A must read from Matt Taibbi exposing the complicity of neo-liberal Democrats led by guess who? the Clintons. If Trump continues to run Hillary wins but what will change? Naomi Klein touches on why:A Republican Workers' Party?
Democratic incompetence has made the previously unthinkable possible: Republicans are reimagining themselves as a labor party...maybe the next strongman those voters pick to lead them out of the wilderness won't be quite as huge an idiot, or as suicidal a campaigner, as Trump. Sooner or later, failing to deal with these questions is going to come back and bite all of us...
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/a- republican-workers-party- w433295
Have you noticed the billionaires from Warren Buffet to Bloomberg signing on to Clinton?The Problem With Hillary Clinton Isn't Just Her Corporate Cash. It's Her Corporate Worldview.
Published in The Nation
For Democrats the scariest words they can hear from Trump is "I quit." Because he is their only chance for Hillary to win. I keep saying that Trump scares me the least of any other Republican because he is not a true Republican. If Trump isn't somehow convinced to drop out assume Hillary wins. The Dems congratulate themselves and don't really change while the Republicans rebrand themselves as the workers party. And in 2020 watch out.
Taibbi writes:
Republican propaganda for decades pushed magical-thinking concepts like "trickle-down economics" that asked lower-income voters to accept present sacrifices for theoretical bigger payoffs down the road. Until this year, Republican voters mostly bought it. But Trump was their way of telling their leaders they're done waiting. They want their piece of the pie now, even if it means unleashing the Trumpinator to get it. People have been conscious of the defection of working-class voters to the Republican Party for years, but this has always been dismissed as the consequence of skillfull propaganda. It's the What's the Matter With Kansas? creation story, i.e., that the white working class has been hoodwinked into going against its own economic interests thanks to cynical/backward appeals to race, religion and culture.Trump exposed the Republican scam. But what of the Democrats whom Bernie exposed?
If we're going to be honest about what's happened in the last 30 or 40 years, the new iteration of the Democratic Party has embraced hocus-pocus neoliberal theory that is not much different from trickle-down economics. The Democratic Party leaders have been fervent believers in the globalization religion since the late Eighties, when the braintrust at the Democratic Leadership Council made a calculated decision to transform the party from one that depended largely on unions for financial and logistical support to one that embraced corporate objectives, in particular free trade.Bill Clinton was the leading voice for the "new" Democratic Party which abandoned workers for the coziness of big business.
When he signed NAFTA into law in 1993, Bill Clinton laid out a utopian vision of how free trade would work. "We have the opportunity to remake the world," he said, boldly. More trade agreements, he said, would create a world that would not only be more prosperous all over, but freer and more able to serve as a market for our exports. "We will press for workers in all countries to secure rights that we now take for granted, to organize and earn a decent living," he said.What a crock. They knew full well they were opening the door to massive corporate profits as jobs left this country while making no provisions to have the abandoned American workers taken care of.
...the basic promise of free trade was that the American middle class would experience temporary losses that over time would be balanced out by increased growth worldwide. It was trickle-down economics, only repackaged with an international spin: After a long trip around the world, the wealth eventually gets back to you.The Democrats abandoned unions while depending on them- or what was left of them - to get elected.
Twenty-three years later, we see how all of this has turned out. There have been some improvements in the economic condition of foreign workers.
They want even American voters to focus on the good news of incrementally increased wages abroad, forgetting that American workers never signed up for a plan to disenfranchise themselves so that workers in China or India could earn a few quarters more per day. Moreover, they certainly didn't elect leaders to push such policies. The problem with all of this is that the Democrats went so far in the direction of advocacy for the global religion that they made something as idiotic as the rise of unabashed nativist Donald Trump possible.So that leaves us with whatever can be pulled together out of the Bernie movement to reach out to American workers. Remember - the major opposition to globalization came from the left in the late 90s with the riots in Seattle.
Trump's rise will give the Globalist Faith Militant an automatic argument for more time. They will decry any criticism of free trade or globalization as racist Trumpism, and Trump is such a galactic jackass that this will work, his vast inventory of offensive bleatings discrediting even the legitimate economic concerns of his voters.
But expecting American politicians to advocate first and foremost for their own constituents isn't isolationism. It's just rational self-interest, which neoliberals only seem to disbelieve in when it pertains to labor.
We heard nothing from our own union which has been so tied to the Democratic Party and the Clintons for 30 years.
The Occupy movement in 2011 was a continuation of the Seattle protests.
Naomi Klein became a major spokesperson and here are some links:
Were the DC and Seattle Protests Unfocused? | Naomi Klein
www.naomiklein.org/articles/2001/07/were-dc-and-seattle-protests-unfocused
Jul 10, 2001 - The young activists who went to Seattle to shut down the World Trade Organization and to Washington, DC, to protest the World Bank and the ...
Learning From Globalization Protests | Naomi Klein
www.naomiklein.org/articles/2011/10/learning-globalization-protests
Oct 6, 2011 - I can't help but compare the Occupy Wall Street protests to the ... end of 1990s, most visibly at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle.
Occupy Wall St. Learns From Globalization Protests - NYTimes.com
www.nytimes.com/.../occupy-wall-st-learns-from-globalization-...
The New York Times
About the only thing positive about Trump is that he emerged following a wide-open and fairly contested primary. Doubtlessly the least favorite of the Republican Party insiders, he nevertheless won fair and square.
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