General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The question is not 'would I support Hillary'? [View all]PatrickforO
(14,559 posts)I'll tell you why. For the past several decades, our politicians had been increasingly owned by corporate interests. This nation's tax code and policy direction have swung during that time in favor of the so-called 1%. An example is that according to Citizens for Tax Justice, about 50 Fortune 500 companies have found an 'offshoring' loophole in the corporate tax code that has allowed them to pay NO income tax for at least a couple years since 2008, and a number of them are ALSO getting substantial tax refunds at the expense of individual taxpayers such as you and I. In fact, in 1944, corporations paid in over 35% of the government's tax revenue and individual taxpayers just over 53%. Now, individual taxpayers are paying in over 83% of the federal government's tax revenue and corporations near 10%.
At the same time, we're being told we don't have the money to continue programs that help Americans. We, are, they intone, going to have to gut the SNAP program, get rid of welfare and other 'wasteful' social spending, such as Perkins funding for postsecondary schools and Pell grants.
And, there's a big push on the part of the neocons and neolibs (these are NOT liberals in the traditional sense, believe me) to privatize and deregulate, as well as gut the New Deal. An example of this is the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, passed by a Republican-controlled lame duck Congress in 2006. This little gem requires the USPS to pay the US Treasury $5 billion per year 'off the top' to fund pensions for employees who haven't even been born yet. We're also seeing a strong backlash against legalizing pot, because the private prisons need to fill beds.
Now we have Citizens United, which allows people like the Koch brothers to buy elections through massive donations to 'super pacs,' and the Supreme Court gutted whole sections of the Voting Rights Act of 1964. Obama knows about these things and he has quietly put some pretty good policies in place, but he can only go so far. Hillary and Bill are quite beholden to corporate interests and we don't hear much in the way of populist rhetoric coming out of their camp.
Sure, Hillary's an order of magnitude better than Rand Paul would be and we won't even mention people like Cruz and Jeb Bush. But what does that really mean to you and I? Look at Obama's vaunted TPP. We lost over 800,000 good jobs to NAFTA, and now TPP will move us even further down that road. So until people like you and I begin taking the trouble to follow legislation as it goes into committee and hold sponsors' feet to the fire about how the proposed law helps the American people, we're going to get corporatists in office (from either party) and the populists we really need will be little more than voices in the wilderness, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.