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Despite what you may have been led to believe, the Democrats are not your friends.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They might gesture in your direction from time to time when they need something (usually money), but they know that come election season you ain\u2019t gonna vote Republican, which explains why they rarely seem interested in following through with their promises. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Democrats are not your friends. Sure they may make frequent appeals to unity, to diversity, to equality, but said appeals are always surface deep. Electing Barack Obama does not, for instance, cancel out structural racism. Rather his presidency and the Democrats preferred approach in general are, to quote the great Michelle Alexander, a kind of \u201ctrickle down social justice.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Democrats are not your friends. Just take a look at San Francisco. The Democratic Party is the party of London Breed, the party of Ed Lee and his Twitter tax break. It\u2019s the party of gentrification. It\u2019s Black Lives Matter signs proudly on display in formerly Black neighborhoods where Black families can no longer afford to live.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Democratic Party is the party of three-strikes laws and care not cash (ie don\u2019t give money to panhandlers, vote for Gavin Newsom instead and he will fix things). It\u2019s \u201cnot in my backyard\u201d housing policies that have strangled the vitality out of our city. It\u2019s people who have lived here a year calling the police on La Pulguita. It\u2019s the rainbow-painted bolder located outside a restaurant in the Castro, that is there to promote LGBT rights, while conveniently keeping homeless people out. It\u2019s also people like Barbeque Becky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Democratic Party is the party of Kamala Harris covering for the SFPD negligence when she was District attorney. It\u2019s Greg Suhr and gang injunctions, it\u2019s stop-and-frisk policies, it\u2019s \u201cdisruption\u201d in the name of progress, it\u2019s Airbnb. Democrats in the Bay Area have presided over two tech bubbles that have created an obscene amount of wealth, and what have they done with it? Again I ask you to look around San Francisco. Yeah, it\u2019s a \u201cSanctuary City\u201d if you can afford 2-3 thousand dollars a month for rent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Democrats are not your friends. Mark Zuckerberg is a Democrat, so is the guy from Twitter and likely the majority of people who ride in Google buses to work. The most noxious type of\u00a0 tech bros are usually Democrats, as are many of the Wall Street types who tanked our economy in 2008. It was the Democrats who bailed out Wall Street during the financial crisis of 2008 by the way. Democrats were quick to bail out the banking system because \u201ctoo big to fail,\u201d but all those Americans who lost their homes? Well, too bad, it was their own fault they shouldn\u2019t have taken sketchy loans from the bankers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Democrats are not your friends. They are the party of symbolic action, the party of non-binding resolutions that do nothing\u2014Nancy Pelosi ripping up Trump\u2019s state of the union speech. Democrats were willing to shut down the whole government to save DACA while at the same time deporting record numbers of immigrants. They ended welfare in the 1990s and broke the backs of labor unions by passing NAFTA. The Democrats are Dianne Feinstein voting for war in Iraq (twice), but against medicare for all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Democrats are not your friends. The Democratic Party is the party of the mainstream media, the same media that ran millions of dollars of free advertising for Donald Trump\u2019s presidential campaign and is now profiting from a symbiotic if adversarial relationship with the president.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Democratic Party is the party of Hollywood hypocrisy and faux activism. It\u2019s assholes like BIll Maher who think they are smarter than everyone else and pundits like Chris Mathews, who love the sound of their own voice. It\u2019s Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein (both of whom were majors donors in addition to being serial predators). And, lest we forget, the party of Donald Trump right up into the Obama era.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Democratic party is the party of the establishment, really it is. Just remember that Trump won on an anti-establishment platform, it was Hillary, the Democratic candidate who was representing the status quo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Democratic leaders in the house like Nancy Pelosi and in the Senate tell us there is no money for universal healthcare or Green New Deal to create sustainable jobs and preserve a livable climate for future generations. But they obviously believe there is enough to fund endless war in the Middle East because 188 House Democrats rubber-stamped Trump\u2019s military budget ($738 billion, which is the biggest ever) while we were all distracted by the impeachment circus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bottom line is that the Democrats don\u2019t really represent you and me, they represent their big donors\u2014 Wall Street, the tech industry, big media, etc. There is no way to credibly vote against Donald Trump without voting for a Democrat. However we can tell the party leadership where to stick their broken promises. We can show them that merely being \u201cnot Republican\u201d isn\u2019t good enough anymore. We can do this by voting for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary on March 3. The Democratic primary in California might be the most consequential vote for California voters in a generation, this is because our state\u2019s primary will have a lot of influence over how voters in other states vote. Sanders represents a challenge to a status quo that isn\u2019t working for us, but is working for the one percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It comes down to this: do you believe that removing Trump from office is enough to right what has gone wrong in the U.S., or do we need to address the conditions that made a Trump presidency even possible? The Democrats who oppose Bernie are the same ones standing in the way of any meaningful change beyond removing Trump from office. So again I say to you, these people are not your friends.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Despite what you may have been led to believe, the Democrats are not your friends.\u00a0 They might gesture in your direction from time to time when they need something (usually money), but they know that come election season you ain\u2019t gonna vote Republican, which explains why they rarely seem interested in following through with their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":30514,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":false,"newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[8175],"coauthors":[18445],"class_list":["post-42804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-voices","tag-bernie-sanders","entry"],"yoast_head":"\n