Let
me begin by admitting that I’m a lifelong Corporatist Democrat, I’ve always
reviled naïve “liberal Democrats,” for their simple-minded mythologies, perhaps
the most vexing to me, being the one that goes, “Democrats are the party of the
common man, while the GOP is the Party of Big Business.”
I
find that kind of sports fan politics to be as dangerous as it is misleading.
BOTH
major Parties are and have been Corporatist for a very long time.
Neither
major Party cares about or represents the poor or working people “better” than
the other. In fact, they both trample on the working poor in their race for
Corporate cash.
The
issue has always been whether the partnership between business and government
should be business led or government led. For a host of reasons, for the
economy to remain stable, it MUST BE a business led model that prevails.
Recently,
I came across a Washington Examiner article that seemed to express shock and
outrage that Barack Obama was, in fact, a Corporatist, who is beholden to a
variety of corporate donors.
“On the one hand,
there is the former community organizer Obama. This Obama has made it clear in
recent weeks that he is at one with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, saying,
for example, when ABC asked how he viewed the demonstrators, that “the most
important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people
know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side...”
“But then there is
the Obama who is more than happy to accept high-dollar contributions from every
Gordon Gecko on Wall Street. As the Washington Post recently reported, Obama
has accepted more money — more than $15.6 million — from these people than all
of the Republican presidential aspirants combined.
“As I keep saying:
They don’t call him President Goldman Sachs for nothing.”
OK,
so what’s at all wrong with, or surprising about Barack Obama sidling up to the
corporations that have been the veritable “founder of the American feast?”
What
rock has the Examiner been hiding under?
Back
in 2008, 3 of the top 7 donors to the Obama campaign were big banks (Goldman
Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase). UBS, Morgan Stanley, GE, IBM and Time
Warner were other major donors. A full 75% of his donations were from Corporate
donors.
Moreover,
one of Barack Obama’s closest friends and one of his biggest “bundlers” (fund
raisers) is UBS Chief Robert Wolf.
According
to economic advisor Austan Goolsbee, "The president just likes being around
him, he has this personal friendship that's beyond what you see most of the
time. Robert is just a fun, relaxed guy and he's not overly needy."
So-called
“liberal Democrats” do both the Party and the nation a great disservice by
pretending that the great Democratic Party stands against Corporatism, in fact,
it’s an outrage, in that it diminishes some of the greatest Democratic
accomplishments.
It
was a Democratic President who signed NAFTA into law in January of 1994 a full
year before the Gingrich revolution was started.
It
was a Democratic President (Bill Clinton) who helped shepherded welfare reform
through Congress to force the dependent poor back to work.
Much
was made of Corporatist Republican G W Bush’s friendship with Ken Lay of Enron,
but little was made of the fact that Lay was even closer to fellow Democratic
Corporatist Bill Clinton!
Today
that insipid “liberal” mythos remains intact, despite the fact that two of
Barack Obama’s biggest corporate donors are BP (the energy giant) and Goldman
Sachs and that one of his biggest bundlers is Robert Wolf of UBS, while Barack
Obama was SUPPOSEDLY beholden to the “liberal” anti-Corporatist and
anti-corporate left of this Party.
Recently,
when asked what he felt about both major political parties, Mark Cuban answered, “They both scare the hell out of me.”
I’m
not sure why Mark Cuban would be scared of the fact that BOTH major political
Parties are diehard corporatist, but for those opposed to that ideology...well,
they should be VERY afraid.