The Democrats Need to Do Much Better

 This is styled as an op-ed for newspaper submissions.  Unfortunately, I have less than a 5% acceptance rate.  Part of the reason is that the biggest newspaper in my State (Maine), the Bangor Daily News, leans Republican in its endorsements.  They did take one of my pieces last year, though.

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 The Democrats Need to Do Much Better

We live in a corrupt system, and the Democrats have been a big contributor to the problem.  They need to do much better.  Otherwise, a redoubling of outrage will make their recent victories short-lived. 

The wealth curve in our country, over the last several decades, has been like a broken lung, one that deflates the middle class and pumps up the wealthiest.  Four hundred citizens now have as much wealth as 50% of Americans (about 150 million people).  The mathematics of the distribution graph don't lie.  It is the clear sign of a sickly nation, not a healthy capitalism.

Who has spoken up about this?  Until the last election cycle, Bernie Sanders, who was not even a Democrat until recently, was the lone standout when it came to wealth inequality and obscene grift.

Consider our healthcare system.  It has come to the point where a hospital is ready to fleece someone for their entire lifesavings if they dare, heaven forbid, to get sick or injured.  Big pharma has no cap on pricing, unlike in other countries.  Once affordable drugs, such as insulin, have skyrocketed in cost.  Not long ago, the pharmaceutical industry had no qualms about flooding the country with addictive opioids to make a buck. 

I won't even go into the maddening, byzantine machinations of the health insurance companies.

The Democrats have been onboard with this decades-long moral decay.  They take plenty of donations from big insurance and big pharma.  Jobs went overseas or to Mexico thanks to Bill Clinton as much as the GOP.  Even very recently, Democrats have defended absurd tax cuts for the wealthy (such as the SALT deduction).

We have become an Alice-in-Wonderland nation.  If wages increase, the stock market suffers (worries of inflation).  If people lose jobs, the stock market benefits (overseas profits).  With a slant worthy of Svengali, increases in the Dow Jones are seen as more vital to our country than indices that monitor the health, income and happiness of the people. 

Case in point:  The Dow has soared to over thirty thousand points while Americans suffer the worst phase of a pandemic.

The siege on the middle class has been so sustained, so awful, that Donald Trump, an extreme outlier, took the White House in 2016.  He would not have been able to accede without tapping into outrage at how rotten our structures of governance and finance have become. 

Trump is even more blatant in his corruption.  But that's not the point.  Large segments of the population, say the 85% who don't have sizeable investments in the stock market, have lost confidence in America.  They have lost faith in our principles.  Many are ready to follow a new kind of leader, one who would change everything by acting as a monarch.

We should all, in fact, despair at the decline that has taken place.  We should recoil at the kleptocracy.  At the sucking away of middle-class life into a grotesque distribution curve.  At the obvious, brutal grift that has wrecked families and homes, and cost lives, health, and hope.

Are we now, even somewhat, that City on a Hill?  The Democrats need to do much better.  Heroically better.  They cannot be as weak and compromised as they have been, or we will continue our worsening decline.

 

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