"Democratic party left behind its working class to pursue the riches offered by the corporate class"

[imagine2015]

Democratic Elites Once Again Demonstrate Their Contempt for Organized Labor
by Jake Johnson
June 6, 2016

According to one influential study, economic elites have near total control over public policy — Shawn Gude calls this "the business veto."

According to Gude, the tremendous power and influence wielded by big business allows elites to "perpetually subvert that most basic condition of democratic rule — that ordinary citizens, not corporate paymasters, set the agenda."

Organized labor has always posed a threat to this established order. And it is because of this fact that many Democrats have, instead of standing in solidarity with working people against corporate overreach, jumped ship to join the side of those who now bankroll the party.

Throughout the 2016 primary process, the state of the Democratic Party has been laid bare by a candidate who has persisted in rejecting the new status quo — a status quo that accepts as perfectly normal the torrent of corporate cash that has infiltrated the political process.

By standing for a tradition that the Democratic Party has left behind — the tradition that, in the past, used mass politics to push reforms that lifted working families — Bernie Sanders has exposed, on a national stage, the rightward lurch of the Democratic establishment.

It is telling that while the party leadership's favorite candidate courts Republican donors, repudiates single-payer health care, and swims in Wall Street cash, Bernie Sanders is the one being blamed for sparking disorder and preventing unity.

This is how far the Democrats have fallen.

Franklin Roosevelt once castigated those he called the "economic royalists" for using their vast wealth to exert pernicious influence on the political process.

Today, Bernie Sanders is delivering a similar message — and receiving nothing but scorn from party leaders.

Perhaps, in today's political landscape, this scorn is the greatest compliment one can be paid.

Who, after all, would want to be praised by the party that has, under the guise of pragmatism, left behind its working class base to pursue the riches offered by the corporate class?

[JEB]

1. K&R for exposure.

It's getting harder and harder to support the party.

[Barack_America]

2. Going to the clerk's office tomorrow.

I'm done.

[BobSmith4152]

3. Yep Al Fromm, Bill Clinton and the DLC took us out of the Union Halls and

into the corporate boardrooms. We're not the party that "welcomes their hatred" anymore. The plutocrats find it just as cost-effective to make "campaign contributions" to "Democrats".

So now the the poster child for neoliberalism is the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee. You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.