Today marks the 60th anniversary of the creation of Medicare and Medicaid — and nearly one month since President Trump’s federal budget slashed nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid to extend tax cuts for the rich. The cuts could lead to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths every year. “Medicaid has been a lifeline. And without it, people will die,” says Ai-jen Poo, co-founder of Caring Across Generations and the Domestic Workers Alliance, which helped organize a 60-hour vigil last week ahead of the anniversary as part of a broader campaign to fight back against Trump’s cuts. She highlights the role of immigrants, who make up a third of the caregiving sector, and says Trump’s crackdown on immigration hastens the dwindling of care available to the aging and elderly. “We should be adding a trillion dollars in investments in healthcare in this country and in caregiving services in this country,” says Poo. “We need to strengthen these systems and programs for the 22nd century, not gut them.”

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

On January 31, the beginning of Tet, eighty-thousand Vietnamese troops issued Washington a formal eviction notice, attacking all the major cities and towns of colonial South Vietnam. Blasting through the walls of the U.S. Embassy compound, they killed two military police and holding off a helicopter assault for seven hours. Government employees arrived at work to find corpses twisted over the ornamental shrubbery and pools of blood in the white gravel rocks of the embassy garden.

They shelled the U.S. naval base at Camrahn Bay and threw open the jails in Quang Ngai city, setting thousands free. They marched nearly unresisted into the ancient capital of Hue and raised the Vietcong flag from its Citadel. They forced the U.S. to raze half the city to the ground at Ben Tre, which an American officer infamously justified on the grounds that, “We had to destroy the town to save it.”

After endless boasts of imminent victory, U.S. troops being home by Christmas, and the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, the Vietnamese Tet Offensive proved beyond all doubt that a U.S. military victory in Vietnam was not in the cards.

Wall Street turned against the war.

In March, LBJ discovered his Vietnam policy had left him no path to a second term. Though elected in a landslide in 1964, four years later his “Great Society” had turned to riot and left him a lonely prisoner of the White House. Wherever he went he was besieged by throngs of outraged students taunting him with “that horrible song” – “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” No matter how many speeches he canceled or how abruptly he changed his travel plans he could not avoid being “chased on all sides by a giant stampede.” The people were firing the president.

Support for escalation in Vietnam had evaporated. Worried that fulfilling General Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 more troops would leave Washington insufficiently protected against the threat of insurrection at home, a Council of Wise Men told a shocked Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw from the war before it tore the U.S. apart.

By then 150,000 Americans were dead or injured and much of Southeast Asia had been annihilated by a U.S. military machine that could do everything but stop. On March 31 Johnson went on nationwide TV to announce his forced retirement: “I shall not seek, and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Four days later Dr. King was assassinated for having publicly connected the dots between domestic racism and imperial war. A year to the day before he was shot he was widely condemned for a speech he gave before a crowd of three thousand at Riverside Church in New York City, where he did not mince words about the war:

“The peasants watched as we supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where thousands of homeless children wandered the streets like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do the peasants think as we test our weapons on them, as the Germans tested new medicines and tortures in Europe’s concentration camps? . . . .We have destroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary political force – the Unified Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators!”

A year later he was in Memphis to help striking Memphis garbage workers. The night of April 3 an exhausted and dispirited King was already in his pajamas and ready for bed when he received a call from Reverend Ralph Abernathy at Mason Temple, informing him that two thousand people had braved tornado warnings and a driving rain to hear him speak. “I really think you should come down,” pleaded Abernathy. “The people want to hear you, not me. This is your crowd.”

Dr. King got dressed and went out into the stormy night.

In the blaze of lights at the podium, he appeared nervous. He told his audience that if he were at God’s side on the dawn of creation he would ask to see Moses liberating his people, Plato and Aristotle debating philosophy, Renaissance Europe, Luther tacking his ninety-five theses on the church door, Lincoln emancipating the slaves, and Roosevelt charting a path to the New Deal. But he would not dally in those times or places, he said, preferring to move on and experience just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, when masses around the world rose up to say: “We want to be free.”

Dr. King, abandoned by militants, vilified by the press, stalked by death and the FBI, felt deeply grateful to share in the freedom struggles that heaped his life with hardship.

With the crowd shouting its approval, he bellowed that he had been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land. Brushing aside prospects of premature death, he said that longevity had its place, but that on that night he was not worried about any thing, not fearing any man.

A burning passion in his eyes, his voice rising to a shattering crescendo, he declared his last will and testament: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

The next day as he was preparing to go out to dinner with friends a bullet exploded into his face, severed his spine, and brought him crashing abruptly down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

Reverend Abernathy bolted to his side, crying out to those in the parking lot below: “Oh my God, Martin’s been shot!”

Dr. King, a look of terror in his eyes, clutched uselessly at his throat. His head lay in an expanding pool of blood. Abernathy tried to comfort him. “This is Ralph, this is Ralph, don’t be afraid.” Reverend King, still conscious, his magnificent voice silenced forever, couldn’t answer. But Abernathy felt he was communicating through his eyes.

In King’s motel room, Reverend Billy Kyle repeatedly banged his head against the wall as he screamed into the phone for an operator. Dashing up sobbing from the parking lot, Andrew Young groped for a pulse, then screamed: “Oh my God, my God, it’s all over!”

Everywhere at once riots erupted and cities burned.

Three weeks after King’s assassination Columbia exploded in protest. President Grayson Kirk, alarmed at the growing youth rebellion, announced that in disturbing numbers young people rejected all forms of authority, which was just another way of saying that all forms of authority were increasingly recognized to have discredited themselves.

Hundreds of students promptly took over the university, hoisting red flags, establishing community government, and barricading themselves inside campus buildings.

They purloined documents from Kirk’s office showing that the university was secretly promoting classified war research and working to “clean up” the neighborhood by moving out its Black and Puerto Rican residents. Resurrecting the spirit of the Paris Commune, the students debated meaning and tactics, relaxed to Dylan and the Beatles, and celebrated romance. Two students even got married, escorted to the center of an applauding circle by a candlelight procession of fellow protestors.

Eight days into deadlocked negotiations a thousand blue collar police were turned loose on the defecting sons and daughters of the Ivy League. Attacking with clubs and brass knuckles, they rioted for three hours, smashing up furniture and beating everyone in sight while carrying out a bloody mass arrest.

One hundred and twenty charges of police brutality were filed against the police department, the most in its history. Echoing the recently assassinated Che Guevara, Tom Hayden called for “one, two, many Columbias” in romantic hopes of bringing the racist imperial state tumbling down.

Days after the start of the Columbia revolt, student radicals in Paris surged into the streets chorusing “all power to the imagination,” propelling France to the brink of cultural revolution and setting the mighty franc to trembling.

Spontaneously embracing and kissing in the streets, tens of thousands of students and workers marched joyously together through the capital, waving red flags and singing the Internationale. Demanding workers’ power, peasants’ power, and students’ power, they announced the end of cooperation with soulless mechanization and bureaucratic arrogance.

On The Night Of The Barricades the fiercest street fighting since Liberation (WWII) shook the Latin Quarter as thousands of students marched in protest, overturning cars and trucks. The police attacked, beating them with clubs and rifle butts, kicking the rebels unconscious and dragging them through tear-gas clotted streets by the hair.  The students fought back with Molotov cocktails, filling them with siphoned gas and pushing vehicles into the middle of the street to serve as barricades. When the police charged, the protesters torched the cars and retreated behind sturdier lines while building residents tossed down water and wet cloths to aid their youthful comrades fighting with cobblestones.

A veteran of the clash reported, “I never felt the gas. I was never more alive.”

In 1968, even Catholic pacifists were moved to a more aggressive style of protest. On May 17, what became known as the Catonsville Nine entered the Catonsville, Maryland draft board office and doused a pile of draft records with their blood, then set them on fire with soap chips and gasoline, a homemade napalm recipe gleaned from a Green Beret handbook. While waiting to be arrested, they prayed and watched the records burn.

At their trial they spoke of United Fruit Company keeping Central American land fallow while the campesinos starved. They told of the CIA overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala and replacing it with a reign of butchers worthy of Hitler. Father Daniel Berrigan told of his visit to Hanoi, of the merciless U.S. bombings, of the weaponry certified improved through tests on Vietnamese flesh and bone. He read a statement explaining how simple humanity required the destruction of the draft files:

“Our apologies good friends . . . for the fracture of good order . . . the burning of paper instead of children . . . the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house . . . We could not so help us God do otherwise for we are sick at heart . . . our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children.”

In early June U.S. support for Israeli savagery caused Sirhan Sirhan to temporarily lose his mind. He had been just three years old when a series of violent episodes near his Jerusalem home scarred him for life. A dynamite bomb hurled by Zionists blew up a line of Arab passengers waiting for a bus at the Damascus Gate; a sudden burst of gunfire caused an army truck to swerve around a barrier and kill his older brother before his eyes; a British soldier blown up almost on his doorstep left behind a severed leg in a church tower and a finger in Sirhan’s back yard.

Nineteen years later Sirhan was living in Pasadena when Israel bombed and napalmed Palestinian refugee camps, subjugating what remained of historic Palestine in the Six Day Land Grab (1967), a sequel to the driving out of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, among them Sirhan and his family.

With his people tasting another round of bitter injustice, Sirhan watched Senator Robert Kennedy wearing a yarmulke on television and promising to cut off U.S. aid to Arab states while sending fifty new Phantom jets to Israel. Shocked, angry, horrified, he fled the television set in tears, covering his ears with his hands.

He scribbled in his notebook: RFK must die.

At his trial for the assassination of Senator Kennedy, Sirhan testified to the assassination of an entire nation:

“Well, sir, when you move – when you move a whole country, sir, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, from their own land, from their own businesses, sir, outside their country, and introduce an alien people, sir, into Palestine – the Jews and the Zionists – that is completely wrong, sir, and it is unjust and the Palestinian Arabs didn’t do a thing, sir, to justify the way they were treated by the West.

“It affected me, sir, very deeply. I didn’t like it. Where is the justice involved, sir? Where is the love, sir, for fighting for the underdog? Israel is no underdog in the Middle East, sir. It’s those refugees that are underdogs. And because they have no way of fighting back, sir, the Jews, sir, the Zionists, just keep beating away at them. That burned the hell out of me.”

Nobody paid him the slightest attention.  In spite of Israel’s constant provocations and attacks, Jews were everywhere portrayed as heroic, avenging victims, Arabs as congenital terrorists, and Israel’s Six Day Land Grab as a glorious warding off of a second Holocaust. Facts were entirely irrelevant.

With hopes of a peace candidate now definitively crushed, all eyes turned to Chicago as the Democratic Party prepared to nominate Hubert Humphrey there as its candidate for the presidency. Eighty percent of Democratic voters had chosen to support either RFK or Eugene McCarthy in hopes of negotiating an end to the Vietnam slaughter. Faced with LBJ’s vice-president heading up the ticket, anti-war protesters vowed to lay siege to the city as a prelude to what they somehow imagined might become a revolution.

Protest was out of favor in the Windy City. In response to the nationwide riots that followed Dr. King’s assassination, the Chicago Tribune opined that “Here in Chicago we are not dealing with the colored population, but with a minority of criminal scum,” and urged Mayor Richard Daley not to be like the “spineless and indecisive mayors who muffed early riot control” in Newark (1967) and Los Angeles (1965). Daley obliged, ordering his police officers to “shoot to kill.”

Loathing “longhairs,” Daley refused to issue permits for protest marches, rallies, or sleeping in the parks. He ordered the city Ampitheatre fenced off with barbed wire, put all twelve thousand Chicago police on 12-hour shifts, and mobilized six thousand National Guard troops. He posted a thousand FBI agents around the city and placed six thousand U.S. Army troops outfitted with flamethrowers, bazookas, and bayonets around the suburbs. With police outnumbering protesters three or four to one, Tom Hayden told members of a New York audience to come to Chicago prepared to shed their blood.

As summer waned the Convention convened, and following days of dangerous cat-and-mouse games in the streets between police and protesters, a brownshirt riot ensued.

Shouting kill, kill, kill, a squadron of red-faced, blue-helmeted, club-wielding police charged out of a bus at full-speed and attacked a jeering crowd of onlookers outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel, beating, choking, kicking and macing everyone in their path, including medics sporting Red Cross armbands. Like maddened Samurai they mowed their victims down, charging again and again, leaving the battered bodies bleeding in the street. Loading them onto the ambulances, they beat them once more.

Eyes bulging with hate, they drove the crowd through the window of the Haymarket Lounge, jumping through the glass shards to upend tables and smash everything inside. They screamed “get the fuck out of here,” and “move your fucking ass,” beating even the startled patrons of the bar. Undeterred by the presence of live TV cameras, they rioted in clouds of tear gas for seventeen long minutes while the surrounding crowd chanted, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.”

Across the street in his hotel shower Hubert Humphrey was briefly overcome from the effects of the gas, which he never was from the horrors of Vietnam.

When televised images of the bloodshed reached the floor of the Democratic Convention, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff stepped to the rostrum to denounce the “Gestapo tactics” of the police. In an instant Chicago Mayor Daley was on his feet, waving his arms and screaming in protest: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker go home.”

As the ballots were being cast, footage of the police riot was beamed across the nation. Viewers saw Hubert Humphrey, irrepressible advocate of the politics of joy, nominated for president in a sea of blood.

Of course, all this was but child’s play compared to the unrestrained violence being inflicted on the slopes and dinks and zipperheads – otherwise known as the Vietnamese people – by the U.S. war machine in Vietnam. Two years later in Detroit, Vietnam Veterans gave chilling testimony as to the type of crimes being committed:

“ . . . they didn’t believe our body counts. So we had to cut off the right ear of everybody we killed to prove our body count.”

“ . . . we threw full C-ration cans at kids at the side of the road. Well, just for a joke, these guys would take a full can, and throw it as hard as they could at a kid’s head. I saw several kids’ heads split wide open.”

“The philosophy was that anybody running must be a Viet Cong; he must have something to hide or else he would stick around for the Americans, not taking into consideration that he was running from the Americans because they were continually shooting at him. So they shot down anybody who was running.”

“This was common policy. Kill anything you want to kill, any time you want to kill it – just don’t get caught.”

“ . . . the heads of the bodies were cut off and they were placed on stakes, jammed down on stakes, and were placed in the middle of the trails and a Cav patch was hammered into the top of his head, with Bravo Company’s ‘B’ written right on the patch.”

“I saw during my tour 20 deformed infants under the age of one . . . I thought it was congenital or something, from venereal disease, because they had flippers and things . . . it was common knowledge that Agent Orange was sprayed in the area.”

“Fugas is a jelly-like substance. It’s flammable . . . they explode the barrel over an area and this flaming, jelly-like substance lands on everything . . . people or animals or whatever.”

“You could take the wires of a jeep battery put it almost any place on their body, and you’re going to shock the hell out of the guy. The basic place you put it was the genitals.”

In other words, the conduct of the United States in Southeast Asia during the war years was nothing short of a complete disgrace. Washington dropped eight million tons of bombs and nearly four hundred thousand tons of napalm, leaving behind twenty-one million bomb craters. It killed over two million Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Laotians, wounded over three million more, and scattered fourteen million traumatized refugees throughout Indochina. It rained down eighteen million gallons of Agent Orange and other defoliants, creating forests bereft of trees, animals or birds, and cursing the war’s survivors with extraordinary rates of liver cancer, miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects. It left in its wake eighty-three thousand amputees, forty thousand people blinded or deaf, and hundreds of thousands of orphans, prostitutes, disabled, mentally ill, and drug addicts.

The total effect was nearly permanent, as journalist Donovan Webster discovered on a visit to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in the mid-1990s.  There he saw a storage room stacked from floor to ceiling on all four sides with deformed fetuses, the final result of the Pentagon’s defoliation program begun three decades before. Some were double bodies fused together on a single torso, others had malformed faces, many had excess heads, fingers, and toes.

Donovan walked out of the storage room in shock.

In a nursery down the hall, a roomful of genetically-damaged orphans was overjoyed to meet the U.S. reporter come to visit them from overseas.

Sources:

 On Vietnam and the Tet Offensive:

Godfrey Hodgson, America In Our Time, (Vintage, 1976) p. 353-4; Frances Fitzgerald, Fire In The Lake – The Vietnamese and The Americans in Vietnam, (Vintage, 1972) p. 518-34; George McTurnan and John W. Lewis, The United States In Vietnam, (Delta, 1969) p. 371-3; Douglas Dowd, Blues For America, (Monthly Review, 1997) p. 153; Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 289; David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996) p. 89; Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War, (Pantheon, 1985) p. 308-9; Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian, (Little, Brown, 1994) p. 214

On MLK and his assassination:

Steven B. Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound – The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper and Row, 1982) p. 435, 483-6; PBS Documentary, 1968 – The Year That Shaped A Generation.

On the Columbia protests:

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987) p. 306-8; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 304-5; Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Long March, Short Spring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (Monthly Review, 1969) p. 125-7, 145; Tom Hayden, Reunion, A Memoir, (Random House, 1978) p. 276-82

On the French student-worker protests:

Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Long March, Short Spring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (Monthly Review, 1969 p. 73-102 passim; PBS Documentary, 1968: The Year That Shaped A Generation

 On the Berrigan brothers and The Catonsville Nine:

Phillip Berrigan with Fred. A Wilcox, Fighting The Lamb’s War: Skirmishes With The American Empire, (Common Courage, 1996) p. 80, 93, 96, 101-5; Daniel Berrigan, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Beacon, 1970) p. vii; William M. Kunstler with Sheila Isenberg, My Life As A Radical Lawyer, (Carol Publishing Group, 1994) p. 190.

On Sirhan Sirhan and RFK:

Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection – What Price Peace? (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978) p. 242-3

Note: A slightly different version of Sirhan’s mental collapse comes from the late Alexander Cockburn, who says Sirhan was driven over the edge from reading an account of the Phantom jets to Israel written by Andrew Kopkind in the Nation. See Jeffrey St. Clair, “Roaming Charges: the Return of Assassination Politics,” Counterpunch, August 12, 2016

On Sirhan Sirhan directly quoted from his trial:

Godfrey Jansen, Why Robert Kennedy Was Killed, (Third Press, 1970) frontispiece.

For an honest account of the Six Day War:

Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995).

On Mayor Daley and protest at the 1968 Democratic Convention:

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987) p. 320-6, Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir, (Random House, 1988) p. 297

On the Chicago police riots:

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 332-4; David Farber, Chicago, (University of Chicago, 1988) p. 200-1, 249; Daniel Walker, Rights In Conflict, (E. P. Dutton,  1968) p. 255-65; Mike Royko, Boss, (Signet, 1971) p. 188-9; Mark L. Levine et al, eds. The Tales of Hoffman (Bantam, 1970); p. 124; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 297

On Vietnam Veterans’ testimony about war atrocities:

Vietnam Veterans Against The War, The Winter Soldier Investigation (Beacon, 1972) p. 5-114 passim

On statistics of the overall damage done by the Vietnam War:

Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar – Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race, (St. Martin’s 1989) p. 44; Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm – Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (South End, 1979), p. 7-9

On the long-lasting effects of the defoliation campaign in Vietnam:

Donovan Webster, Aftermath – The Remnants of War (Pantheon, 1996) p. 214-17

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael K. Smith.

It Can Always Get Worse Dept: After Margarine Trailer Queen told a crowd of young Nazi wannabes that Biden wants to "complete socialism" by addressing education, poverty, health care etc just like FDR/LBJ/Lenin, and before she called Jack Smith "a weak little bitch" for trying to arrest "the People’s president," she unveiled a new "MAGA rap" video with one Forgiato Blow, as in coke, who took time off from bragging on "four bitches in my trailer" to laud her for "fighting for our freedom." Whew.

Georgia's screechy so-called Rep. Greene was last seen at the week-end's far-right Turning Point conference in Palm Beach, where the tawdry likes of Trump, Gaetz, Tucker et al valiantly worked at whipping up a new generation of fascists; at night, they were joined by Groyper and Nationalist Network white supremacist hooligans trying to entice often-under-age females to party with them - “Invite Only, No Libtards” - while proclaiming “Anne Frankly, Anne Frankly," "White Boy Summer!" and "Aryan Autumn!" Despite having just been booted from the Freedom Caucus, lipstick-on-a-pig Marge showed up at the confab anyway, fear-mongering by ominously warning that Joe Biden, just like the highly esteemed Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, is plotting to do Bad Commie Things like "address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and welfare," and create jobs - all longtime Marxist priorities, if we're remembering our Das Kapital right. Are we?

Carefully reading from notes like a 5th-grader struggling with a confounding book report or Wikipedia entry - though "Wikipedia would come out looking like the Library of Alexandria" compared to her - Greene darkly summoned the specters of Johnson and Biden to ask, "How are they the same?" "They’re both Democrat socialists!” she shrieked, which isn't a thing, but okay! Inane History 101 lumbered on: She incisively noted LBJ was a Senate majority leader - "Does that sound familiar?" - and VP to JFK - Biden was a vice-president too! - whose "socialist programs were the Great Society" and Biden's is Build Back Better "the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs (which is) finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on,” just like ole Vladimir (Lenin, not Putin, though close). You'd think owning the libs by flagging their stellar legislative achievements would be a staggeringly stupid political strategy, but to her thinking (sic) programs that help millions of people translate into, "We're losing our freedoms."

Thus did she offer a terrific lead-in for snarky Dark Brandon. "Caught us," the White House tweeted. "President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families." Then he promptly made an ad of her speech: "I approve this message." LOL. Meanwhile, despite periodic claims she's "evolved," the esteemed gentlelady from Georgia, as Jamie Raskin likes to call her, keeps tumbling into deeper, louder, white-trash-filled holes. Having screamed "liar!" at Biden during the State of the Union, ranted about Pelosi's "Gazpacho police, melted down at a security briefing, called Pride flags "Hate America flags," derided trans women as "men in a dress," charged Dems were "princess predators" for supporting Ketanji Jackson's SCOTUS appointment, and promoted her podcast with an image of her at the Capitol with an AR-15, she recently called for Biden, his 500-person staff and (duh) Hunter to be drug-tested after coke was found at the White House because, noted Sherlock Space Laser Lady, "It should not be a mystery who's (sic) cocaine was found."

Her timing was sublime: A few days later, she launched her "rap career" in a video by one Forgiato Blow, a chubby, racist white rapper known for “Pure Cocaine" about selling and snorting it, and for songs about trafficking women - an earlier one featured babysitter aficianado Matt Gaetz - with Dylan-esque lyrics like, “I just got your baby mama...Bad day I make 20 on her” and, “Got like two bitches fucking two bitches...They call me blow I made them snort it off they ass." Born Kurt Jantz, the Florida-based, face-tattooed - bitcoin, Richie Rich, RR for Rolls Royce - lout in an "American Gangster” cap was a white middle-class kid who failed to make it in the rap game until he changed his moniker to Blow, also Trump's Nephew and Mayor of Magaville. Once he started alternating his coke-fueled-orgies-with-yahoos-and-flags tracks with iconic anthems like "All Eyez on MAGA," "Fock Bud Light," and "Boycott Target," for its Pride Month merch, he sparked reviews like "What the fuck is this," "Conservative artist = shoutbox full of rage," and "pee yew."

His latest triumph, "MTG," raises the question, "What comes after cringe?" Hurl? A paean to "MAGA's MVP," it celebrates "a southern belle, a little hood" - "Watch her shake 'n bake/ Watch her drain the swamp" - who's "calling RINO’s out/No one does it better than you." It begins with Greene's screechy, nuanced oratory - "The Democrats are a party of pedophiles" - and goes down from there. "Everyone in Washington has known about the Biden crimes for a very long time yet nobody has said anything about it" while "regular Americans, they go to jail when they don't pay their taxes (or) if they walk in the Capitol escorted by Capitol police" yada yada. Then there she is, seated on a gold, winged throne - yes, there've been a lot of toilet jokes - awkwardly smirking as Blow serenades her: "Deep state and the left always hatin’/ When they gonna let Joe up out that basement?...She’s fighting for the Jan Six-ers/ She’s fighting good versus evil." More awkward smirking as she stands, folds her arms, perches on a flashy car, seemingly speechless like the rest of us.

"You Can’t Get More MAGA Then (sic) MTG & FORGIATO BLOW!! America 1st Patriots!!" exclaims Blow online, urging, "Let’s Get It (sic) The Top 10 on iTunes." Greene was also psyched about her new career move. "Most rap videos exploit women, glorify drugs and violence, but Forgiato Blow’s new video is about calling out the left’s grooming agenda and protecting our children from genital mutilation," she gushed, having clearly neglected yet again to do her homework. "I never thought I’d be featured in a rap video, but then again I never thought the left would be grooming our children!” Observers responded they'd likewise never thought they'd be subjected to this. "Hands down the most awkward disaster I’ve ever seen on the Internet - I need to scrub my eyeballs," said one, echoed by, "That's enough Internet for today. Many wondered if she was "on the clock" for her so-called constituents while churning out this effluvia; others tried to humor her. "Children love to pretend," one noted. "Some pretend to be adults. It's so precious. Yes, you are special indeed."

Yet she's still here. This week she called for investigating "COVID vaccine injuries and deaths," pushed four critical amendments" to a FAA bill to prohibit diversity and equity programs that "make our sky’s (sic) less safe," vowed to kill Green New Deal provisions "to fund Democrat (sic) pet projects" and praised 65 countries with border walls, including "Israel's Apartheid Wall" - "Walls are very important for most countries" - by quoting a 2015 Daily Mail story ("a study last month") but leaving out its conclusion that walls' "main function is theater...not real security.” Sigh. Dorothy Parker, asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence: "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think." Finally, she freaked out over Trump's latest indictment: "It's absolute bullshit...The Communist Democrats are trying to win (the) election by arresting the People’s president (to) cover up Joe Biden’s REAL CRIMES." Also hoax, lies,little bitch Jack Smith, "proven innocent time and time again." (Wait, when?) "It's hard to recognize our country anymore," she squawked. "It's an embarrassment on the world stage." Yes. Yes, she is.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

It Can Always Get Worse Dept: After Margarine Trailer Queen told a crowd of young Nazi wannabes that Biden wants to "complete socialism" by addressing education, poverty, health care etc just like FDR/LBJ/Lenin, and before she called Jack Smith "a weak little bitch" for trying to arrest "the People’s president," she unveiled a new "MAGA rap" video with one Forgiato Blow, as in coke, who took time off from bragging on "four bitches in my trailer" to laud her for "fighting for our freedom." Whew.

Georgia's screechy so-called Rep. Greene was last seen at the week-end's far-right Turning Point conference in Palm Beach, where the tawdry likes of Trump, Gaetz, Tucker et al valiantly worked at whipping up a new generation of fascists; at night, they were joined by Groyper and Nationalist Network white supremacist hooligans trying to entice often-under-age females to party with them - “Invite Only, No Libtards” - while proclaiming “Anne Frankly, Anne Frankly," "White Boy Summer!" and "Aryan Autumn!" Despite having just been booted from the Freedom Caucus, lipstick-on-a-pig Marge showed up at the confab anyway, fear-mongering by ominously warning that Joe Biden, just like the highly esteemed Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, is plotting to do Bad Commie Things like "address education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, transportation, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and welfare," and create jobs - all longtime Marxist priorities, if we're remembering our Das Kapital right. Are we?

Carefully reading from notes like a 5th-grader struggling with a confounding book report or Wikipedia entry - though "Wikipedia would come out looking like the Library of Alexandria" compared to her - Greene darkly summoned the specters of Johnson and Biden to ask, "How are they the same?" "They’re both Democrat socialists!” she shrieked, which isn't a thing, but okay! Inane History 101 lumbered on: She incisively noted LBJ was a Senate majority leader - "Does that sound familiar?" - and VP to JFK - Biden was a vice-president too! - whose "socialist programs were the Great Society" and Biden's is Build Back Better "the largest public investment in social infrastructure and environmental programs (which is) finishing what FDR started, that LBJ expanded on,” just like ole Vladimir (Lenin, not Putin, though close). You'd think owning the libs by flagging their stellar legislative achievements would be a staggeringly stupid political strategy, but to her thinking (sic) programs that help millions of people translate into, "We're losing our freedoms."

Thus did she offer a terrific lead-in for snarky Dark Brandon. "Caught us," the White House tweeted. "President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families." Then he promptly made an ad of her speech: "I approve this message." LOL. Meanwhile, despite periodic claims she's "evolved," the esteemed gentlelady from Georgia, as Jamie Raskin likes to call her, keeps tumbling into deeper, louder, white-trash-filled holes. Having screamed "liar!" at Biden during the State of the Union, ranted about Pelosi's "Gazpacho police, melted down at a security briefing, called Pride flags "Hate America flags," derided trans women as "men in a dress," charged Dems were "princess predators" for supporting Ketanji Jackson's SCOTUS appointment, and promoted her podcast with an image of her at the Capitol with an AR-15, she recently called for Biden, his 500-person staff and (duh) Hunter to be drug-tested after coke was found at the White House because, noted Sherlock Space Laser Lady, "It should not be a mystery who's (sic) cocaine was found."

Her timing was sublime: A few days later, she launched her "rap career" in a video by one Forgiato Blow, a chubby, racist white rapper known for “Pure Cocaine" about selling and snorting it, and for songs about trafficking women - an earlier one featured babysitter aficianado Matt Gaetz - with Dylan-esque lyrics like, “I just got your baby mama...Bad day I make 20 on her” and, “Got like two bitches fucking two bitches...They call me blow I made them snort it off they ass." Born Kurt Jantz, the Florida-based, face-tattooed - bitcoin, Richie Rich, RR for Rolls Royce - lout in an "American Gangster” cap was a white middle-class kid who failed to make it in the rap game until he changed his moniker to Blow, also Trump's Nephew and Mayor of Magaville. Once he started alternating his coke-fueled-orgies-with-yahoos-and-flags tracks with iconic anthems like "All Eyez on MAGA," "Fock Bud Light," and "Boycott Target," for its Pride Month merch, he sparked reviews like "What the fuck is this," "Conservative artist = shoutbox full of rage," and "pee yew."

His latest triumph, "MTG," raises the question, "What comes after cringe?" Hurl? A paean to "MAGA's MVP," it celebrates "a southern belle, a little hood" - "Watch her shake 'n bake/ Watch her drain the swamp" - who's "calling RINO’s out/No one does it better than you." It begins with Greene's screechy, nuanced oratory - "The Democrats are a party of pedophiles" - and goes down from there. "Everyone in Washington has known about the Biden crimes for a very long time yet nobody has said anything about it" while "regular Americans, they go to jail when they don't pay their taxes (or) if they walk in the Capitol escorted by Capitol police" yada yada. Then there she is, seated on a gold, winged throne - yes, there've been a lot of toilet jokes - awkwardly smirking as Blow serenades her: "Deep state and the left always hatin’/ When they gonna let Joe up out that basement?...She’s fighting for the Jan Six-ers/ She’s fighting good versus evil." More awkward smirking as she stands, folds her arms, perches on a flashy car, seemingly speechless like the rest of us.

"You Can’t Get More MAGA Then (sic) MTG & FORGIATO BLOW!! America 1st Patriots!!" exclaims Blow online, urging, "Let’s Get It (sic) The Top 10 on iTunes." Greene was also psyched about her new career move. "Most rap videos exploit women, glorify drugs and violence, but Forgiato Blow’s new video is about calling out the left’s grooming agenda and protecting our children from genital mutilation," she gushed, having clearly neglected yet again to do her homework. "I never thought I’d be featured in a rap video, but then again I never thought the left would be grooming our children!” Observers responded they'd likewise never thought they'd be subjected to this. "Hands down the most awkward disaster I’ve ever seen on the Internet - I need to scrub my eyeballs," said one, echoed by, "That's enough Internet for today. Many wondered if she was "on the clock" for her so-called constituents while churning out this effluvia; others tried to humor her. "Children love to pretend," one noted. "Some pretend to be adults. It's so precious. Yes, you are special indeed."

Yet she's still here. This week she called for investigating "COVID vaccine injuries and deaths," pushed four critical amendments" to a FAA bill to prohibit diversity and equity programs that "make our sky’s (sic) less safe," vowed to kill Green New Deal provisions "to fund Democrat (sic) pet projects" and praised 65 countries with border walls, including "Israel's Apartheid Wall" - "Walls are very important for most countries" - by quoting a 2015 Daily Mail story ("a study last month") but leaving out its conclusion that walls' "main function is theater...not real security.” Sigh. Dorothy Parker, asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence: "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think." Finally, she freaked out over Trump's latest indictment: "It's absolute bullshit...The Communist Democrats are trying to win (the) election by arresting the People’s president (to) cover up Joe Biden’s REAL CRIMES." Also hoax, lies,little bitch Jack Smith, "proven innocent time and time again." (Wait, when?) "It's hard to recognize our country anymore," she squawked. "It's an embarrassment on the world stage." Yes. Yes, she is.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

About 50 striking nurses have held a protest in American Samoa over their employment conditions.

The protest yesterday follows some nurses at the LBJ Hospital who walked off the job on Friday after discovering their pay was lower than they expected it to be.

The striking nurses protested near the hospital about unpaid overtime and the hospital’s failure to pay them wage increments promised last week.

• READ MORE: Other American Samoa reports

One senior nurse told RNZ Pacific that with the LBJ Hospital hiring unlicensed nurses from Fiji, and accommodating them in hotels to await nursing school in January, it must be able to afford wage commitments to its current staff.

Two nurses who spoke on condition of anonymity to KHJ News said they were promised increases in their latest pay cheques, which were credited to bank accounts last Friday.

They said what they were promised and what was in their accounts did not match.

Those nurses who did receive pay increases are said to have received hikes ranging from 18 cents an hour to $1 an hour, but it is believed that some did not receive a pay rise at all.

KHJ News reports the nurses saying they work a minimum of 12 hours and the ratio is sometimes one nurse to 12 patients because of the acute nursing shortage.

They said this is against regulations and puts patients’ lives at risk.

Since Friday, contract nurses have been manning the wards and clinics, including newly hired ones from Fiji who have yet to undergo certification under US standards.

A meeting between the nurses and the board of directors and CEO of the hospital is due to take place.

Hospital management has yet to respond to media questions about the nurses’ action.

The CEO of the LBJ Hospital, Moefaauo William Emmsley, announced a week ago that the hospital had completed a salary reclassification for nurses which would bump up the entry rates for nurses and all salary levels.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Former President Lyndon B. Johnson (left) and his successor, Richard Nixon, ride together to the so-called Western White House on Aug. 27, 1969.

Photo: Bettmann Archive

“The prospects for a bombing halt or a cease-fire were dim, because Nixon was playing the problem … to block.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jon Schwarz.

Many grassroots Democrats separated from their party in the 1990s, and the 2020 election may be the last chance to save the marriage.

While the GOP has been trying to establish a semi-permanent ruling majority through bigotry, gerrymandering and voter suppression, Democrats had long-term majority control of American politics pretty much continuously for more than a half-century.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected four times to the presidency and brought with him a Democratic Party sweep so complete that, with the exception of two brief two-year periods, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives from 1931 to 1995. FDR built the modern-day Democratic Party and launched it toward the 21st century.

Working-class Americans had fallen in love with Roosevelt and Democratic Party policies in the 1930s, and that love affair persisted across the better part of three generations. In the past few decades, though, they “fell out of love” with the Democratic Party and began regularly putting Republicans in charge of the country.

What happened?

Back in the 1980s, sociologist Diane Vaughan did some remarkable research about how people fall in and out of love that she compiled in her book Uncoupling. Her surprising but commonsense findings, now used by psychotherapists and marriage counselors around the world, apply to politics as much as they do to intimate relationships.

At some point during most relationships, one partner will become dissatisfied with the behavior of the other. When this dissatisfaction is so fundamental that the unhappy partner might consider dissolving the relationship if it’s not changed, they will almost always say something or otherwise signal their dissatisfaction.

This signal of dissatisfaction is referred to by therapists as “the cry,” as in “the announcement” (think town crier, not sobbing). If the “offending” partner ignores or doesn’t understand the gravity of this “cry out” about how the relationship is going, it’s referred to as “the cry unheard.” The most common occurrence is that the partner “hears” the cry, but doesn’t think it’s a big deal and so ignores it; in other cases, it’s missed altogether.

When the “cry” isn’t heard or is misunderstood as a routine small disagreement, the dissatisfied partner will begin noticing other things that are offending, and, over time, compile a list of reasons to leave the relationship that outnumbers the reasons to stay.

Meanwhile, the offending partner—not having heard, or having misunderstood the “cry”—is oblivious and thinks everything is just fine.

The first turning point in the relationship comes when the dissatisfied partner, having put out the cry unheard and not seeing changes in behavior, starts to share the grievance with others, complaining (often subtly) about their partner.

After a (typically relatively short) time, having gotten feedback from others that, “Yes, that behavior would bother me, too,” the dissatisfied partner, concluding the relationship can’t be salvaged, begins an emotional separation process, moving past bargaining and anger into grieving the loss, accepting that the relationship is not salvageable, and then, finally, announcing that they are pulling the plug on the relationship.

Hearing for the first time this announcement that the relationship is dead, the clueless partner who didn’t hear the cry is blindsided, shocked, and devastated. While their partner has already gone through all the stages of unhappiness, deciding to leave, grieving the failure of the relationship, and accepting it as over, the clueless partner is forced to begin the process (similar to Kubler-Ross’ stages of dying) for themselves from a cold start.

Applying this model to the Democratic Party, the first really loud “cry unheard” from the Democratic electorate came in 1992.

Prior to 1992, the Democratic Party had been FDR’s and LBJ’s party of big government, big projects (from legalizing unions to creating Social Security and Medicare to putting a man on the moon), and the great defender of working people.

For example, many Democrats and their union allies strongly opposed Nixon’s 1974 Trade Act (ultimately signed by Gerald Ford) that gave fast-track authority to the president to encourage offshoring American jobs (we’ve lost more than 80,000 factories just since then) by cutting protective tariffs on imports.

I was living in Michigan running an advertising agency and reporting news part-time in the mid-1970s, and I remember well how dangerous it was to drive one of the cheap imported (mostly Japanese) cars that began flooding the country that decade as a result of the Nixon/Ford trade policies.

Working people were furious with the job losses, and when Jimmy Carter didn’t reverse Nixon’s trade policies, they turned to Reagan, who had promised, in the election of 1980, that he would protect workers’ jobs, even securing the endorsement of PATCO, the air controllers union he would famously betray in his first year in office. While union leaders were wary and opposed Reagan, many rank-and-file members believed the charismatic actor.

But instead of standing up for working people, in 1981 Reagan declared war on the unions (then the largest funders of the Democratic Party nationwide), and began negotiations with Mexico and Canada to speed up the rate at which American companies were moving factories and, thus, union jobs out of the U.S.

This picked up steam with the NAFTA agreement itself, which was finalized by the George H.W. Bush administration in 1992, although it was yet to be ratified by Congress.

In 1971, when Walmart was a regional retailer operating in only five states, its stores often had banners proclaiming what became the title of Sam Walton’s autobiography: “Made in America.” By the election year of 1992, four years after Sam had stepped down as CEO, it was getting hard to find anything in a Walmart that was still made in the USA.

And it wasn’t just Walmart—the 1970s trickle of foreign cars had become a flood by the end of the Reagan and Bush years in 1992, and union jobs all across America were vanishing, along with the factories that provided for them.

Thus, the “cry unheard” of America’s working people—most of them Democrats back then (even if they’d had an “affair” with Reagan)—was, “Please stop these insane ‘free trade’ deals that Nixon started and Reagan/Bush put on steroids!”

But by this time the leadership of the Democratic Party wasn’t listening, or dismissed union concerns as something that would pass. As Reagan planned, union jobs evaporated throughout the 1980s and with them went the ability of big unions to support Democratic politicians with either cash or boots-on-the-ground.

With the unions dying under Reagan’s assault, Bill Clinton, planning to run for president in the election of 1992, knew he had to find other sources of financial support (the Supreme Court had opened the floodgates to corporate money in 1976 and 1978, exploding the cost of a presidential campaign). This was before anybody knew how to raise individual contributions on the internet, so Clinton had to figure out how to finance his campaign without relying on the unions.

As Al From lays out in his book The New Democrats and the Return to Power, he and Bill Clinton worked “to rescue the party from the political wilderness, redefine its message, and, most importantly, win presidential elections.” And that would take a lot of cash.

Bank robber Willie Sutton famously said that banks were “where the money is,” and the money available for politics in 1992 had moved from the pockets of working people (wages had been flat for more than a decade) and their unions (unionization was in freefall) into the pockets of banks, insurance companies, drug companies, defense contractors, and other big corporations. And the Supreme Court had legalized taking their money in exchange for favors just before Reagan’s election in 1976 and 1978 (and tripled down on it in 2016).

“In April 1989,” From’s book notes, he “traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas, to recruit the state’s young governor, Bill Clinton, to be chairman of the DLC.” The result of their partnership was the creation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and a new mantra for the Democratic Party: “[E]conomic centrism, national security, and entitlement reform…” that brought with it a flood of corporate and billionaire money.

The party of big government solutions had become the party of big corporate money.

As a result, that first Clinton election year, 1992, was also the year when the “cry unheard” of American working people became a primal scream.

Nearly one in five voters that year cast a ballot for an eccentric billionaire from Texas, Ross Perot, whose mantra was that the NAFTA free trade agreement negotiated by Reagan/Bush but also supported by the newly baptized DLC chair Clinton would lead to “a giant sucking sound from the South” as factories and jobs moved to Mexico.

Clinton suggested that blue-collar jobs weren’t the future of America, and his running mate, Al Gore, said that moving automotive and other factories to Mexico would actually be good for America because Mexican workers would no longer have an incentive to cross our southern border and “we [could] cut down on illegal immigration.”

The Democratic Party now led by Clinton thus embraced a behavior that most working Americans knew would be a disaster for them, and that they had cried out loudly against with their Perot vote in 1992.

Over the next eight years, as Clinton ignored them, many began considering having another affair with the GOP. After all, if Clinton was going to embrace Reagan/Bush trade policies, why not just go right to the source—the GOP itself—for policy prescriptions.

According to Bob Woodward, during a meeting in the Oval Office, Clinton said sarcastically, “Where are all the Democrats? I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans.”

He added, “We’re Eisenhower Republicans here. Here we are, and we’re standing for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?”

Further turning his back on the FDR/LBJ Democratic Party principles, Clinton went on to heartily embrace Republican policies of cutting the social safety net. “The era of big government is over,” he proclaimed.

Putting the knife hilt-deep into the spine of LBJ’s Great Society, Clinton said, “Today we are ending welfare as we know it” as he signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. That law undid much of LBJ’s Great Society legislation, which had succeeded in cutting poverty rates in America from 22.2 percent in 1963 down to 12.6 percent in 1970.

For the first time since LBJ’s Great Society in the 1960s, families in poverty were not guaranteed a lifeline. They had to prove they were working in order to qualify for assistance, which sounded like a good idea in theory, especially during boom times like the ’90s, when there were lots of jobs available. But during recessions, when three or four people are looking for every one available job, a work requirement for welfare does a lot of harm to already struggling families.

The stats have borne this out. In the years after welfare reform, as a series of presidents and governors have followed in Clinton’s footsteps, ever more people have been kicked off benefits, while poverty has increased. Before Clinton’s “welfare reform,” roughly 70 percent of impoverished families had access to a lifeline. But after reform, by 2016, only 23 percent did, and in some states that number was below 10 percent.

Meanwhile, the Reagan Revolution’s trade policy was wiping out the industrial base of America, while its tax policies were simultaneously moving trillions of dollars in wealth from middle-class families into the pockets of the top 1 percent.

The year Reagan was sworn in, we were the richest nation in the world, and other than a few wobbles during the Civil War and two World Wars, our national debt had been relatively steady in inflation-adjusted dollars since the administration of George Washington. We were the world’s largest creditor—more countries owed us money than any other nation on earth.

Today, after nearly 40 years of neoliberal Reaganomics, we are the world’s largest debtor nation, and our national debt nearly outweighs our annual GDP.

The year Reagan was sworn into office, the United States was the largest importer of raw materials in the world, and the world’s largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods. We brought in ores for manufacturing, and shipped out everything from TVs and computers to cars and clothing.

Today, things are totally reversed: We are now the world’s mining pit, the largest exporter of raw materials, and the world’s largest importer of finished, manufactured goods. We’ve gone from trade surpluses to trade deficits, a reflection of the fact that our factory floors had moved to Asia and Mexico.

In 1960, about one in four Americans worked in manufacturing, producing things of lasting wealth for our nation. Today, after jumping headfirst into one free-trade agreement after another, fewer than one in ten Americans work in manufacturing.

Between 2000 and 2017, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. They didn’t disappear; they just moved to low-wage factories in foreign nations.

Ironically, Republican President Eisenhower (1952-1960) knew that Americans loved FDR’s New Deal, and continued FDR’s trade policies. He had, after all, grown up with them (he was born in 1890), and fought World War II as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe under FDR and led the invasion at Normandy.

He told his brother Edgar in a 1954 letter, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

Eisenhower added, “There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are… Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

But Clinton and the “moderate” DLC Democrats embraced becoming Eisenhower Republicans, even as Eisenhower would have repudiated their policies.

“CLINTON SWIPES THE GOP’S LYRICS” read the headline of a 1996 Washington Post column by E.J. Dionne, which opened with this prescient paragraph:

“‘The good news is that we may elect a Republican president this year,’ said Republican consultant Alex Castellanos. ‘The bad news is that it may be Bill Clinton.’”

The result was the beginning of the Great Uncoupling the Democratic Party experienced in the 1990s, with formerly Democratic-voting working-class and poor people going over to the GOP, a trend we saw continued with Trump’s election.

As Harry Truman once said, “The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat…”

As jobs and economic issues became the exclusive provenance of what the media calls “far-left” politicians like Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders, and the leadership of the Democratic Party stayed with Reaganomics, working people generally failed to show up in large enough numbers to keep George W. Bush out of the White House.

But George W. Bush didn’t repudiate Reaganomics, so the working class continued to stagnate economically. Frustrated Americans decided to take another try with the Democrats.

This set up Senator Barack Obama, who promised “hope and change,” to beat John McCain’s “steady as she goes” approach to the presidency.

But, vague rhetoric aside, Obama’s “change” was largely a continuation of Clinton’s Eisenhower-like corporate- and billionaire-friendly DLC policies. He restored dignity and sanity to the presidency, but also pushed hard to expand NAFTA-like outsourcing policies by throwing several years of political capital into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was ultimately as unpopular among a majority of Americans as was NAFTA in 1992. And his support of organized labor was weak, at best.

Since 1981, not one American president has seriously challenged the neoliberal basis of Reaganomics. Billionaires and corporations now largely run our politics, to the point that average working people’s desires are about as likely to be made into law as random chance.

As a result, Pew found that only about half of Americans qualified as “middle class” by the beginning of the Obama presidency. “From 1971 to 2011, the share of adults in the middle class fell by 10 percentage points,” they noted.

With fewer than half of Americans qualifying as middle class by 2015, Pew concluded their study: “The hollowing of the middle has proceeded steadily for the past four decades.” Four decades earlier, of course, the Democratic Party began a course that culminated in Bill Clinton leading the party to turn its back on FDR and LBJ, and embrace Republican-lite economic and trade policies.

Like a partner whose cry was still unheard, America’s still-wounded working-class and newly poor voters decided to take another chance with a new Republican partner, this time a mobbed-up New York City real estate hustler and reality TV star who promised to reverse so-called “free trade” and “bring those jobs home.”

Donald Trump had reached back into the old Democratic playbook, picking up where LBJ (who maintained protective tariffs and brought us Medicare and Medicaid without a single Republican vote) had left off, promising to reinstate protectionist trade policies to bring factories back to America. He also promised to reinstate LBJ’s emphasis on the quality of life for working-class and poor people through a national health insurance plan that would be “better” than Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which was floundering after being gutted by the Supreme Court.

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump told the Washington Post. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” Then-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price added, on “Meet the Press,” that “nobody will be worse off financially” with the new Trumpcare plan. Trump tweeted that there would be “no cuts… to Medicaid” and said that “no one will lose coverage.”

And while Trump’s trade efforts have been ham-handed, his trade war with China is—outside of farming communities—still popular in the industrial heartland, particularly among current and former union workers.

His health care plan was a scam, making available on Obamacare exchanges formerly 90-day (now three-year) emergency “bridge plans” that could still cancel insurance for preexisting conditions. But with the media focused on Trump, horserace and scandal, virtually no Americans realize that the plans Trump pitched as new and cheaper are so dangerous.

Thus, working-class whites in the American Midwest and South, even those not in thrall to Trump’s pitch to white supremacists, are largely staying with him. Hope springs eternal, after all, and dies last. The Democratic Party is still locked out of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House, even after two of the past four presidents who served for eight years each were Democrats.

Which brings us to how relationships heal and couples reunite, and how this could be applied to save the soul and electoral outcomes of the Democratic Party.

When the partner who had ignored the “cry” now hears it, there’s a very real chance that the relationship can be saved. Doing so requires two steps, both done with a lot of commitment and hard work.

First, change the offensive behavior.

Second, remember why you “fell in love” in the first place, and revisit those reasons, experiences, feelings, and activities that first brought you together.

Democrats know how to do both of these things, party leadership notwithstanding.

The Democratic Party had built a three-generation governing majority once in the past. All they need do today is reimplement Democratic policies from 1933 to 1979, updated for modern times.

Raise taxes on the rich, bring our factories home, expand the safety net, support GI Bill-style free education, and restore union rights. The party should know its history, after all, and should remember how well it was received by the American people.

Like a partner who wants to repair a wounded relationship, the Democrats must return to core principles and stay faithful to them. And we still have the template.

Today, the Democratic Party has two presidential nominees who carry the values and economic policies of FDR and LBJ, while embracing modern-day values of diversity and inclusion in ways neither party dared before this century. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is the second-largest Democratic caucus and the third largest in all of Congress.

If the Democratic Party follows its base and promotes progressive candidates and policies, it has a good chance of pulling America back from the brink of authoritarianism and oligarchy, and to restore our moral authority in the world. A return to big thinking and big goals like those of FDR and LBJ will put Democrats on a track to a second multigenerational governing majority.

If the party uses its convention and superdelegates (on a second vote) to choose another candidate committed to DLC (now Third Way) policies, get ready for either another four years of Donald Trump or a “moderate” one-term pause in the continuing deterioration of the middle-class American Dream.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Thom Hartmann is a former psychotherapist, SiriusXM talk-show host and the New York Times bestselling author of The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.