Some Frankness From Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank on How Democrats Went From Being the ‘Party of the People’ to the Party of Rich Elites - In These Times:

I loved this quote ... isn't it wonderful to see how the DC wing of TP ("The Party"-D) thinks?

I live in Washington, D.C., and I spend time around Hillary-style Democrats. They really think that they’ve got this thing in the bag. And I don’t just mean her versus Bernie. I mean the Democratic Party winning the presidency for the rest of our lives. From here to eternity. They can choose whoever they want. They could nominate anybody and they would win. They think they’re in charge.

I tend to agree with them -- they have brought in enough illegals, made voting with no ID nearly the national standard, and through organizations like ACORN and just the fact of 90% of the people tabulating the votes being union government employees, that all counts are suspect. As Stalin said "The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do". TP counts the votes -- or contracts for the machines to count the votes.

The main thesis of the article is:

According to Frank, popular explanations which blame corporate lobby groups and the growing power of money in politics are insufficient. Frank instead points to a decision by Democratic Party elites in the 1970s to marginalize labor unions and transform from the party of the working class to the party of the professional class. In so doing, the Democratic Party radically changed the way it understood social problems and how to solve them, trading in the principle of solidarity for the principle of competitive individualism and meritocracy.

There is that left wing word again "meritocracy" -- oh how they hate the idea that people are blessed with different abilities and can use them wisely or foolishly to obtain different economic result! TP moved away from PRIVATE sector unions in the '70s and focused on the massive growth of PUBLIC  sector unions. Automation, global trade and non-competitive labor had pretty much destroyed vast swaths of American industry by that point already, Steel being a great example. TP cares about POWER not people -- they go where the power is, and it was certainly with the professional class.

But Frank seems surprised that TP operates as it does and clearly took action when BO took office to benefit it's major constituency, the upper 10-30% (Frank wants it to seem more elite than it is, it's more than 10%)  -- government workers, teachers, university professors, lawyers, financial people, fortune 500 professionals.

This is not only because of those evil Republicans, but because Obama played it the way he wanted to. Even when he had a majority in both houses of Congress and could choose whoever he wanted to be in his administration, he consistently made policies that favored the top 10 percent over everybody else. He helped out Wall Street in an enormous way when they were entirely at his mercy. 

He could have done anything he wanted with them, in the way that Franklin Roosevelt did in the ‘30s. But he chose not to.

He didn't do what FDR did because what FDR did failed miserably. It prolonged and deepened what would have been a bad recession, much like 1982 into the Depression. BO's "FDR lite" of STILL massive government intervention, regulation and cronyism have made a "recession" into the "Great Recession". BO got away with what he could get away with to not make the disaster as obvious as it ought to be. It is STILL easy to look at the 1930's, late 1970s and 2008-2016 as times of TP taking control (they took Congress in 2006) and the economy being bad.

The big overarching problem of our time is inequality. If you look at historical charts of productivity and wage growth, these two things went hand in hand for decades after World War II, which we think of as a prosperous, middle-class time when even people with a high school degree, blue-collar workers, could lead a middle class life. And then everything went wrong in the 1970s. Productivity continued to go up and wage growth stopped. Wage growth has basically been flat ever since then. But productivity goes up by leaps and bounds all the time. We have all of these wonderful technological advances. Workers are more productive than ever but they haven’t benefited from it. That’s the core problem of inequality.

First of all, productivity is NOT improving. The OBJECTIVE of the left is the story of inequality! A more and more privileged government crony elite class and an ever more dependent and controlled mass "proletariat". The left is about CENTRALIZATION OF POWER in the hands of the VERY few, ultimately THE ONE! Left is control, right is chaos, the US was supposed to be "center right".

If policies of merit and competition are allowed to work, one gets the US 1982 - 2008. If the policies of the left are allowed to work, the result is East vs West Germany prior to '91, North Korea vs South Korea today.

The biggest question I have is whether Frank is a "Useful Idiot" and doesn't know that BO (and FDR and Carter before him) are doing exactly what is intended, or if he is simply a propaganda shill for the TP. I guess it really doesn't matter ...


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