So Normon Solomon thinks that the only possible hope is that the leftists take
over the party and he points to the fact that the Greens have made no progress
in gaining large numbers of places in office. Actually, he should have said
that our system is set up to keep additional parties out. And Chris Hedges
thinks that we'll get nowhere unless we overthrow the current system and start
over, and do it without violence. But for you and me, who are not young
acdtivists, there are few choices. Vote for the candidates or not. Vote for
candidates whom we support but who won't but whose politics we support, win or
vote for candidates who are terrible, but not as terrible as the ones they
oppose.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, December 04, 2018 10:14 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What It Means That Hillary Clinton Might Run for
President in 2020
"What It Means That Hillary Clinton Might Run for President in 2020."
What it means to me is that the Democratic Party is incapable of change. It
means that a large number of people who beg voters for their support, answer
instead to the Big Money. It means we are in for a long downhill slide for the
Working Class. It means that too many Americans have been sold a pile of
garbage.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/4/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What It Means That Hillary Clinton Might Run for President in 2020 By
Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
04 December 18
Twenty-five years ago - when I wrote a book titled "False Hope: The
Politics of Illusion in the Clinton Era" - I didn't expect that the
Democratic Party would still be mired in Clintonism two and a half
decades later. But such approaches to politics continue to haunt the
party and the country.
The last two Democratic presidencies largely involved talking
progressive while serving Wall Street and the military-industrial
complex. The obvious differences in the personalities and behavior of
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama diverted attention from their underlying
political similarities. In office, both men rarely fought for
progressive principles - and routinely undermined them.
Clinton, for example, brought the country NAFTA, welfare "reform" that
was an assault on low-income women and families, telecommunications "reform"
that turned far more airwaves over to media conglomerates, repeal of
Glass-Steagall regulation of banks that led to the 2007-2008 financial
meltdown, and huge increases in mass incarceration.
Obama, for instance, bailed out big banks while letting underwater
homeowners sink, oversaw the launching of more missiles and bombs than
his predecessor George W. Bush, ramped up a war on whistleblowers,
turned mass surveillance and the shredding of the Fourth Amendment
into bipartisan precedent, and boosted corporate privatization of public
education.
It wasn't only a Congressional majority that Democrats quickly lost
under President Obama and never regained. By the time he left the
White House (immediately flying on a billionaire's jet to his private
island and then within months starting to collect giant speaking fees
from Wall Street), nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures had been
lost to Democrats during the Obama years.
Thanks to grassroots activism and revulsion toward President Trump,
Democrats not only won back the House last month but also recaptured
one-third of the state legislative seats that had been lost while
Obama led the party and the nation.
During the last two years, progressive momentum has exerted major
pressure against the kind of corporatist policies that Bill Clinton
set into cement atop the Democratic Party. But today, the party's
Congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are still in
a mode loosely replicating Clinton's sleight-of-tongue formulas that
have proved so useful - and extremely profitable - for corporate
America, while economic inequality has skyrocketed.
As 2018 nears its end, the top of the Democratic Party is looking to
continue Clintonism without the Clintons.
Or maybe Clintonism with the Clintons.
A real possibility is now emerging that Hillary Clinton will run for
the
2020 Democratic presidential nomination. On Sunday, The New York Times
printed a Maureen Dowd column that reported: "Some in Clintonworld say
Hillary fully intends to be the nominee.. And Bill has given
monologues to old friends about how Hillary knows how she'd have to
run in 2020, that she couldn't have a big staff and would just speak
her mind and not focus-group everything. (That already sounds focus-grouped.)"
Dowd provided a helpful recap: "After the White House, the
money-grubbing raged on, with the Clintons making over 700 speeches in
a 15-year period, blithely unconcerned with any appearance of avarice
or of shady special interests and foreign countries buying influence.
They stockpiled a whopping
$240 million. Even leading up to her 2016 presidential run, Hillary
was packing in the speeches, talking to the Institute of Scrap
Recycling Industries, the American Camp Association, eBay, and there
was that infamous trifecta of speeches for Goldman Sachs worth
$675,000."
A cogent sum-up in the column came from former Washington Monthly
editor Charles Peters: "What scares me the most is Hillary's smug
certainty of her own virtue as she has become greedy and how typical
that is of so many chic liberals who seem unaware of their own greed.
They don't really face the complicity of what's happened to the world,
how selfish we've become and the horrible damage of screwing the
workers and causing this resentment that the Republicans found a way
of tapping into."
That's where we are now - not only with the grim prospect that Hillary
Clinton might run for president again, but more fundamentally with
corporate allegiances still dominating the Democratic Party
leadership.
The only way to overcome such corporatism is for social movements to
fight more resolutely and effectively for progressive change,
including in the Democratic Party. If you don't think that's a path to
real breakthroughs, consider Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar,
Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, winners of Democratic primaries
this year who'll be sworn in as members of Congress next month.
(Compare those successes to two decades of Green Party candidates
running for Congress and never coming close.)
Whether or not Hillary Clinton runs for president again, Clintonism is
a political blight with huge staying power. It can be overcome only if
and when people at the grassroots effectively insist on moving the
Democratic Party in a genuinely progressive direction.
Email This Page
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org.
He
is the author of a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How
Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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