"Bill Clinton’s many reversals of Democratic tradition..." [View all]

[RiverLover]

The issue is not Hillary Clinton's Wall St links but Democrats' core dogmas
by Thomas Frank
The Guardian
2/16/16

The Democratic party rejected the New Deal and its stress on working-class Americans in favour of a technocratic elite – is it time for a political revolution?



..........snip........what voters are rejecting is not Hillary the Capable; it is the party whose leadership faction she represents as well as the direction in which our modern Democrats have been travelling for decades.

...The figure that brought triumphant closure to that last internecine war was President Bill Clinton, who installed a new kind of Democratic administration in Washington. Rather than paying homage to the politics of Franklin Roosevelt, Clinton passed trade deals that defied and even injured the labor movement, once his party’s leading constituency; he signed off on a measure that basically ended the federal welfare program; and he performed singular favors for the financial industry, the New Deal’s great nemesis.

Among the legions of the respectable at the time, Bill Clinton’s many reversals of Democratic tradition were thought to establish him as a figure of great historic significance. A telling example of this once-common view can be found in an admiring 1996 book by the then Guardian journalist Martin Walker, who asserted that the president’s few failings were “in the end balanced and even outweighed by his part in finally sinking the untenable old consensus of the New Deal, and the crafting of a new one”.

That Clintonian consensus, which slouches on in the bank bailouts and trade deals of recent years, is what deserves to be on the table in 2016, under the bright lights of public scrutiny at last. As we slide ever deeper into the abyss of inequality, it is beginning to dawn on us that sinking the New Deal consensus wasn’t the best idea after all.

Unfortunately, focusing on the money being mustered behind Hillary Clinton by various lobbyists and Wall Street figures misses this point. The problem with establishment Democrats is not that they have been bribed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the rest; it’s that many years ago they determined to supplant the GOP as the party of Wall Street – and also to bid for the favor the tech industry, and big pharma, and the telecoms, and the affluent professionals who toil in such places.

Consider the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street, which drew so much public outrage in the early days of the Obama administration … or the revolving door between Washington and Silicon Valley, which has been turning briskly in recent years without much public notice at all. Or the deal the pharmaceutical companies got as a result of the Obamacare negotiations. Or the startlingly different ways in which Obama’s Treasury Department treated beleaguered bankers and underwater homeowners.

.....snip......

http://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/feb/16/the-issue-is-not-hillary-clintons-wall-st-links-but-her-partys-core-dogmas

FDR



To me, fighting FOR the values of FDR & his New Deal within the Democratic Party far outweighs the struggle against the rethugs, because at this point, we have 2 rightwing parties and no leftwing representation.

I am an FDR Democrat with no representation.

For me that is why I want Bernie Sanders to lead our party & our nation back to its former greatness with FDR values.