U.S. Democratic Party - Requiem For The People’s Party
Politics / US Politics Apr 06, 2015 - 04:55 PM GMTBy: Stephen_Merrill
The Democratic Party of the United States is the oldest political party in the world by far. Some would suggest the Democratic Party is also the most successful political party at any time over modern history. It led the United States, in largest part, from near its beginning into becoming the sole superpower on the planet.
Democrats have held a majority in one or both houses of Congress for 124 years of the past 188 years. There have been 15 Democrats elected to the Presidency serving 92 years in office, including 16 of 24 years through 2016. Democrats today control 41 of 99 state legislative chambers along with 18 governorships. Of US voters, 40% favor or lean toward the Democratic Party outpacing Republicans considerably at their 34% of the national vote.
The heroes of the Democratic Party dominated politics in their time from Andrew Jackson to Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy. Democrats held power in Washington through both 20th Century world wars, during the Great Depression, the Vietnam War and during much of the Cold War.
It was the Democratic Party essentially that seceded from the Union in 1860 leading to the War Between the States. Just about every Confederate politician was formerly a Democrat.
Even this author was a Democrat as a youth mesmerized by the alleged ability of the federal government to correct the many injustices in society.
Having been transformed philosophically time and again over almost two centuries, there has nonetheless always been a unifying theme for the Democratic Party. Democrats represent the mass of people in society, the little guy against the big boys. Helping the average worker and helping the poor or elderly or lame is the essence of the Democratic Party even today according to its supporters.
Yet, the Democratic Party in its soul died some time ago in the United States. It was an ignoble passing for the basic equality and liberty of American citizens.
Growing economic inequality became the goal of the Democratic Party in its policy actions, no matter the rhetoric favoring the common person. It was a fifth-column assassination done in the open that ended the people’s party, an act of treachery that has grown to threaten the very survival of the nation, like not since 1860.
A Political Juggernaut
The founding of the US Democratic Party in 1828 quickly led to the ultimate success with the election of Andrew Jackson to the Presidency later that same year.
 |
The party was at first a loose congregation of largely agrarian interests with a common theme: the protection of the individual citizen and businessman from the political influence of powerful special interests, like bankers and industrialists. The political solutions offered by the party centered on individual liberty, capitalism on a level playing-field, hard money and the sharp limits of federal power. The new party was the heir of the Democrat-Republican Party which was the heir of the Jeffersonian tradition. |
It was the rugged individual the Democratic Party enthroned at its start, never the forced collectivist State so subject to official corruption. Like Jefferson, the new Democrats believed firmly that only unhindered economic freedom for everyone could help the average person succeed and help society build a greater middle class.
The Democratic Party voting coalition was swept together by the national appeal of Andrew Jackson, the greatest American hero since George Washington. Jackson had won the popular vote for the Presidency in 1824 only to be denied the office by the Congress. Jackson won the 1828 election as a Democrat over incumbent John Q. Adams by a margin of 56% to 44%.
With his landslide re-election in 1832 President Jackson finally achieved the libertarian financial nirvana in US history. He smashed the Second National Bank of the United States into powder. Jackson then paid off every dollar of the US national debt, a debt that had dogged the federal government since the time of the Revolution. Jackson firmly banned any notion of fiat money in any form. Gold and silver was the only money to Andrew Jackson.
And how it worked. With canals and telegraphs and railroads changing the world within the free market in the US, the middle class Jackson so represented grew and grew until near the time of the War Between the States.
A Near Ultimate Defeat Slowly Swings the Party of Slaveholders
By the time of the middle of the 19th Century though, the Democratic Party was long entrenched in power throughout most of the nation, especially in the South. The Democratic Party was the face of the establishment by then, very much off the path of the noble and free American individual. Special interests like railroads, banks, tobacco, cotton, shipping, mining and coal pushed themselves to the top of Democrat priorities. Political donations, public and private, dominated US legislatures, even where Democrats ruled supposedly on behalf of the average man.
Jackson’s Democratic Party did not delve into questions of curing gross social inequality as long dictated by American law. The idea that non-whites were also born equal and free was a complete blind spot for Democrats and for almost all other white Americans. Immigrants from Asia held little better status in law than the oppressed American Negroes and native-born people.
Before the War Between the States, Democrats did nothing to speak of to help end slavery. They were instead much more the oppressors. Jackson himself persecuted American natives like no other President in US history. The March of Tears stands as possibly the greatest atrocity in US history. The great Jacksonian revolution in democracy for everyone left out half of even the white population, women.
So one of the basic planks of libertarian government was left untouched by the Democratic Party in its earliest form. There had never been liberty for all in the United States by 1860 in by far most of the nation, nowhere close.
It took a second sudden rise to federal power in the United States of a maverick new political party to begin, by the middle of the War Between the States anyway, the American revolution of true equality for all. When Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860 the cards were aligned for a national fire like no other.
Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was made while victory in the war remained very uncertain. Prior to then, the war was thought to be fought to save the Union on one side and to save state sovereignty on the other.
By the end of chaos and death in 1865 a new principle of being an American took hold firmly at least in theory. Truly all people are born equal deserving of the natural freedoms that all should share.
But, despite the Confederate debacle: Despite the well-known corruption and greed in high places for so long: The Democratic Party survived quite well after the war, even in the North and, somehow and someway, especially in the South. It was an astonishing survival for a thoroughly discredited and vanquished political elite. Democrats remained the sole true alternative to Republicans throughout the nation.
Democrats proved after the first years of Reconstruction their complete flexibility in ideology and rhetoric, especially when it comes to hanging onto official power. Over time, with the passage of Jim Crow laws, the flexibility had cycled back to largely the racial attitudes of the Confederacy.
Even by this middle stage of US history the Democratic Party was becoming the party of the Idealists at its core, the 10% of the population that is so effective at gaining top-down social power through mutual solidarity and advocacy. This prime constituency has defined the Democratic Party ever since. Most Idealists have become Democrats ever since.
Ironically, by the 20th Century, the Democratic Party had transformed itself to the party of the Progressive Movement eventually seeking to abolish by official decree social inequality of all forms. The movement at its outset included odd bedfellows, like Republican Teddy Roosevelt.
Women voters were emancipated nationally by the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. By the time of passage, 15 states had already given the full right to vote to women.
The civil equality movement for American Negroes met its fruition one hundred years after the War Between the States when a deeply split Democratic Party, in 1962 at the last possible moment while backed into a corner by freedom riders and James Meredith’s demand to attend Ole Miss University, adopted the cause of freedom truly for all by joining the civil rights revolution, along with a critical mass of Republicans. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act finally enforced the final judgment of 1865. By that time the Democratic Party had completely switched sides in the struggle.
The civil rights era still leaves the Democratic Party as the supposed bastion of civil equality and civil liberties, a burden of history seldom matched.
Even this great 20th Century victory for social equality though, largely by the Democratic Party, like so many great victories, held the seeds of its own destruction, even at its apex. The Age of American Political Entitlement had become the nation’s model after the success of the Civil Rights Movement for black Americans. Congress could then fix anything for anyone, though often for a price.
Democrats over time sliced and diced American society into a field of warring factions, woman against man, old against young, poor against rich, non-white against white and non-believer against believer, worker against employer, with the federal government positioned to decide all disputes in the artificial social warfare. There is but a single winner always, the growth in power of the federal government. Citizens became no longer first an American 100% and only then a member of some smaller category of people.
A Forgotten Master Politician
Though the Democratic Party survived as a major party during Reconstruction and beyond, it was not able to muster a plurality vote for the Presidency for six straight national elections.
All that changed in 1884 when the spirit of Jefferson suddenly renewed the Democratic Party in the person of New York Governor Grover Cleveland. Cleveland would become the second man after Andrew Jackson to win three straight elections for the US Presidency and, likewise, gaining the office only twice. Cleveland’s two terms in office were divided by four years. The close election of 1888 went to Republican Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College after a famously corrupt election in certain states.
 |
Like Jefferson and Jackson, President Cleveland was generally a libertarian force when it came to the US economy. He believed in capitalism and the rugged, free individual, but also believed in reigning in the undue powers of the industrialists, especially railroads. Cleveland’s zeal in fighting corporate monopoly power led to the ignoble achievement of creating the Interstate Commerce Commission, a federal invention that would over time itself fall to becoming an engine of crony capitalism. Cleveland’s effective efforts in office mostly blocked the crony wishes of his Republican Congress and kept his own party from joining a movement to partly rid the |
United States of the gold standard by adding silver coinage to the monetary mix at a fixed low value.
Cleveland was best known in his time for fighting official corruption and for his honesty and common sense, the ultimate personal achievements in an honest form of politics.
Cleveland won and wielded his power without being a master orator or a brilliant deal-maker or a military hawk or even as the head of a party with a reliable majority of votes. He was not an especially handsome or trim person. Cleveland instead won the popular mood by engaging the popular conviction of the time and seeing it through with rock-ribbed integrity. It is a vision as far removed from present day politics as the Earth is removed from the Sun.
The financial panic of 1893 and the failure to support labor in the Pullman Strike of 1894 ended Cleveland’s chances of serving three terms in the Presidency. Cleveland’s longtime political enemies took control of the Democratic Party in 1888 nominating for President William Jennings Bryant of Nebraska, the leader of the anti-gold standard forces.
As the age of growing statism took control in the US, President Grover Cleveland became largely lost to memory (until this article). He was no longer shiny enough, his collectivist vision not sufficiently grand.
The Democratic Party had hopelessly splintered for a second time with the fall of Grover Cleveland from national power. The party’s revival at the national level would only come again largely by accident and then end again, this time in the fires of world war.
A Professor’s World
Twenty years of Republican rule in the White House after the Cleveland administrations did little to help the party in opposition to regain office.
But in 1912 President Howard Taft had a much more formidable opponent in the Presidential election than Democrat Princeton University Professor Woodrow Wilson presented. Wilson had gained the Democrat nomination that year at a National Convention on the 47th ballot.
Teddy Roosevelt had already been elected Vice-President and President as a Republican serving almost two full terms in the Presidency at the outset of the new century. Roosevelt anointed Taft as his successor to the Presidency in 1908. Voters went along.
Nonetheless, press darling TR spent his time away from office criticizing Taft’s policies and Taft personally. Outmaneuvered by Taft for the Republican nomination at the 1912 National Convention, TR decided to split the Republican electorate in two by forming his own “Bull Moose Party” or “Progressive Party”.
To complicate matters more the Socialist Party of the United States fielded it own Presidential candidate for 1912. Old electoral warhorse Eugene Debs ran his fourth campaign for President. The decision at the polls for the four-way race was non-committal: Wilson 42%, Roosevelt 27, Taft 23%, Debs and others 8%.
 |
Most votes went for retaining the Republican tradition in the top national office, but it meant nothing to the end result. Yet, the Presidency arising from the closely divided election of 1912 would make the two fateful policy choices that now a century later greatly threaten the American Dream. |
An Accidental American Revolution
During the campaign of 1912 Wilson promised a humble, non-interventionist foreign policy that was the traditional US model. Wilson did not endorse the Big Stick diplomacy of TR. There was no Wilsonian campaign vision of the United States as the leader of nations or the as the arsenal of democracy even by the 1916 election.
Wilson in 1913 appointed William Jennings Bryant as his first Secretary of State, a pacifist. Bryant had been instrumental to Wilson in gaining the nomination and winning the election. Wilson ran for re-election as the peace candidate in 1916 after WWI had broken out in Europe.
Quite ironically, Wilson’s main domestic policy vision in the 1912 campaign was known as the New Freedom, a bottom-up approach to building a vibrant middle class. As with Jefferson, Jackson and Cleveland, greater economic freedom was advanced by the Wilson campaign as the best way to help the average worker. The Wilsonian slant was to level the playing field for workers by balancing corporate power by taxation and other means.
Rather than championing new economic freedoms, once in office President Wilson pushed as Progressive financial reform what was possibly the single greatest Congressional mistake in US history, little noticed at the time by the public. It was a new federal institution, one that TR also supported in its creation.
It was the twisting of the silver coinage movement led by Bryant into the Creature from Jeckyl Island by Wilson and his Democratic Congress which directly led to the creation of the third national bank of the United States. Its creation laid the necessary power in a semi-private institution, the Federal Reserve banks, outside of the democratic process, to allow a small financial elite to all but control the nation’s wealth, depending on how daring they choose to become. The money-printing powers of the third US national bank is an American 20th Century invention that proved central to bringing the proud nation to its knees one hundred years later.
This first bow of the Democratic Party to JP Morgan and the Rothschild dynasty, in unison with many Republicans, at Christmas time, 1913, slyly appeared to reach the Bryant anti-gold movement’s goal of greater flexibility with the volume of money in the economy, but without a partial abandonment of the classic collateral of national and international trade. Wilson thought he was reaching a grand modern goal while spending little political capital in the process.
So, the naive thinking of America’s new President from the halls of the Ivy League, in his first year in office, contrary to his campaign promises, made the key historic misstep into top-down centralized economic planning at the federal level, with all of the corruption such a system implies.
And it was Wilson’s naivety and intellectual grandeur later in office that led also to possibly the greatest mistake of the 20th Century, the decision by the United States to enter WWI against Germany in 1917.
Forcing an Allied victory over Germany embittered the continent of Europe for a generation while never making the world safer for democracy or any other form of government. Had the US stayed out of the European war the deadly stalemate for nothing would have driven the warmongers from political power across Europe following an inevitable peace settlement driven by mutual exhaustion. War would have had its deserved bad reputation across the political spectrum in Europe.
Yet, JP Morgan and company on Wall Street had made huge loans to England and France and were looking to possibly go unpaid, even by a stalemate.
Suddenly, the US peace candidate of the 1916 election became the adventurous commander-in-chief in 1917. JP Morgan won all his bets on the Allies.
Thereafter, the dark ingredients that led to the rise of Hitler poisoned European politics throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Post-war Wilson quickly became a figure ridiculed in international diplomacy as a clueless dreamer. Wilson was all but ignored at the Versailles Peace Conference ending WWI.
By 1920 Wilson’s disastrous foreign policy had been thoroughly discredited back home, even by many Democrats, as an unneeded, bloody change from traditional US foreign policy. The United States never became a member of Wilson’s post-war League of Nations. The US did not continue as the world’s “arsenal of democracy”, a cruel contradiction in words.
The Democratic Party would be banished from national power again for many years after the Wilson Presidency. During that period America’s taste for foreign wars that was started by Roosevelt and Wilson abated for a time, only to rise with a fury in the midst of the next world war.
A Return to Power Amid Ruin
Four Republican Presidents followed Woodrow Wilson in office. One, Warren Harding, was forced to resign from office amid a personal scandal. Harding was succeeded in office by the amiable Calvin Coolidge, someone whose political philosophy differed little from that of Grover Cleveland.
The 1920s America is portrayed as an age of Lassie Faire, but in reality, throughout the decade, the US Federal Reserve bank was unwittingly blowing a credit bubble in private lending through artificially low interest-rates, a bubble that would reach massive proportion. The rich had become massively richer throughout the 1920s by Wall Street speculation with cheap Federal Reserve money.
When the bubble thoroughly burst in 1929 with the stock market crash the disaster caused a number of Wall Street money men to jump to their death from their office window. The Dow-Jones eventually lost 90% of its value.
The effect on employment and manufacturing in the United States was far more consequential, the Great Depression. Millions of Americans became destitute with many living in “Hoovervilles”.
Another New York Governor received the Democratic nomination for President in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR trounced the incumbent Republican bringing the Democratic Party back into national power, now like never before.
 |
With his four straight election victories by a majority vote for the office of President, FDR is highly unlikely to ever be eclipsed as the longest serving President and one with a perfect batting average for elections. FDR’s last Vice-President, Harry Truman, also won his own term in office in 1948. |
Never before had the US political universe been so focused on the White House for so long a time.
FDR’s domestic policies could not have been more different than the policies and beliefs of Grover Cleveland and Andrew Jackson. The new fashioned Keynesian theories in economics had begun to undermine the nation with the central planning by bankers that so afflicts the world through till today.
The Beast of Jeckyl Island was truly getting its footing, whether during a time of boom or bust. Even President Hoover had substantially applied the new Kool-Aid for financial mayhem. Washington D.C. was determined to “create” jobs and increase “growth”.
Roosevelt’s similar fiscal policy can be stated concisely: Federal government economic planning and expenditures are a near perfect substitute for the distribution of capital and manpower in a private, free market economy. All one needs to do to cure a recession then is to restart growth through public spending. It is the flawed principle that has destroyed the US economy over time. It makes the crazy assumption there is no such thing as scarcity in the world.
Suddenly, instead of a beast to be tamed at all times, the federal government somehow in legend became the means of rescue from the Great Depression.
The results of Rooseveltian intervention in the national economy could hardly have been more perverse though. Despite lasting New Deal jingoism about eventual success, the purposeful draining of private capital into wasteful federal spending like the WPA (We Play Around) jobs program kept the economy in a stupor, like never before. Previous financial panics and economic downturns in the United States had lasted no more than a year or two followed by a serious rebound.
By 1936 the media invention about economic growth in the US, an economic takeoff, was similar in nature to today’s atmosphere. By 1937 the stock market was crashing again and millions more were losing their job.
With steady doses of Roosevelt’s central-planning medicine, the patient never did recover until Harry Truman let loose the power of capitalism again in the aftermath of WWII.
Yet the most disastrous consequence of the Roosevelt era had to do with the overall political power of Washington D.C. in a more general way.
By intimidating a shameful US Supreme Court into expanding the powers of Congress to infinity by turning the Constitution’s Commerce Clause on its head, in order to accommodate his New Deal craziness, the fabric of the US Constitution was ruptured by Roosevelt ending the Republic as a practical matter. Capitalism and the Bill of Rights now had a termination date to be set by Washington, D.C.
Democrats’ long reign was finally ended by Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, a candidate who had either national parties’ Presidential nomination for the asking. Truman’s Democratic successor after Eisenhower’s time in office would lead a different world.
An Age of Few Limits
With a war story and charisma few could ever match, Democrat John F. Kennedy squeezed into winning the Presidency in 1960. America had been on a worldwide roll since the end of the WWII, but now the Cold War with the Soviet Union was seriously setting in with some disturbing scientific and military advances by the Soviets.
 |
Other than his late decision to enlist in the Civil Rights Movement on the side of history, JFK’s three years in office left little mark on the nation. His foreign policy failures at least matched his successes. Kennedy did navigate the Cuban Missile Crisis successfully, though he pushed the world closer to nuclear annihilation than was ever prudent. It was Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev who proved to be the sane national leader during the crisis. That cost him his power in 1964. What Kennedy’s assassination in office in 1963 left the nation though was a spirit of noble adventure inspired in Washington, D.C. The |
Presidency had never been quite so shiny and inviting, the most powerful of images. Even the Congress and the CIA were popular in 1964.
So, instead of invariably imploding due to his wild sex life in office, Kennedy became the modern saint of the Democratic Party.
The political capital earned by Democrats was promptly spent by JFK’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson, largely to vast effect. It was the Johnson administration that championed the Civil Right Act and Voting Rights Act to passage in Congress. It was the Johnson administration that proposed and enacted Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, fatherless child subsidies for the asking and so much more. The Age of American Political Entitlement had begun in earnest.
President Johnson, after winning one Presidential election of his own, was forced to withdraw from the 1968 contest due to his travails in bringing and prosecuting the US War in Vietnam. Military empire was proving to be a risky, costly enterprise. Johnson’s Vice-President Hubert Humphrey lost the election to Republican Richard Nixon, another Keynesian dreamer.
The next Democrat nominated for President, George McGovern, was the absolute classic modern liberal. His campaign in 1972 lost 49 states.
Only national scandal largely by its own presentation brought the Democratic Party back to the Presidency in the person of someone from outside the universe centered in Washington, D.C.
A Stranger Comes to Office
Richard Nixon’s 1973 Watergate downfall for covering up a two-bit effort at Democrat surveillance demonstrated how powerful a partisan media can advance the mimes of one of the national parties.
With supposed scandals that would not have risen to the radar level with other Presidents, the most powerful man in the world was forced from office mostly because the Democrats could.
Establishment Democrats thought the propaganda victory over Nixon would certainly win the Presidency in 1976 for one its Washington insiders.
Yet Washington acolytes Frank Church, Lloyd Bentsen, Birch Bayh nor Sergeant Shriver could even slow Georgia farmer Jimmy Carter down from gaining the Democratic Party nomination for President. The Watergate scandal ended boomeranging on the entire Washington political class. The United States, while no longer a true Republic, did remain a democracy by that time in US history.
 |
President Carter, almost single-handedly, brought peace between Israel and Egypt. Despite great provocation, Commander-in-Chief Jimmy Carter did not drop a single bomb while in office. While handling the Iran hostage crisis in a questionable way, Carter did bring the 52 US diplomatic hostages home largely unharmed on the last day of his Presidency. |
capitalism to be revived amid the deep recession of 1978 cleaning out the Keynesian distortions of Johnson and Nixon. Carter did not offer a stimulus plan. His Federal Reserve allowed interest rates to naturally rise to 14%. Carter whipped inflation like President Gerald Ford only promised to do. Carter left office with the national debt of 900b little changed than when Carter took office and well down as a percentage of the overall economy.
That greatest noble deed, saving the US free market from elite central planning as the best remedy for a distorted national economy, cost Carter the Presidency in the election of 1980. But the succeeding economic boom of his creation proved in the most fundamental way the successful Austrian credentials of Jimmy Carter, America’s last capitalist in national office.
The one 20th Century President to empower the middle class and to bring greater peace to the world has been vilified by statist, warmongering interests since the day he left office. Carter’s great comparative success in office will only be acknowledged after the age of US tyranny has passed.
The next Democrat to take the Presidency could not be more different than the Sunday Preacher from Plains, Georgia.
Another Master Politician Emerges
After three terms of Ronald Reagan and George Bush the First, Bill Clinton took the Presidency in 1992 in a way quite similar to Woodrow Wilson eighty years earlier.
With the first serious third-party candidacy for President since TR, the 1992 election results were a solid Electoral College win for Clinton, though he polled only 43% of the national vote, one digit higher than the percentage won by Wilson in 1912.
Billionaire third-party challenger Ross Perot emphasized during the campaign the need to save America’s industrial jobs from export to Latin America and Asia under so-called free trade treaties like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and via the WTO (The World Trade Organization).
Clinton and incumbent President George Bush both strongly backed NAFTA and the globalization of world commerce through lower trade and regulatory barriers across the board. Both insisted the push to US economic growth generated from NAFTA and similar treaties would more than replace the American manufacturing jobs lost.
Was a Democrat actually working for a more capitalist world? Sadly, no. Clinton was primarily serving the uber-elite class of global banking and industrial plutocrats he has been the main stageman for ever since.
The American middle-class was destined to pay Clinton’s bill from the global aristocracy. The fewer jobs and lower wages of the bottom 95% of American workers since the Clinton administration tell the tale of globalization in the United States. The effect was to eliminate jobs and lower wages to the point where American workers were much more “competitive” with workers in China and Mexico. Further sinking in the general US standard-of-living continues for the lower 95% through till today. Big US corporations shed the country in favor of slave wages, few taxes and no pollution regulation in the Third World. Only the rich in the US benefited.
However, Clinton’s master strokes for the obscenely wealthy came also in another form: the opening of a trillion dollar financial casino on Wall Street. With Clinton’s new “reform” now allowing open gambling with bank depositors’ accounts by Wall Street, not just with their own money, Clinton broke down, alongside the Republicans in Congress, one of the few beneficial legal barriers Roosevelt’s New Deal put in place, one to prevent Wall Street greed from ruining the national economy a second time, The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Clinton, as a new-style Democrat, abolished this safety barrier from financial speculation with all Americans’ savings.
Over time the new Wall Street Casino raised the stakes by grossly inflating the “shadow” banking system, especially derivative betting on interest rates and loan defaults. The off-the-official-books derivatives lottery now boggles the mind at hundreds of trillions of dollars.
So, quite singularly, Bill Clinton is personally responsible for the present state of affairs where the savings of all Americans have become the leveraged collateral used to gamble with by Clinton’s puppeteers. This “New Democrat” innovation may have been the biggest single reason for the 2008 Wall Street crash and the onset of the Greatest Depression.
Having been bailed out in 2008 and beyond, Clinton’s casino appears now liable to go insolvent big time again. Trillion dollar bets on the establishment’s zero interest rates causing growth game-plan are being lost.
Clinton’s explosive impact on the national economy will not be finished until the entire façade of the Washington/Wall Street dark partnership comes crashing down.
Not Giving Peace Any Chance
Possibly Clinton’s most shameful policy in office though, since it cost so many lives and still does, was in foreign policy.
Clinton came to office in the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The complete reason for NATO had disappeared. So, had the need for US military bases across the globe and for ever more advanced generations of weapons and ships. The need for the CIA and for most official spying of all forms had ended.
It was a time to bring the world to a place where the military behemoths retained by the Cold War could be retired in an orderly way among nations. It was a time for diplomacy and capitalism to return as the main interface between nations, like the late 18th Century and beyond.
1993 was a time for the United States to return to its former role in the world, as one nation among many that deeply respected the sovereignty of other nations, but encouraged human rights, free markets, democracy, diplomacy and free commerce. It was time to become again the nation that led primarily be example and inspiration.
The economic dividends to the US economy could have been staggering. Defense spending over the medium term would have been eliminated by half or much more, along with mega-billions of related empire spending. No longer would American workers and resources be so devoted to the production of killing machines that only destroy things. Those productive efforts could then be dedicated to improving the US standard-of-living across the board, a truly Democratic agenda. The mighty Pentagon contractors so feared by Dwight Eisenhower could finally be vanquished.
Instead, Clinton followed the money for the elite as usual, any way his pals could get their hands on foreign resources or slave labor or global business or US taxpayer money.
NATO, instead of being disbanded, actually launched its own Clinton’s war in Europe for no credible reason, thereby closing Clinton’s plan to divide the former Yugoslavia into pieces for control by Western commerce.
Clinton bombed Saddam Hussein for threatening to sell oil in Euros.
Clinton assured the Russians that EU expansion would not mean NATO expansion and then expanded NATO to Poland and the Baltic States anyway. Clinton advisors believed it was unfair for Russia to have so much territory and natural resources. Possibly the Russian Federation could be balkanized for US business interests too.
The US continued to outspend the rest of world by far on its own military, on foreign military aid, on new weapons and on worldwide martial propaganda through its State Department and NGOs. There were no peace initiatives from Bill Clinton.
So, the great opportunity for lasting world peace in the aftermath of the Cold War under the ideals of the Republic of the United States was passed on by a Democratic President, as his predecessor Republican George Bush the First had passed as well. The drive to world empire was energized instead.
The dark side had won across the board with Slick Willy, the shiniest, hippest President since JFK. The average worker and citizen was sold out by his own political party after the election, with a warm smile and handshake from Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The Clinton years should be marked as the era of the end of democracy by the people in the United States. The Democrats had, in fact, joined the Republicans as the party enthroning the moneyed elite. The entire US political world has been just a cover story for the self-aggrandizing rule by billionaires ever since.
By the time Clinton’s Democratic successor in office arrived eight years later, the stage was set by Wilson’s and Roosevelt’s and Johnson’s and Clinton’s brew to bring the nation fully to a state of comic, tragic folly, like few empires before.
From the Cliff Over into the Fire
By the time Democratic President Barack Obama, an unseasoned rookie, took office in 2009, after the Bush the Younger years of debacle, the nation was already in the physician’s office for a severe case of double-pneumonia. It was a sudden illness where the very parasites that caused the patient’s dire condition were even themselves at severe risk of financial death, even of criminal prosecution for their audacious trails of crime.
Gangsterism siphoning off the people had been launched in earnest in 1981. By the onset of the Bush the Younger days in 2000, Big Money was ruling both domestic and foreign policy entirely.
The medicine applied in 2008 by our clueless Republican President, and especially by the Bankster’s Counterfeiter-in-Chief at the Federal Reserve, had been to allow the parasites entirely free reign on devouring the remaining functioning parts of the deathly ill patient. Trillions of dollars of counterfeit were gushing from the Federal Reserve to keep the gangster kingdom afloat. Yet, the patient was looking ever more pale and gaunt.
Finally, the money grim reaper was calling for Dracula himself. Perhaps, this national trauma would finally rid the nation of the bloodsuckers anyway. It would be capitalism’s rebalancing from excess debt and systemic fraud, another cleansing of the economy.
So, in 2009, a compete downfall of the powerful along Main Street, the Square Mile and beyond would free the nation to recover from its bout of kleptocratic rule. The silver-lining to the “Great Recession” was clear for all to see. And there was now a President of the people that was perfect to do the needed job.
Yet the new man in the Office of the Presidency, a supposed savior of the middle-class and the poor and of the dreams of Idealists, the candidate of peace and reconciliation, the first truly 21st Century man, turned out to be as counterfeit as a fiat US dollar, someone already fully devoted to the dark side of America’s tragic fall. Barack Obama had been bought by Wall Street and by his own narcissism well before he received a single vote for the Presidency.
The preordained Obama decision to give a Stay Out of Jail Card to every torturer, mass-killer, Ponzi artist, sociopath and crony thief in George Bush’s America was implemented immediately, but only dribbled out to the public. Obama, Cheney, Hillary and Bush all work for the same people, after all.
The thieves’ amnesty was Obama’s green light to keep the pillaging of America from the top at full tilt, as it did. Federal regulators, like the SEC, morphed from being just deaf and blind to being specialized coverup artists for gangsters.
Once in office the new President did all he could to support Fed Chief Ben Bernanke as he cranked the printing presses from ZIRP to QE 1.0. 2.0. 3.0 etc. et. al. to the tune of endless trillions of dollars more, even to Europeans. “Loan” windows of many acronyms opened for the powerful to withdraw their counterfeit millions, the grandest welfare program in human history, all for the mega-wealthy, and all under the direction of a Democratic President especially known for representing the disenfranchised citizen.
Obama has never breathed a word in public though about the ongoing massive counterfeiting for the wealthy that has destroyed the middle-class so much further during his reign.
Obama instead steadily arms the forces of violent control through marital law as a truly fearsome army protecting an elite at risk of revolution, Obama’s failsafe priority.
When Barack Obama reappointed Ben Bernanke as Fed Chair in 2011 everything that was needed to be said about the President’s concern for the average citizen and small businessperson was known. Outside of billionaires, Obama voters with a job or money were sheep to be shorn to the bone. Many, many sheep must become happy with the scraps thrown to them from the welfare table, since there is no longer any room in America for general self-reliance anymore, like building a new business and keeping it. The productive, independent, critically thinking individual is very much the enemy in Obama Land.
The past six years of blood feuds with Republicans in Congress, with blather about stimulus for jobs and about the towering lies about unemployment, inflation and growth, with imperial foreign policy dressed for the naive as noble and humanitarian, and with the doubling-down on war and terrorism, have all been a bad, juvenile script written by the minions of plutocrats and given to the linked-in Western media to confound the people with: Entertainment, beheadings, fraud and propaganda for the those raised in America’s failed public schools, for the people without passports, for the Tea Partiers and Occupiers without a clue. It is quite the spectacle, Bread and Games for the Masses turned to Hemlock and Opiates. It is what now substitutes for the American Republic and US Democracy.
Only a single political party has ruled in the US since 1992, the party of the bankers, the industrialist, the spies and the mega-wealthy, Bill Clinton’s original gang of hucksters and tyrants.
Under Obama and Bush the Younger, the American nobility’s control and surveillance of information has reached heights undreamed of. The US public is not even allowed to know about the American empire’s steady crackup across the world, alongside the US dollar.
The clear forensic evidence that the Dutch airliner over Eastern Ukraine was downed by air-to-air machine-gun fire is never mentioned on the MSM. Nor are the facts that two Kiev fighter jets were in the immediate vicinity of the airliner just before the crash. When Kiev’s assaults its own cities in the eastern provinces with artillery fire or even when 50 Ukrainian citizens were burned alive in Odessa by a fascist gang from Kiev, it does not make the Western news.
Walled into ignorance, the US masses have all of their own communications spied on and catalogued for future use, should a peon dare to seriously insult or threaten the elite.
Obama first lied about mass surveillance, then dissembled with the Snowden revelations, came back to lying about mass surveillance and is now posturing as he assembles his newest lies, the most transparent President in US history.
So, George Orwell’s 1984 world has arrived in spades with the reigns of Barack Obama and George Bush the Younger, including all of the New-Speak and endless war it entails. It is the saddest of fates for one of the greatest of nations. It is said to be the bottom breakup cycle of civilizations and empires again, that has played out so many times before.
Requiem
So, the Democratic Party has the longest of stories to tell.
Born as the champion of the average citizen, then succumbed to slavery and official cronyism and corruption over time, was reborn for a time by one man’s vision of the nation, later led the nation onto the path of its eventual destruction in a mission to save the world under a plan created by a supposedly brilliant elite, fell again into oblivion, only to be reborn in the fires of the Great Depression and WWII, to sink again from hubris and failure, then to have one man come into power somehow to help the people again, only to be, in the end, bamboozled and sold to the alligators by the shiniest stars of a morally corrupt age, a sadly true story for the nation and the people’s party.
The full-on betrayal of the Democrat voting constituency was especially disastrous for the nation by ending all political balance. After the death of the Republic and then Democracy in the US, there was no one left in Washington, D.C. truly concerned with the happiness and prosperity of the average citizen. The “new” Democratic Party fully surrendered in its role as the primary guarantor of the US Bill of Rights. The Fourth Amendment was bashed to dust in secrecy by the National Security State without a peep of opposition from leading Democrats and with the help of many, especially Obama.
There is not an ounce of good reason to expect the long sold out Democratic Party will be able to remake itself again, in 2016 or anytime soon, back into something that is not the guaranty of elite, top-down rule in the US for the top. The corruption of power and money and killing is now thoroughly complete in the Democratic Party. The heady kind of days of Woodrow Wilson, FDR and JFK are long gone from America.
Thankfully, finally the Idealists, who have been the engine of the Democratic Party for so long, are having their hearts opened to the reality of the defeated middle-class, the propaganda serving as principle for so long. Facts eventually have to be recognized. A horde of Artisans may not be further allowed to rule the world with the active help of Idealists.
Already it is far too late for the passions of the Idealists to ever be reborn for the present gangster owned, warmongering, spying Democratic Party. The Idealists will lead a new American political party instead someday soon, from the beginning or later on: One that cleans away the rot to allow for the return of the US Republic, whether in the same Union or in several.
The Democratic Party’s end will come with the coming collapse of the hollowed, bankrupt US oligarchy under a rising Eastern Sun, amid the demise of the US fiat dollar.
The fate for the Democratic Party could possibly be as a merger of political parties with the equally discredited Republicans, the truth of the death of the people’s party finally coming out in the open.
Mr. Merrill is the editor of the Alaska Freedom News, formerly the Hampton Roads Freedom News.
© 2015 Copyright Stephen Merrill - All Rights Reserved
Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.
© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.
