On the famous podcast, Pod Save America, I found myself in the unusual position of agreeing with Jon Lovett. When he says, “The Election’s not for over a year and a half…I don’t know who’s putting this kind of pressure on you to pick a candidate this early.” I agree with this, but likely for a different reason than Lovett. I agree that there really is no reason you should pick a candidate right now, but you almost certainly know what category of Democratic Primary candidate that you are going to vote for.
See, Lovett and the rest of the Pod Manipulate America guys need to make sure their listeners don’t decide who they want to vote for right today. After all, If the Pod Save Guys said, Joe Biden or Beto O’Rouke or “Insert Random Corporate Owned Candidate X”…and they said, Joe is our guy and you should vote for him in 2020, then why would you continue tuning in to their show? You wouldn’t.
The Pod Save Guys and the rest of the big corporate media, CNN-FoxNews-MSNBC — they all suck in their own special way. Well they can’t have you tuning out their content before the election season really even begins for most Americans. Their business model depends on you continuing to tune in to their pretty pitiful cable news shows, radio programs, and/or podcast episodes from now until Election Day 2020. But, do you really need to do that?
No, you don’t. I’m going to attempt to convince you: 1) that you likely already fall into one of two camps today; 2) those two camps have different visions for the future of the country; and, 3) little is likely to change from now until Election Day regarding this core dynamic. Therefore, you might find yourself stuck between voting for a Corporate Owned Democrat (C.O.D) like Harris, Biden, Buttigieg, Booker, Beto, and/or Gillibrand, but you won’t likely be torn as whether or not to vote for a small “d” democratic Democrat (Small d) Bernie, Gabbard, Warren, or Yang. In fact, these two groups are the split in the Democratic Party. So, there is no reason to pick a candidate, but most people should be able to pick a side.
The crude explanation of the split follows. Democrats like Harris, Beto, and Biden want to get a majority of some sort in the legislature and to take the White House. They don’t want it to govern though. They want power to protect and grow their own power. They will not fight to transform our economy away from fossil fuels and endless war to something different and sustainable. They will take power and tell their working class voters that the federal government just doesn’t have the capacity to deal with the big issues that are killing thousands of working class and poor people in the U.S. every year.
While they tell poor people the government doesn’t have money to help them, they give trillions of dollars of public money to bankers and multibilliion dollar corporations. This isn’t even a hypothetical. This is what Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and C.O.Ds did in response to the 2008 crisis. Workers got a weak Affordable Care Act-bandaid on a fundamentally corrupt and broken healthcare system, while Wall Street got trillions and bonuses for crashing the economy. For several years after the crisis, corporations got Quantitative Easing to the tune of trillions of dollars following the Wall Street inflicted financial crisis of 2008. And about those wars Obama said he’d end if elected in 2008? We are still dropping bombs in every country we were when Obama took office over 10 years ago. We hoped for change in 2008 and didn’t get it. We are demanding it in 2020 and there is a path to it, but it’s not with a C.O.D. I wouldn’t vote for one of these people for President, Congress, or Senate, State Senate, State Representative, or Dog Catcher.
If you want to usher in a new era in American politics, then there’s no better way to voice that belief than by voting for a small “d” Democrat, such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Gravel, or an equivalent. Full disclosure, I’m voting for Bernie; however, Warren, Yang, and Gabbard are all already running exceptional campaigns and will likely continue to, so I can see why someone would be undecided within one side or the other of the current split within the Democratic Party.
First, C.O.Ds are integral parts of a fundamentally corrupt politics. They’ve spent their careers taking corporate money. Corporations run on profit. They invest in politics generally to secure business favors and/or to get a slice of a public budget for their company. The politicians come through, resulting in higher profits for the company. Over the period of a few decades, I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say plainly that big corporate America owns the Federal Government and uses the government primarily for their own benefit. It’s just who these CODs are.
The CODs are just so deep in all of it, they’re true allegiance is always going to be to corporate board rooms over working people. After all, these CODs have to get jobs when they leave office too. The CODs keep their public offices paying after they leave their them by walking through a revolving door. They often land a job at a prior donor. What many CODs do is cast a vote to benefit a company while in office, then go work for that company or some similar company in the industry. See John Boener, Joe Crowley, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton post public service or just go look at some of the prices these CODs fetch on the Washington Speaker’s Bureau. Essentially, what I’ve been trying to stress in the last two paragraphs is this: the popular CODs blasted to you from CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, etc. have already done a lot of damage to the country and fundamentally not what we need right now.
I’ll use Senator Sanders to explain why his position of well-to-the-left of the C.O.Ds makes him, and the rest of the small “d” democratic Democrats, better choices than any of the Corporate Owned Democrats. Bernie and the other democratic Democrats have long records of fighting very long, hard fights that usually faced overwhelming opposition against the fighters as they were fighting them. For instance, Bernie was talking about the climate emergency thirty years ago when almost no one else was. He’s voted against both Iraq Wars. A testament to Sanders’ consistency over time in the face of adversity. The C.O.Ds have had their careers funded by the very people Bernie has spent his career fighting against.
Why else vote for a democratic Democrat? They want to wield power. Many rightly argue that the Democratic Party, today primarily composed of C.O.Ds, have a certain way of doing business. First, they run a corporate financed campaign where they talk about helping workers and “regular Americans.” Then, they get in office and are met with “new realities”, or “political considerations”, or “budget constraints” or list out one of a 100 other bullshit talking points generated by some high paid cookie cutter D.C. consultant bot to be used to deceive voters of the Democratic base.
Once the C.O.D notifies the electorate of these new constraints they’ve just been made aware of once they assumed office, they then must convey the inevitable let down: “I cannot deliver my campaign promise. And no, I will not fight, I mean ‘my hands are tied.’” In the mean time there is always enough money for bailouts, war, and Quantitative Easing. That’s the game they play anyway. C.O.Ds manipulate. It’s just how they operate. Well, Bernie fights. He has a track record of fighting to make systems more environmentally and people centric…that’s what we need now more than ever.
See, Lovett was right, but just for the wrong reasons. You don’t need to make up your mind today about who to vote for, but honestly, you probably do already have a rough idea what category of candidate your voting for. All you have to do is ask a couple of questions: Do I want to get set up to be let down after the election by a representative not willing fight to really address inequality, climate, and the war on terror? Well, vote for a COD to be let down. If you want to change the politics of America by taking on directly the forces driving inequality, climate, and the war on terror, then vote for a small “d” democratic Democrat like Sanders, Gabbard, Warren, or Yang. To conclude, you may not know the exact candidate you want to vote for, but you likely do know in which of these camps you belong.
