Hillary’s Candid Motto for Democratic Party: “Represent Banks”

From AlterNet:

I’ve never forgotten Clinton’s remark about representing banks because it tells us much about  her worldview – both then and now that she’s even more embedded in the corporate elite (and had  Rupert Murdoch host one of her senate fundraising events).  

More importantly, Clinton’s comment speaks to the decline of the Democratic Party as a force that identifies with the broad public, those who often get stepped on by big banks and unbridled greed. Her remark is an apt credo for a party leadership that has spent the last quarter-century serving corporate power (through Wall Street deregulation, media dereg, NAFTA-style trade pacts, etc.) as persistently as it spews out empty rhetoric about “the needs of working families.” 

Back then, it was a minor controversy that Hillary Clinton had represented a shifty S&L. Today’s Democratic elite is inextricably tied to far more powerful interests – Wall Street, big pharma, giant insurers and other pillars of the corporate 1-percent.  

More here.

This problem continues.  The Republicans clearly want to destroy the nation and make us all impoverished third-worlders, while at the same time marginalizing women, gays, and people of color.  The Democrats want to destroy the nation and make us all impoverished third-worlders, too, but cloak and confuse these intentions with groovy liberal love for women, gays, and people of color.  And it's been this way since the Clinton era.

Essentially, our political choice is this: destruction of the nation while boot-stomping the face of everybody who's not a white male, OR destruction of the nation with a lot less boot-stomping and a lot more uplifting rhetoric.  Either way, the nation is destroyed, but with the Democrats, at least, it's done in a more egalitarian way.  That is, we can die horribly, or we can die less horribly, but either way we're dead and it's horrible.

So sure, yeah, there are differences between the parties, but not enough to keep us from changing our path of destruction.

For many years, I've had no idea what to do about this.  The Green Party seemed promising for a time, but, in the end, it amounted to nothing.  Lately, however, I've been paying very close attention to what the Tea Party has been doing to the GOP establishment, and it gives me some hope.  I mean, of course, Tea Partiers are crazy, but not so crazy that they don't know how to alter the emphasis and focus of the Republican Party.

Case in point: primary challenges against sitting office-holders.  And it seems to be working.  You don't even need to win your challenge.  Just sort of make a showing.  Suddenly, just because they had to fight to be renominated, sitting Republican Congressmen feel like they have to play to the Tea Party, shifting further to the right, simply because they're the people showing up to vote in primaries.  And from time to time some of these challenges actually succeed, and the Tea Party gets one of their own into office.  It's a win/win scenario.

So this is possible, in theory at least.  The Democrats can, in fact, be pushed away from their current pro-corporate stance, and toward something truly egalitarian and economically just.  But it will require people getting off their asses more than once every four years.  And that includes me.  But the payoff would be glorious.

Who's with me?

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