abandon the Democratic party 11/6/2017 0 Comments   by E.L. Christianson Jr. It is all about politics.  It should be all about solving the problems of this country.  As this blog has reported repeatedly, there is no substantial difference between the only 2 political parties in the United States of America.  Both Republicans and Democrats represent the 'ownership' class.   All other classes of people that exist in this country are without representation.  The 'work' done in congress, at the federal level and in the various state legislatures is to enhance the benefits of the wealthy elite at the expense of the ordinary, every-day people.  We all know this to be true.  There is actually no debate on the validity of this concept.  Government operates for the 'corporate person' and not for the 'flesh & blood person'. As we examine the current activities at the government level, we see American healthcare (already poor by comparison to standards in the industrialized world) is being decimated by the political actors.  Similarly we see the upcoming tax changes as giving tremendously to the wealthy and taking away from everyone else while moving national finances deeper and deeper into debt. And there can be no doubt that each of the parties, both Democrats and Republicans, are 'war parties'.  Trump can't understand why Japan doesn't shoot down North Korean missiles, and Clinton fantasized about 'Russian aggression' in every speech.  For both Trump and for Clinton, their vision is delusional and dangerous. The common American citizen is nowhere in the political system.  The 'minor' political parties have been pushed to the sidelines and made irrelevant by the wealthy who make the rules and pass the laws.  "Legal" and/or "Illegal" are whatever the wealthy say they are, and they make changes based on what is convenient for themselves at any particular time... it changes according to their 'whim'. People who aspire to social progress and national improvement for the American people have been duped into believing in the Democratic party as the solution for America's problems... it is not. Everyone can easily see that the Democratic party is in deep trouble (the same is often said about the Republican party) and those on the progressive side of the party want to save the party and to revamp it to serve the people of this country.  That is not going to happen. Instead of wasting time and effort with the terrific infighting necessary to attempt altering the Democratic party, those interested in a progressive agenda should put that energy into pushing the Green Party and/or the Peace and Freedom party to the front.  Make the Green Party and/or the Peace and Freedom party a force to be dealt with - or the Independent Party...  And, for those not favorable to the Green Party or the Peace and Freedom party, there are other choices -- but forget about rebuilding something that hasn't really worked well, anyhow.  Factual history proves only the negatives of the Democratic party (or the Republican party).  Our system hasn't functioned.  Let's move on in a positive direction. The polls always show discontent among the population regarding the work in congress, regarding the work of government, and regarding the operation of the entire system.  Rather than trying to alter that gigantic negative feeling among the people toward 2 very corrupt political parties, it is better to help those voters to choose something different, something better, something that will work in 'their' favor, something that benefits the whole nation rather than the few at the top. Let the Democratic party and the Republican party go their own way (which demonstrably is downhill). Let them crash and burn as they deserve. As a side issue, the media and some in the Democratic party are looking for excuses regarding the Clinton loss in the election and they want to blame Russia.  From every angle one looks, the Democratic party has self-destructed.  That they didn't offer any alternatives to Republicans is only the starting point of conversation about the current irrelevancy of the Democratic party.  That 'Russia' thing is simply an attempt to divert attention and has no real meaning. We have some real and serious problems in the United States. Repairing a dysfunctional political party is not one of the things that should be allowed to consume our energy.   War, climate change, and the welfare of our citizens are items for us to concern ourselves about.  Given all of the circumstances and all of the issues, there is only so much that we can do and trying to resurrect the Democratic party isn't worth the effort, and that's the truth !!! 'Bipartisan' is Republicans and Democrats stealing and deceiving in unison. Pictured is Donald Trump kissing the Republican tax plan during a meeting with the House Ways and Means Committee. Photo Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times -- of course he loves 'this plan' because it gives him millions and millions of dollars that it takes away from ordinary American citizens... We need to remove millionaires (Republicans or Democrats) from governing for the benefit of millionaires... Demo-Catastrophe It Was Worse Than We Thought, and Bigger Than Bernie vs. Hillary Donna Brazile’s bombshell may be overstated, but it helps explain the fiasco of 2016—and how we got there. from AlterNet by Andrew O'Hehir /  Salon ​ More than a year and a half ago, I wrote a column suggesting that Democrats should resist the temptation to gloat at the apparent implosion of the Republican Party, because their own party was in far worse shape than it appeared to be. Honestly, though — I had no idea. There’s an object lesson there for pundits: Sometimes you can be so far wrong that you travel the whole way around the globe and end up being right again. My governing assumptions in March 2016 were highly conventional ones: Republicans were likely to turn on Donald Trump, sooner rather than later, and wind up nominating someone marginally more normal. Hillary Clinton was exceptionally likely to be the next president. Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign was essentially over, after a series of lopsided Clinton victories in large Southern states. Those assumptions, let’s just say, turned out to be flawed to varying degrees. But my underlying premise that the Clinton-Sanders primary battle had revealed an unresolved ideological and political conflict at the heart of the Democratic coalition, which was not actually about Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, was substantially correct. It was flawed in one important way: I failed to perceive that the Democratic Party’s real problems ran much deeper than that. With the publication in Politico this week of an explosive excerpt from former interim Democratic chair Donna Brazile’s first-person tell-all, we have learned that the Democratic National Committee went into the 2016 election cycle essentially bankrupt and deeply in debt. By late summer of 2015, as Brazile tells it — several months before the first votes were cast in Iowa or New Hampshire and nearly a year before the party’s Philadelphia convention — the DNC had become a “fund-raising clearinghouse” or client state for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which was paying the party’s bills and had practical control over its finances, strategy and staffing. At least on the surface, that's worse than the most dire accusations hurled at the party last year by internet BernieBros or Julian Assange. Some of Brazile's account has subsequently been called into question by Democratic insiders, most notably the timing of the fund-raising agreement between the DNC and the Clinton campaign, No individual element of that picture is especially damning on its own, and there was nothing illegal about this arrangement, as Brazile makes clear. But there’s also no way to make it look good, and the overall impression is one of an organization so rudderless, demoralized and destitute it had stopped caring about its integrity. Brazile insists that during her stint as party chair, after the ouster of the much-derided Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she could find no other evidence of “internal corruption” to suggest that DNC insiders had intentionally rigged the Democratic primaries to boost Clinton and torpedo Sanders. Well, OK. But I would say that's a moot point, wouldn’t you? Brazile's contention is that the party organization was being operated as a money-laundering front by its leading candidate, in roughly the same way Tony Soprano would run a bankrupt sporting-goods store. If that was true at any point, then the intentions of the people involved are irrelevant. The entire enterprise was corrupt from top to bottom. Brazile’s revelations have obviously provided new ammunition to Sanders supporters who perceived the 2016 Democratic contest as rigged, not to mention more fodder for tweets about “Crooked Hillary” by crazy old guys, including the one in the Oval Office. But to return to the principle mentioned above, I think that’s missing the point: Bernie vs. Hillary was never the central issue, and it definitely isn’t now. The extent to which virtually all discussion about left-liberal politics and the Democratic Party’s future devolves into vitriolic disputes about those two candidates, or into circular arguments about “social justice” and “economic inequality” (as if those things were opposed or categorically distinct), is itself an index of Democratic dysfunction. In fact, I’m inclined to take Brazile at her word: There was no nefarious conspiracy to tip the Democratic nomination to Clinton, and none was necessary. The DNC’s pro-Hillary leanings were obvious to everyone, even if we didn’t know the gruesome details. But it’s also true that Clinton won more votes and more delegates, under a process understood by all parties in advance. Now, what might have happened if the party had had a different process, a different ideology, a different approach to politics and a different constituency? That’s just too many ifs. (In fairness, there's also no way to know how Sanders would have fared against Trump in the general election; it's safe to assume the Republicans would have rolled out some ferocious "oppo.") Point being, the Democratic Party’s corruption was, and is, systemic rather than specific. It wasn’t so much “OMG what do we do about the weird old socialist guy?”, although it’s clearly true that Sanders’ campaign caught party insiders by surprise and they weren't too thrilled about it. The moral implosion that Brazile describes was the tragic result of a bunch of more or less decent people with more or less honorable intentions struggling to deal with a long chain of unintended consequences stemming from decisions they hadn’t made. Even Debbie Wasserman Schultz, America’s Most Kickable, wasn’t personally responsible for the way Barack Obama regally ignored the Democratic Party for eight years, leaving it with (Brazile says) $25 million in debt, not to mention wiped off the political map in virtually every state that doesn’t touch a large body of water. For that matter, it wasn’t Obama who decided that the working class and the welfare state were yesterday's news and turned the Democrats into the party of “The End of History,” embracing Silicon Valley venture capital and deep-pockets Hollywood donors (cough, cough, Weinstein) and deregulated Wall Street derivatives that nobody could understand but were sure to keep going up, up, up. That particular maneuver paid off big time for Bill Clinton in the '90s -- and has been poisonous ever since. The net result of all this has been highly anomalous, if not unique in political history: On one hand we have a party that nominally stands for principles and policies supported by a majority of the population, whose nominee has won the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections. On the other we have a party that has lost close to 1,000 state legislature seats over the past decade and suffered historic wipeouts in the last two midterm elections, leaving it in a weaker position on Capitol Hill than at any time since the Great Depression. That party became so strapped for cash, not to mention so spiritually enervated, that it rented itself out to one of its presidential candidates while pretending to remain neutral with respect to that candidate’s campaign. Spoiler alert: Same party!             The New Democratic Party from the New York Times by Charles M. Blow A year ago this week, America made what I believe history will record as one of the greatest electoral mistakes in the life of the nation: It elected Donald Trump president of the United States. ​ It did so while drowning in Russia-produced propaganda, under a torrent of Russia-stolen emails, facing the stiff arm of renewed voter suppression, and on the watch of a splintering and dysfunctional Democratic Party. All of those caveats are valid and necessary, but they don’t undo what has been done. They rightly call into question the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, but they don’t nullify it. The only remedy is removal, and that’s a very high bar, although recent moves in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation have renewed hopes. How did we get here? This is becoming old saw: Russia stole and published emails and also generated fake news, all in an attempt to hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances of being elected and therefore to aid Trump’s chances. What is new is knowledge of the overwhelming extent of Russia’s meddling and how it was aimed specifically at widening America’s divisions. As Facebook’s general counsel testified to a Senate committee last week, 126 million Americans may have been exposed to Russia-generated content on that platform alone. As a point of reference, only 137.5 million Americans voted in the 2016 election. Even the interim chairperson of the DNC has come out with evidence that Hillary Clinton controlled the DNC and rigged the primary against... Russia used American technology and American companies as weapons against American democracy. The Democratic Party, or at least many of its highest-profile figureheads from the last election, is locked in a vicious cycle of re-examinations and recriminations. The latest of those is the controversial new political memoir, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House,” by Donna Brazile, about serving as acting head of the Democratic National Committee during the last legs of the campaign. The book is dishy on a personal level but damaging on a political level. Maybe that’s the point. As Joy-Ann Reid wrote on The Daily Beast, “Donna Brazile may be burning the village in order to save it.” But at a time when Trump is scrambling for anything at all to distract from Mueller’s plodding — and fruitful — investigation, is it the right time to start a three-alarm? I don’t begrudge anyone the right to tell his or her own story, but my focus now is on protecting the country from Trump, and nothing else. Brazile contended on ABC’s “This Week” that there would be no truly good time for her to release her book, and that people questioning the timing could “go to hell.” The problem is that we’re already in hell and trying to dig our way out, and many of us are crestfallen when any obstacle is added that might impede that effort. A Newsweek cover story last week declared, “Trump is Leading the Most Corrupt Administration in U.S. History, One of First-Class Kleptocrats.” He is a joke on the international stage. He is pushing us closer to an unthinkable nuclear conflict with North Korea. He is inflaming racial tensions by siding with the racists. His Justice Department is chipping away at civil rights. His Environmental Protection Agency is seemingly trying to do everything at odds with protecting the environment. And now Trump and the Republicans want to give the rich a giant wet kiss of a tax break. The reign of Trump is the reign of ruin. That is why the Resistance is needed now more than ever. ​ And that’s the good news. The Resistance is strong and resolute, passionate and focused. The historic Women’s March has continued its work with a convention last month in Detroit. Resistance groups like Indivisible have continued their organizing and pressure. Indivisible now boasts that “across the nation, over 5,800 local groups (at least two in every congressional district) are using the Indivisible Guide to hold their members of Congress accountable.” And, as CNN reported on Saturday, there is an overwhelming surge of Democratic women interested in running for office. More people in polls appear to be waking to the reality that Trump is a walking failure who built his legend and his fortune on the lies that he was savvy and shrewd and a consummate deal maker. They are also waking to the very real possibility that all these Trump campaign contacts with Russians that everyone on the campaign seemed to forget may not be an epidemic of amnesia, but instead a widespread effort to cover something up. Liberals have the will and determination to turn this giant mistake around, to pressure their elected officials or possibly replace them. They have the resolve to resist Trump by every means at their disposal, while clinging to the hope that he might one day be replaced. The only issue I see is that these efforts seem to be operating separately from the national Democratic Party, a dinosaur of bureaucratic machinery in an evolved age of direct democratic action. Liberalism has leapt over the Democratic Party. Liberalism has its eye on a new beginning, while the mainstream party is stuck looking backward and bickering. The Resistance isn’t part of the old Democratic Party; The Resistance is the new Democratic Party, or at least its future. I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter (@CharlesMBlow), or email me at chblow@nytimes.com. Charles M. Blow Politics, public opinion and social justice. There’s no way to separate the Democratic Party’s ideological collapse from its institutional collapse, or from the way it has self-gerrymandered into a regional party whose voters are an awkward coalition of rich and poor in the coastal states and the top dozen or so metropolitan areas. (I know, I know: The "Big Sort," because everybody who used to vote Democratic in the heartland states died or moved to California.) All those things are aspects of the same phenomenon, which is that Democrats are constantly on the back foot, fighting yesterday’s battles and burdened by the PTSD of 2008 or the Cold War or the Reagan Revolution or Chicago 1968. That’s admittedly preferable to the Time Machine Amnesia party on the other side, which used to long for an anodyne, theme-park fantasy of the 1950s but now seems to have embraced a level of delusional nihilism that suggests either a postmodern art movement or severe mental illness. But for the last two decades or so, Democrats have had no semblance of a collective identity other than not being Republicans. They’re not homophobic or misogynistic, they’re not overtly racist, they’re not hysterical about immigration, they’re OK with scientific evidence and they don’t embrace patently false conspiracy theories. Which are good things! But at this point, the argument that “we’re better at managing things than the crazy people” has repeatedly proven inadequate to win power, to hold onto it or to do anything useful with it. ​ Both sides in the Democratic Party’s current faction fight, as I see it, are in denial about the true nature and scope of the problem. Sanders-style progressives long to purge the old guard and build anew, rebranding the entire party as a social-democratic enterprise dedicated to single-payer health care, a $15 minimum wage and higher taxes on the rich. Clintonite moderates, meanwhile, maintain that the Trump presidency, Republican hegemony in Washington and widespread social discord are rogue events that perhaps didn’t really happen and in any case do not reflect on their strategy of policy-wonk triangulation or their record of repeated and humiliating defeat. Both responses are essentially utopian: They rest on the premise that the Democratic Party is still a functioning political organization and that the United States is still a functioning democracy. We ought to know better by now. It does no good to pretend that the Democratic (and democratic) crisis — which is not just ideological and political but also moral, philosophical, financial, institutional and other adjectives besides — does not exist or isn’t important. Numerous social-media observers have already suggested that Donna Brazile should not have aired her party’s dirty secrets because we face a national emergency and need party unity at a time like this, etc. Nonsense: What unity? And for that matter, what party? The Demo-catastrophe cannot be swept under the carpet in the name of winning a House majority in 2018 (which isn’t going to happen anyway), although that’s a fair description of the party’s official strategy. That way lies madness, or at least the form of liberal derangement represented by Jon Ossoff, the guy who spent 30 million bucks, more money than any congressional candidate in history, to get exactly the same number of votes as the previous Democrat to be defeated in his suburban Atlanta district. (I was angry about it at the time and am angrier now: The demoralizing effect of the Ossoff debacle will have a long tail.) Now here we are, in the still-unbelievable conditions of 2017, with an erratic, vindictive and thoroughly incompetent president who finished second in the voting and is widely despised by the public. He sits atop a hollowed-out zombie version of the Republican Party, which has forged an especially noxious and nonsensical coalition of predatory capitalism and resurgent white nationalism. (I can hear my colleague Chauncey DeVega reminding me that that particular combination has a name.) That party’s base of support is nowhere close to a majority, yet somehow it controls all three branches of the federal government and 38 (or so) of the 50 states. It's Our Only Hope, and that's the truth !!! Now here we are, in the still-unbelievable conditions of 2017, with an erratic, vindictive and thoroughly incompetent president who finished second in the voting and is widely despised by the public. He sits atop a hollowed-out zombie version of the Republican Party, which has forged an especially noxious and nonsensical coalition of predatory capitalism and resurgent white nationalism. (I can hear my colleague Chauncey DeVega reminding me that that particular combination has a name.) That party’s base of support is nowhere close to a majority, yet somehow it controls all three branches of the federal government and 38 (or so) of the 50 states. How in God’s name did that happen? Well, we’ve all spent too much time blathering on about that and coming up with halfway plausible explanations: It was sexism and Russian meddling and racial resentment and “economic anxiety” and the marginalization of the white working class. It was a flood-tide of right-wing fake news and Jim Comey’s October surprise (remember, we were supposed to hate him before we were supposed to love him). It was voter suppression and depressed turnout and bearded millennial snowflakes who voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. Given how flukish the 2016 election was, it’s fair to say that all those factors played a role, and that if any one of them could be adjusted just a little, the outcome might have been different. Even at their most grandiose and Putin-enriched, those are granular explanations of what happened last November — a uniquely traumatic and damaging event, to be sure — which completely ignore the near-total meltdown of the two-party system that got us there in the first place. Hillary Clinton’s bizarre defeat-in-victory was an event so unlikely it seems like a metaphor. So does the fact that the Democratic Party was so broke and so cynical it literally sold its soul for rent money. ​But those things happened. Until we face them honestly there will be no Resistance, no victory, no political renewal and no democracy. and we can see where that has gotten us...