"Wall Street Democrats failed us." The establishment Democrats have failed the American people."

[rainy]

On November 14, six days after the election of Donald Trump, some 40 young people walked into the office of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, calling on the senior lawmaker to step aside in his bid to be Senate minority leader. Carrying a banner that read “Wall St. Democrats Failed Us,” they argued that Schumer, who has received more than $3 million in campaign contributions from the securities and investment industry in the last five years, was exactly the wrong figure to lead the opposition to Donald Trump. When the senator refused to meet with them, the protesters sat on the floor to barricade the office, filling the halls of the Hart Office Building with protest songs. In the end, 17 were arrested.

Asked about the purpose of the protest, organizer Yong Jung Cho stated, “The establishment Democrats have failed the American people. The establishment Democrats failed to stop Donald Trump.” Another leader, Waleed Shahid, added that the group, #AllOfUs, would continue to target Democratic senators “who don’t do anything they can to filibuster Trump’s legislation that promotes his hatred or his greed.”

At a time when so many people are furious at Donald Trump and terrified of his agenda, some will ask why these activists are targeting leading Democrats. After all, isn’t that attacking the wrong side?

A look at the history of social movements under hostile governments provides a counterintuitive answer. At a time when Donald Trump has risen to the presidency by railing against the Washington establishment and upending the traditional rules of politics, the Democratic Party’s propensity for compromise and triangulation only plays into his hands. The only hope for unseating Trump and minimizing the damage of his agenda will be to fight his racist right-wing populism with a progressive vision. This vision must express a genuine disgust for Washington politics, but be devoted to eliminating the corrupting power of the wealthiest one percent, rather than scapegoating immigrants and people of color.

https://popularresistance.org/why-targeting-corporate-democrats-is-part-of-fight-against-trump/

[Madam45for2923]

1. These people are full of crap! They are never gonna protest Trump! but DEMS they protest.

Not impressed.

[Ken Burch]

22. They've been protesting Trump for weeks now.

All over the country.

[kcr]

46. Read the story again

That's a funny way of protesting Trump. Sitting in Schumer's office.

[Ken Burch]

47. They were protesting Trump BEFORE that.

They will do so after that.

[OKNancy]

2. pish posh

silly opinions by the naive

[rainy]

3. Really? The loyal democrats are

expected, like cattle, to march and vote for the democrat all the while knowing that the candidate will be restricted by their big donors. Something has to give to move the world forward in a more progressive way. The time is now to get off the money in politics train and work hard against Washington establishment if we truly want to progress to a more intelligent people and earth oriented civilization of humanity first. I see nothing wrong in pointing out the limitations of a political party owned by corporations and Wall Street. We need to understand the harm in letting them own our politicians and run our government.

[Madam45for2923]

4. If I saw these people taking the threat of Trump seriously I would trust them to be sincere

Till then they are full of crap!

I see them as a disinformation campaign to divide and demoralize Democrats😙

This seem to be their goal.

Not fooling us! NICE TRY!

[Cha]

13. Hillary would have made a great president.. It sounds

like you don't really know that much about her platform.

The Dem Party got 66 Million Votes.. we are alive, Fighting, and Resisting.

[realmirage]

23. Agree with you rainy, the party needs a tune up

[lastlib]

27. Aim at the target.

Not saying we don't have to CONSTANTLY remind our allies to continue to be our allies, but we also have to fight the power structure that tRump and repuglicans represent. That is the true enemy, and we set ourselves up for disastrous failure if we don't focus on that. We may have to accept some distasteful alliances on occasion in order to win the greater battle. But let's define our priorities. Schumer votes for our side on most issues, so let's support him when he's on our side, and hold his feet to the fire when he's not. We're in for a rough four years if we don't pick our fights thoughtfully. Repugs are salivating over the chance they have to take this country politically and economically back to the 1890s, and if we start eating our own now because they aren't pure enough, we won't be able to stop the GOPhers on anything. We cannot afford to give the GOPhers ammunition to use against our own allies.

[standingtall]

42. No getting big money out of politics

with republicans in charge of government. Did you forget it was the conservative supreme court that upheld citizens united? Guess who gets to pick supreme court justices now?

So yes loyal democrats should march in and cast their vote for the democrat. If they actually really care about issues instead of leaning on fantasies. When was the last time there was a federal minimum wage increase? I remember it is when we had a democratic congress. You think you get that with republicans? Fat chance!

[treestar]

54. We have to band together, that's the only way to win elections

We all have to settle for less than perfect candidates or we get the worst. See it as the lesser of two evils if you must, but the lesser of two is better than the greater of two.

[Trust Buster]

5. The 46% of eligible voters who sat on their collective asses on November 8 failed this country.

[WhiteTara]

28. Include the protest voters as those

who failed our country. They were just too pure to vote for the Democratic nominee.

[YoungDemCA]

37. Ah yes, let's blame the voters for an electoral defeat. Very appropriate for the DEMOCRATIC Party...

[Trust Buster]

39. You're darn right I do. After watching that maniac on the campaign trail for 18 months,

46% couldn't bring themselves to vote. We CAN'T have any semblance of a Democracy when so many don't care.

[RKP5637]

53. Well said !!! K&R !!! n/t

[geek tragedy]

51. blaming non-voters is perfectly fair nt

[emulatorloo]

57. People who don't vote don't get a say.

[Madam45for2923]

6. BTW I think your source is anti-Democratic party

Delete your OP


Found this there in their calendar events: Future Of Left And Independent Politics Network

[ms liberty]

7. Interesting piece.

Some might prefer us to only be protesting against Trump and the Republicans, but our own party has to hear us too. Our party will at least hear what we are saying; Trump and the Republicans will never listen or agree, and use our protests against us as propaganda to their sheeple.

[Girard442]

8. I support the pro-Democrat wing of the Democratic Party.

You know, like Howard Dean.

[rainy]

10. We need to move away from the corporatist center

"Movements against the current regime do well to not merely study the example, but to avoid replicating its shortcomings. The challenge they face is making sure that the political candidates empowered by organized anti-Trump activity cannot simply co-opt the energy of the movement, but rather represent a true shift in power away from the corporatist center."

From the article^^

[yardwork]

12. Trump could not be more corporatist and he won.

The Republican Party could not be more corporatist and they hold majorities in both houses of Congress and in most states.

The voters don't seem to give a damn about "corporatists," with the exception of a handful of whiny narcissists who like to pretend that they are the only real progressives. In actuality these entitled brats have made themselves completely irrelevant and along the way helped to ensure the most profound and massive right-wing objectivist corporatist shift in the U.S. in more than 100 years.

[JCanete]

17. Trump said he wasn't one, and even made absurd claims on their face that he was going to fight that

kind of cronyism. Hillary was pilloried for being one and should have done a better job of showing just how corrupt Donald is when it comes to bribery and everything else. On that issue, people were totally fooled for voting for Trump, but the American people weren't given a truly legitimately anti-corporate candidate in the GE, so you can't really make the claim you're making that voters don't care using that as evidence.

By the way, saying in the same sentence that a group of people have made themselves completely irrelevant, "and at the same time" have handed over the Presidency to Trump sounds a little inconsistent. I suggest you pick one.

[yardwork]

19. They're irrelevant now that the damage is done. Anybody who was fooled by Trump didn't listen.

People who should have known better were so blinded by their hatred of the Clintons they allowed the country to elect a dangerous fool. Those folks have made themselves irrelevant.

[BainsBane]

33. And they helped put him in office

I bet anything those protestors didn't vote for Clinton. Then they take advantage of the Democratic loss to double down on their opposition to the party and its voters.

They had an opportunity to organize and vote for getting money out if politics and they chose to work against it. I saw assholess like this celebrating the Democratic loss. To pretend they were upset about the loss when it is exactly what they wanted shows how malevolent they are. Fascism is as fascism does.

[BainsBane]

34. I find it fascinating how campaign finance reform has come off the table

And instead the problem is attributed to individual politicians and parties, conveyed through ahistorical buzzwords. But I suppose that's what happens when people don't really care about systemic reform and vote against those policies to "make a statement".

It is truly astounding how detached from the nightmare we are living in that you even think these issues are relevant now. You might as well be arguing about the Bank of the United States (it's a history thing; look it up), for all the relevance it has to our current political situation.

[Abu Pepe]

11. Clinton win by 3 million votes. nt

[NastyRiffraff]

14. Good lord I'm tired of reading crap like this

There are many factual (remember facts?) reasons for the loss, not one of them involves "corporatists." (Geez I'm sick of that word, just like the tired "oligarchy.&quot Among those reasons: Russian hacking, the media's giving free advertising to Trump and pretending he and Hillary were just the same, voter intimidation and denying votes by Republican (remember them?) operatives, and last but certainly not least, the 46% who "sat on their asses" as someone said in this thread.

That's just the beginning. If anyone's a corporatist, it's Donald J. Trump (remember HIM?). The fact is, Hillary Clinton got more votes than presidential candidate, ever. Yes, before someone pitifully bleats that the popular vote doesn't matter, I know we don't elect by popular vote, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

This is a crap OP from a crap site. Go ahead and alert this post.

[George II]

40. I'm tired of the expression "Identity politics", too. Samantha Bee did a great segment....

...about it on her show this week, all but saying that it's bullshit.

[NastyRiffraff]

43. Love Samantha!

Identity politics aka civil rights!

[La Lioness Priyanka]

15. Aww. Didn't realize feingold and teachout

Had such strong wall street backing.

[JI7]

20. and they will continue to ignore those races

I have been seeing these types for years and they have no real interest in getting change.

It's just a career for them. And very easy since you just attack others and can feel morally superior for being so pure.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

21. I consider it my job on du to remind them

Of these inconvenient facts

[forjusticethunders]

50. Disaster capitalism wrapped up in socialist rhetoric.

They have a VESTED interest in fascism and reaction winning. They make MONEY off it. People like Glenn Greenwald were NOBODIES (and he was a right wing nut job before he found a niche as "civil libertarian&quot but they piggybacked off opposition to Dubya, then he updated the script to bash Obama because he would have lost his revenue stream.

[emulatorloo]

55. Those races totally undercut their false narrative, so of course they ignore them

[zipplewrath]

45. Yeah, there's a real mix here

One can analyze these races as individual events, unrelated to each other. And since Trump's margin of victory was so slim, it's easy to point to almost any factor and say "that was it". When you step back though and look at the wide range of state and federal elections that we lost, a slightly different picture begins to emerge. The themes that lost this election tended to be independent of the candidate per se. Trump won as he did because of appealing to a very narrow sliver of the minority in a few key states. The margin of victory is so slim, it is hard to point to one thing and suggest that it could have been changed. These were people listening to his schtick and choosing to buy into it, regardless of information to the contrary.

The larger losses point to a distrust of democratic candidates in general. It is difficult to correlate their losses to anything other than that they were democrats. That suggests it is the larger trends over the last several elections. This would tend to suggest that the party has been mismanaged for some considerable period of time. That isn't going to zero in on any single person, policy, or event. One can discuss the participants in those larger trends, but it will never be the single cause of where we are.

None the less, here we are.

[ismnotwasm]

16. Oh bullshit.

[Rex]

18. C-levels will crybaby about your thread.

They are part of the problem, clueless and living in a bubble of wealth.

[realmirage]

24. Yup. If we don't change we keep losing

[betsuni]

25. The group should change its name to #AllOfUsAreStupid.

[JHan]

29. lol lol lol

[BainsBane]

32. I think the more appropriate name is

#makeAmericaGreatAgain

[still_one]

26. I guess that is the reason why every establihment republican incumbent won in those critical swing

states for Senate

They sure showed us

What a bunch of BS

[BainsBane]

30. They succeeded in defeating the corporatist Democrats

Trump won. They got exactly what they wanted. The Democratic Party and it's corporatist voters earning under $50k a year have been shut out. The women, elderly, poor, and people of color who voted for Clinton have been put in place and will be punished for daring to exercise their voting rights as they see fit. The anti-Democrats got what they wanted. This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that helped Trump smear Democrats, and these are the people who voted for Trump or a third party candidate to teach the Democrats a lesson. The anti-"corporatists" successfully stood up against Hillary and her proposals to get dark money out of politics and appoint SCOTUS judges amenable toward repealing Buckley and Citizens United. The anti-Democrats rejected that reform and decided the problem was die not to the law but an absence of personal virtue. If they couldn't have a Democrat who enriched himself off the campaign to the tune of $10-14 million dollars, they wouldn't have anyone. They decided that policy didn't actually matter, that Scotus appointments were irrelevant, and that they would organize against the one major party candidate who ran on regulating Wall Street and reforming campaign finance. And they were victorious. They wanted to bury the "establishment" Democrats, and they did just that. Now they get to witness what the "anti-establishment" government they helped elect looks like. Yet even in victory they complain. Talk about a bunch of sore winners.

[SidDithers]

31. Fringe left dumbasses...nt

Sid

[dionysus]

41. Vaht? Vaz you shaying shumthing... about fringy type people, to meeee?

...vaht?

[still_one]

35. Every Establishment, republican, incumbent won against those Democrats running for Senate in the

critical swing states.

If those self-identified progressives who refused to vote for Hillary, had voted for Hillary, we wouldn't be facing this situation.

In Michigan Hillary lost by .3%. Jill Stein received 1.1% of the vote. Similar results in Wisconsin and other critical swing states.

Russ Feingold lost by a greater percentage than Hillary in Wisconsin. Where were they for Russ?

In Wisconsin if the voters who voted for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson, had also voted for Russ Feingold, Russ would be Senator. The same applies to those critical swing states, and because of that we lost the Senate.

This election was a generational event. It is going to have to start at the local and state levels, and that will take a long time

[hrmjustin]

36. I wonder how many of them voted third party.

[George II]

44. I would say the non-Establishment "democrats" failed the American people, mostly....

....out of stubbornness and spite.

They felt they were sticking it to the so-called "Establishment Democrats" but they only stuck it to themselves and the country as a whole.

[NCDem777]

48. Okay full disclosure

I volunteered for both the Bernie and Hillary campaigns. Voted for the former in primary and latter in general.

The thing with so many anti-establishment Dems is that they want Democrats to be liberals. And not just more polite less racist versions of Republicans.

How can we call ourselves anti-war when a Democratic President got us into a bunch of ill conceived military engagements in the Middle-East? Despite the fact he basically ran on a platform of not doing that and we won in 2006-08 on the basis that we'd stop that bullshit. Now we're involved in multiple moronic conflicts in the region (I consider any conflict with its roots in religion. ANY religion, moronic), sometimes accidentally aiding both sides.

How can we credibly say we're against trade deals that gutted the Middle Class when Democratic Presidents signed a good chunk of them and actively pushed for the TPP, which was less a trade deal and more of corporate Christmas list? And let's not pretend Hillary wouldn't have been pushing for it if Sanders didn't force the issue.

How can we say we're against mass incarceration and THEN nominate the literal worst Dem. to tackle that issue? She helped popularize the "superpredator" crap. Bill Clinton went all in with the hysteria the Republicans were promoting. Saying "whoopsie" just doesn't cut it.

And all of this could potentially be forgiven if the Democrats weren't always so conciliatory towards Republicans. Look at how Democrats behave in the majority vs. how Republicans behave in that position. We try to "find common ground". They roll over us.

It's hard to have faith in weak-kneed Dems who basically behave like Republicans when it comes down to the big issues. We need to become the party of no.Especially since the other party, given the chance, would try to have us exterminated.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

49. Yup

[geek tragedy]

52. Schumer is very popular in upstate NY amongst the WWC voters who voted for Trump this time nt

[ismnotwasm]

58. Oh Bullshit.

I fucking grew up politically when George W Bush was nominated. I don't know what the fuck a "Wall Street Democrat" fucking is. I am fucking tired of this sick shady shit pointing fingers at the only people who were working their asses off to stop Trump--that would be Democrats--for those still living in the delusion that casting 3rd fucking party votes somehow helped this fucked up situation we find ourselves in. What the fuck is WRONG with people who write crap like this? Pre-criticizing Democrats for fucking what?

The entire progressive left failed to stop Trump. The media fucked up for a buck up. Racists and sexists and single issue gun and pro-life voters came out in droves. Some of us were too pure and some of us were too apathetic, and some of us didn't listen to valuable constructive criticism, sure.

But I don't blame the fucking victims--I cast blame on every hand that voted for one of the most obvious assholes of our time.

And I'm not giving in to those motherfuckers either.