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Fight the soulless juggernaut: Big money, machine politics and the real issue separating Sanders and Clinton
Democrats face a stark choice: A money-mad, scandal-plagued establishment, or the potential of decency and change
Salon
Camille Paglia
2/25/2016
Excerpt:
Despite Bernie Sanders being tied with her for pledged delegates after last weekend’s Nevada caucuses, the media herd has anointed Hillary Clinton yet again as the inevitable Democratic nominee. Superdelegates, those undemocratic figureheads and goons of the party establishment, are by definition unpledged and fluid and should never be added to the official column of any candidate until the national convention. To do so is an amoral tactic of intimidation that affects momentum and gives backstage wheeling and dealing primacy over the will of the electorate. Why are the media so servilely complicit with Clinton-campaign propaganda and trickery?
Democrats face a stark choice this year. A vote for the scandal-plagued Hillary is a resounding ratification of business as usual–the corrupt marriage of big money and machine politics, practiced by the Clintons with the zest of Boss Tweed, the gluttonous czar of New York’s ruthless Tammany Hall in the 1870s. What you also get with Hillary is a confused hawkish interventionism that has already dangerously destabilized North Africa and the Mideast. This is someone who declared her candidacy on April 12, 2015 via an email and slick video and then dragged her feet on making a formal statement of her presidential policies and goals until her pollsters had slapped together a crib list of what would push the right buttons. This isn’t leadership; it’s pandering.
Thanks to several years of the Democratic party establishment strong-arming younger candidates off the field for Hillary, the only agent for fundamental change remains Bernie Sanders, an honest and vanity-free man who has been faithful to his core progressive principles for his entire career. It is absolutely phenomenal that Sanders has made such progress nationally against his near total blackout over the past year by the major media, including the New York Times. That he has inspired the hope and enthusiasm of an immense number of millennial women is very encouraging. Feminists who support Hillary for provincial gender reasons are guilty of a reactionary, reflex sexism, betraying that larger vision required for the ballot so hard-won by the suffrage movement.
The Democratic National Committee, as chaired since 2011 by Clinton sycophant Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has become a tyranny that must be checked and overthrown. Shock the system! Here are the flaming words of one of my heroes, Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1964, he declared from the steps of Sproul Hall to a crowd of 4,000 protesters: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”
A vote for Bernie Sanders is a vote against the machine, the obscenely money-mad and soulless juggernaut that the Democratic Party has become. Perhaps there was a time, during the Hubert Humphrey era, when Democrats could claim to be populists, alive to the needs and concerns of working-class people. But the party has become the playground of white, upper-middle-class professionals with elite-school degrees and me-first values. These liberal poseurs mouth racial and ethnic platitudes, acquired like trophy kills at their p.c. campuses, but every word rings hollow, because it is based on condescension, a patronizing projection of victimhood onto those outside their privileged circle. There is no better example of this arrogant class bias than Wellesley grad Hillary Clinton lapsing into her mush-mouthed, Southern-fried dialect when addressing African-American audiences.
Sanders is no Communist, bent on seizing centralized control of business and industry. He is a democratic socialist in the Scandinavian mode, where social welfare is predicated on cooperation and shared sacrifice. Whether such a system can work in the vastly larger and more culturally diverse U.S. is another matter. The financial viability of his proposals would certainly be stringently vetted by Congress, which holds the purse strings of the national budget. But Sanders’ attack on the crass excesses and unpunished ethical lapses of Wall Street is a great awakening call, at a time when the U.S. has disastrously lost its manufacturing base and when the super-rich have accumulated proportionally more wealth than at any time since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
.......................................
View the complete article, including image, at:
http://www.salon.com/2016/02/25/figh...s_and_clinton/
Democrats face a stark choice: A money-mad, scandal-plagued establishment, or the potential of decency and change
Salon
Camille Paglia
2/25/2016
Excerpt:
Despite Bernie Sanders being tied with her for pledged delegates after last weekend’s Nevada caucuses, the media herd has anointed Hillary Clinton yet again as the inevitable Democratic nominee. Superdelegates, those undemocratic figureheads and goons of the party establishment, are by definition unpledged and fluid and should never be added to the official column of any candidate until the national convention. To do so is an amoral tactic of intimidation that affects momentum and gives backstage wheeling and dealing primacy over the will of the electorate. Why are the media so servilely complicit with Clinton-campaign propaganda and trickery?
Democrats face a stark choice this year. A vote for the scandal-plagued Hillary is a resounding ratification of business as usual–the corrupt marriage of big money and machine politics, practiced by the Clintons with the zest of Boss Tweed, the gluttonous czar of New York’s ruthless Tammany Hall in the 1870s. What you also get with Hillary is a confused hawkish interventionism that has already dangerously destabilized North Africa and the Mideast. This is someone who declared her candidacy on April 12, 2015 via an email and slick video and then dragged her feet on making a formal statement of her presidential policies and goals until her pollsters had slapped together a crib list of what would push the right buttons. This isn’t leadership; it’s pandering.
Thanks to several years of the Democratic party establishment strong-arming younger candidates off the field for Hillary, the only agent for fundamental change remains Bernie Sanders, an honest and vanity-free man who has been faithful to his core progressive principles for his entire career. It is absolutely phenomenal that Sanders has made such progress nationally against his near total blackout over the past year by the major media, including the New York Times. That he has inspired the hope and enthusiasm of an immense number of millennial women is very encouraging. Feminists who support Hillary for provincial gender reasons are guilty of a reactionary, reflex sexism, betraying that larger vision required for the ballot so hard-won by the suffrage movement.
The Democratic National Committee, as chaired since 2011 by Clinton sycophant Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has become a tyranny that must be checked and overthrown. Shock the system! Here are the flaming words of one of my heroes, Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1964, he declared from the steps of Sproul Hall to a crowd of 4,000 protesters: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop!”
A vote for Bernie Sanders is a vote against the machine, the obscenely money-mad and soulless juggernaut that the Democratic Party has become. Perhaps there was a time, during the Hubert Humphrey era, when Democrats could claim to be populists, alive to the needs and concerns of working-class people. But the party has become the playground of white, upper-middle-class professionals with elite-school degrees and me-first values. These liberal poseurs mouth racial and ethnic platitudes, acquired like trophy kills at their p.c. campuses, but every word rings hollow, because it is based on condescension, a patronizing projection of victimhood onto those outside their privileged circle. There is no better example of this arrogant class bias than Wellesley grad Hillary Clinton lapsing into her mush-mouthed, Southern-fried dialect when addressing African-American audiences.
Sanders is no Communist, bent on seizing centralized control of business and industry. He is a democratic socialist in the Scandinavian mode, where social welfare is predicated on cooperation and shared sacrifice. Whether such a system can work in the vastly larger and more culturally diverse U.S. is another matter. The financial viability of his proposals would certainly be stringently vetted by Congress, which holds the purse strings of the national budget. But Sanders’ attack on the crass excesses and unpunished ethical lapses of Wall Street is a great awakening call, at a time when the U.S. has disastrously lost its manufacturing base and when the super-rich have accumulated proportionally more wealth than at any time since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
.......................................
View the complete article, including image, at:
http://www.salon.com/2016/02/25/figh...s_and_clinton/