The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a
genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will
choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican
before they will a phony Democrat,
~Harry Truman, May 17th, 1952
The DNC never learns.
The DNC under Howard Dean’s leadership abandoned Hillary Clinton and the
Democratic base of white working people in favor of a “new kind of Democrat”
called the Obama coalition. Ted Kennedy,
Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden headed up the new Democratic coalition that
consisted of courting millennials and black Americans while labeling Hillary
and Bill Clinton and their supporters “racists.”
During the 2008 primary, the Democratic Party was hijacked
and white working people were banished and left by the wayside. Candidate Barack Obama, the Illinois Senator
who was famous for avoiding any votes in the State legislature by voting
“present” and having an unremarkable half term in the U.S. Senate was chosen by
the Democratic elite as their candidate. During Obama’s first interview he took the
opportunity to slam President Clinton as an ineffective president, while
lavishing effusive praise on his hero, President Ronald Reagan.
Excerpt:
In 1970, following a series of
environmental calamities, 20 million Americans — 10 percent of the U.S. population — took to the streets on Earth Day,
demanding an end to environmental pollution. It was the largest public
demonstration in American history. And it worked. The sheer enormity of the outrage forced
President Nixon to address the problem head-on.
As a result, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created. The Federal
Water Pollution Control Act, which later became the Clean Water Act, was
enacted to empower the EPA to go after major polluters. The Act included strict pollution limits and
penalties for those who violated them,
and called for waterways to be fishable and swimmable again by July 1, 1983.
The EPA initially made significant headway, suing several major polluters and
banning DDT, for example.
Unfortunately, a decade later, the Reagan administration’s deregulation agenda
gutted the EPA, effectively stopping it in its tracks… Today,
it seems both public and political will to take strong, affirmative action to
protect the environment has been lost, and the pollution flowing from
industrial agriculture and elsewhere is essentially and largely unregulated.
So let’s take a look at the accomplishments of the
Republican-lite DNC’s President Barack Obama.
From Counter Punch:
Excerpt:
President Barack Obama’s Crappy Legacy by DAVE LINDORFF
Barack Obama came into the White
House on a wave of passionate new voters,
many of them black or young and white, becoming the nation’s first black
president and promising a new era of “hope and change.” Eight years later, as he is preparing to exit
the White House, he leaves behind
considerable wreckage, disappointment and a legacy of death and
destruction, plenty of it physical, but also much of it in the legislative and
political arena.
He did give us, over the last eight
years, a lot of change, but not much hope, and most of the change has been negative.
Let’s just run through at least some of the list:
* One of candidate Obama’s big
selling points in 2008 was that he
promised to end the Bush/Cheney administration’s disastrous war in Iraq, to
close the horrific torture site and prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba … Eight years later … US forces being added even as our Nobel Peace
Laureate president prepares to leave office. Guantanamo remains open and
stocked with prisoners many of them known to have been wrongly accused of
terrorism, as the president has proved
too gutless to do the right thing and just shut the place down, or order
the captives released…
Meanwhile, torture continues, the president has expanded and formalized a system of state-sanctioned and directed
murder, even of US citizens abroad, and surveillance of Americans has reached
appalling levels not even imagined by science fiction writers like George
Orwell a generation or more ago...
* Race relations in the US, and the economic condition of people of
color in America, have only deteriorated
during President Obama’s two terms… racial profiling and the killing of
unarmed blacks, including children, by mostly white police officers has become
epidemic… along with a general militarization
of police (encouraged by his administration’s offer of free military
surplus war armaments) to the point that it’s hard to distinguish them from an army of occupation across the land…
* The prison system has continued
to expand, with perhaps some of the
worst conditions of all in Supermax prisons run by the federal government
(under the direct control of the president), where all inmates are held in
conditions of solitary confinement that
the civilized world considers to be a form of torture…
* A once-in-a-generation opportunity to finally scuttle this
country’s outrageous and uniquely expensive and class-based for-profit health care system in favor of some kind of
government run “single-payer” national system such as, again, the rest of the
civilized nations of the world have adopted at much lower cost and with far
better access and outcomes, was
squandered by this president…
* Climate disaster, which candidate Obama warned was the biggest
crisis facing America and the world, has
been allowed to worsen almost unimpeded. The president refused to make it
his number one issue… instead pursued his wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya,
Syria, Somalia and elsewhere and his
drone killing campaigns elsewhere in places like Pakistan and Yemen, and as he promoted a gratuitously
confrontational foreign policy towards both Russia and China as advocated by the neo-con advisors he
appointed to key positions in his administration, including as
Secretary of Defense.
* Particularly where it comes to
energy, the president not only did nothing significant to reduce carbon
emissions in the US… He continues to back the construction of
pipelines that only encourage more exploitation of heavy carbon-producing
“dirty” oil from places like North
Dakota and Canada’s tar sands.
And now on his way out of office Obama is now betraying the
Native American water protectors and plans to approve the Dakota Access
Pipeline.
* Nuclear war, which the president as candidate promised to make
less likely, has become more likely… than
any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. This is in large part because this
president has pushed an aggressive program… of undermining the elected
government of Ukraine only to replace it
with a coup government run by anti-Russian fascists…
* The president campaigned with
tremendous labor movement support… American
workers have continued to have to battle to survive during the president’s two
terms under a National Labor Relations Act that is stacked against them.
* Beginning in 2010, the president… ran conservative Democratic candidates
against … more radical and progressive candidates seeking office in Democratic
Party primaries. The result of this backstabbing
of progressive candidates… leading to Republican takeover of both House and
Senate — a grim situation that will now be difficult to undo.
* In the area of education, the president has actively encouraged… privatization of public school systems
at the expense of public schools…
shifted public tax money from poor schools to selective privately run
schools, where much of it ends up being siphoned
off to high-salaried executives and the shareholders of for-profit management companies running the charters… At the level of higher education, the president had the government take over
as lender to students… although such loans do not even allow default, they
continue to be offered at extortionate
interest rates, leaving graduates as essentially indentured servants
for life.
* In the area of open and
law-abiding government, candidate Obama promised a new era of open government.
That was probably his biggest whopper.
By all accounts, his has been the most
secretive government in history, with the most prosecutions of whistleblowers…
his hounding of such courageous exposers of government wrongdoing as
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, NSA critic Edward Snowden, and war-crimes
exposer Chelsea Manning, and his G W Bush-like fondness for executive orders.
* Finally, Obama failed abysmally
on the economy, in large part because just as with the criminals of the
Bush/Cheney administration whom he
declined to prosecute for their clearly illegal and unconstitutional crimes of
torture, aggressive war-making and illegal surveillance on Americans, he
decided to bar the Justice Department
from prosecuting the criminal bankers...
That decision was a disaster that still haunts the USA today, where some 20 percent of the workforce remains
unemployed or unwillingly working less than full-time, often at a fraction of the wages they were
earning before 2008.
In spite of the horrendously disastrous record of Barack
Obama, Hillary Clinton decided to abandon the white working Americans who stood
by her in 2008 in order to attract the “Obama coalition.” That was a big mistake, her fate was sealed
when she decided to defend the indefensible record of Obama. Is it any wonder that the Democratic base fled
the party and joined the ranks of Donald Trump and his “make America great
again” campaign?
Trump’s message of fighting for all Americans, extracting us
from these wars for profit and dumping the class based, Wall Street profit
driven healthcare system resonated with the people. The Democratic Party is dead, the Republican
Party is on notice, support the Trump agenda or you are fired.
Harry Truman faced the same phony Democratic Party in the
1950’s and he was absolutely right when he said “The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a
genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will
choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before
they will a phony Democrat.” Trump
is a Teddy Roosevelt Republican and that is a good thing. The world is ready for a new day, and it is
here, Donald Trump will make America great again.
By Patricia Baeten
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