The news that e-mails show that conversation was taking place in the Democratic Party, by its managers, about how to defeat Bernie Sanders represents something far worse than bad behavior. It represents disrespect for the demo
The news that e-mails show that conversation was taking place in the Democratic Party, by its managers, about how to defeat Bernie Sanders represents something far worse than bad behavior. It represents disrespect for the democratic process and not party in a democratic nation is a legitimate party if it violates basic principles of fairness that allow “the people” to make choices regarding who they want to hire to serve as their executive. This is not simply an error in judgment. It is about error at all. It is about intention driven by attitude and probably by greed–greed for power and, yes, greed for the kind of money that power brings and greed for the kind of status money buys, status that allows one to cavort with those who have enough money to buy the decision making process that should be the people’s.
Debbie Wassermann Shultz will no longer serve as Chair of the democratic party and she will not be appearing at the convention. Hillary Clinton will still be the candidate. She might lose because a good part of the appeal of the democratic party has been its concern (real or not) for those who do not have much power, who do not have the power to buy it, and those poor and misguided schmucks (the schools are good at confirming such status) who do not really care as much about money as they do a good and humane society and a decent life for all.
I have no party now and feel a bit ashamed for hanging with the democrats for so long, this despite my knowing for a long time now that it did not stand for the things most important to me and that the people who ran the party and benefited most from what it really stood for and did were the people who had wrested ownership of the country, its political system, to serve their own desires no matter how what the cost to those “less fortunate” than themselves. For their own sake, so that they could feel comfortable walking the streets where those who had been taken and taken from roamed, they built a society of mass incarceration. To hide the real causes of poverty, they found ways to blame and shame those without, those who would not work who would have worked if the jobs available to them, if there were any to be found, payed enough to sustain life with as semblance of decency.
They, the party elite became an elite and they not only stopped serving the masses of “common” people, they helped to insure that they could continue to ignore the people by making sure they remained common. In all the years I have been alive, no matter which party has been in office, schools have been underfunded and none with power have ever done much of anything to change the conditions of school, to even advocate for truly decent pay for educators so that those actually qualified to teach would find their way into classrooms and stay. This is good for an elite because to have an elite there has to be a something below and schools in America have for a very long time remained, as Joel Spring once called them, “sorting machines” worked to label and then insure that the “product” lived up to (or down to) the label, the children of the disenfranchised, of course, most always labelled incapables.
My old party has supported many a war whose purpose was to insure business as usual, that usual business so very often so blatantly exploitive of the people of other nations that their “liberation” by us caused them to hate all of us even though most of us had nothing to gain by the sacrifice. And those of us sacrificed; hardly ever of the classes that had something to gain from the fight.
I won’t ramble on any longer here, except to say that there has always been but two parties with viability in this nation and this by design, not the design described in the Constitution or supported by the humanist philosophy that was to serve as the basis for our constitutional democracy in the Declaration, has made the United States something far less than a democracy, a nation run not by the whole of the people but by a few of an elite class that works to maintain its elite status and benefit, at the expense of the most people, from something far less than democratic state they have worked to create.
The recent manipulation of party politics to insure that the party elite’s anointed candidate for the presidency occurred because the leaders needed to make certain that a true democrat would not be allowed to begin to bring democracy back into the political system. The underhanded dealings by the party elite were precipitated by real fear because what they had to loose in a fair and honest nominating process is great, great in wealth and great for the power wealth brings those who are wealthy to remain wealthy and powerful and become even more wealthy and powerful.
