History Lessons [View all]

Still, the dismal Eisenhower Democrat and former Goldwater Girl Hillary – a moderate and hawkish Republican at leftmost – clings to a stubborn lead over the Franklin Roosevelt-ian Sanders in the polling data. Her victory of Sanders in Nevada two days ago is likely to be the first in a string of victories that will carry her to the nomination with some help from party “super-delegates” (the 20 percent of Democratic Party presidential delegates who are absurdly unelected). How does she do it? Part of the answer is pure and simple deception.

History Lessons: “Ultra-Radical” Reflections on Hillary, Bernie and U.S. Politics

by Paul Street ~ February 22, 2016

No Surprise

In a recent Guardian column arguing that nominal socialist Bernie Sanders’ majority support among Democratic voters below the age of 50 shows that the United States is entering a new progressive politico-ideological phase, the liberal French economist Thomas Piketty notes that “Hillary Clinton… appears today as if she is defending the status quo, just another heiress of the Reagan-Clinton-Obama political regime.”

She appears like that, someone might want to tell Piketty, because she is like that. For Hillary as for her NAFTA-signing husband and Trans Pacific Obama, there’s a useful translation for “a progressive who knows how to get things done”: a corporate neoliberal who manipulates populist and liberal sentiments in dutiful service to the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire. These “pragmatic” Democrats stand to the right of 1950s U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, who accepted Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal as an inviolable part of the national, corporate-liberal consensus.

Is it any wonder that a Wall Street Democrat with a long corporatist-“New Democrat” (Republican-lite) track record like Hillary Clinton’s [1] is having a harder time than she expected locking down the Democratic presidential nomination? It shouldn’t be. Not in a time when the big money-sponsored rightward shift of both reigning, dollar-drenched political parties helps usher young adults into a New Gilded Age of rampant economic precarity and hyper-inequality – into a society where the top 1% percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90% and gets pretty much whatever it wants from government and politicians regardless of which party holds the White House and/or Congress.

Is it surprising that Sanders is doing better than the Clintons, the Democratic National Committee, and probably Sanders himself expected he would? It shouldn’t be ...

much more here: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/22/history-lessons-ultra-radical-reflections-on-hillary-bernie-and-u-s-politics/