Hey, kids! Yeah, YOU on the blue bar! Get off my lawn!
But before you do, shut up about Wall Street. It was that way before you were born, and you weren’t the first generation to figure out that it has problems.
And while you were watching Pokemon cartoons in the early 1990s and learning to, you know, walk, Hillary Clinton was fighting for universal health care, and got beaten up badly. Even her compromise, which was pretty close to Obamacare, got defeated with ugly Republican tactics.
I guess my point is…. just because Bernie articulates your frustration doesn’t mean he has the skills to fix things. In fact, I can assure you he hasn’t weathered one-tenth of what Hillary has in the fight for progress. He hasn’t faced the GOP destruction machine. It’s easy to campaign on the problems that we face; it is nothing… NOTHIHG… compared to fixing them.
Many of you are like those people who think they have discovered a new band, and everyone already knows about it. Just because you were born in the early 1990s doesn’t mean that you are more knowledgeable about current events. There’s been several generations before you who have fought these battles.
You may ask, well, why didn’t any this stuff get fixed then? It’s because of people like some of you, who are let “the perfect” become the enemy of “the good”. I’m talking about those who think that by casting a vote for change, suddenly health care become universal, and Wall Street excesses go away. But that kind of thinking is as delusional as those yokels in Oregon who just don’t understand how government works.
Look, many of you simply don’t know HIllary, but are happy to believe the smear machine. That’s the whole POINT of the smear machine, and you’re letting it working. Except for her husband, there has been no politician so tested by the forces that try to lie and deceive and bring this country into the hands of the rich and powerful. Bernie is a good man, but he hasn’t paid his dues. Hillary is the trojan horse — the one who can get in there and pull the coalitions together to get things done.
As for “Wall Street connections”, what does that even mean? She takes money from Wall Street contributors? So what? So has Elizabeth Warren. It doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Elizabeth Warren has specifically said that the next president’s agenda should:
- Defend Dodd-Frank against attempts to weaken or compromise it.
- Scale up enforcement, investigations and convictions: “When big financial institutions are not deterred from breaking the law… then that’s what they will do.”
- “Tackle the shadow-banking sector,” which created “runs and panics in the short-term debt markets that spread the contagion across the financial system.”
- Create a “targeted financial transactions tax.”
- Break up the biggest banks. First “cap the size of the biggest financial institutions,” then create a new Glass-Steagall Act “that rebuilds the wall between commercial banking and investment banking.”
Do you know where Bernie stands on these issues? Do you know where Hillary stands? I will leave it to you to decide who has the better plan for each (although Bernie doesn’t HAVE a specific plan for dealing with #2 and #3), but before you just ASSUME Hillary is in Wall Street’s pocket, you should, you know, investigate.
Anyway, I’m glad there is a generation of politically active people, because it was kind of lonely there for a few decades. So welcome. Pull up a folk guitar, learn a little from your elders, and then take over the world.
Also, get off my lawn.