[…]
Hillary Clinton’s website says all the right
things when it comes to boosting incomes and job creation—just enough
information so one can enter a voting booth and with a hazy rationale pull the
lever against your own interests. Candidates like Clinton may wax empathetic
talking about the poor, but the reality that Democrats and their Republican
colleagues have created over the last four decades is deeply different from the
fuzzy optimism of their websites. Bernie Sanders is the outlier. He has
consistently punctuated the “rigged” system that benefits the one percent at
the expense of everyone else. He seems the only candidate willing to launch a
real jobs program, rather than tinkering with small business taxes or new
lending regimes that will theoretically produce job growth but in the end
deliver just the sliver of sound-byte ‘progress’ needed for the re-election
campaign.
Aside from Sanders, though,
Democrats aren’t interested enough to acknowledge the depth of the American
malaise. For instance, that most Americans haven’t got a $1000 in savings. That
household wealth is cratering.
That workers haven’t seen a raise this century. That one in four children lives in poverty. That 640,000 individuals exited the labor market last month, though these people
aren’t counted in the widely reported unemployment rate. This last point
reflects the Bill Clinton’s innovative formula for disguising the poor: to be
uncounted is to be unseen, and to be unseen is to be non-existent. Clinton also
found that the formula worked nicely for welfare reform.
Instead, as we’ll see in
Philadelphia this summer at the Democratic National Convention, Clintonites
will arrive touting the millions of jobs produced on Obama’s watch. No one will
mention what kind of jobs these are, or that they represent our glide path into
third-world economic status. If the created jobs are so desirable, why are half
of the 24 million citizens that rely on food banks already employed?
[…]
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