Why Bernie vs Hillary Matters More Than People Think

Why Bernie vs Hillary Matters More Than People Think

I saw this super-interesting and educating read on Facebook I thought might be appreciated more on here. It is really educational in regards to the consumption vs. investment dichotomy and how it affects the concurrently sad-state economy we live in.

My favorite part:

Democrats who remained committed to the party's egalitarian ideology rightly feared that Carter was too right wing and would effectively strip the party of its historical commitment to the continuation and expansion of the legacy of FDR and LBJ. However, they ran too many candidates against Carter, splitting the left vote and allowing Carter to win the nomination.

Click to expand...

Bill Clinton took the party even further to the right. In 1992, he ran on the promise to "end welfare as we know it," a total repudiation of the FDR/LBJ legacy. With the help of republicans, Clinton was eventually successful in drastically cutting the welfare program. Clinton also signed important deregulatory bills into law, like the Commodities Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

Click to expand...

The 2008 primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is sometimes billed as if it were a contest between two ideologies, but the most prominent difference between them was the vote on the Iraq War. On economic policy, there never was a substantive difference. The major economic legislation passed under Obama (Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act) did not address the structural inequality problem that the Democratic Party of the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60's and early '70s existed to confront.

Click to expand...

Wealth inequality, which decreased under FDR, Truman, JFK, and LBJ, increased under Carter, Clinton, and Obama:

Click to expand...

Someone somewhere else on this forum once said Obama and Hillary were essentially centre-right. At first I decried them as making baseless assumptions, but now I'm beginning to think they were right all along. I'm starting to think this country has been hijacked by two factions of vaguely-divergent (but still ultimately loyal to their corporate "bosses") right-wing crony capitalists (or, dare I say it, "ultranationalists")... and I'm thinking at this point in time a little bit of socialism would not be such a bad thing at all.

#FeelTheBern!