Now, there has been some hot debate over what 'the Establishment' is. Being the 'establishment' candidate is toxic to your campaign, warranted or not. Donald Trump, the ultimate 'outsider' is now being considered part of the 'establishment' by some since the RNC banned National Review from an event after an epic and scathing indictment of Trump and his terrible personality and policies. Rubio has been considered the 'establishment' candidate for months though no one can reasonably explain how he got that classification except that a lot of people like him and that must be baaaad. But let's go with a reasonable definition of 'establishment':
1. Party Establishment: These are the people (like the RNC and SuperPACs) that control the message and direction of the party. They are influential in candidate platforms and are heavily influenced by partisan lobby groups.
2. THE Establishment: These are the people, politicians, business people, corporations, and lobbyists who hold the vast majority of Power in any given system. In many cases, especially in America, these groups work together to maintain and grow their own wealth and power.
Now, can you think of any candidate running in 2016 that completely and totally fits BOTH of those establishment criteria? I'll give you a hint, her top five campaign donors are 4 megabanks and 1 global law firm. Did you guess Hillary Clinton? If you haven't been sleeping under a rock for the last year, I'll bet you did. Further troubling is the special treatment she gets not only by the Mainstream Media but by the Federal Government. Just this week, the State Department announced that it needed a month-long extension on releasing further damaging emails, which takes us past the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary. Hillary Clinton, in a nutshell IS the establishment. She is getting campaign backing from people who have financially benefited from her decisions - like the bank bailout that allowed the burdened tax payer to fund the bonuses of bank execs that completely ripped off the American people.Oh, Hillary supporters will claim they could only do that because there wasn't enough 'regulation'...you know, even though Alan Greenspan the Head of the Fed at the time was part of the sub-prime mortgage scheme and supposedly the Federal Government has a great deal of oversight there. Hell, he was even appointed by the Government. And, of course, we can't forget the politicians that gained more power by promoting mortgages for people who never could afford them. Just like the bank execs, Washington was living high on the hog until everything came crashing down. But, instead of letting the market punish bad business, they stole funds from the very people who were ripped off to pay the criminals. And Hillary ardently supports that choice, in fact, if there were ever another problem over at her friend's Goldman and Sachs, she'd proudly cry for more corporate welfare.
So, Hillary Clinton is the 'establishment'. Anyone arguing otherwise is intellectually dishonest or severely out of touch with any kind of reality. So what? What's wrong with the establishment anyway? Well, for one, people buying favors and pretending they can manipulate an entire economy effectively because they've been sitting in a echo chamber like the Senate are at olympic level hubris. Hillary Clinton, nor her economic advisers can effectively run the largest economy in the world. They can't just write the 'perfect' regulations to fix everything and make it all work. It's never been done, it never will be done. It's been tried for the last 200 years with very little success. And yet, Hillary Clinton is the one who will finally make the Status Quo work. Why? Because she's bought by Wall Street? And just what regulations, exactly, would she pass that wouldn't further victimize small business while handing over bigger monopolies to companies 'too big to fail'?
You see, for decades, long before Obama or Bush, we've been treating the economy like something that elected lawyers can 'fix' or manage with the 'right' influence. This idea that Capitalism is great, but we just need to 'fix it' IS the status quo and has been since just about five minutes after the Industrial Revolution. It hasn't worked to date, but we are expected to believe that Hillary can do it. Okay, fine...but in a time when people are not happy with the status quo, why should anyone want someone who only knows how to play by the old political rules and has made her entire career on being the establishment candidate who can make shitty deals with shitty people all in the name of 'political progress'?
And why, when the nation is clearly fed up with 'business as usual' are we even considering electing a candidate who will be exactly like Obama, or Bush before him, or Clinton before him, or H.W. Bush before him, and so on? All she is doing is pulling the New Deal out of the trash trying to wipe the shit off of it and repackage it as her own. It didn't work the first time, it's not going to work now. New ideas are needed. Fresh perspectives with people who understand politics in the 21st Century are needed. And, most importantly, people who have a sense of what is wrong with America are needed...and no, it's not that we don't have enough politicians 'fixing' Capitalism. It's because we have too many trying to.
