, etc. Businesses are already covered. The Citizens United decision suddenly granted “personhood with inalienable rights ” to propery – corporations. Corporations have no Bill of Rights inherent rights endowed by their creators – who are men. (The Roberts Court was early in the “transhuman” movement. / heh.) Citizens United was as bad a decision as the Taney court’s “Dred Scott” decision: in that decision, a human person was declared property. In Citizens United decision property is declared a human person. / my 2 cents
Sorry, DNC Services Corporation has a business plan, and only shareholders get a vote on it.
Chaired by Milo Minderbinder, no doubt. / ;)
Thanks for this.
Something I’ve noticed in the Dem pres winning candidates since 1992: They talk New Deal on the stump and administer like some Gilded Age promoter when in office. C, O, and B all talked New Deal on the stump…. to us little people.
That was the hustle. In office they were pure Gilded Age enablers, imo.