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SHRED

SHRED's Journal
SHRED's Journal
February 18, 2016

The Democratic Party needs to return home

This article delves deeply into everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party.
It is why I support the restoration of a return to the ideals and actions of FDR.
It points out where we went wrong as a party and in my view why we need to heed the call of Bernie Sanders.


In office, Clinton pursued Republican objectives. He launched a prison-building empire, gutted welfare, deregulated the financial markets, produced astonishing tax breaks for the rich, passed a trade bill that destroyed American jobs and wrecked Mexican agribusiness, and decided there was no good reason to maintain a wall between the unscrupulous capitalist investor and unwitting depositor. After all, as the Nineties refrain went, banks can police themselves. All the while, of course, he continued to peddle his sincerest sympathies to Main Street.

America hasn’t been the same since. Not least because the very deregulatory policies Clinton approved gutted the global economy in 2008. From an electoral perspective, the Democrats need only shade slightly left of the Republican insurgents to appear like even-keeled moderates and win the liberal vote. This is the platform and plan of Hillary Clinton, too. Another neoliberal corporate presidency. Obviously the Clintons think their strategy can still prevail. After all, as Bill Clinton gleefully said of disillusioned progressives he knew would eventually return to the fold, “They have nowhere else to go.”


FEBRUARY 18, 2016
The Clinton Monster That Won’t Die
by JASON HIRTHLER

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/18/the-clinton-monster-that-wont-die/

..
February 17, 2016

It's about the destruction of The New Deal and who best to help restore it

I am voting for Bernie Sanders because he is NOT part of the problem and in fact is sensible in his desire to return to the principles of FDR.



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.


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. Or the amazing double standard his Justice Department seems to have erected for dishonest mortgage financiers and dishonest mortgage borrowers. Or the way office-holding Democrats of nearly every rank throw money at the people they call “innovators” while telling working-class Americans that little can be done about their ruined lives.


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



Many thanks to RiverLover for inspiring my post:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1254925
February 12, 2016

"Let’s consider some of Kissinger’s achievements...

...during his tenure as Richard Nixon’s top foreign policy–maker. He (1) prolonged the Vietnam War for five pointless years; (2) illegally bombed Cambodia and Laos; (3) goaded Nixon to wiretap staffers and journalists; (4) bore responsibility for three genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; (5) urged Nixon to go after Daniel Ellsberg for having released the Pentagon Papers, which set off a chain of events that brought down the Nixon White House; (6) pumped up Pakistan’s ISI, and encouraged it to use political Islam to destabilize Afghanistan; (7) began the US’s arms-for-petrodollars dependency with Saudi Arabia and pre-revolutionary Iran; (8) accelerated needless civil wars in southern Africa that, in the name of supporting white supremacy, left millions dead; (9) supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America; and (10) ingratiated himself with the first-generation neocons, such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, who would take American militarism to its next calamitous level.


Let's not forget what Hillary's friend is all about.

Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton’s Tutor in War and Peace

http://www.thenation.com/article/henry-kissinger-hillary-clintons-tutor-in-war-and-peace/
February 8, 2016

We must try...here is why

Why We Must Try
Sunday, February 7, 2016

Instead of “Yes we can,” many Democrats have adopted a new slogan this election year: “We shouldn’t even try.”

We shouldn’t try for single-payer system, they say. We’ll be lucky if we prevent Republicans from repealing Obamacare.

We shouldn’t try for a $15 an hour minimum wage. The best we can do is $12 an hour.

We shouldn’t try to restore the Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate investment and commercial banking, or bust up the biggest banks. We’ll be lucky to stop Republicans from repealing Dodd-Frank.


CONTINUED...
http://robertreich.org/post/138894376115


A good read.
February 8, 2016

The "Big Dog" is yapping

He's attacking Bernie's disgust of corporate influence and corruption of our political system. This is right out of the Rove playbook. It's called "attack them where you are weak."

A dumb move in my opinion as it focuses more attention on the Clintons and their friends like Robert Rubin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rubin

Please proceed Mr. President!


Bill Clinton Accuses Bernie Sanders Of Living In A 'Hermetically Sealed Box' - http://huff.to/1Xcxqb6

February 8, 2016

You're damn right it's the corruption

The trade deals endorsed by the Clintons and the DLC are a horrible reminder of the havoc greed inflicts. Just look at what happened to Flint. Fucking NAFTA.

February 6, 2016

Another outrageous hypocrisy of Marco Rubio and Republicans

...increase the defense budget by $1 trillion over the next 10 years...


http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/12/politics/marco-rubio-rand-paul-conservative-debate-military-spending/

If he becomes their nominee our candidate should pummel him on this. Just two short years ago, when it came to helping our vets, Rubio talked about the expense.
Now he sings a different tune for his defense contractor buddies.

Rubio is at the 1:46 mark.

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