The wharf turned the ship

In a Dutch magazine called De Groene Amsterdammer I read an interesting article about the Democratic Party in the United States of America. The Democrats are decades being lead by politicians who are not dealing in the best interests of the American people but mostly dealing in the interests of big companies, the multinationals. Recently I subscribed to this magazine because I read more interesting articles in the magazine and why not support it.

Progressive media in The Netherlands, like the so called progressive media in the USA were a huge fan of Barack Obama. He talked about change, change and some more change and that made him almost an angel, worth the Nobel Price of Peace due to his speeches alone. Speeches people wrote for him mostly I believe. Speeches about change. When I saw Barack Obama I disliked him and saw in him a second Tony Blair. Someone who wants power and easily can put aside his views - if he even has any views at all - for keeping power. Backing the big companies, the ones that bought his election in the first place. Tony Blair made a deal with media-tycoon Rupert Murdoch, also a big company guy.

De Groene Amsterdammer and many left, progressive and liberal media were not criticizing Barack Obama. Not criticizing Tony Blair, not criticizing Wim Kok, the Dutch prime minister of the labor party. No one was. As if we were living in a heaven on earth. And now they write and talk more and more about the wrong turn The labor party in the Netherlands, and their equivalent in the UK and the Democratic Party in the USA took. I always hated Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Wim Kok and their politics that were almost the same as of the politicians of intolerant parties on the right. The right-wing parties that were not loved by the so called progressive media. They only supported those progressive parties because they were to close with them. They slept with each other, a lot of times literally.

Now the wharf has turned the ship. A popular Dutch phrase. The same is happening in the USA and in the UK and so on. More and more new media are sprouting - especially on-line - that are criticizing the status quo. As examples I can give The Huffington Post, The Intercept, Salon.com, The Daily Beast, Spiked, Vice, et cetera. The old media are slightly changing too. Like I said, the wharf turned the ship.

I never understood why humanistic people would support Bill Clinton, who for instance did nothing for all the people locked away in prisons: he doubled only their amount. Why people loved Tony Blair, who supported a war in Iraq with lies of mass destruction weapons. Blair, like Clinton and Kok in The Netherlands toughened many sex laws. They - and the mass media - needed more and more scape goats because a growing amount of hard working citizens could not pay their bills anymore. There was - and is - something wrong with the system but the people holding power did not want to better the situation of the lower and in the end even of the middle class: they made it worse.

The Times They Are a-Changin' - Bob Dylan.