Robert Reich: It’s Time To Dismantle The Democratic Party And Start Anew (Demo)

On November 10, 2016, Robert Reich writes:

As a first step, I believe it necessary for the members and leadership of the Democratic National Committee to step down and be replaced by people who are determined to create a party that represents America – including all those who feel powerless and disenfranchised, and who have been left out of our politics and left behind in our economy.

The Democratic Party as it is now constituted has become a giant fundraising machine, too often reflecting the goals and values of the moneyed interests. This must change. The election of 2016 has repudiated it. We need a people’s party – a party capable of organizing and mobilizing Americans in opposition to Donald Trump’s Republican party, which is about to take over all three branches of the U.S. government. We need a New Democratic Party that will fight against intolerance and widening inequality.

What happened in America Tuesday should not be seen as a victory for hatefulness over decency. It is more accurately understood as a repudiation of the American power structure.

At the core of that structure are the political leaders of both parties, their political operatives, and fundraisers; the major media, centered in New York and Washington DC; the country’s biggest corporations, their top executives, and Washington lobbyists and trade associations; the biggest Wall Street banks, their top officers, traders, hedge-fund and private-equity managers, and their lackeys in Washington; and the wealthy individuals who invest directly in politics.

At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The presidency was won by Donald Trump, who made his fortune marketing office towers and casinos, and, more recently, starring in a popular reality-television program, and who has never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican party. Hillary Clinton narrowly won the popular vote, but not enough of the states and their electors secure a victory.

Hillary Clinton’s defeat is all the more remarkable in that her campaign vastly outspent the Trump campaign on television and radio advertisements, and get-out-the-vote efforts. Moreover, her campaign had the support in the general election not of only the kingpins of the Democratic party but also many leading Republicans, including most of the politically active denizens of Wall Street and the top executives of America’s largest corporations, and even former Republican president George HW Bush. Her campaign team was run by seasoned professionals who knew the ropes. She had the visible and forceful backing of Barack Obama, whose popularity has soared in recent months, and his popular wife. And, of course, she had her husband.

Trump, by contrast, was shunned by the power structure. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, actively worked against Trump’s nomination. Many senior Republicans refused to endorse him, or even give him their support. The Republican National Committee did not raise money for Trump to the extent it had for other Republican candidates for president.

What happened?

There had been hints of the political earthquake to come. Trump had won the Republican primaries, after all. More tellingly, Clinton had been challenged in the Democratic primaries by the unlikeliest of candidates – a 74-year-old Jewish senator from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and who was not even a Democrat. Bernie Sanders went on to win 22 states and 47% of the vote in those primaries. Sanders’ major theme was that the country’s political and economic system was rigged in favor of big corporations, Wall Street and the very wealthy.

The power structure of America wrote off Sanders as an aberration, and, until recently, didn’t take Trump seriously. A respected political insider recently told me most Americans were largely content with the status quo. “The economy is in good shape,” he said. “Most Americans are better off than they’ve been in years.”

Recent economic indicators may be up, but those indicators don’t reflect the insecurity most Americans continue to feel, nor the seeming arbitrariness and unfairness they experience. Nor do the major indicators show the linkages many Americans see between wealth and power, stagnant or declining real wages, soaring CEO pay, and the undermining of democracy by big money.

Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.

Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it.

The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs.

Democrats have occupied the White House for 16 of the last 24 years, and for four of those years had control of both houses of Congress. But in that time they failed to reverse the decline in working-class wages and economic security. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class – failing to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violate them, or help workers form unions with simple up-or-down votes. Partly as a result, union membership sank from 22% of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to less than 12%today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

Bill Clinton and Obama also allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated. The unsurprising result of this combination – more trade, declining unionization and more industry concentration – has been to shift political and economic power to big corporations and the wealthy, and to shaft the working class. This created an opening for Donald Trump’s authoritarian demagoguery, and his presidency.

Now Americans have rebelled by supporting someone who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. The power structure understandably fears that Trump’s isolationism will stymie economic growth. But most Americans couldn’t care less about growth because for years they have received few of its benefits, while suffering most of its burdens in the forms of lost jobs and lower wages.

The power structure is shocked by the outcome of the 2016 election because it has cut itself off from the lives of most Americans. Perhaps it also doesn’t wish to understand, because that would mean acknowledging its role in enabling the presidency of Donald Trump.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/19625/robert-reich-donald-trump-democratic-party-president

Nowhere does Robert Reich address what a new Democratic Party platform should stand for. I am a co-author of the Unite America Party platform, which is a platform open to any political party to adopt. Notice the “UNITE” in the name of the party. At this juncture we need to unify Americans and this platform is design to do just that. Please  read and think about it, and comment.

As a preface, on July 4, 2014, Norman Kurland, Chairman of the Unite America Party wrote:

The Fourth of July is the appropriate day for me to thank you for your eloquent messages over the last 13 years celebrating the birth of the founding document of the first American Revolution.  The founders of that document gave rise to the first nation on Earth dedicated to freedom and inalienable rights of every person.

Yet as you know, the Declaration of Independence was silent about America’s “original sin” — that of “slavery.”  A provision condemning the slave trade was removed from the first draft of the Declaration by founders from South Carolina and Georgia.  See The People Shall Judge: Readings in the Formation of American Policy, The University of Chicago Press, 1949, p.203, fn. 3.)

While our nation is still in the process of of providing greater equality of opportunity for the descendents of America’s slaves and native Americans, we are all aware that equal freedom and equal opportunity for those descendents is still a work in progress.  You are a pioneer of the ESOP as a revolutionary advance in the business world and one of the few ESOP practitioners who are familiar with the revolutionary ideas of Louis O. Kelso, Mortimer J. Adler and others who promote a Just Third Way alternative to monopoly capitalism and all forms of socialist or “collective ownership” of productive capital assets. You are therefore also aware that America and other countries of the world now perpetuate a new form of human slavery: “wage slavery”, “welfare slavery”, “charity slavery” and “consumer debt slavery.” Slaves by definition are not economically empowered citizens.  They are not free.

Today, the Founders’ vision of universal freedom is under attack, domestically as well as throughout the world.  There is growing inequality of wealth between the top .01 % of the world’s capital owners and over 99% of the world’s population.  Such economic exclusion is a systemic problem. The system will be corrected when people like you unite with others to lift the systemic tax, monetary, financial, corporate culture, inheritance, gift tax and other barriers to more equal opportunity for every citizen to become an owner of productive capital assets.  We need not depend on Wall Street and others who control past savings or on those who do not want to share power over the future. With the awakening of people power combined with “the power of an idea whose time has come”, the system can be transformed going forward as we finance each year’s trillions dollars of new capital assets and the transfer of existing capital assets.  This can be done in ways consistent with gradually reducing the redistributive power of government, encouraging genuinely free and non-monopolistic markets, and restoring the original rights of private property in corporate equity.  And equal ownership opportunity can be achieved without violating private property rights of existing owners of existing capital assets, as described in the Summary of the proposed Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/ and other books and writings at www.cesj.org.

Some us think we need a peaceful and more just Second American Revolution to unite all Americans, based on a moral recognition that freedom and political democracy must be based on a foundation of universal principles of economic justice and economic empowerment.  Today, on this day celebrating freedom for all, the Unite American Party of Kentucky was officially launched, following approval of its registration yesterday with the State of Kentucky.  It will be run a people’s candidate for U.S. Senator from Kentucky in the September elections.

I would be most interested in your comments on the national Platform of the Unite America Party at http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/UAP-Platform.pdf.  The full document was posted on the blogs of HuffingtonPost (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/platform-of-the-unite-ame_b_5474077.html), Nation of Change (http://www.nationofchange.org/platform-unite-america-party-1402409962), and OpEd News (http://www.opednews.com/articles/Platform-of-the-Unite-Amer-by-Gary-Reber-Party-Leadership_Party-Platforms-DNC_Party-Platforms-GOP-RNC_Party-Politics-Democratic-140630-60.html).