I originally posted the following as a reply to fladem’s comment on his own post, The May 2016 e-mail that predicted the loss of PA, OH and MI. He wrote:
—snip—
Is the system really in crisis? Not if measured by corporate profits that are near all time highs. Stock market: headed up. The top 20%: doing fine with rising incomes.
So the system is being run by the rich and it is benefiting the rich.
So where exactly is the crisis?
–snip–
This seemed to me to be so wrongheaded that it needed serious opposition.
So I wrote some.
Read on for more.
Fladem wrote:
So the system is being run by the rich and it is benefiting the rich.
So where exactly is the crisis?
That is the crisis, fladem. This general tendency has always been true in human history, but…as happens from time to time in all societies…the rich eventually get too greedy. When that level of greed reaches a certain point, a reaction sets in. It is not necessarily “reactionary” in the current use of the word, but definitely a pullback in some direction, away from any system that has been set up to benefit the rich.
We are reaching that crisis stage now.
You say below that you do not believe the Democratic Party is the enemy. If you consider the over-rich “the enemy,” then the Democratic Party is without any doubt whatsoever owned by the enemy, and as a result will not in any way take effective measures to alleviate this problem. The anti-Sanders inside game that played out during the primaries is ample proof of that, as is the continued presence of its major players in positions of power within the party establishment.
One of the real villains in all of this…for decades, now…has been Donna Brazile. She is a fine example of bureaucracy in action. It flatters its bosses and fights change with all the clomp, clomp, clomping power at its disposal. The fact that she is still there…still in the news, still clomping along…is sufficient argument all by itself that the Democratic Party is a lost cause. If someone who seems to mean to change things in a positive direction does manage to get nominated to be the Dem candidate for 2020…I am speaking particularly of Elizabeth Warren, here…that candidate will have been forced to make so many concessions to the corporate-owned power players in the party that he or she will enter the race crippled for the outset, and whomever the Republicans nominate will once again win.
Sorry, but there it is.
I am sure that you can gin up some “data” to support your position, but it will be just as flawed as was the data that said HRC would mop the floor with Trump.
Further:
That “May 2016 e-mail that predicted the loss of PA, OH and MI” to which you refer?
How about my own post two months before that? PermaFix Backfires!!! Blows Itself Up Real Good!!! in which I wrote:
I took a little (working) mini-vacation early this week. By car. Traveled west from NYC through the great state of New Jersey (You know, the one that elected Chris Christie?) into rural eastern PA, then up through “The Endless Mountains”…that’s what PA calls them…into the southern tier of western NY state, right on up to Rochester and then back southeast again to Ithaca (a little haven of safety) and further through what I call the Badlands of rural NY state on into the Paterson NJ area and then further (Safe at last!!!) my own bastion of (somewhat) sanity, the working class West Bronx. I stopped for gas, stopped for food, stopped just to stop. And…I left my radio (AM and FM) on through the long treks. Here’s what I heard and saw. (Felt actually, as much as anything.)
Trump gonna take about 80% of that trek no matter who opposes him.
Watch.
It’s a big U.S., but it ain’t that much different from the lands through which I traveled. Different weather, same socio-economic groups in about the same percentages. It’s all connected by the media, by the internet.
Watch. (Watch out, actually!!!)
The AM listeners are totally pissed off!!! Politically, morally, economically, in terms of so-called “religion”…pissed off like a mothertfucker!!!
The FM listeners?
About 35% of them are listening to country music. (Read “complaint” music.) Maybe 10% are listening to truly lame “PBS”-style shit, all the rest are listening to almost totally sexualized, drug-laden, totally non-political travesty music produced by robots. They’re not even listening to sports talk.(Too mixed-race in terms of content is my theory.)
Who do you think is coming out to vote this November?
Yup.
You got it.
The pissed-off ones.
And they are voting for Trump.
Watch.
Or…how about this from Ross Perot, twenty-five years ago!!!
From the NY Times coverage of the 1992 presidential debates:
Q: Yes, I’d like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.
PEROT: That’s right at the top of my agenda. We’ve shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you’ve served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who’ve got these one-way trade agreements that we’ve negotiated over the years and say, “Fellows, we’ll take the same deal we gave you.” And they’ll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we’ve got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply — you see, if it was a two-way street — just couldn’t do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided I was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.
He called it. He nailed it!!!
You continue to defend one of the two-headed, Uniparty entities that managed that change.
Thus…it is you who is the enemy.
Part of it at the very least, even without understanding your own part.
A well-meaning, self-justifying enemy. The most dangerous kind.
Thanks for all of your good work, podna.
Look where it has gotten us so far.
Thanks loads.
AG
