I’ve had it with the Democratic Party.
I caucused for Bernie Sanders and worked hard for him here in Minnesota and in other states. Most of our local DFL politicians decided that their ability to fundraise from mega donors with Hillary Clinton was more important to them than respecting the will of the voters they will be relying on to get re-elected. We already have one big-business-favoring, mega-donor-loving party that does not give a darn about the lives of working Americans. If Democrats can’t figure out that we don’t need a second one I’ll just vote for the GOP till they get the message or the country implodes. The climate is already trashed and Clinton and President Obama’s pro-fracking, pro-Wall-Street, anti-average-people policies aren’t helping anyone who hasn’t donated thousands of dollars to them.
Trickle-down cheerleaders
Democrats have been making fun of trickle-down economics publicly since I can remember, but privately they have been among its biggest cheerleaders. President Ronald Reagan may have cut the top tax rate from 70 percent to 30 percent, starting the wealth accumulation at the top, but it was President Bill Clinton who deregulated the banks with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) that forced the middle class deeper and deeper into debt and eventually created the great recession.
Obama had the biggest mandate in a generation to change the status quo as he got elected amid the financial collapse. Rather than make any substantive changes, however, he let his Wall Street donors staff his White House and let hard-working families lose their houses while bailing out the crooks on Wall Street. Neither party cares about anyone who doesn’t have a nine-digit bank account.
Slower road, same bankruptcy
Relying on identity politics to bring people to the polls so they can vote for the team that wants to bankrupt them a little more slowly than the other guys is not a good enough message. If David Brock and George Soros have anything to do with the Democratic Party going forward you can count the grass-roots activists out. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and other DFLers running in 2018 need to make it clear where they stand — with the American people or with the billionaire financiers who want to keep the game rigged. And empty platitudes like Hillary Clinton’s won’t suffice.
I guess we will see in the next year or two if the Democrats learned anything or if they continue to try desperately to be the 1 percent’s backup party.
Phil Uhrich is a grass-roots activist.
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