The Silver Bear Cafe

November
13
2017

Our Kind: Why the Democrats Abandoned the Middle Class
Jesse's Cafe Americain

"Another example of giving the game away in few words came two nights ago when the liberal-elitist 'Inside Elections' political analyst Stuart Rothenburg spoke on the PBS NewsHour. 'The Democrats as a party' Rothenburg told NewsHour host and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member Judy Woodruff, 'are divided between the Bernie Sanders wing and Hillary Clinton wing, the pragmatists and ideologues.'

For Rothenburg, the Clinton wing members are the 'pragmatists,' the realistic adults who want to 'get things done' (one of the great neoliberal president Obama’s favorite phrases and claims). The Sanders folks are 'ideologues,' a pejorative term meaning people who are mainly about ideology and who are carried away by their own flighty and doctrinal world view.

This was a slap (an ideological one I might add) at the more progressive and social-democratic faction of the Democratic Party – a blow masquerading as 'objective' and detached political analysis."

Paul Street, Giving the Game Away

If you watch this relatively short video much of what has been puzzling you about the failure of our political system will be made clearer.

Franklin Roosevelt could work tirelessly for the common person because he was already comfortable in his own skin with regard to his own social status, and more importantly, as a result of his long term paralysis he knew how little that it really meant. As suffering sometimes does, it introduces compassion and empathy even among the upper crust.

But the New Deal principles were shunned for the credentialed aspirations of those class-climbing, middle class kids who would be rich and acknowledged as members of an elite crowd with the right kinds of bona fides. There are probably few better recent examples than the Clintons. Their attitudes towards the average American are paternalistic at best, and highly cynical and patronizing at worst.

They attempted to disguise their credentialed, professional class preferences with 'identity politics.' But if you look at the culmination of actual policy initiatives, versus platform platitudes, the Democrats, similarly to the GOP, serve no one but themselves.

They rely on the 'lesser of two evils' to scrape out the occasional win, when the excesses of the other party drive people to embrace 'hope and change,' and to be largely betrayed once again.

“Having created this asset bubble, again, in conjunction with the financiers and Wall Street, the Fed is deathly afraid of anything that will break the mirage and put the banking system at risk.

And we are seeing, like a dog returns to its vomit, the Banks start taking up the kinds of leveraged risks that brought us to the brink in the great unwinding of the housing bubble in 2008.

Surely they must care. Surely they must have a caution for the damage they will cause to untold thousands of innocents. And if not the money men, then those who are sworn to restrain their greed.

As John Kenneth Galbraith observed in his masterwork, The Great Crash of 1929, ‘The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.’

And you can toss in the political and corporate media elite in there as well. It’s a club, and you aren’t in it.”

jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

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