Roosevelt's Ghost

       It’s worth betting real money that the Trump candidacy may blow up before or at the Republican convention.  If it does his replacement would probably be Governor John Kasich of Ohio—a prominent participant in the Primary contests with the mojo to defeat Hillary Clinton.  Absent a rejected Trump remaining in the race, a Kasich-like nominee would face the Democratic leadership with the possibility of seeing Hillary Clinton not only lose the election but lose her anticipated momentum to maintain and enlarge Democratic control of the Senate. This is why the Sanders candidacy remains in play.

       Both the Democrats and the liberal news media have had trouble moving from opportunistic day-to-day political coverage to the badly needed deeper probe into growing inequality in both the American and global community.  Sanders’  progressive policy proposals stand out because the ghost of the FDR New Deal version of the Democratic party—a party aligned by Roosevelt with working class and middle class folks—haunts today’s Democrats.  Thomas Franks, author of “What Happened to Kansas” and a new book, “Listen Liberal,” asserts that the FDR version of the Democratic Party has become the Bill and Hillary Clinton party of the top ten percent with deep commitments to the new class of technocrats, professionals, Wall Street wizards and Silicon Valley CEOs.  

       These are the CEOs who shipped millions of jobs to China to make their unprecedented fortunes.  It was a shift that left a third of Silicon Valley, South Chicago and the South Bronx with an irremediable jobless population. It’s terrible for the permanently jobless or underemployed, but working and middle class folks are almost equally stricken--the ones who teach in your local school or work on the fire department—but can’t afford a house to live in-town.  

        Lest a line form to cast the first stone, this class line can be found from Asia to your local church or synagogue.  Virtually every church in the United States (there are notable exceptions) holds services for their middle class congregants just a few miles from the bullet-infested narcotic-laden streets of their city, or from the migrants bent-over in the fields to pick their strawberries. Everyone can see that the political tempest is growing more violent from Afghanistan to the assassination of labour party MP Jo Cox in England to the Orlando madman equipped by Congress with an AR-15 automatic rifle.

        At the bottom of the Mid-East crisis is the vast inequality that creates unspeakable wars and that has so far killed 400,000 people in the Syrian conflict.

“the International Organization for Migration said that thousands of migrants had died trying to cross seas and deserts…. Along one of the busiest sea routes to Europe, a third of the dead were children.” 

       This global humanitarian and economic inequality crisis shattering communities world-wide is the real issue but it’s not clear that today’s Democratic party wants to face that storm.   While Bernie Sanders’ stance about economic injustice can belong to Hillary as well, she is very unlikely to win without a partnership with him.  Roosevelt’s ghost this week made it plain that this will be a hard sell. Sanders will be in Philadelphia with 1,900 delegates!