In a comment on my recent post Perez now chairman of DNC. Oh Well…There Goes THAT Idea!!!…the subject of which was the regrettable Perez win by the Schumer/Pelosi forces in the latest DNC chairman sweepstakes…karl pearson wrote:
If the Dem elites don’t change soon, this will be my epitaph: “Born an FDR Democrat, but the Party left her.” Just sad.
Here is my reply.
Read on.
I feel your pain.
I really do.
My grandfather… the man whose name I honor by using it here…radicalized me when I was in grammar school. Well…”radicalized” is a relative word. He was a staunch FDR Dem. He lived through the Great Depression and was a Democrat by heredity…the son of a NYC Irish immigrant mayor.. He was not a “radical,” he was simply a mainstream Democrat during the McCarthy years, and he was madder than hell about what was happening.
The thing is, FDR’s democratic socialism…and that’s what it really was, even if that label was not used…is now radical when compared to what comes from the machinations of the DNC. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are really mainstream, FDR Democrats…maybe not even as “radical” as was FDR when you get right down to it. The U.S. was falling apart after the Great Crash, and FDR’s WPA plus many other socialist actions and programs helped the country to lift itself by its own bootstraps out of the Big Money-caused Depression pit into which it had fallen.
Now?
Phfffft…
The Dems are all talk, no walk.
All front men and frontwomen, no action.
All compromise behind its big talk.
And it has lost the working class as a result.
Trump’s win is as simple as that. The working classes of this country…and by that I mean the people who get out of bed each day and either go to work or stay home and raise children, people of all economic levels and all races…are not very politically involved or sophisticated. They basically want to be left alone to live their lives in relative peace. That means they want to make a living wage; they want to be able to provide for themselves and their children on all important levels…health, shelter, food and education being the most important of those levels…and they want to be able to continue to live after they are no longer able to perform hard work on a daily level.
That’s about it. That’s all most of them really want.
And neither party has been able to provide them with those basic needs, because both parties are now owned lock, stock and barrel by corporate interests whose only real “morality” is the morality of the bottom line. They are essentially artificial intelligences themselves, these interests. If the quarterly books do not show a good profit, they are basically programmed to do whatever is within their power to rectify that bottom line problem, and soon, because if they don’t the corporate entity will fire them and get someone who can do that. End of story.
These interests need to be controlled, but instead they are now the controllers. They own the whole political process…including the media that publicizes it…and as a result the U.S. has been bottom-lined right into a near crisis state. The infrastructure is in almost total disrepair…hell, I can’t even trust the subways of NYC to get me to work anymore. The most important subway in NYC as far as I am concerned (the west side IRT line’s #1 local train ) is closed for repairs this entire weekend!!! I have lived here all of my adult life and I have never seen this happen.
The public school systems are a mess; the whole charter school thing is just a monetized ripoff even if there are a few good schools within it; the healthcare system ranks below many third world countries on any number of levels; the food supply is full of poisons of all kinds; we cannot really trust our drinking water and inflation is eating almost every dollar we make before we can manage to spend it on necessities.
How did Trump win?
He demonized the mainstream parties and their media, that’s how. It was a cinch to do that, because they suck!!!
And…despite ample evidence that he is a total huckster…enough working people bought his line to get him elected.
Duh!!!
They felt like they had no other choice.
And they didn’t.
The DNC made damned sure that they didn’t by effective backroom hustling against Bernie Sanders. Of course…they were just doing their own job. And what is that job. exactly? It is to continue to make sure that the bottom-liners come out on top no matter which party wins.
The “choice” of of Perez for DNC chairman simply proves that nothing has changed. The bipartisan RatDemlican party and their allied media will work very hard to get rid of Trump because he threatens their plutocractic owners, and then they will cooperate in the business-as-usual hustle that follows his fall.
It is increasingly clear that only a third party will be able to stop this game. But where will it come from? Who will volunteer to be the crystal that starts its formation?
Damned if I know.
Sanders?
Warren?
Maybe.
Somebody else?
Who?
Let us pray.
ASG
