Some cranky old coot wrote an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times today. He opened his piece by citing appalling statistics on wealth inequality. Current Democratic President Barack Obama has sounded similar themes throughout his two terms in office, including a speech in 2013 in which he called income inequality “the defining challenge of our time:”
President Obama on Wednesday pointed to a combination of growing income inequality and a lack of upward mobility as “the defining challenge of our time,” arguing the government should take further steps to reverse a decades-long trend that has widened the gap between the nation’s richest citizens and everyone else.
“The basic bargain at the heart of our economy has frayed,” Mr. Obama said. He repeated later in his speech that “the combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe.”
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has made wealth inequality a central focus of her campaign as well, including in this speech in 2015 that echoes President Obama’s themes:
Mrs. Clinton said “the defining economic challenge of our time” is raising incomes for the vast majority of Americans whose wages have remained virtually stagnant for 15 years as the costs of housing, college, child care and health care have soared.
“We must raise incomes for hardworking Americans so they can afford a middleclass life,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech at the liberal New School in Greenwich Village in New York. “That will be my mission from the first day I’m president to the last.”
In his NYT op-ed today, the cranky old coot also cited lack of access to healthcare as a core problem, noting that 28 million people don’t have coverage. You know how many Americans were uninsured in 2008? More than 49 million.
The cranky old coot’s op-ed is entitled “Democrats Need to Wake Up,” and it concludes with this paragraph:
In this pivotal moment, the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind. We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires.
Not once does the cranky old coot mention the name of the popular two-term Democratic president who orchestrated the largest top-down transfer of wealth in the history of the United States via the ACA: President Barack Obama.
Not once does the cranky old coot mention the name of the only human being on the planet who has a shot at continuing the push for more progressive policies as the Democratic nominee to follow President Obama: Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Not once does the cranky old coot mention the Republicans in Congress, who vowed from President Obama’s first day in office to make him a one-term president and have opposed and obstructed every attempt the president and Democrats in Congress have made to improve the lives of the poor and middle class — carrying on a decades-long tradition that was in full force in the 1990s, when they killed Hillary Clinton’s universal healthcare proposal and tried to hound her husband out of office over a blow job.
The cranky old coot did briefly allude to Donald Trump’s bigotry and demagoguery. But the true villain of the piece — the entity that is asleep at the switch, according to the cranky old coot — is the Democratic Party.
Fuck that cranky old coot. The end.