https://themilitant.com/2019/02/09/democrats-2020-campaign-takes-aim-at-workers-rights/
Democrats’ 2020 campaign takes aim at workers’ rights
By Terry Evans
Vol. 83/No. 7
February 18, 2019
The minute the 2018 midterm elections wound down, the 2020 presidential
election campaign — as well as contests for state and city offices in
2019 — got going full speed. As one Democratic aspirant after another
throws their hat in the ring, they each say they are the best candidate
to lead the “resistance” to prevent the “unthinkable” — a second term
for President Donald Trump. Their real target is the working class that
the capitalist rulers increasingly fear today.
Kamala Harris, a former San Francisco prosecutor, is the progressives’
front-runner. Over 20,000 people went to her first rally in Oakland.
Harris has been joined so far by Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi
Gabbard and Kirsten Gillibrand. They all view workers, farmers and small
proprietors as ignorant, racist, gun-loving sorts, who need to have
their rights restricted to prevent them from making “bad” decisions — as
they did by electing Trump to the presidency. They think working people
need to be “managed” by “smarter” people like themselves, acting on
behalf of the capitalist rulers.
These workers are the people Hillary Clinton denigrated in 2016 as “a
basket of deplorables.” She said the president’s voters come from the
“backward” areas of the country between New York and California — the
coastal “dynamic” areas where she won her votes.
Kamala Harris reiterates Clinton’s views. Last March she declared,
“California represents the future and if Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions
don’t like it, they are in for a fight.”
Liberals’ disdain for working people
Tens of thousands of working people joined in the victorious teachers
strike in West Virginia last year, a strike that built on traditions
from decades of miners’ battles against the coal bosses. It offered
fellow workers around the country an example of the capacities of our
class to organize and fight.
Their actions are “a living refutation of the portrait of working-class
bigotry and ‘backwardness’ painted … by a broad spectrum of middle-class
liberals and much of the radical left,” explains Socialist Workers Party
leader Mary-Alice Waters in In Defense of the US Working Class. “It is
not only Donald Trump they obsessively hope to impeach,” she adds.
“Their target … is that class of people that is rising up, many of whom
voted for Donald Trump.”
Like state prosecutors across the country under the capitalist “justice”
system, Harris helped implement the massive rise in the prison
population, spurred by “anti-crime” legislation from the Bill Clinton
administration. In 2014, Harris’ office opposed the release of prisoners
eligible for parole on the grounds that the state needed them as a
supply of cheap labor. She backed laws to allow prosecution of parents
whose children skip school.
Like Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, Harris is a “mainstream” Democratic Party
“progressive.” These are the ones — not the “democratic socialists”
elected in 2018 like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who are leading the
charge against Trump and working people.
In the eyes of the liberals, anyone who might obstruct the Democratic
Party’s path to the White House should be shut up. When former Starbucks
boss Howard Schultz spoke in New York after announcing he was
considering a run for president as a “centrist independent,” Democrats
organized repeated attempts to shout him down.
The liberals are so concerned about potential for unrest in the working
class that they’ve moved to criminalize political differences within the
ruling class itself. They’ve turned to the FBI — a tool of the
capitalist class to frame up working-class militants, Black rights
fighters and opponents of the rulers’ wars — to take down Trump. They
hope former FBI boss Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe into Trump’s
2016 campaign will dig up enough dirt to oust the president even before
2020.
At dawn on Jan. 25, Mueller sent a 29-member FBI team armed to the teeth
with assault weapons, two armored vehicles, an overhead helicopter,
drones and an amphibious vehicle as backup to arrest former Trump
campaign adviser Roger Stone at his Florida home. They cuffed and perp
walked him out before a phalanx of press who said they’d gotten a “tip”
to be there.
Stone said that he would have voluntarily turned himself in if only he
had been asked. In fact, such methods are dangerous for the working class.
The Republican Party is fractured as well. Many “Never Trumpers” view
the president as an erratic outsider who threatens their party.
Republican leader Mitch McConnell sponsored a bill through the Senate —
with bipartisan support — that denounced Trump’s plans to withdraw
troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
“The Democrats and Republicans try to trap working people into voting
for the ‘lesser evil,’” Dan Fein, Socialist Workers Party candidate for
Chicago mayor, told the Militant. “But there is an alternative. Workers
need to act independently of the bosses and their parties. The SWP’s
campaigns across the country explain that through working-class struggle
our class will develop the confidence, courage and leadership to be able
to take political power into our own hands.”
In This Issue
Front Page Articles •Political crisis in Venezuela deepens - US hands off!
•Protests win heat back at federal jail in Brooklyn
•Democrats’ 2020 campaign takes aim at workers’ rights
•‘Working people need to organize independent of the bosses’ parties’
•Washington, Beijing rulers vie over trade, telecommunications markets
Feature Articles •Working people respond with solidarity after Havana
tornado
Also In This Issue •Yellow vests demand halt to cop attacks on protests
•$9,000 pledged so far as readers respond to ‘Militant’ fund appeal
•Join Cuba May Day Brigade, see the revolution for yourself!
•Protesters demand dignity, rights for Australian Aborigines
Editorials •Join Socialist Workers Party campaign!
On the Picket Line •Autoworkers strike in Hungary wins 18 percent
monthly raise
•Building workers in New Jersey strike three days for contract
Books of the Month •‘There’s a revolution going on, a worldwide revolution’
As I See It •What are lessons for workers from the LA teachers strike?
25, 50 and 75 years ago
Letters
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Carl Sagan
“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind
and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says
everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the
fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan
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