By Mark L. Taylor
The Commoner Call (4/26/17)
OMG, the democrats are just bound and determined to remain ineffectual, irrelevant and teeth-grindingly tone deaf while slavishy devoted to the corporate forces grinding what’s left of America into dust. Even in the face of the existential threat of Donald Trump, congressional republicans and the corporate state coup, former president Barack Obama just can’t resist trotting off to Wall Street to snag his own MOAB (Mother of All Paybacks) by collecting $400,000 for a single speech for the investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Sure, Obama is known for a silver tongue, but 400 grand?
Puhleeze!
Obama’s humungous payout makes Hilllary Clinton’s minimum $225,000-a-pop speeches at Goldman Sachs look like pin money. (Hillary, you need a better agent.)
The announcement of Obama’s Wall Street windfall comes a day or so after a speech at the University of Chicago – the burrow of the fascist dictators’ favorite economist Milton Friedman – where he pontificated about dedicating himself to supporting a new generation of leaders. But leaders of what? Ineffectually gelatinous leaders who, like him, did nothing to hound and convict the Wall Street crooks who engineered and cashed in on the devastating 2008 economic crash? Leaders who made sure that Wall Street banks were made whole, their executives’ precious bonuses were protected with taxpayer dollars while millions of homeowners who paid those taxes and were raped by Wall Street fraud got little or no pennies-on-the-dollar relief. Those kind of leaders?
The last thing we need are more Democratic leaders punched from the Obama mold.
In his Chicago PR event, Obama pontificated that the growing economic, racial and class inequality now stalking life in America can be resolved.
“All those problems are serious, they’re daunting, but they’re not insoluble,” Obama intoned. “What is preventing us from tackling them and making more progress really has to do with our politics and civic life.”
As 2016 displayed, and the DNC has yet to learn, Americans, with damn good reason, absolutely loathe the corporate and political elite rifling the last of this nation’s riches and future.
Obama’s Cantor Fitzgerald gig is a big wet obscenely lucrative thank you smooch to one of the smoothest protectors of Wall Street malfeasance and fraud to ever nest up in the White House. Certainly one of the most hypocritical. We can expect to see a lot more of the Obamas lapping it up on the big money corporate speaking tour while mouthing empty platitudes about poor folks and struggling families.
It will be a busy schedule, however, since Obama and wife Michelle are also busy marshaling the ghostwriters to pen memoirs for which they received $60 million. $60 million? Oh, for godsake!
Reform? Really?
In the meantime, we progressives are supposed to believe the democratic party is reforming itself. The embarrassing DNC chair Tom Perez/Bernie Sanders love fest unity tour only served to confirm that establishment democrats hate, hate, HATE the progressives who supported Bernie Sanders. When asked, Perez wouldn’t even commit to supporting a single-payer health care program – the only way all Americans will ever have a crack at health care. Instead of boldly standing for real reform that would really help, Perez cussed, in what I guess he assumes is some kind of brotherly solidarity with the working stiffs of America. Sad!
Never mind that Sanders, with a national 60% approval rate remains, far and away, the most popular political leader in the country. Never mind that single payer – and free public college education for that matter – were central to the Sanders movement. Despite that popularity, Sanders, his supporters and, most importantly, their ideas and causes are destined to be nothing more than ignored window dressing and faux progressive glitter dust for the corporate democratic party.
Where Sanders was greeted with cheers on the tour and Perez was frequently booed, it seems even the gods have their doubts about Tom Perez.
As the Observer noted, “Toward the end of the tour, he was pooped on by a bird. Twitter users poked fun at the incident and compared it to Sanders’ famous interaction with a bird that landed on his podium during his presidential campaign.”
Is Tom Perez, Obama’s former labor secretary, the kind of new leader Obama is promising to mentor?
What the corporate democrats absolutely refuse to accept is that as long as they are dependent upon corporate funding and corporate golden retirement parachutes there is no reason – absolutely none – to believe anything the democrats mouth about caring about the needs and futures of the poor and sinking middle class Americans. What obedient little DNC apparatchiks like Perez need to understand is that their focus group tested progressive script means nothing; it’s their actions that count.
And as long as we see Dem leaders like the Obamas and Clintons wallowing in the Wall Street corporate pig trough there is absolutely no reason to believe the party sales pitch. As 2016 displayed, and the DNC has yet to learn, Americans, with damn good reason, absolutely loathe the corporate and political elite rifling the last of this nation’s riches and future. What they have done and continue doing is immoral and political malpractice. When you take millions from Wall Street you cannot possibly represent the interests of American families and workers.
*****
Want To Get A Sense Of The Growing Challenge To The Corporate Democrats? Watch Cenk Uygur Of The Young Turks and Justice Democrats Take Them On: 16+-Minute Video
To learn more about Justice Democrats link HERE.