richard lightner

Aug 45 min read

Democrats are Frauds

Thomas Frank. Listen Liberal or whatever happened to the party of the people? 2016

Journalist Thomas Frank asks serious political questions about the democratic party in the United States.

“Wal-Mart . . . sucked the life out of thousands of middle-American towns.” (3)

“It is the Republicans certainly who bear primary responsibility for our modern plutocracy. . . . tax-cutting and wage-suppressing.” (8)

“Since 1992 [the year Clinton was elected] . . . have done very little. They have stubbornly refused to change course when every sign said turn.” (9)

“Their viability to address the social questions is not accidental. The urgent leaders of the Democratic Party know their form of liberalism is somehow related to the good fortune of the top 10 percent.” Inequality became a part of the Democrats’ identity. (10)

In his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama “raised more money from the financial services industry . . . than did his Republican opponent.” (10) Thus, the late Great John the Pilger coined the phrase “brand Obama.”

President Obama told American bankers he would “protect them” after the 2008 banking crisis. He would not make changes to the banking industry. (12)

Obama spoke in the same tired way of Beltway pundit, consensus. (14)

Between 1968 and 1972, “unions lost their position as the premier interest group in the Democratic coalition. (46)

The famous Powell Memo of 1971 called “forthrightly for reorienting the Democratic Party around the desires of the professional class.” (47)

“Democratic leaders decided to reorient the party after 1968 not because this was necessary for survival but because they distrusted their main constituency and had started to lust after a new and more sophisticated one.” (52)

Running for the Senate in 1974, Gary Hart, former campaign manager for George McGovern, spoke of “the End of the New Deal” and criticized Eleanor Roosevelt. (53)

When Hart ran for president in 1984, the media associated him with yuppies “whose rise was supposed to signal yet another break from the Democrat’s traditional blue-collar demographic. (53)

Under President Jimmy Carter, a Democratic Congress “enacted the first of the era’s really big tax cuts for the rich and also the first of the really big deregulations.” (54)

By the 1980s, these people were referred to as Neo-Liberals. (56)

“The 1983 Neo-Liberal manifesto, for example, blamed unions for the country’s industrial problems, mourned all was involved in the Social Security program, and called for a war on public school teachers so that we might get a better education system.” (56)

Democrats who revolted against the George McGovern Democratic ideals formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Originally “established by a group of white Southern politicians in 1985 and supposedly committed to the working-class the Democratic Party left behind. The DLC’s point of view and things was that the Democrats lost elections “because their leaders were too weak on crime, too soft on communism, and too sympathetic to minorities.” (57)

They believed that of all people, Jimmy Carter was too liberal. Walter Mondale was too liberal. Michael Dukakis was too liberal. (57)

The DLC had to move to the “center.” “The essential flaw in this neat little syllogism flashed on and off like a neon sign -that all three of the Democratic candidates in the 1980s had followed this exact strategy of shifting rightward and had lost anyway.” (57)

The DLC had no interest in working people they wanted corporate support. (58)

Frank cites the late great Kevin Phillips's The Politics of Rich and Poor, writing that middle-class families will tire of hearing about the rich and famous. (62)

In 1991, the “Philadelphia Inquirer published . . . how the wealthy had plundered the country’s productive enterprises during the 1980s, pushing the nation toward a two-class society.” (63)

With the economics of Clinton, the poor got discipline, and the professionals got endless indulgence.” (115)

“Discipline was the point of ’94 crime bill, too: The poor were to live in a state of constant supervision where there was “zero tolerance” for those who stepped out of line.” (116)

Clinton did more to hurt working families than “even the most diabolical Republican.” (122)

The Democratic Party rejected “the New Deal order and anticipated the imminent dawning of the postindustrial society.” (124)

In 2008, Barack Obama would cozy up to Wall Street most. Thus, John the Pilger referred to Brand Obama.

The financial catastrophe of 2008 caused some Democrats to re-embrace the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt. (139)

Early in Obama’s presidency, he had “convinced himself in late 2009 that there wasn’t much he could do about the problem anyway,” according to Ron Suskind in Confidence Men. (146)

While Barack Obama spoke eloquently about inequality, it was Obama who crushed the working class. (147)

President Obama did nothing to help foreclosed homeowners in bankruptcy. (147-148)

President Obama reneged on his opposition to NAFTA. Frank writes that the president’s audacity seemed to disappear. (148)

He continued his reversals on positions by supporting in 2015 the Trans-Pacific Partnership “which aimed to extend the NAFTA patterns to” the Pacific. (149)

Obama “accused treaty opponents of stupidly wanting to pull up the drawbridge and build a moat around ourselves.” (149)

Obamacare was noted for its complexity, which was its “most striking characteristic.” (160)

MIT economist Jonathan Gruber said that the Obamacare “law was deliberately written in a tortured way with a lack of transparency that was meant to confuse evaluators and thus get it past the clueless and bewildered public.” (160)

“One of the challenges in our society is that the truth is kind of a disequalizer, Larry Summers told journalist Ron Suskind during the early days of the Obama administration. “One of the reasons that inequality had probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they’re supposed to be treated.” (172-173) Summers said that women are not capable of doing well in mathematics. He was and will always be an asshole. How he rose in society says a lot about society.

With all the alleged brilliance in the Obama administration had no creativity. (173)

Under Obama, the liberals did not understand the rightwing would attack them. (175)

“And this brings us to perhaps the most crucial indictment of them all: these Democrats don’t seem to care about winning elections.” (175)

The Democratic response is they did the best they could. (176)

“Organized labor was the great force of the Roosevelt years, but it is atomized labor, cheered for and pushed by Democrats like Ploufe and Leanne, that will forever shape American memories of the Obama years. . . . Uber is the most famous . . . hacks for hire.” (212)

“Government could have easily prevented or at least mitigated every single one of the developments . . . when a company’s business strategy consists of some novel way to get around safety regulations, or antitrust statutes, or basic labor law, it is government’s duty to do something about it.” (213)

Why didn’t the Democrats address the situation? (214)

Robert Reich wrote in 2015 that “all these developments are the logical culmination of a process that began thirty years ago when corporations began turning over full-time jobs to temporary workers, independent contractors, free-lancers, and consultants.” (215)

The rules of economic systems do not derive from the laws of nature. The “rules are made by humans . . . In a democracy, we can set the economic table however we choose.” (216)

Peter Edelman, an expert “on welfare and a former friend of the Clintons, found that “extreme poverty has increased dramatically in this country since Bill Clinton signed welfare reform in 1996.” (243)

Comments

Different Points of View over the future of Atomic weapons.

During the Afghan War, President Donald Trump (GAG!) authorized a General to use the Mother of all Bombs, a bomb just shy of the power of an atomic bomb, on his own. Notice that this had no positive affect for the US in the outcome of the war. (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/asia/moab-mother-of-all-bombs-afghanistan.html)

There is a plethora of information about the development and use of the atomic bomb during World War II. Much of the world was astounded that the US used such a bomb on civilians. Others said, drop more.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 9, 1945, “served as the symbolic coronation of American global power.” Nevertheless, the use of the atomic bomb in World War II brought international condemnation. At the Tokyo War Crimes Trials of 1946-1948, Justice Pal of India cited the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as war crimes. U.S. President Harry S. Truman responded by publicly saying that the atomic bombs were dropped “in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands of young Americans.” However, President Truman in correspondence with John Foster Dulles that his reasons for dropping the atomic bombs were the attack on Pearl Harbor and the murder of our prisoners of war. “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.” (Martin Sherwin. “Hiroshima and Modern Memory.” The Nation. October 10, 1981)

“In the summer and fall of 1945, US atomic policy left us troubled and perplexed. Roosevelt, we thought, had been committed to a policy of international understanding and conciliation. . . . Truman’s policy, however, appeared to have the opposite aim: to keep a monopoly of the atomic bomb in U.S. and British hands, and to use it as a strong trump card in tough political bargaining with the Soviet Union.” (Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance. 1975. xi)

And, well before the bombings FDR and Churchill “rejected steps that might have led to the international control of atomic energy.” (Martin Sherwin. “Hiroshima and Modern Memory.” The Nation. October 10, 1981)

According to nuclear physicist Hans Bethe who worked on the Manhattan Project, “Many of us had been influenced directly or indirectly by Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist. He argued that only international control of nuclear weapons could save the world from a nuclear arms race, and that such a race would imperil, not enhance the security of the United States and Great Britain. Many other scientists, especially at the University of Chicago Metallurgic Laboratory, at the initiative of Leo Szilard, had come independently to the same conclusion.

Martin Sherwin, George Mason University History professor who specialized in the history of nuclear weapons, wrote that, this interpretation by physicists and historian is wrong. Roosevelt decided, with Churchill, “that the bomb should remain and Anglo-American monopoly.” (Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: the Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance. 1975. xii)

However, this is not mentioned in Hiroshima in America: fifty years of denial, by Robert Jay Lifton and Gregg Mitchell.

KOREA

There are numerous arguments about whether or not the atomic bomb should have been used in Korea, Vietnam, or other existential circumstances.

In late 1950, following their invasion of Korea, Chinese forces surrounded U.S. Marines. “Distraught himself, the chief executive (Truman), told a press conference on November 30 that nuclear bombsight be used against the enemy and seemed to indicate that the decision would be MacArthur’s.” (William Manchester. American Caesar. 608, 610; Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 30)

The U.S. developed the ability fire an “atomic shot from a cannon.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 34)

“In mid-May Ike (President Dwight Eisenhower) told the [American] National Security Council that using nukes in Korea would be cheaper than conventional weaponry, and a few days later the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended launching nuclear attacks against China.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 34)

This is interesting since Eisenhower’s reaction to Hiroshima was, we didn’t have to use that awful thing on them. (Lifton, Robert Jay and Mitchell, Greg. Hiroshima in America: fifty years of denial. 1995. 213)

Operation Hudson Harbor - flying lone B-29 bombers over North Korea to simulate a dropping of an atomic bomb. North Korean leaders must have had “steel nerves” as this simulation was eerily similar to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Operation Hudson Harbor concluded that the use of atomic weapons would not be “useful” as it was difficult to identify “large masses of enemy troops.” (Bruce Cumings. The Korean War: a History. 2010. p. 157-159)

The United Nations/United States forces faced defeat in Korea but Truman looked strong because he “threatened to use the atom bomb against China.” However, this “made peace talks virtually impossible.” (Stone, I.F. The Hidden History of the Korean War. 213)

Major General Emmett (“Rosy”) O’Donnell, commander of the Far East Air Force’s Bomber Command . . . [stated that] “We have never been permitted to bomb what are the real strategic targets, the enemy’s real sources of supply.” He said that the strategic bombing commanded been “designed to deliver the atomic offensive to the heart of the enemy” and indicated very clearly that he thought the bomb should have been used against the Chinese.”” (Stone, I.F. The Hidden History of the Korean War. 245)

RICHARD NIXON

Richard Barnet, former State Department aide, activist and scholar, who founded the Institute for Policy Studies (Wikipedia) warned “of the danger that the United States government might resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Barnet then cites Vice President Richard Nixon speaking to the Executive Club of Chicago on March 17, 1955 as saying,

“The weapons which were used during the Korean War and World War II are obsolete. Our artillery and our tactical Air Force in the Pacific are now equipped with atomic explosives which can and will be used on military targets with precision and effectiveness.

“It is foolish to talk about the possibility that the weapons which might be used in the event war breaks out in the Pacific would be limited to the conventional Korean and World War II types of explosives. Our forces could not fight an effective war in the Pacific with those types of explosives if they wanted to. Tactical atomic explosives are now conventional and will be used against the military targets of any aggressive force.”

Of course, we are not aggressors by threatening China or invading Vietnam.

VIET NAM

1964 American Republican Presidential candidate Senator Goldwater of Arizona was a reserve Air Force General and “suggested that the United States could isolate the Vietcong in South Vietnam any bombing the supply routes connecting China and North Vietnam.” He also proposed using nuclear weapons “to clear the jungles where the Vietcong were presumably hiding. The public reaction to those notions was one of horrified alarm.” (Thomas Powers, The War at Home. 2) It turns out that the United States bombed Southeast Asia the equivalent of many atomic bombs through out the war.

“Although Goldwater was finally persuaded to stop talking about nuclear weapons.”

Although Goldwater’s advocacy of atomic weapons scared people his idea to win the war did not. Johnson portrayed himself as “responsible” as opposed to Goldwater who he implied would get us all killed. (Thomas Powers, The War at Home. 9)

Noted military writer Hanson Baldwin believed that the US should use its overwhelming technological power to counter communism even if that meant nuclear weapons. Of course, only for “defensive purposes.” “If we cannot do this, he says, we had better “call it quits.” (Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia. 52)

General Curtis LeMay advocated the use of nuclear weapons to end the conflict with communism once and for all. “We ought to nuke the chinks. . . . We are swatting flies when we should be going after the manure pile.” (Thomas Powers. The War at Home. 40; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. Lyndon B. Johnson: the Exercise of Power. 538)

So, there is pretty much agreement that the use of the atom bomb was on the table. The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki completely ignored.

In 1954 the United States “assuming the Chinese Communists intervene would engage in a “highly selective atomic offensive.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 46) However, if the “Chinese Communists do not intervene” then the use of atomic weapons would occur if it would aid the US in the war. (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 47)

McNaughton drafted a “Proposed Course of Action” to McNamara. In his long list of actions McNaughton noted risks. One was the “escalation to the use of nuclear weapons.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 442-445, passim)

Presidential assistant for national security, Walt. W. Rostow, wrote a memorandum on May 6, 1967, analyzing U.S. bombing strategy in Viet Nam. One of his conclusions was “we do not want a nuclear confrontation over Viet Nam.” (Pentagon Papers. New York Times. 1971. 585, 588)

Democrats are Frauds

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