Reddit mentions of The Democrats: A Critical History (Updated edition)

http://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920

I highly suggest you read this book. It is a critical history of the Democratic party from a Marxist perspective. Lance Selfa lays down a good case for why the Democratic party can not be a vehicle for transitioning away from capitalism.

The democrats permanently put in place most of the Bush tax cuts after they expired. The democrats worked with healthcare lobbyists to pump the Affordable Care Act with complexity so that it helps healthcare companies. These were the same lobbyists working for companies forging an all out media assault on the ACA. One of its leaders was a former democrat who went to head a lobbying firm for healthcare companies. PBS has a great report on how the democrats are corporate puppets just like the republicans. This was highlighted again a couple of years later after e-mails detailing their negotiations were leaked.

Who is Obama thinking of electing as Fed chair? Larry Summers, who went to work at Citibank after advising Obama to bail out the bankers during his first term, and who is an undeniable Wall Street insider. Summers, along with Ben Bernanke, was basically the villain of Inside Job, the documentary that detailed how Wall Street completely defrauded the US people with Clinton, Bush, and Obama playing alongside them. But it's not just Obama that approves. The senate leadership says they will support any Fed nomination from Obama. Dodd-Frank, which so far has done little to stop the banks, was authored by Democrats with the help of bank lobbyists. Like the healthcare legislation, instead of opposing and killing it, it was pumped full of complexity so that the bankers could avoid it, as a former Wall Street executive who quit working for Goldman says.

Obama's treasury secretary, Jack Lew, worked with Clinton to deregulate banks during the 90's, after which he went to Citibank to rake in money, and who got paid a nice bonus by Citigroup before he returned to government(I wonder why).

Obama obliterated McCain 3-1 in campaign spending in 2008 after refusing to use the traditional campaign system used by presidents (which McCain used). Obama, competing with Romney, otherwise known as wealth incarnate, spending billions of dollars campaigning. Obama was attending a fundraiser every two days during his last political campaign. The democrats spend their time as telemarketers in capitol hill, just like Republicans, begging for campaign donations for half of each day.

The democrats hold the same stances on education and the military that Republicans do. Democrats get away with their stance on these issues because the people think they are actually fighting for them, but they aren't. Nobody pays attention to these issues because nobody ever brings it up. The democrats want charter schools to break teacher's unions just like the Republicans. Rahm Emmanuel, adviser to both Clinton and Obama, and then mayor of Chicago, has led an all out assault on public schooling. The democrats spend the military budget on private contractors just like Republicans, and mostly voted for the war. Obama has expanded the drone program dramatically, a program that a Stanford/NYU report deems a institutionalized terrorist campaign. He kills innocents unconstitutionally with drones, which reporters on the ground have said is actually hurting our domestic safety, and a Yemeni who had his village struck testified to congress saying drones are hurting the US in the entire middle east and creating more extremists. Vali Nasr, an Obama administration official in the state department under Hilary Clinton, left the administration after Obama's first term because he was so discontent with their actions, and said that Obama is simply not serious about dealing with either Iran or Israel because of how he parrots neoconservative foreign policy. Obama has appointed Brennan for director of the CIA and Comey for director of the FBI, both of whom approved torture personally under the Bush administration. Let's not even get started about Obama and the NSA.

Sure, some democrats are against these things. But not the ones that matter. Not the ones who have any power. Nobody that actually controls what goes on in this country cares about a few dissident democrats who stand in line on most other issues.

Why, you may be asking? Reagan beat the democrats down with money in the 80's. In 1984, Reagan beat his opponent, Walter Mondale, in the biggest landslide election in US history. The democrats, fearing for their political life, formed the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) so they could appease the moneyed interests that allowed Reagan to beat his opponent so badly. From the wikipage: "upon its formation, [the DLC] argued the United States Democratic Party should shift away from the leftward turn it took in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The DLC hailed President Bill Clinton as proof of the viability of Third Way politicians and as a DLC success story". Obama is proudly one of these New Democrats. Obama said it himself: he would be a moderate Republican 30 years ago. He's just another Reagan.

Here is a valuable book, Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics, released in 1989 that presciently foresaw the dramatic right turn democrats took after the democrats were beaten down in the 80's. That's not to say the democrats were for the people before then though. People forget that it was Truman that decided to drop the atomic bomb. Eisenhower was the general that led the historic D-Day in France before he was president after Truman, and said the bomb was unnecessary (dropping unnecessary bombs...war crime?). It was Kennedy that began the military involvement in South Asia, after which Johnson and then Nixon continued. The democrats only got severely worse after the 1980's. If you want even more details read this book, Democrats: A Critical History. It has everything you need to know about the function the democrats have played in this country's history.