by Robert Reich:
'One of you just sent me Matt Taibbi's piece, below -- which confirms my fear that the Democratic establishment wants nothing better than to pretend Bernie never happened.
Twenty-five years ago I was in Bill Clinton's administration. I'm proud of some of what we achieved. But I'm not proud of the concerted effort he and the Democratic Leadership Council made to move the Democratic Party to the right.
Those were good years for the economy because we had a strong cyclical recovery. But the long-term structural shift of the economy toward wider inequality continued, as did the growing influence of big money on politics.
These problems are far worse now than they were 25 years ago -- as evidenced by the backlash toward neo-fascism (Trump) and the enthusiasm for Bernie's political revolution. We cannot afford to ignore what has happened to America. A Trump presidency would be a disaster. Another Clinton presidency that led us rightward would be a colossal shame.
What do you think?'
https://www.facebook.com/RBReich/?fref=nf
Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie
Instead of a reality check for the party, it'll be smugness redoubled
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/democrats-will-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-brush-with-bernie-20160609
= new reply since forum marked as read
rocking it like Shakespeare 
just suffering from bad memory. Clinton didn't try to move the party permanently right. He was dealing with a right-sympathetic America that was reacting to decades of Democratic governance by demanding change (and to also our leftward turn of the 1960s), and he tried to preserve power for Democrats and keep even more Democrats from being kicked out of office by responding to what the people said they want.
That is very, very different from a "concerted effort to move the party right," unless you consider anything less left than the ideology of the 1960s "right."
And even then: This graph is only for the U.S. House of Representatives, but just take a look at where the Democratic caucus was and the direction it headed during the Clinton era of the 1990s. A graph of the Senate caucus is similar, though we have more senators who are relatively conservative compared to the house. In any case, if Clinton was trying to pull the party right, he failed terribly.
The question isn't so much what was done but why. When elected, neither Clinton nor Reich had any idea just how extremely deep Bush I deliberately drove the nation into a debt crisis--to a point that threatened the economy and forced Clinton to immediately make his first priority balancing the budget so we could function. It was big news back then. Bush had only let this information out right before the inauguration, so right up until then Clinton had had very different plans for what he would attempt to accomplish his first year.
Any discussion that kind of passes over this crisis manufactured by the Republicans specifically to block the Democratic agenda, while having the happy secondary effect of pleasing the GOP funders by funneling a major chunk of our national wealth upwards, is dishonest.
This has also become a standard Republican technique for dealing with every regime change: open the spigot while they still have control of it, hand the Democrats a crippling debt crisis and no money to fund planned government programs, and do their best to make sure they fail to get hold of it and get voted out after four years of economic problems by an unhappy electorate.
I'm guessing that Mr. Reich would not have been pushed outside to back channels if he had accepted the president's new plan for dealing with these new realities and got to work on it. His disagreement and disappointment unfortunately did not allow him to fulfill the role he was hired for.
He might have spent a couple of sentences pointing out that Clinton's policies were a great success in rescuing the government in record time, and instead of crashing into recession he reestablished a healthy economy with healthy jobs growth. What we know, of course, is that the kind of new, progressive advances to advance wellbeing they two of them had initially planned were mostly sacrificed.
Otoh, although the GOP tactic worked as usual, the recession they hoped would cause an unhappy nation to eject the Democrats after one term did not happen and there was an 8-year hiatus before the GOP could once again rev up the flow of wealth upwards.
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but gotta stay near my grandkids and commiserate about 'our party' with my daughter. 
I was speaking more of internet sites 
Just spent time replying to a post that was locked because it was unflattering, no reason to think, just cheer!
Wish I could have ice cream! 
not sure where the 'underground' portion of the name ever really applied.
Personally I would favor a balance of news, there are real concerns in our party, problems that the Dems would have been drooling over years ago if it had been a Repub candidate, but now are readily dismissed all to achieve a party win.
but of course the powerful do their best to limit the amount of information the 'people' receive. Education's harmful, you know.
There are very good reasons for many voters to
distrust her, and I am one of them.
I am sorry that O'Malley is supporting her, but I
understand his position.
Unfortunately the dem establishment as well as
media and the corporations seem to have won a
fight that was almost too hard for one honest
person to fight.
Taibbi's interpretation is correct, imv, but that
won't change the present election. Maybe that
this country is ripe for a serious revolution, but
unfortunately the police state has already so
much power that even this may fail.
As far as Trump is concerned, I don't believe for
one minute that he really wants the job. It is much
easier for him to raise hatred of the minorities
and of women, so that HRC gets elected.
In the end he can collect his dues from her when
she is in the WH. He was and is playing a game
at this point. The question is what his party will
do in the end to stop the bleeding.
.
"If the party you're in is in total agreement, it's time to switch parties."
This may be a spin-off of someone else's quote but it certainly holds true here. After the 16th of this month, we either toe the line or risk being banished. No dissension, no exceptions. Why do you want to help Trump win? Blah, blah, blah. Frankly, I'm blisteringly disgusted by the smugness of some of Hillary's supporters here. Maybe it's high time to head elsewhere. 
