"The Daily Beast" Writer David Rothkopf Warns Of "Gut Punches" To Democracy-- Including The Failure Of Bill Clinton
This Daily Beast article by Rothkopf is on target. It summarizes the various "gut punches" to Democracy which have brought us to this point, starting with Reagan. (Link here)
What is different is that he blasts the Clinton administration as being "Reagan Lite", for triangulating policy with the emerging racist/fascist GOP of that time under the leadership of Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay. Rothkopf served under Clinton, so he saw the whole rotten process up close.
The issue he raises midway is that Clinton pushed the repeal of FDR's Glass-Steagall law, allowing the consequent orgy of mergers, acquisitions and financial speculation to build a tech and Real Estate bubble economy. Not developed in specific detail is Clinton's embrace of Welfare reform, his crime bill, and push for the anti-labor NAFTA treaty, but Glass-Steagall was the ultimate deal breaker. That repeal put Wall Street in charge of the US economy, and opened the floodgates to a Tsunami of phoney money.
Hardly anyone brings this up. No one wants to confront the fact that the downfall of Democracy truly began with the Clinton era Centrists hollowing out of the Democratic Party, through their triage of traditional Democratic policies and constituencies.
Why is this rarely brought up today? Because the worst features and individuals associated with Triangulation still operate in the Biden administration advisory team, and ideologically they stand with Corporate influence in opposition to Biden's own FDR inspired Economic program.
I keep mentioning Anita Dunn. She is no longer in the White House formally, but she is part of Biden's inner circle. Her husband is White House Counsel Bob Bauer, who may be a fine lawyer but has a corrupt wife. She runs a lobbying juggernaut which is opposing major aspects of the "Build Back Better" program while she is simultaneously giving Biden political advice on how to get bipartisan support for it by giving up whole parts of it. (Which won't work anyway, no matter how much they give up, due to GOP obstructionism)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/617185/
There is a network of Clinton/Obama administration Centrists who are still triangulating with the fascist GOP. They are the ones discussing "compromises" with Manchin and Sinema. These are the people responsible for sabotaging our Infrastructure plan and voting rights, by defending the fillibuster and keeping it in place in the name of bipartisanship.
Rothkopf's reference to the Clinton administration capitulation to the "Conservative Revolution" of Gingrich and Delay are in my view a signal to the Biden administration to actually start fighting, and stop compromising before we lose everything.
Many writers have written articles on the theme of "how did we get here?" No one yet to my knowledge has taken ownership of this Clinton era failure of commitment. Not even his former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, the well known Liberal commentator.
One of my priorities in making commentary has been to address what is missing in most political punditry, what is left out. This is where you often find what is most fundamental and in what way the writer's ideology gets in the way of real analysis. Or, what an editorial staff doesn't want going out under their masthead for purely corporate reasons.
Now that we are desperate, and people see the end of Democracy as imminent, the filters are coming off, and increasingly liberal pundits are giving voice to previously unspoken thoughts. The problem is, as I've been saying, they waited too fucking long to do it.
