Just when you thought this political year couldn’t get any weirder, along comes the entire Democratic Party establishment rushing en masse to the cliff’s edge, hurling themselves head-first into the presidential contest. What has spurred this gaggle of political operatives, fat cat donors, and former presidential hopefuls is a collective impulse to unite behind the very worst candidate the party could possibly put up against Donald Trump in November’s election: Joe Biden.
While practically everyone in the political swirl admits privately that Joe’s pretty slow, awfully corporate, and practically bent over double with a bag full of very bad political positions he’s taken during his decades-long career as a Washington insider – his establishment cohorts are now resurrecting his dormant campaign by ecstatically proclaiming that he’s a “winner.”
When pressed, their main pitch for Biden is that he’s “decent.” Well, probably even Melania Trump would like to see something better than Donald’s in-your-face, gross-out indecency in a president, but every contender for the Democratic nomination met this minimal threshold of suitability (and before the establishment hoists “Gentle Joe” onto a pedestal of decency, they might check with Anita Hill about his ugly political abuse of her).
A “winner”? How enthusiastic will seniors, low-income families, and others be when they realize Biden has spent 30 years (including during his vice presidency) trying to cut spending for the people’s crucial safety net, declaring: “I meant Social Security as well; I meant Medicare and Medicaid; I meant veterans’ benefits… I tried it once… twice… a third time… a fourth time.”
Also, how excited will young voters be to find that kindly old Joe has constantly backed efforts by big bankers to make it harder for students to get out from under their price-gouging loan payments? And how thrilled will hard-hit manufacturing workers be that Biden has been a constant cheerleader for NAFTA and other job-killing, wage-busting trade scams?
At a time when big majorities are clearly sick and tired of business-as-usual politics and are demanding bold policies for grassroots progress, why would Democrats put up the poster boy of corporate-purchased, inside-the-beltway, status-quo-ism? Not only would Biden be uniquely vulnerable to Trump this fall, but he’ll also lose the political future for Democrats by turning off voter turn-out – especially among young people and others who feel abandoned by the establishment.
Cynically, the Democratic Party’s moneyed and political elites have rushed to hug-up Joe Biden, not because he’s the best the party’s got, but because of what he’s not: He’s not Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The party powers are not only ganging up on Bernie, but specifically ganging up in a political panic against the growing grassroots insurgency of young activists, women, Latinos, Asian-Americans, working-class whites, and others, who’re fed up with the Party’s same-old-same-old politics that’s knocking down the middle class and holding down the poor. Funded by the uber-rich, the elites are colluding in a blatant power play to cut off this rising democratic majority inside the Democratic Party, pushing old Joe forward not because he has any appeal to those they’re trying to shut out, but simply because he’s one of the inside clique – a trusty who’s no threat to the corporate order that’s suppressing America’s democratic possibilities.
Of course, they don’t have the integrity to say this. Instead, they claim Sanders and his supporters are advocating free healthcare-for-all and other ideas that, “scare” voters – even most Democrats. Hello – in the 12 states where it was specifically polled in this election, that overdue reform has won handily, including getting 94.3 percent “Hell Yes” support in the recent Democratic primary in my state of Texas!
Still, the money boys are pressing a Bernie Panic Button, saying he’s too hot, too progressive – too Democratic – to beat Trump. The clueless plutocrat billionaire, Mike Bloomberg (who even stooped to calling Sanders a communist) has set up a one-man SuperPAC to enthrone Biden as the Nominee. Yet, recent polls in key swing states, and in supposedly red states like Texas, confirm that the Vermont anti-establishment populist is the strongest candidate of all Democrats against Trump.
What if the people had a candidate in November who was not controlled by big campaign donors, who has the authenticity to stand unequivocally for what he believes in, and who will fight the corporate powers – as Franklin Roosevelt once put it – “to restore America to its own people”? It could be a landslide for progress.
The New York Times bestselling author and America’s funniest activist gives the lowdown on how to put up-not shut up-in the fight for our future.
America is at an historic divide between rulers and rulees and the rulees are restless. Hightower’s THIEVES IN HIGH PLACES is an epistle to the American people about vision and choices, and it’s a clarion call to action. The question Jim Hightower is asking is: What kind of country do you want America to be? Not only for you, but for your children and theirs? In THIEVES IN HIGH PLACES Hightower takes on the Bushites, the Wobblycrats, and the corporate Kleptocrats, digging up behind-the scenes dirt that the corporate media overlooks like BushCo’s “Friday Night Massacres”, what’s happened to our food, and the Bush plan for empire. Also drawing on Hightower’s Rolling Thunder Down-Home Democracy Tour, Hightower has tapped into the thriving activist networks that are our country’s grassroots muscle, and his book tells their uplifting stories of retaking control of their communities.
The bestselling grassroots guru is back with his incisive take on the state of the union and life today in the good ol’ U.S.A.
Jim Hightower, America’s favorite subversive, is still mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. But he will give you a sizeable piece of his mind on Election 2000. This plain-talking, name-naming, podium-pounding populist zeros in on everything that ails us, from the global economy and media to big business and election winners everywhere. In his hard hitting commentary and hilarious anecdotes, Hightower spares no one, including the scared cows — and especially the politicians — who helped steer us into this mess in the first place. An equal opportunity muckrucker and a conscientious agitator for “We the People”, Hightower inspires us to take charge again, build a new politics for a better tommorow — and have a lot of laughs along the way.
Revised, and with a New Introduction by the Author