Photo by Pepi Stojanovski
Politically speaking, it is useful to follow the money, the donor dollars. The more greenbacks flow to America’s bipartisan political system, the greater influence that money has to shape domestic and foreign policies. The poor and working classes in and out of America suffer the adverse consequences.
In the U.S., the lack of universal healthcare, a main cause of personal bankruptcies, is a case in point. The medical-industrial complex donated a total of $750,838,554 in the 2024 election cycle. Big Pharma led the way with $387 million in donations. Hospitals and nursing homes were the next biggest political donors at $133 million. https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/lobbying?cycle=2024&ind=H
The donor dollars flow to Democrats and Republicans to sustain the current for-profit health care system. Public support for universal healthcare, e.g., Medicare for All, gets rhetorical backing from Democrats. Then the party’s corporate donors kill that change. This is a reliable playbook. The donor class likes this reliability.
Take the policies of corporate-friendly Democratic presidents They have paved the way to the worsening of living and working conditions for the poor and working class in America. Do not fall for AOC and Bernie’s speeches of fighting the oligarchy in Red and Blue states. The Democratic Party depends on the same oligarchy for its financial-political existence. Sorry to be the messenger of AOC and Bernie’s inauthentic counter-narrative. Their performative politics does not repair but does mask the donor-funded rot at the center of the Democratic Party. It remains in and out of funding foreign wars, an enemy of the global poor and working classes, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, to give a nod to the classic tale of children’s literature. On that note, the Democratic Party has been and remains an enabler of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, Ukraine’s proxy war against Russia, and last but not least, saber-rattling against China.
Why the latter? China is outperforming the U.S. economically while building alliances such as the intergovernmental grouping of nations, or BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and now including Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. America’s economic supremacy is over. Finished. Despite or because of this reality of the world economy, U.S. presidents prefer to impose commercial and financial penalties on other nations, from Cuba to Russia and Venezuela.
A brief review of the so-called resistance party’s history of backing foreign wars and Wall Street’s thievery is in order. Before the spring of 1999 U.S.-NATO attack on the former Yugoslavia, President Clinton championed misnamed free trade pacts like the NAFTA. It destroyed the manufacturing base of the country and its union labor force, as the former governor of Arkansas maintained the opposite outcome would come to pass. It didn’t, but it did set a precedent of ruling-class economics and politics that alienated the poor and working class from Democrats. That alienation or void would become fertile soil for a GOP message of Make America Great Again, as if the U.S. ruling class and the poor and working class are all in the struggle together. As if the corporate class did not direct the destruction of the U.S. industrial base and its blue-collar labor union labor force. The MAGA message is simple: blame foreigners, from undocumented immigrants to other nations cheating Americans. We are permanent victims who need a strong leader with stronger deeds and words to protect us.
The NAFTA did help the U.S. car and tech manufacturing and food and retail industries cut their costs for labor services. That is why the U.S. capitalist class shifted industrial production abroad. Automation and computerization facilitated this move, also known as capital flight. American workers, notably in the so-called Rust Belt regions of the country, suffered. Life expectancy fell. Deaths of despair rose.
These deindustrialized areas across the Midwest and Northeast morphed into the “sacrifice zones” of America, according to author and journalist Chris Hedges. The social conditions for a politician to connect with an audience of former Democratic voters expanded. Trump knows the vulnerability of his audience. Meanwhile, Democrats doubled down on talking left and walking right.
President Clinton also backed banking deregulation. His policy of destroying Depression-era bank regulations created the financial conditions for the Great Recession. That economic crisis led to the political bailout of the banking perpetrators and sellout of the home foreclosure victims.
President Obama oversaw the Great Recession home foreclosure relief policy that helped bankers and harmed homeowners. His brand of “hope and change” turned into hopelessness amid the continuation of capitalist rules, e.g., donor dollars buy government policies to save them when the economy breaks down, beginning with, say, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in late 2008. Meanwhile, the loss of working-class health and wealth from federal government policies under Democratic presidents reverberates to this day.
President Trump feels that material pain, which Democratic presidents have enabled. Trump’s solutions to worsening conditions for the American poor and working class, such as global trade tariffs, are nonsensical, to be sure. That material reality is coming into sharper view with each passing day. He might cow Jeff Bezos into Amazon, Inc. removing the actual costs of tariffs from the online giant’s prices, but smaller businesses will be less likely to bend their knees and kiss the ring of Trump.
At the same time, Chinese leaders plan to change importers to counter U.S. trade tariffs. For instance, China will adapt to Trump’s tariffs in part, replacing U.S. soybean imports with Brazil’s soybeans. The Democratic Party is tone-deaf to such global economic changes. Instead, the party of fake resistance remains hell-bent on pursuing a New Cold War against China. Apparently, when holding a big hammer, all the world looks like so many nails to pound when there are profits for Raytheon and other U.S. weapons makers to grab.
Contrast President Trump’s approach of supporting mainly white workers, rhetorically, to that of the Democrats. This center-right party of overpaid consultants, celebrity spokespeople and labor union misleaders wrapped in identity politics aims to divert public attention away from the monopoly industries that fund the “lesser evil” of the political duopoly. The Democratic Party controlled the House and Senate when President Biden took office in January 2021. Recall the words, “Nothing fundamentally will change,” to his wealthy donors before winning the White House over Trump. Truth-telling.
To wit, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. That is 15-plus years. Further, this paltry hourly wage became the official poverty rate recently. https://www.epi.org/blog/the-federal-minimum-wage-is-officially-a-poverty-wage-in-2025/What if Vice President Harris had supported an increase of the federal minimum wage instead of the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza? Hands down, she would have won the election over President Trump. However, the financial-political relations between capitalist donors and the so-called party of resistance stood in the way of policies to help humanity at home and abroad.
America is ready for a third political party. Cynically, perhaps more honestly, the country needs a second political party. Hat tip to the great, late Gore Vidal, who observed that the U.S. has one political party with two right wings. Donor dollars, Democrats and dour days rule the roost now, but it seems clear at least to me, that a politics of fundamental change is fast approaching stateside. Will it be sunny for humanity? There is a chance. Much depends on the rise of a movement politics that can center class and its links with gender and race in a grassroots process that avoids the Democratic Party’s capture.
