Muncie, IN NEWS – Lot’s of whining and complaining coming from Hillary Clinton fans and supporters of corporate owned dynastic politics. I’ve written countless times why the DNC should have tapped into the energy of the Bernie Sanders’, “Political Revolution”. I even slammed Bernie and Elizabeth Warren for selling out progressives when they endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. The 2016 election was about populist rage aimed toward corrupt politicians and their Wall Street owners. In what could be labeled the dumbest move in the history of politics, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) fought against their populist candidate and pushed a career politician connected to the corrupt establishment. It was an abject failure across all national to local political offices. How did they miss it? Perhaps Proverbs holds the key, “Pride cometh before the fall.”
What is the Meritocracy?
If you’ve read any of the articles discussing the Podesta emails, you’ll see the inner workings of Washington establishment – the meritocracy – Washington’s revolving door. Read Thomas Frank’s comment about the John Podesta emails:
Everything blurs into everything else in this world. The state department, the banks, Silicon Valley, the nonprofits, the “Global CEO Advisory Firm” that appears to have solicited donations for the Clinton Foundation. Executives here go from foundation to government to think-tank to startup. There are honors. Venture capital. Foundation grants. Endowed chairs. Advanced degrees. For them the door revolves. The friends all succeed. They break every boundary.
However, the irony of this story really dates back to 1992 when Bill Clinton made the conscious decision to align the ‘party of people power’ to Wall Street. What ensued was nothing less than pure greed by the Washington meritocracy. Bank deregulation, NAFTA, disempowering workers, slashing welfare, and creation of the private prison industry. And, let’s not forget the privatization of public schools, roads, and parks. Neoliberalism under Clinton’s administration grew dramatically and continued with Barack Obama.
Bill and Hillary Clinton helped deregulate the banking industry allowing greedy bankers to defraud Americans and the global investment community. Then in 2008, after their greed erupted into the financial meltdown of Lehman Brothers, and other Wall Street actors, Citibank executives literally hand-picked President Barack Obama’s oncoming 2008 administration. What ensued was the theft of trillions of dollars as bankers looked to the Federal Reserve to bail them out, and boy did they ever. Trillions of dollars flooded into Wall Street to clean up toxic assets and make the banks solvent – the bill was sent to Main Street.
The media played a major role in the election of Trump. As John Podesta’s emails point out, part of the campaign strategy involved pushing marginal republican candidates (Trump and Cruz), so they could be marginalized later in the general election, or “exposed as extremists”. The DNC would use their media contacts to push this strategy. The very same media who invested ‘dollars and ink’ to get candidates elected. The plan was using Trump to drown out U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ message of change to populists on the left.
Much will be written, but the meritocracy was rejected on November 8th, 2016. It was all in those damn emails the democratic faithful kept saying they were sick and tired of hearing about. If only they had read them, but they have a long history of not reading pertinent documents (see Affordable Care Act).
Elite Rule is Oppressive
So instead, they shoved their chosen candidate on voters who simply rejected her. No historical first female president title for Hillary Clinton. The democrats lost from the top position all the way down to local races. It was a complete rejection of a platform symbolizing greed and insider corruption. And now, the media will spin the story, assess blame, break down the numbers, etc. None of them will take responsibility for the oppressive campaign they committed on ‘liberals’, and American voters.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people–they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.
