Monday, October 10, 2016

We're Saying The Same Things

Which Must Be Said, Over And Over, With Fierce Conviction

(An excerpt from Thomas Frank, in The UK Guardian Online: "With Trump Certain To Lose, You Can Forget About A progressive Clinton")

“Jobs” don’t really matter now in this election, nor does the debacle of “globalization”, nor does anything else, really. Thanks to this imbecile Trump, all such issues have been momentarily swept off the table while Americans come together around Clinton, the wife of the man who envisaged the Davos dream in the first place.

As leading Republicans desert the sinking ship of Trump’s GOP, America’s two-party system itself has temporarily become a one-party system. And within that one party, the political process bears a striking resemblance to dynastic succession. Party office-holders selected Clinton as their candidate long ago, apparently determined to elevate her despite every possible objection, every potential legal problem.

The Democratic National Committee helped out, too, as WikiLeaks tells us. So did President Barack Obama, that former paladin for openness, who in the past several years did nearly everything in his power to suppress challenges to Clinton and thus ensure she would continue his legacy of tepid, bank-friendly neoliberalism.

My leftist friends persuaded themselves that this stuff didn’t really matter, that Clinton’s many concessions to Sanders’ supporters were permanent concessions. But with the convention over and the struggle with Sanders behind her, headlines show Clinton triangulating to the right, scooping up the dollars and the endorsement... She is reaching out to the foreign policy establishment and the neocons. She is reaching out to Republican office-holders. She is reaching out to Silicon Valley. And, of course, she is reaching out to Wall Street. In her big speech in Michigan on Thursday she cast herself as the candidate who could bring bickering groups together and win policy victories...

...[W]hat seems most plausible ... is a landslide for Clinton, and with it the triumph of complacent neoliberal orthodoxy. She will have won her great victory, not as a champion of working people’s concerns, but as the greatest moderate of them all, as the leader of a stately campaign of sanity and national unity. The populist challenge of the past eight years, whether led by Trump or by Sanders, will have been beaten back resoundingly. Centrism will reign triumphant ... for years to come.

...Trump loves to boast that he is immune to the scourge of money in politics, that he’s nobody’s puppet, and from his coming ruin and disgrace we will no doubt be told to draw many lessons about how money in politics actually helps prevent the rise of people like Trump and makes the system more stable.

For decades, the Davos set have told us that doubt about “globalization” was a species of racism, and soon Trump, as a landslide loser, will confirm this for them in overwhelming terms.
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2 comments:

  1. here's an alternative viewpoint - brent budowsky asserts that bernie was the winner of debate 2

    http://observer.com/2016/10/bernie-sanders-won-the-trump-clinton-debate/

    i think thomas frank's analysis is correct - hillary owes her loyalty to the .01%, not to the little people whom she is so glad not to be one of any more - the podesta emails make this very clear

    on tv this weekend one of the talkers referred to the "donor class" unironically - by which is meant the owner class, of course - those who have their hand on the pie slicer and decide who gets how big a piece

    i wonder if i'm as consumed with hate and envy as i sometimes fear - or if, rather, i have an unquenchable thirst for truth, justice, and the potentially sentient way, and am full of unselfish love for all my fellow creatures

    maybe both

    may the creative forces of the universe smile in our general direction

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    1. If you weren't both, I'd be surprised. The culture we've been birthed in has taught our hindbrains (among other things) to Want -- that What We Possess In Life is a gauge of our intrinsic value as living beings, and that our existence has No Other Valid Point Of Reference. It's narcotic. Being weaned off a dependence on that skein of beliefs is a life's work.

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