Hillary Clinton and the Northern Strategy

[kenn3d]

For decades now, we liberals have been shaking our heads in wonder at the working stiffs who give the rich pashas atop the GOP their votes. There’s hardly a liberal alive who can’t recite what’s the matter with Kansas: the parable of the downtrodden whites in their double-wides, so enraged by their dwindling slice of the American pie that they vote for hucksters who vow to keep Negro hands off their lily white daughters, homosexual hands off their wedding cakes, Mexican-rapist hands off their orchards, atheist hands off their crèches, guvmint hands off their assault weapons. The hucksters, with the votes in hand, go off to D.C. and sock it to the suckers who sent them there—shipping their jobs abroad, rigging the tax code against them, gutting their schools, taking swipes at their Social Security and Medicare. It’s not that the con men don’t throw the rubes some nourishing scraps. They block a bill to register firearms here, pass a Defense of Marriage Act there, decry the War on Christmas with their fellow shriekers on Fox. Donald John Trump is just the latest in a long parade of flimflammers to adopt the Southern Strategy. His only innovations are speaking bluntly rather than in code and cranking up the volume. It’s a pitiful farce, no?

...
Ask a group of liberals what they want in a candidate, and you’ll get a sketch of a champion who will fight for income equality, rein in big banks, defeat ruinous trade agreements, restore our battered civil liberties, look to diplomacy before war, and stop the devastation of our climate. Sure enough, in every election year Democratic candidates come along peddling such wares...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/22/hillary-clinton-and-the-northern-strategy/

[thereismore]

1. "She has long argued that everyone should have access to healthcare, and for nearly as long she has

worked against it"

[islandmkl]

2. K&R - nice succinct read on our Party's problem(s) with buying the snake oil...

we keep waiting for the candidate that doesn't sell US down the road once they get in office...

it's time to stop being "all the people, all the time..."

[islandmkl]

3. the conclusion is apt:

I don’t know which prospect is more appealing: that Sanders could write Republicrat Hillary Clinton’s political obituary or that he could write the Northern Strategy’s. In a sense the difference between the Clinton and Sanders campaigns is simply this: she’s betting liberals are too dumb to see her for what she is; he’s betting they’re smart enough to see him for what he is. It’s anyone’s guess which is so.

[MisterP]

4. under neoliberalism the bubbles generated by "liberating" the economy were supposed

to take over for the state's pullout and disinvestment: individuals and universities just had to manage "smartly," like Cramer and Orman yelled at you to

oil in the mid-80s, S&Ls in the late 80s, IT/telecom early 90s, dotcoms until 1999, housing until 2007--all were "surefire, inflation-proof investments" that'd never go down

the safety net could be minimaxed down and blamed for any deficit, service jobs would take over outsourced manufacturing (Canada's economy's no less service-dominated); even Massachusetts Miracle technocrat Tsongas got the ball rolling by saying Dems shouldn't concern themselves with how money's distributed, just to "make the pie higher"

what happened, of course, was that the top 15-20% profited--plenty of neo-gentry living off investments, and somebody's gotta be buying all those McMansions nobody living off wage work can afford; but their situations are very precarious, too, so it's only nominally "working out" for them

[hedda_foil]

5. She bills herself a champion of Main Street over Wall Street, but she has been a lackey of Wall St "

This piece is SO on the money

She bills herself a champion of Main Street over Wall Street, but she has been a lackey of Wall Street her entire political life.

Candidate Clinton has put forward what she calls a bold plan to reform the excesses of Wall Street, including a tax on high-frequency trading. Just one problem: “her proposal is very narrowly targeted to one specific practice, in which a trading computer tells a marketplace that it’s going to make a large number of trades but then cancels them before they go through,” writes Alan Pyke at ThinkProgess. “All other forms of HFT would be free to continue as normal under the proposal.” Only a dupe would have expected otherwise. Clinton’s Wall Street record has been littered, in and out of the Senate, with such gems as refusing to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act (whose elimination contributed mightily to the crash of 2008 and our current Great Recession), rebuffing calls to break up big banks, and helping big banks screw their customers by making it ridiculously hard to declare bankruptcy and renegotiate crushing credit card debts. In fact, thanks to Senator Clinton and others, it’s easier for a bank to declare bankruptcy and renegotiate its debts than it is for you. Does it surprise you that four of her top five donors over the last 16 years are Wall Street firms? If so, count yourself among the duped. Are you shocked that among the truly unscrupulous tycoons she has taken cash from is one Donald Trump? The Don, in addition to giving big to her senate campaigns, gave between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Populist babble may burble off Clinton’s lips on the campaign trail, and Democrats may fall for it, but “[d]own on Wall Street they don’t believe it for a minute,” Politico’s William Cohen writes. What’s more, “the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president.” (Many are the reports that have said the same.) I don’t know what’s sadder—that Big Money is smarter than the average Dem, or that average Dems will be shocked when she chooses Wall Street over them if she lands in the Oval Office