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1. Starting 2006 or so, I've become somewhat disillusioned with the Democratic Party. I'm going to explain why. It has to do with the relationship most Democrats have with corporate power, or really, power. Now first, to explain, I'm a liberal Democrat.
2. What I saw in 2006 was the allegiance Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had to lobbying power. They both backed Joe Lieberman against a Democrat. Obama then lied about NAFTA in 2008, and retroactive immunity for telecoms. He lied about a lot in 2008. Dems didn't notice or care.
3. In 2009, I began working in Congress for a member of the financial services committee. Tim Geithner sought a foreclosure wave and to help the banks. Rahm Emanuel Larry Summers ran around protecting monopolies. My friends at Moveon, etc didn't notice, cheerleading Obamacare.
4. T day Obamacare passed, a friend sitting was sitting on my couch. He was tearing up with joy, and I've never felt so much contempt. We got calls from people with cancer. When do I get my free Obamacare? Try explaining to someone with cancer they get it in four years.
5. People in the Obama White House would scoff and laugh behind the scenes at who they perceived as deadbeats in foreclosure. Meanwhile we took calls from people desperately trying to show they paid the bank what they owed but were losing their home anyway.
6. I was reminded of the stupidity and venality of the Obama administration day after day by their actions, big and small. They were mean, petty, dumb, greedy, and dishonest. And Democratic voters refused to believe their own leaders were doing what they were doing.
7. Obama snuck in a provision to the stimulus mandating that AIG execs would get their bonuses. Obama then blamed that provision on Chris Dodd and held a press conference on how he would do everything he could to get those bonuses back, after they had already gone out.
8. Obama's first FCC Chairman, Julius Janikowski, was a buddy from law school. He refused to actually do net neutrality. He's now at the Carlyle Group in private equity. Tim Geithner is also in private equity. Obama takes massive speaking fees from powerful financiers. Rancid.
9. The thing is, Obama didn't do any of this without permission. He got permission from every single Democratic voter who supported and loved him. Every time his people threatened members with primary challenges (and he did), he was doing it with Democratic voters' endorsement.
10. No one was honest. Not the centrists or the left. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, 350.org and various spinoff movements refused to admit that Obama was hostile to their values. And gradually I realized it's because they just don't see power.
11. Most Dems think injustice is what lives in the heart. It isn't. It's what lives in our institutions. Corporate power is autocracy, but to know the autocracy, you have to learn about trade, finance, law. Liberal democracy is all about equality.
12. Our political order is oriented around legitimizing only those who can claim some form of victimization. It's why the woke stuff/white supremacy is so powerful. It's a fundamentally anti-enlightenment model of politics.
13. You can see how the Chinese government, which is a truly fascist power, uses illiberal arguments to advance its agenda. The idea that Chinese people's feelings are hurt, the claims to racial grievance, attacks on liberal democratic forms of government, the CIA in Hong Kong.
14. Tim Geithner was not a racist. But Tim Geithner did this. "According to a 2013 study of TARP investments, black-owned banks were ten times less likely to receive bailout money than nonminority-owned banks." washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/march…
15. Democrats do not see corporate power where racism and autocracy is institutionalized, because it conflicts with the left-libertarian narrative that only victims have a right to be heard.
16. It's improving, rapidly. @BernieSanders in 2016 gave voice to frustrated Democrats, and in 2020, the last debate was basically a rejection of Obama. But even so. We have a lot of work to do. Here's an example. National security.
@BernieSanders 17. A lot of the energy on the left is focused on sustainability, resiliency, localism. Good. Yay! And a lot of the energy on the right is focused on nationalism, making things in the U.S., protecting our supply chains.
Hey everyone, this is the same thing.
Hey everyone, this is the same thing.
@BernieSanders 18. At any rate, we have very serious problems. We can't make anything. That knowledge and experience was ripped out by Bill Clinton and it never came back. How are we going to do a Green New Deal? Who is going to do it? We can't build high speed rail in California.
@BernieSanders 19. Most of our think tanks are corrupted by Chinese and Wall Street money. Our elite class has been trained to be a bunch of useless McKinsey-trained fools.
@BernieSanders 20. We need a social movement to fix our corporate structures. A real movement. A movement of engineers and farmers and business people and bankers and programmers and students who hate corruption and love liberal democracy.
@BernieSanders 21. None of us have ever seen liberal democracy work the way it should. This is an accident of history. It's just weird we turned away from liberal democracy in the late 1970s. So we'll have to take it on faith and on archival evidence that it can work.
@BernieSanders 22. And the Republicans are in worse shape. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were our cult of personality leaders who corrupted us. But Reagan, Bush, Trump is yours. You will have to dig yourselves out, the way us Democrats are slowly doing it. It's possible. It's necessary.
@BernieSanders 23. Here's the AIG bonus piece, where Obama's people went to the mat on behalf of the evil bankers who crashed the world. Particularly toxic little episode. They never showed .01% of this amount of concern for the middle class. 
@BernieSanders 24. Yup.
