The Lioness of the Senate
I know. Its Bernie who is currently capturing the hearts of long lost Democrats. Why are we talking about Elizabeth Warren unless to speculate on who she will endorse? I’m not here to speculate. I already know. Bear with me.
If you look closely you’ll see that Bernie Sander’s political revolution is more reclamation than revolution. He is calling us to reclaim our once proud Democratic Party and put it back in service to its once and future purpose as the stalwart defender of working class Americans against the predatory and anti-democratic nature of Big Business.
The rise of the Sanders phenomena is truly an amazing thing to behold. Tens of thousands packing into stadiums. 4 million individual contributions. 27 bucks. America. Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. Huuuuge!
If you think back just a few years, how impossible this moment seemed.
Then came Elizabeth.
(You only need to watch the first few moments):
Boom!
The Poster of a Rigged Economy
(The answer to her question, of course, was Goldman Sachs among others)
Elizabeth Warren has, like Bernie Sanders, worked hard to understand the plight of working class Americans. She plugged away in obscurity until her moment arrived. They say that opportunity favors the prepared. Elizabeth Warren is nothing if not prepared. Her preparation was born of the most American of ideals: Hard Work. What she began to notice was that for ordinary Americans, Hard Work was no longer enough to survive and prosper in today’s rigged economy.
Her opportunity came, unfortunately for many hard working everyday Americans, when the economy collapsed. Her voice instantly became elevated. Her hard earned knowledge and expertise was eagerly sought. In that moment she became the most credible voice for accountability for the vast financial crimes committed by a recklessly deregulated Wall Street.
My goodness, what a voice. It was as if she had unlocked a secret room in which she found a Rosetta Stone to translate the seemingly forgotten language of the Democratic Party. Or, if you will, she found the sheet music to the lost Battle Cry of the Democrats.
We’ve been given a republic, if we can keep it. So was the prescient admonition of Benjamin Franklin as he strode out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention of 1787. To a man it seems, our Founders agreed that informed citizen engagement was the essential requirement to our ‘keeping it’. Education would be the major safeguard to the maintenance of citizen control of our government.
But who would be trying to take it from us? Who would we be keeping it from?
The Battle Cry of the Democratic Party
If we are indeed the Party of Jefferson, we should listen to his words and the words of his Democratic Party heirs. Across two centuries they have told us explicitly what we need to be eternally vigilant of: Runaway, Unaccountable Corporate Power.
Here are their Battle Cries:
The Party of Me.
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson
Big Banks beware.
……and unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations. Andrew Jackson
The sympathies of the Democratic Party, as shown by the platform, are on the side of the struggling masses who have ever been the foundation of the Democratic party. There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them. William Jennings Bryan
Fear not.
For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service…
It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Give ‘em Hell.
It is a pity that Wall Street, with its ability to control all the wealth of the nation and to hire the best law brains in the country, has not produced some financial statesmen, some men who could see the dangers of bigness and of the concentration of the control of wealth. Instead of working to meet the situation, they are still employing the best law brains to serve greed and selfish interest. People can stand only so much, and one of these days there will be a settlement. We shall have one receivership too many, and one unnecessary depression out of which we will not come with the power still in the same old hands.
Harry S. Truman
Ask not.
In this serious hour in our nation's history, when we are confronted with grave crises in Berlin and Southeast Asia, when we are devoting our energies to economic recovery and stability, when we are asking Reservists to leave their homes and families for months on end, and servicemen to risk their lives -- and four were killed in the last two days in Vietnam -- and asking union members to hold down their wage requests, at a time when restraint and sacrifice are being asked of every citizen, the American people will find it hard, as I do, to accept a situation in which a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of private power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility can show such utter contempt for the interests of 185 million Americans.
John F. Kennedy
The Dream shall never die.
…These are not simplistic pledges. Simply put, they are the heart of our tradition, and they have been the Soul of our Party across the generations. It is the glory and the greatness of our tradition to speak for those who have no voice, to remember those who are forgotten, to respond to the frustrations and fulfill the aspirations of all Americans seeking a better life in a better land.
We dare not forsake that tradition.
We cannot let the great purposes of the Democratic Party become the bygone passages of history. Ted Kennedy
Keeping Hope Alive in a Dark Decade
For almost eight years we've been led by those who view social good coming from private interest, who view public life as a means to increase private wealth. They have been prepared to sacrifice the common good of the many to satisfy the private interests and the wealth of a few.
We believe in a government that's a tool of our democracy in service to the public, not an instrument of the aristocracy in search of private wealth. Jesse Jackson
Fighting the old fight.
I don't represent the big oil companies, the big pharmaceuticals, or the big insurance industry. They already have great representation in Washington. It's the rest of the people that need representation.
Paul Wellstone
The Corporate Takeover
Locked away were these words and verses seemingly never to be spoken again by Party Leadership. For the Democratic Party had been remade in the image of its new Corporate Overlords, the Third Way/DLC. We were told: Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow but never, ever speak the way we used to in our yesterdays.
You simply cannot raise the Battle Cry while at the same time you are begging for money.
Its the Fundraising, Stupid!
From here on out, the Battle Cry of the Democratic Party was to be permanently muted.
The New Battle Cry became an oxymoronic, Milli Vanilli whimper of Progressive, Free Market, Fiscally Responsible solutions. Like New Coke, the formula had changed. And of course, the Era of Big Government (that could help working families) was over. Deregulation, Privatization and Diet Trickle Down would fulfill the promise of that antiquated and clunky old New Deal.
No better example of this milquetoast political language came about this time last year as the Center for American Progress floated a Hillary Clinton trial balloon on income inequality.
We would tackle income and wealth inequality without over-vilifying the wealthy. And we would not dare stoop to a “politics of envy”. In other words, the Democratic Party would not be using the Battle Cry, lest we offend the donor class on Wall Street.
That makes for a winning stump speech, for sure, when speaking to an electorate defrauded to the tune of at least 16 trillion bucks. Just watch Hillary go full Milli Vanilli on Income Inequality back in 2014. Count how many times she mentions Wall Street.
We have to have a concerted effort to meet a consensus about how to deal with this.
We know that certain decisions by government are more likely to help the private sector than others, predictability for example...There are changes that will please Republicans and there will be changes that will please Democrats, but at the end of the day we’re all on the same team, we’re on the American Team...
What a Stem Winder. She really ripped the face off of Wall Street Greed and Corruption in explaining Income Inequality. She’s so skilled she was able to rail against Wall Street Greed and Corruption without even mentioning the terms Wall St or Greed or Corruption. Damn, she’s good.
The Third Way Myth and the Centrist Unicorn
NAFTA will create 200,000 jobs in the first year alone
This Fairy Tale philosophy of Third Way Enlightened Free Market Ideals has taken the Democratic Party incrementally to the brink of irrelevance as a force for good in the lives of everyday hard working Americans like you and me. This soft-core Reaganism foisted upon the Democratic Party by a Wall Street Fundraising Junta within our leadership is the ultimate Centrist Unicorn.
It has produced Puppies and Rainbows like:
NAFTA
GATT
PNTR China
They are currently seeking their TPP Pony, most likely to pass in lame duck.
Deregulation for the 21rst Century
Incremental Fairy Dust was spread far and wide with deregulatory masterpieces such as:
Telecommunications Act of 1996
Graham Leach Bliley Act
Commodities Futures Trading Act
Foreign Policy and National Security Pie-in-the-Sky got us into the war in Iraq, the Patriot Acts and a general acquiescence to NeoCon blunderings.
Little Red Credit Card Company.
Cupcakes and Ice cream were a plenty for the LBGT community with DADT and DOMA. This, of course, prevented the mythical Constitutional Amendment that was foretold in the Centrist Sagas.
The DLC Fairy God Mother read African Americans a bed-time story about Criminal Justice and Welfare Reform.
Little Red Riding Hood was saved from the Big Bad Wolf with the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005. Unfortunately, in the minds of Third Way New Democrats who supported the legislation, Little Red Riding Hood was the Credit Card Companies and the Big Bad Wolf was Working Class Americans caught in financial distress in large part caused by Medical Bills.
Enough is Enough
We had begun slowly to take notice of this sobering fact when along came Elizabeth Warren, singing the ole Battle Hymn. She set the stage for Bernie Sanders who, like a political Andy Dufresne, had been chipping away with his rock hammer his entire adult life.
To be sure he will still have to crawl through a river of shit to get to the nomination, but he will come out clean on the other side no matter what the outcome.
The Day after New Hampshire
And here we are today. Thanks to Elizabeth Warren, we have a choice, a meaningful choice. Thanks to Elizabeth Warren speaking the old tongue, we also have a deeper understanding of what our choice is. Regardless of the outcome of the primary, each of us gets to choose, personally, what kind of Democrat we want to be.
We can continue to hold on to the Centrist Philosophy of Progressive Free Market solutions with incremental implementation. We can continue to look to Wall Street and Corporations across America for the money we need to sustain our Party while pretending that money does not influence outcomes that hurt the working families of America.
We can continue to put our faith in the incremental regression of the Democratic Party until all that we hold dear is lost. This includes Voting Rights, Civil Rights, a Women’s Right to Choose, Marriage Equality, Environmental Protection and Sustainability to name a few.
Or we could choose a once and future vision of our Democratic Party; one that is deeply rooted in the idea that this party is the thundering voice of the voiceless. We can choose a Democratic Party that stands up to defend hard working, patriotic Americans against the predatory plundering of Big Business and Wall Street, not one that lays down to do their bidding.
We have a choice to be a Democratic Party that puts fourth principles conceptualized in the Board Rooms of Wall Street or we can be a Democratic Party that gets its marching orders from our Town Halls and Union Halls on Main Street.
The Democratic Party faithful are regaining their moral compass. They are sensing that the Old Road is new and the New Road is old. If you will forgive a twist on the Dylan masterwork:
...Your new road is rapidly aging, so get out of the old one if you can’t lend your hand. Yes, the times they are a changin’.
So, Thank you Senator Elizabeth Warren. You set the stage for Bernie Sanders. No matter which candidate you may choose to endorse, you have already endorsed the Bedrock Principle of the Democratic Party. Thank you for making our choice in this Primary a clear and meaningful choice, even though you chose not to enter the fray directly.
You picked a fight, you “raised some sand”. Our fight. The old fight.
You re-lit our torch and we feel it Bern.
You have truly become our Lioness in the Senate.
Pressure and Time. Pressure and Time.
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