Forget the FBI cache; the Podesta emails show how America is run

The Manchester Guardian ^ | Thomas Frank

[2ndDivisionVet]

The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves....

[Ann Archy]

America is run by CRIMINALS!!!!

[gaijin]

[Fitzy_888]

We have some talented and creative people here, some with legal backgrounds, we could draft an indictment. To see what it would look like. Just satire, of course.

I’m no lawyer, but drafted a subpoena once and posted it here. (Again, satire, protected by the First Amendment.)

Just say’in.

[Original Lurker]

America is run by crony capitalists and banksters.
It has been since old Abe.

[p. henry]

Great article. I’ve been feeling pretty much the same as the author as I read some of the Podesta emails. Podesta and those he corresponds with are so smug, so self-important, so self-satisfied, so sure they’re part of the club even though they’ve never been elected to anything. It’s really quite disgusting. And I’m sure there are analogs on the Republican side. America truly has become a plutocracy. I miss the old days. The days of Truman, Eisenhower, Stevenson, Dirksen, Humphrey, Moynihan, Goldwater and Jackson (Scoop, not Andrew). They were true public servants. Our current crop of politicians don’t serve the public. They serve themselves and the club.

[marktwain]

Yes that is why Trump’s Election is a Revolt!

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2016/10/revolt-against-american-aristocracy.html

[Verginius Rufus]

Is this the guy who wrote The Trouble with Kansas? -- the book that Obama's 2008 "bitter clingers" comment was based on?

[OddLane]

One and the same.

[Liz]

Podesta, and those he corresponds with are so smug, so self-important, so
self-satisfied, so sure they’re part of the club even though they’ve never
been elected to anything. It’s really quite disgusting.

They're part of a shadow government that runs our agencies ONLY for themselves and their cronies.

Really nauseating is hokey hillbilly Bill.....he seems to be laughing at the rest of us Americans who actually work for a living.

The buck-raking Clintons are the flesh-eating denizens of the DC swamp we need to drain......we need laws or amendments to the Constitutiion that say once you serve you go home....you can't use your former office to get rich or to form a shadow govt that excludes people you don't like.

[stephenjohnbanker]

AMEN!!