The Democratic establishment is freaking out right now because they are experiencing the problem of throwing good money after bad.
Bloomberg can’t buy the votes with billion dollars. He already spent half a billion. Bezos can buy The Washington Post, but up a pay wall and commission 1000 stories about how Mayor Pete is more electable than Bernie Sanders and it’s still not true.
Hillary got stopped by the genuine political and cultural wave of Obama and took a knee as Secretary of State. Then she put all of her leverage into halting Bernie’s populist Wave on the Left and got slammed from the right by Trump’s wave on the Right.
The Democratic establishment may have been saved by Obama’s willingness to play ball and lean right with a Clintonian nod to being the best behaved Blue Dog Democrat in the room (see Republican). But the DNC has not acclimated well to the Internet.
Nobody has accept for the Oligarchs. Bezos, Putin, Trump, they were born for the dumbing down and selective outrage of this age.
“I don’t waaaaaant to have to go to a bookstore! Oh cool Amazon has a bookstore. Convenient.”
The thing is that blowback is a b☆tch. And you can only rig a democratic election so much with Slave era ideas like the Electoral system, Jim Crow ideas like Gerrymandering and voter suppression, and Internet age ideas like turning Grandpas into Neo Nazis clinging to guns to protect their grandbabies.
A landslide is a landslide. You push those grand parents hard to the Right but at the end of the day they still need The New Deal. They paid into social security and it kept getting robbed and raided by both parties.
Grandma can’t take a bus from Kansas to Canada to buy cheaper medication.
The New Deal ain’t dead, but it needs to be renewed. As does the DNC’s commitment to the real Democratic party. Unless they want to take us further Right into the Stop & Frisk land of Jim Crow. That is a democratic Impulse of the Democratic establishment going back to the age of FDR he helped pull the party out of.
Just listen to the song “Rednecks” by Randy Newman. Those statues of Southern heroes are all Southern Democrats. When MLK went to Chicago before he got killed he was up against a machine the Democrats of the North bought into.
Read these words by Randy Newman and ask yourself which kind of Democrat you should be and which version of the party you should accept. Slavery itself was a good money after bad scenario. So is automation. Neither were truly progressive. You can save some money now but you are destroying the future. And we are still dealing with this wreckage.
“Yes he’s free to be put in a cage
In Harlem in New York City
And he’s free to be put in a cage
On the South Side of Chicago
And the West Side
And he’s free to be put in a cage
In Hough in Cleveland
And he’s free to be put in a cage
In East St. Louis
And he’s free to be put in a cage
In Fillmore in San Francisco
And he’s free to be put in a cage
In Roxbury in Boston
They’re gatherin’ ’em up from miles around
Keepin’ the n*****s down”
I choose Bernie’s platform, because the idea of abandoning the values of our party is truly radical. But as Randy explains, maybe it’s the classic move. Let’s not fix anything.
It’s swept under the rug that the rioters of 1919 were White. It’s only after we built these cages that we had “black riots”. Shakespeare knew people are people. You can reset your story in Italy or Botswana or Boston.
But people are fed up and you can’t stop a Revolution with clickbait from the Washington Post. The ballot box gives us an option for a bloodless one every four years. It’s not a coincidence there is low turn out and we have a Holiday for everything except voting.
At a certain point, “the rent is just too damn high” and you are no longer free. Except for the cages.
– Musician and writer Davin Michael Stedman has many ventures, such as the AMAZING blog, 100milesofmusic.com. Davin’s recent song has become a global earworm and Caribbean dancehall hit. Listen here on Reggaeville: DAVIN MICHAEL STEDMAN & ANTHONY RED ROSE – FREE YOUR MIND FEAT. SLY & ROBBIE WITH LENKY MARSDEN. The video is now available on Youtube: Tuff Gong Television. His single with British band Sherlock Soul is available here.
