Thom
Hartmann - The problem corporate
neoliberal Democrats, the heirs to Clintonism and Obamaism, face is that a
majority of Americans are now clear that it simply doesn’t work. We’re sick of
partial, corporate- and billionaire-aligned solutions to large problems that should
best be handed by our government as part of the commons.
— Trying to get affordable
healthcare to all Americans via Obamacare, for example, is increasingly failing
because the massive for-profit insurance industry it depended on is
increasingly committed to squeezing every last penny out of us, regardless of how
many of us die.
— Trying to lift a majority of
Americans back up into their parents’ middle class lifestyle is also failing,
largely because the corporate wing of the Democrats dependent on campaign
contributions from giant union-hating corporations have “mysteriously” failed
in their proclaimed effort to increase unionization and the minimum wage.
— Trying to give all Americans
access to a college education without debt has failed because a large handful
of big-bank-funded Democrats supported Bush’s bankruptcy “reform” in 2005 that
outlawed using bankruptcy to discharge student debt. When Reagan came into
office, roughly 80 percent of the cost of college was covered by state and
federal money and college endowments; today that’s only around 20 percent;
returning to 80% (and, thus, affordable college) is now a big legislative lift
when our tax code is so skewed toward billionaires and massive corporations
that the money for college is largely gone.
Forty-five years of the Reagan
Revolution being maintained by both parties have pretty much proven that
neoliberal Democratic policies won’t be enough to either stop Trump’s full-on
push to convert America into a fascist state, nor will they address the very
real problems most Americans are experiencing today when it comes to being able
to afford everything from rent to groceries to healthcare.
Today’s generation of progressive
Democrats, therefore, are taking a page from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
New Deal and proposing genuinely big solutions to the massive problems that
Democratic neoliberalism and Republican neofascism have produced.
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