Political mapmakers: Where is the Democratic Body Politic headed as we prepare for the 2008 elections?
Reading Patricia Goldsmith article inspired this diary. The quotes serve as topics for discussion. I'd like/hope for constructive comment contributions; and some decent dialogue after that. It has been difficult to conduct this discussion in the past.
The Limits of Tolerance - by Patricia Goldsmith
It certainly wasn't tolerance when President Bill Clinton sat on his hands as Republican operatives wielding baseball bats stopped votes from being counted in Florida in 2000.
Corporate Plutocracy
With the words, "I'm in it to win," Hillary Clinton tossed her hat into the ring-and gave us the motto of the Democratic Leadership Council, the group that launched her husband's presidency and continues to dominate Democratic Party strategy. In the mid- to late-eighties, at the height of the Reagan Revolution, this group of Democratic politicians and strategists realized that unless they could figure out a way to start winning elections again, they would not have political careers.
DLC
So instead of bucking Reaganomics, they hitched the Democratic Party to the Republicans' bumper, like a string of tin cans bouncing along in the dust. They declared that business and government would henceforth be friends and partners. They had found a third way, a new center. No more unseemly scuffles.
In practice, however, it turned out to be a very lopsided partnership. If the average citizen won by inches during Bill Clinton's tenure-with his popular family leave bill, for example-big business won by light years, especially with the passage of NAFTA. (This is the same Bill Clinton, by the way, who chose to leave the Kyoto global warming protocols unsigned at the end of his term.)
Hillary's current war chest shows just how handsomely the move to a business-friendly party has paid off in cold hard cash-at least for people named Clinton. Rupert Murdoch actually held a fundraiser for Hillary over the summer-which just goes to show that corporate moguls know the value of having two parties to choose from. But not everyone has the billions it takes to put a down payment on a president. And the price is going up.
Campaign Financing 2008
Senator Clinton has opted out of public financing, the first candidate to do so for both the nomination and the general election campaigns-which, according to experts, will probably be the end of the current voluntary system for regulating big money in presidential campaigns.
NAFTA
Since the passage of NAFTA, we've seen the same effects in the US that we've seen with globalization all around the world: increasing economic inequality. Monetary agreements are harshly enforced, but there is no corresponding enforcement of labor, human rights, or environmental standards. Free trade has, in fact, turned out to be a very efficient vehicle for concentrating wealth in a few private hands at the expense of whole societies. It's a privatizing, planet-eating machine.
Class Inequality & Culture War
It will be an uphill battle. Centrist Democrats are working as hard as Republicans to protect free trade, while the deregulated corporate media continues to block most discussion of class inequality-and almost no one is pointing out the connections between culture war and class war inequality.
http://www.opednews.com/...