Tom’s Tidbits- Trump will kill us now. CorpraDems will kill us later

Greetings,

When I vote in 10 months it will be for the Democrat, because I know the least of them would be better than the abomination behind the desk now. BUT… not all Democrats are created equal. The civil war in the Democratic party is real and it matters… not only to removing Trump in 2020, but also to how and if our country survives beyond him.

The Republican Party has been proudly in the pocket of Big Business since well before Trump, telling the Common Man that their interests were identical to Money’s. Big Business once hated and feared Democrats of all stripes but in the 90’s Democrats began to sell out their own middle-class base, and Big Money has since become quite comfortable with the DNC/Clinton/Pelosi/Biden breed of Corporate-friendly Democrats… the CorporaDems. Today, while THEY ARE NOT EQUIVALENT, both parties dress up their ideologies in the same Common Man Happy Talk. Either might accidentally let a scrap fall to the regular folks, but bettering the lives of everyday middle-class Americans no longer seems to be the driving force behind either one. Don’t think so? Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page compared ‘what the Public wants’ to ‘what the Government actually does’, and found “the preferences of the average American appear have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy” while the preferences of the “financial elites” are turned into policy approximately 75% of the time. Or consider the recent threats by “Democratic donors on Wall Street and in big business to sit out the presidential campaign fundraising cycle – or even back President Donald Trump – if Sen. Elizabeth Warren wins the party’s nomination.” CorporaDems don’t threaten Money’s consolidation of its stranglehold on political power, but the Warren/Sanders/AOC breed scares the hell out of them.

Donald Trump won, in part, by promising to “drain the swamp”. A worthy goal. But Trump was never the person to do it because we’re not sinking into the swamp he sees. His idea of the ’swamp’ is government restriction on the graft and fraud of the 1%, restrictions on environmental and economic pillaging, or restrictions on America’s greed and bloodlust abroad. His vaporous promises to “Make America Great Again” are only to hide that goal. The CorporaDems also promise a return to an America that once worked… you know, like under Obama. But that’s another illusion; America under Obama was better than Trump, but it was already breaking down and any ‘return’ is undesirable as well as impossible. This CorporaDem pablum is just as facile and dangerous as Trump’s cynical lies… more soothing, but just as bad.

The #1 stated priority of every Democrat is to defeat Donald Trump, and that’s driving the lingering love for a party that’s become nothing but Republican-lite since Clinton. They’re worried that the middle-of-the-roaders won’t vote for change; that running anything other than a whitebread corporatist risks scaring away the swayable middle. But Trump didn’t win by swaying the middle, he won by activating the same cultists who will support him in 2020. That’s a lesson the Dems ignore at their peril. They have the choice… a couple choices, actually… that can activate their base and actually excite the middle with a new vision that includes them, rather than looking at them as a necessary inconvenience.

It may sound naïve but maybe bombs, prisons, and border walls aren’t as effective as killing-them-with-kindness assaults. Unlike bombs, buildings leave a value instead of a bloody crater. Money spent for things like schools, healthcare, living wage jobs, human dignity, food, and mental health are an investment that pays back for the entire society, not political funders. A domestic and foreign policy based on butter rather than guns builds a society for the People, not the Money. Maybe trying consistent accountability for little things like war crimes, mass murder, corruption, or theft in the billions would make our government more responsive and less corrupt.

Trump is the problem of today, but the election will also be about the problems of tomorrow. We’ll need a leader that can resurrect hope for an America that’s better than it’s been behaving lately. We’ll need someone who cares about the long-term viability of the vast bulk of American Middle Class and not the short-term interests of their rich handlers. We can’t rely on ANY of our previous systems, not because they were necessarily bad to begin with but because they were built to solve the problems of their day. A ‘return’ to the ‘old ways’ solves the problems we had then, not the ones we have now… a guarantee of failure. Replacing Trump with a CorporaDem may be a necessary and painful first step to success, but we’ll need someone other than a CorporaDem to step beyond that.

Make a great day,