So we're faced with a choice, American Corporate Empire, or American
Corporate Empire Light?
The Oligarchy offers only one choice, pick door #1 or door #2. Either
door bets a tiger. Door #3 is locked and the lady went home for the
duration.
We're stuck. And all the "blah blah blah" is only window dressing.
Some folks spend countless hours quibbling over gray shades, never
facing the truth that it's all the same. The same Ruling Oligarchy
will rake in the sucker's money and holler, "Step right up, ladies and
gents..." And the ladies and gents step right up.
Might as well pop a beer, grab some chips and settle down for another
Lose Lose election year...did I say "year"? This election "year" has
been around 30 months.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/18/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My problem with this very good argument is that it deals in absolutes, in
blacks and whites. It absolutely negates subtleties. One can try arguing
point by point, but it's useless. Capitalism isn't just one monolithic
thing. It has taken different forms and how harmful it is, has depended on
the form it has taken and how much it is regulated. The same goes for
socialism. And each of these systems looks different in different countries
because cultural traditions vary widely. If one's ideology blinds one to
the differences between the effects on average Americans of a Trump
administration, versus what they would have been under a Clinton
administration, then we have no basis of communication. I'm as angry at the
Democratic Party leadership as anyone could possibly be, and that includes
Obama. I am particularly aware that the parties differ less in foreign
policy than they do in domestic policy. And given the fact that New York,
because of the electoral college, will vote for Biden, regardless of what I
do, I can express my rage and disaffection by throwing away my vote, by
giving it to a candidate who stands for what I believe in, who has no chance
of winning, and who won't hurt a Democratic victory. But given what I know
about how Republicans choose judges, about their record in terms of racism,
economic choices, and immigration, if I lived in a swing state, I'd vote for
Biden and then go home and vomit.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2020 11:14 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Capitalism vs. Socialism
https://socialistaction.org/2020/03/16/capitalism-vs-socialism/
Capitalism vs. Socialism
Socialist Action / 2 days ago
A critique of “lesser-evil” politics
By NICK BAKER
Right-wing columnist George Will recently wrote that in American elections
“the question is not whether elites shall rule, but which elites shall, so
the perennial political problem is to get popular consent to worthy elites.”
This is the American capitalist electoral strategy in a nutshell, stated
openly in Will’s syndicated column published in hundreds of newspapers. Over
100 years ago Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin said that in a capitalist
democracy “the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which
particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and
repress them in parliament.” George Will says Lenin was right.
While the Democratic Party forces today coalesce to push former Vice
President Joe Biden to the fore, many—including most vociferously Senator
Bernie Sanders—are proclaiming the importance of backing whomever emerges as
the Democrat’s presidential candidate. Sanders railing against the
“billionaire class” and the “billionaire Washington establishment”
notwithstanding, billionaire Michael Bloomberg was included in his pledge!
In January, Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Leslie Cagan, Norman Solomon,
and other prominent writers and activists published an open letter to the
Green Party denouncing its decision not to follow a “safe state” strategy in
the November election. Traditionally, the Greens tell their supporters to
vote Green in “safe states” that are already guaranteed to go to either the
Democrat or Republican, but to vote Democrat in “contested states,” where
votes for a Green candidate could prevent the Democrat from beating the
Republican. The letter proclaims the “special danger of Trump” and chastises
Greens for the “price that millions and even billions of people will pay for
Trump winning” if they “spoil” it for the Democrats.
The writers say, “We are told, ‘Greens want to get Trump out as much as
anybody’ but how can that be if Greens would vote for a Green candidate, and
not for Sanders, Warren, or any Democrat in a contested state knowing that
doing so could mean Trump’s victory?” [emphasis added]. I suppose you would
call this “Trump-shaming.”
For Chomsky, this simply continues his election-year tradition of telling
people that the moral choice is to vote for the Democrat as the “lesser
evil.” In an interview on the Al Jazeera television network’s show UpFront
in January 2016, Chomsky said that this strategy is “exactly what I’ve said
in every previous election,” when he announced that he would “absolutely”
vote for Hillary Clinton, already the presumptive nominee at that time,
against whoever became the Republican candidate.
When asked by the interviewer, Mehdi Hasan, to describe the difference
between Clinton and the yet-unsettled Republican nominee of either Donald
Trump or Ted Cruz, Chomsky cited Cruz’s desire to carpet bomb Syria and the
horrors of carpet bombing. Clinton, who throughout the campaign called for a
massive increase in U.S. troops and bombs in Syria and a “no-fly” zone
(where only the U.S. could fly), was therefore Noam Chomsky’s moral choice,
apparently because Clinton didn’t go as far as carpet bombing. When Donald
Trump became the Republican nominee, the New York Times ran an article
saying that of the two, it was Clinton who was the hawk on Syria, not
Trump.
So long as the two parties of capitalism are not literally identical,
Chomsky says that you should vote for the “lesser evil,” as he did in 2016,
2012, 2008, 2004, 2000!
The Left Sinks into the Bernie Campaign
Many on the left insist that Sanders is unlike Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama
and Bill Clinton – neoliberals who unfailingly subordinated workers’
interests to capitalist profit.
But Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist. Some of his
supporters insist that he’s not a Democrat at all, claiming he’s an
“Independent.” Yet Sanders is financially backed by the Democratic Party, is
a prolific fundraiser for the Democratic Party, and a member of the Senate
Democratic Caucus. The Democratic Party has prevented party members from
running against “Independent” Bernie in Vermont. An analysis of Sanders’s
congressional votes done in the 90’s showed that he had a 95 percent
Democratic Party voting record—well above the 80% rating of the average
Democrat at that time.
Sanders is a capitalist candidate full stop. As we demonstrated in our
earlier analysis of his campaign platform and deeds (See “Anatomy of Bernie
Sanders’ Socialism,” December 2019), his politics are nothing more than
warmed-over New Deal liberalism.
Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal, while a genuine improvement in health
care access for American workers, would do little more than socialize the
costs of health care while leaving in place the private, for-profit
hospitals and the extortionary pharmaceutical monopolies where massive
profits and price-gouging will remain the rule.
Sanders’ answers to a recent New York Times questionnaire are revealing.
Asked if he would “consider military force for a humanitarian intervention”
[emphasis added], Sanders gave the answer of every ruling class candidate:
“Yes.”
Claims of “humanitarian intervention” have been the ruling class
stock-in-trade in every imperialist war in history. The current U.S.
imperialist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, are all wars of
“humanitarian intervention,” along with the U.S.’s attempted coup and
economic warfare in Venezuela, its embargo of Cuba, and its endless threats
against China, Iran, and North Korea. Obama destroyed Libya on the basis of
a “humanitarian intervention.” Going back over 120 years, the U.S. has
justified its invasions of Cuba, Haiti, Korea, Vietnam, etc. on the basis of
“humanitarian intervention.”
Sanders response to next NYT question, “Would you consider military force to
pre-empt an Iranian or North Korean nuclear or missile test?, was similarly
revealing.” Sanders answered “Yes” again.
Is the Sanders campaign a movement to build socialism?
Many Sanders supporters insist that his campaign can be the beginning of a
movement. We hear this more and more from the segment of his supporters who
identify as socialists and who state plainly their belief that socialism is
the only way to that goal, that is, a just society ruled by the working
masses in their own name and in their own interests, for the benefit of all,
not the profits of the few. These “socialists” often acknowledge that
Sanders himself is not actually a socialist. But, they assert, his campaign
is or can be the beginning of a movement, inside the Democratic Party – or
inside the so-called leftwing of the Democratic Party – to build working
class power and eventually socialism in America.
In truth, Bernie Sanders is a capitalist politician operating in a ruling
class party tightly controlled by the ruling rich and always operating in
the interests of capitalism. It is the party that has absorbed so many
activists from the civil rights movement, the Black liberation movement, the
women’s liberation movement, the LGBTQI liberation movement – turning those
activists away from their movement goals while often integrating them into
the very structures of the capitalist system.
That’s why the Democratic Party is known as the “graveyard of social
movements.” It aims and operates to take promising social movements out of
the streets and into the voting booth, into bourgeois elections – the
preferred arena of the ruling class where the wealthy elite write the rules
themselves and choose whether or not to enforce them, according to whatever
best serves their interests. All roads inside the Democratic Party lead to
the same place: the continued domination of the capitalist exploiters.
Socialist supporters of Sanders will soon learn what the class line means.
The Democratic Party is on one side of it and the interests of the working
class are on the other. There is no movement for working class power that
can be built alongside the exploiters of working class labor. There is no
socialist internationalism that can be built inside the party of imperialist
war. There is no anti-capitalism in the party of billionaires. There is no
revolution in the party of the one percent.
If the Democrats ran Lenin himself, we wouldn’t vote for him. Because the
Democratic Party is an instrument of the ruling rich who control it, fund
it, guide its every move, and whose interests it serves perfectly.
Socialism can only arise from independent organizations of the working
class, acting in its own interests. Vote Socialist Action in 2020! Join us!
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March 16, 2020 in Uncategorized.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson
