Hillary Stuffs Entire U.S. Ruling Class Into Her Big, Nasty Tent

by Glen Ford, BAR

Hillary Clinton is celebrating in the bloated expanse of the “Big Tent” Democratic Party she and Bill have dreamed of building since their days in the backwaters of Arkansas. Slick Willie and his wife have succeeded in assembling under one party roof nearly the whole of the U.S. ruling class and their hordes of attendants and goons. The scam that undergirded the duopoly system that has served the Lords of Capital so well for so long, has come undone. Thanks to a white nationalist billionaire who was too spoiled to play by the corporate rules, the two parties of the ruling class have become one.

It’s a funky place to be – especially for the traditional Black, brown and labor “base” of the party, now squished into a remote and malodorous corner of the tent, near the latrine, clutching the pages of a party platform that was never meant to bind anyone. These Democratic stalwarts appear intoxicated, high on the idea that they are part of a united front against the “fascist” Donald Trump and his imaginary storm troopers. The brass sound of martial music is heard, far off in the catered center of the tent. The generals have arrived, barking strategies to make Syria safe for “our” jihadists, re-bomb Libya, re-re-re-bomb Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia, and teach Russia and China the full meaning of geopolitical strangulation. Hillary’s cackle rings out above the bombast. She is pleased with her uniformed recruits.

Wall Street is also in the house, too big to jail and definitely too fat for this tent. Michael Bloomberg, the 7^th richest man in the country; Warren Buffet, who could buy and sell Bloomberg; and lesser plutocrats Meg Whitman and Mark Cuban, are part of Clinton’s “bipartisan cadre of billionaires.” Billionaires are, by nature, bipartisan, since they have no loyalties to country or party – only to their class. They are in Hillary’s Big Tent to trash one of their own, Trump, who has betrayed his class by raging against the free flow of money and jobs across borders, a heresy of the first order that is at the heart of Capital’s flight from the GOP, this year. Clinton claims she opposes the Trans Pacific Partnership corporate trade deal, but only the fools squeezed into the corner near the latrine feel compelled believe her. The Democratic Party platform they clutch so tightly says the opposite.

[read more here]