Do The Two Political Parties Make You Want To Throw Up?

Feel the love?

In 2006, I started interacting with other progressive bloggers nationally through some e-mail groups. I freely shot off my mouth pretty regularly and often attacked Rahm Emanuel, than head of the DCCC. I assumed the 600 or so people on the list knew what I knew about Emanuel and his record as a neoliberal, self-serving and corrupt shit head. Bad assumption. I was attacked for being a Republican-plant. There were many people on the list who saw Emanuel as a stalwart hero of the Democratic Party... and who the hell was I? Most of the list of progressives saw the DCCC and Rahm Emanuel as our allies and even if they didn't all buy into the assertion that I was working for the GOP, the sentiment was to kick me off the list.

At the time, Matt Stoller was a respected and admired blogger. He told the people attacking to STFU and was the only person to defend my position on the merits. Stoller understood what Emanuel was back then. Of course, now almost everyone does but back in 2005-6 it was definitely a minority position among progressives. Yesterday, Stoller, who has since then worked for Alan Grayson and Bernie Sanders in Capitol Hill and now works for the anti-monopoly Open Markets Institute and writes here, created a tweet storm work looking at and considering. This is it in narrative list version-- Matt Stoller:

1. Starting 2006 or so, I've become somewhat disillusioned with the Democratic Party. I'm going to explain why. It has to do with the relationship most Democrats have with corporate power, or really, power. Now first, to explain, I'm a liberal Democrat.

2. What I saw in 2006 was the allegiance Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had to lobbying power. They both backed Joe Lieberman against a Democrat. Obama then lied about NAFTA in 2008, and retroactive immunity for telecoms. He lied about a lot in 2008. Dems didn't notice or care.

3. In 2009, I began working in Congress for a member of the financial services committee. Tim Geithner sought a foreclosure wave and to help the banks. Rahm Emanuel Larry Summers ran around protecting monopolies. My friends at Moveon, etc didn't notice, cheerleading Obamacare.

4. The day Obamacare passed, a friend was sitting on my couch. He was tearing up with joy, and I've never felt so much contempt. We got calls from people with cancer. When do I get my free Obamacare? Try explaining to someone with cancer they get it in four years.

5. People in the Obama White House would scoff and laugh behind the scenes at who they perceived as deadbeats in foreclosure. Meanwhile we took calls from people desperately trying to show they paid the bank what they owed but were losing their home anyway.

6. I was reminded of the stupidity and venality of the Obama administration day after day by their actions, big and small. They were mean, petty, dumb, greedy, and dishonest. And Democratic voters refused to believe their own leaders were doing what they were doing.

7. Obama snuck in a provision to the stimulus mandating that AIG execs would get their bonuses. Obama then blamed that provision on Chris Dodd and held a press conference on how he would do everything he could to get those bonuses back, after they had already gone out.

8. Obama's first FCC Chairman, Julius Janikowski, was a buddy from law school. He refused to actually do net neutrality. He's now at the Carlyle Group in private equity. Tim Geithner is also in private equity. Obama takes massive speaking fees from powerful financiers. Rancid.

9. The thing is, Obama didn't do any of this without permission. He got permission from every single Democratic voter who supported and loved him. Every time his people threatened members with primary challenges (and he did), he was doing it with Democratic voters' endorsement.

10. No one was honest. Not the centrists or the left. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, 350.org and various spinoff movements refused to admit that Obama was hostile to their values. And gradually I realized it's because they just don't see power.

11. Most Dems think injustice is what lives in the heart. It isn't. It's what lives in our institutions. Corporate power is autocracy, but to know the autocracy, you have to learn about trade, finance, law. Liberal democracy is all about equality.

12. Our political order is oriented around legitimizing only those who can claim some form of victimization. It's why the woke stuff/white supremacy is so powerful. It's a fundamentally anti-enlightenment model of politics.

13. You can see how the Chinese government, which is a truly fascist power, uses illiberal arguments to advance its agenda. The idea that Chinese people's feelings are hurt, the claims to racial grievance, attacks on liberal democratic forms of government, the CIA in Hong Kong.

14. Tim Geithner was not a racist. But Tim Geithner did this. "According to a 2013 study of TARP investments, black-owned banks were ten times less likely to receive bailout money than nonminority-owned banks."

15. Democrats do not see corporate power where racism and autocracy is institutionalized, because it conflicts with the left-libertarian narrative that only victims have a right to be heard.

16. It's improving, rapidly. @BernieSanders in 2016 gave voice to frustrated Democrats, and in 2020, the last debate was basically a rejection of Obama. But even so. We have a lot of work to do. Here's an example. National security.

17. A lot of the energy on the left is focused on sustainability, resiliency, localism. Good. Yay! And a lot of the energy on the right is focused on nationalism, making things in the U.S., protecting our supply chains.

Hey everyone, this is the same thing.

18. At any rate, we have very serious problems. We can't make anything. That knowledge and experience was ripped out by Bill Clinton and it never came back. How are we going to do a Green New Deal? Who is going to do it? We can't build high speed rail in California.

19. Most of our think tanks are corrupted by Chinese and Wall Street money. Our elite class has been trained to be a bunch of useless McKinsey-trained fools.

20. We need a social movement to fix our corporate structures. A real movement. A movement of engineers and farmers and business people and bankers and programmers and students who hate corruption and love liberal democracy.

21. None of us have ever seen liberal democracy work the way it should. This is an accident of history. It's just weird we turned away from liberal democracy in the late 1970s. So we'll have to take it on faith and on archival evidence that it can work.

22. And the Republicans are in worse shape. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were our cult of personality leaders who corrupted us. But Reagan, Bush, Trump is yours. You will have to dig yourselves out, the way us Democrats are slowly doing it. It's possible. It's necessary.

The only thing I'd like to see more than Trump rotting in prison for child rape would be to see Bill Clinton in there with him as a cell-mate. I was on the phone with an old friend today, the guy who first ran against then-Speaker Denny Hastert and who set in motion his eventual downfall. Topic: AOC, who beat Joe "the next Speaker" Crowley, one of the most awesome electoral outcome of 2018. We agreed that Democratic Party elected officials never learn anything substantive. None of them will change any policy-oriented or corruption-oriented behavior to avoid Crowley's fate. Instead, like Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX), Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY), Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA), Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR), Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL), Stephen Lynch (New Dem-MA), Tom O'Halleran (Blue Dog-AZ), David Scott (Blue Dog-GA) and Eliot Engel (New Dem-NY), they are leading a counter-revolution against AOC, against "the Squad," against the Green New Deal, against Medicare-for-All and against any semblance of a progressive agenda. That thermometer on the right is how you can contribute to the progressive candidates fighting those 9 reactionary corporate whores.

Yesterday, Caleb Howe, reporting for Mediaite, roasted MSNBC's worst prime time host, Chris Matthews for his defense of all his pals who were raping underage girls under the auspices of Jeffrey Epstein. "Matthews," he wrote, "offered a rather unusual defense of rich politicians like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump who socialized with dead probable human trafficker and rapist Jeffrey Epstein: they like private planes."

The long Hardball segment on Epstein’s suicide covered his death, the theories about how it could have happened, the “chutzpah” of Trump to talk about Clinton’s association, given his own, and the attendant issues with MSNBC legal analyst Paul Butler and Vanity Fair’s Vanessa Grigoriadis. They decried Trump’s theorizing about Clinton, and also theorized that Trump and Attorney General William Barr “facilitated” Epstein’s suicide.

But one take offered by Matthews was particularly unusual.

“One thing culturally that goes on in politics that I find really dismaying: politicians need money. A lot of them aren’t that wealthy. They live on their salaries. A hundred and a half a year, they’re not crying, but they love travel and private planes. They to get around for their professional and political reasons,” said Matthews. “They’ve become friends with the wrong frickin’ people. And these people are frightening and they want something, they want the prestige of hanging around a politician.”

“These relationships are awful, the names that have come out. I don’t want to use their names tonight. Why do these guys know a guy like this guy Epstein? Why do you want to know him?” he asked Butler.

It’s more than just the implied absolution, it’s the fact that he declines to say names, he paints them almost as victims. The poor politician is so poor he needs to hang around with pedophiles just to get a few private plane rides. Woe is us!

Liberal writer Naomi LaChance noticed:

It’s extremely embarrassing for MSNBC that Matthews likes politicians so much he didn’t even want to report on the ones who are reportedly linked to an accused child rapist. It seems as though he’s in complete denial that some people in this world are violent abusers. Welcome to 2019, buttercup, that’s the world most of us are living in.

Besides, all three of these men-- Trump, Clinton, and Gore-- have been accused of inappropriate sexual conduct outside of the context of Jeffrey Epstein. (All three men denied the cumulative array of charges leveled against them.)

Amazed that Matthews couldn’t posit another theory as to why these men were acquainted with Epstein, LaChance said he “clearly knows one very clear possible answer and does not want to speak its name aloud.”

Ouch.

How does that fit in with Stoller's theories about Democratic politicians and the direction of the Democratic Party? Maybe a random tweet will help: