We've been conditioned over many years to be our own worst enemy. We
cannot allow ourselves to fall into the trap that we can reform the
existing government. It's not ours. Besides, you can't reform a dead
horse by beating it.
We need to see our many divisions come together and talk about the
sort of world we want for our grandchildren. Then we need to figure
out how to move the Masters out of the throne room without resorting
to their murderous tactics.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/11/15, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Can you think of any reason that the US would be immune to the laws of
history?
On 12/11/2015 11:30 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Aside from a few mis statements, this is a pretty good summary of the
situation. The problem is, I feel like it leaves us nowhere. Does the
Socialist Workers' Party or any other socialist of communist party
actually think that there can be a socialist revolution in the US? I
suppose that hope springs eternal for some folks.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Friday, December 11, 2015 10:19 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] ‘Lesser-evil’ politics from Trump to Sanders
http://socialistaction.org/
‘Lesser-evil’ politics from Trump to Sanders
Published December 10, 2015. | By Socialist Action.
Sasha Murphy, of the ANSWER Coalition, leads demonstrators in a chant
during a protest against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's
hosting "Saturday Night Live" in New York, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015. Despite
a 40-year history of lampooning politicians while inviting some to mock
themselves as on-air guests, booking a presidential candidate to host the
NBC sketch-comedy show is almost unprecedented.
(AP Photo/Patrick Sison)
Sasha Murphy, of the ANSWER Coalition, leads demonstrators in a chant
during a protest against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's
hosting "Saturday Night Live" in New York, Saturday, Nov. 7, 2015. Despite
a 40-year history of lampooning politicians while inviting some to mock
themselves as on-air guests, booking a presidential candidate to host the
NBC sketch-comedy show is almost unprecedented.
(AP Photo/Patrick Sison)
By JEFF MACKLER
That the leading Republican Party presidential candidate,
multi-billionaire Donald Trump, is a full-blown reactionary caricature of
a capitalist politician is now the common parlance of most major media
outlets. Even the relatively conservative Washington Post featured a Dec.
1 Dana Milibank column entitled, “Donald Trump Racist Bigot.”
Milibank, reflecting the general unease at Trump’s virulently racist,
misogynist, and xenophobic outbursts, wrote: “Let’s not mince words:
Donald Trump is a bigot and a racist. … There is a great imperative not to
be silent in the face of demagoguery. Trump in this campaign has gone
after African Americans, immigrants, Latinos, Asians, women, Muslims and
now the disabled…
“It might be possible to explain away any one of Trump’s outrages as a
mistake or a misunderstanding. But at some point you’re not merely saying
things that could be construed as bigoted: You are a bigot.
“It has been more than a quarter century since Trump took out ads in New
York newspapers calling for the death penalty for “criminals of every age”
after five black and Latino teens were implicated in the Central Park
jogger case. The young men, convicted and imprisoned, were later cleared
by DNA evidence and the confession of a serial rapist—and Trump called
their wrongful-conviction settlement a ‘disgrace.’”
“Since then,” Milibank continued, “Trump led the ‘birther’ movement
challenging President Obama’s standing as a natural-born American; used
various vulgar expressions to refer to women; spoke of Mexico sending
rapists and other criminals across the border; called for rounding up and
deporting 11 million illegal immigrants; had high-profile spats with
prominent Latino journalists and news outlets; mocked Asian accents; let
stand a charge made in his presence that Obama is a Muslim and that
Muslims are a ‘problem’ in America; embraced the notion of forcing Muslims
to register in a database; falsely claimed thousands of Muslims celebrated
the 9/11 attacks in New Jersey; tweeted bogus statistics asserting that
most killings of whites are done by blacks; approved of the roughing up of
a black demonstrator at one of his events; and publicly mocked the
[physical] movements of New York Times (and former Washington Post)
journalist Serge Kovaleski, who has a chronic condition limiting
mobility.”
What is perhaps a bit different in today’s virtually year-round election
hyperbole is the fact that virtually every one of the dozen or so
Republican presidential contenders have remained all but silent as Trump
daily spews out his noxious diatribes. Indeed, until quite recently, most
of the corporate media relished covering Trump’s every anti-social rant,
fearful perhaps that failure to do so might lose them critical media
ratings.
Trump himself has repeatedly affirmed that any coverage, especially free
media coverage—and to date he has by far had the lion’s share of the
latter—could only work to his advantage.
On Nov. 8, Trump delighted in the opportunity to appear on the popular
“Saturday Night Live” television show, where wacked-out comedian Larry
David, who plays the part of an obnoxious liberal racist on his “Curb Your
Enthusiasm” show, took up DeportRacism.com’s offer of a $5000 prize to
publicly heckle Trump and call him a racist. David, who has yet to collect
his winnings, did just that—with Trump’s explicit and prior, if not
enthusiastic, agreement. In capitalist America today, a real live,
laughing, racist billionaire is a profitable talent to broadcast!
Meanwhile, the front-running Trump has a dozen Republican challengers,
including the second in the polls—retired surgeon, Christian
fundamentalist, and climate and evolution denier Ben Carson. All afford
Trump virtually free rein in his fear and hate-mongering campaign, with a
few occasionally and cautiously seizing the opportunity to one-up this
racist bigot in order to better capture an ever greater portion of the
Republican Party’s alienated, largely middle-class, Tea Party-enthusiast
voter base.
No doubt Trump’s rants find fertile soil in a small layer of the overall
electorate, but even less in the general population, some half of which
increasingly does not bother to vote.
But Trump’s backwater histrionics are not new to the increasingly
polarized and crisis-ridden world capitalist scene. Overtly far-right, if
not neo-fascist, views are similarly expressed in France, England, and
across Europe. In the former two nations such right-wing parties have, for
the first time in nearly a century, outpolled the traditional capitalist
stalwart parties of the status quo.
Trump is the American reflection of overtly racist and neo-fascist
ideology— if not a conscious experiment with it. His racist rants in some
instances have encouraged the use of violent physical attacks by his
disaffected followers, who find his scapegoating of the oppressed to their
liking.
Democratic Party charade
On the Democratic Party side of capitalism’s electoral charade, this
ruling-class party’s lead candidates take the opposite tack, portraying
themselves as the font of progressive values.
In their first nationally televised debate, all five of the original
Democratic Party contenders, led by “socialist” Bernie Sanders and matched
by Hillary Clinton, enthusiastically decried the “casino capitalism” of
Wall Street.
Their purported vision of the future society is one in which the U.S.
“returns” to the moral values of its much fantasized “small business”
and “hard-working little man” roots, where prosperity awaits all who
conscientiously put in the effort. References to America’s slave-labor and
robber-baron origins are absent in this scenario.
Given President Obama’s significantly declining poll ratings, none of the
present Democratic Party contenders sought his overt political support.
“Mums the word” with regard to Obama’s record of leading the nation in
implementing each and every corporate assault against unions, workers, and
the poor. None chose to identify with Obama’s unprecedented corporate
largess in the form of multi-trillion-dollar bailouts to the richest
sectors of the U.S. ruling class.
Rhetoric aside, Sanders’ Democratic Party voting record stands at 98
percent, while Hillary Clinton’s financial support from corporate
America’s giants, as with Obama before her and Bill Clinton earlier,
topped all contributions to her Republican opponents.
We might add that former Secretary of State Clinton backed to the hilt
every imperialist war effort of the Obama administration from Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Libya to today’s U.S. war efforts in Syria. Obama’s
countless covert and drone wars abroad murdered millions while stuffing
the coffers of the military-industrial complex at home. But virtually no
comment from Bernie or Hillary!
Meanwhile, Obama’s hard-working “legacy” promoters struggle today to
posture the president as a keen environmental advocate, an ally of
immigrant communities, a champion of health care for all, a friend of the
working class, a champion of democratic rights, and a man who is reluctant
to send more troops to fight in the interests of U.S. imperialism.
Obama has become the media-promoted rational champion of climate science,
currently partaking in the UN-sponsored Paris talks as the chief
“defender” of the earth against the ravages of global warming.
Yet, Obama’s administration holds the modern-day record for increasing the
use of fossil fuels, opening the floodgates to corporate off-shore
drilling, and maintaining the obnoxiously high government tax breaks for
the leading Big Oil polluters.
Obama’s recent squelching of the infamous Keystone XL pipeline provided
his administration a momentary fig leaf of credibility that immediately
vanishes when contrasted to the massive increase of environmentally
destructive pipeline complexes in place or under construction across the
country.
Obama, the “Great Deporter,” with a record two million immigrants brutally
forced out of the country to his credit, gifted $13 trillion in bailouts
over the past seven years to the corporate elite. He presided over the
wholesale shredding of civil liberties (as so ably exposed by the Snowden
revelations). His signature “affordable” health care legislation gifted $3
trillion over the next 10 years to the private and largely monopolized
insurance, hospital, and pharmaceutical industries—as opposed to a
single-payer alternative that would have saved $1 trillion in government
expenditures over the same period.
A Dec. 5 New York Times article entitled, “Jobs Report Seen as Strong
Enough for Fed Action” [to raise interest rates on today’s nearly
zero-rate “loans” to corporate America] nevertheless revealed some bitter
truths about the Obama administration’s seven-year record.
“At 62.5 percent,” The Times notes, “the proportion of Americans in the
labor force remains near mid-decade lows. The jobless rate for
African-Americans rose by 0.2 percentage points in November to 9.4
percent, which is more than twice the 4.3 percent for white Americans.”
“Moreover, The Times adds, “the economy is still 2.8 million jobs short of
where it would have to be to match pre-recession employment levels while
also absorbing new entrants into the workforce. … Even if the current
trend continues, that so-called ‘jobs gap’ will not be closed until
mid-2017.”
Another Dec. 5 New York Times article, “Lawmakers Near Deal on Billions in
Tax Cuts,” notes that the upcoming bipartisan tax-cut legislation, in
almost all cases written behind the scenes and negotiated secretly by the
technocrat specialists of the corporate elite, amounts to nothing less
than a five-year duration transfer of $840 billion from us to them—from
tax-paying working people to the tax-avoiding richest portion of the one
percent that really rules America.
A general shift to the right
Today’s political/electoral drama, almost always devoid of the crooked
corporate machinations that lead to tax cuts and other perks for the
super-wealthy, can best be summarized: “The Republicans talk the talk:
the Democrats walk the walk.”
The silky and “progressive”-sounding Democratic Party election-time jargon
is no accident or fluke. It is consciously designed to pose this wing of
the ruling class as the “civilized” representatives of an egalitarian
society that respects, if not cherishes, democratic and human rights and
economic fairness.
Similarly, the Republicans’ election posturing as a racist nut-case party
of almost deranged hate-mongers, climate deniers, and war hawks is not
without its own logic. The extreme verbal political divergence between
Democrats and Republicans lays the foundation for capitalism’s well-honed
election-time lesser-evil scenario, wherein alienated voters who would
more than likely abandon the two-party shell game—a 60 percent majority
favor a new third party, according to a recent Gallup poll—feel compelled
to once again allow themselves to partake in “choosing”
capitalism’s preferred horse in the race.
The seeming Republican Party scapegoating mania combines well with a
generalized disgust with “establishment” politics, and it allows Democrats
to move ever further to the right. Few doubt that President Obama and his
Democratic Party political, social, and economic policies are far to the
right of the most “evil” Republican propositions of yesteryear.
This generalized shift to the right of ruling-class politics, and the
associated feigned public disputes, never fail to reach resolution in the
hidden congressional and corporate corridors, where “compromise”
solutions, always at the expense of the vast majority, are routinely
arrived at.
The chaotic and crisis-ridden capitalist system itself—in a crisis
virtually equal in magnitude to that of the Great Depression of 1929—best
accounts for today’s public partisan discord. Different wings of the
ruling elite are today at odds with regard to how much, how fast, and with
what means—mass repression or “friendly” persuasion—to most effectively
advance their common corporate interests.
Sanders pledges to support any Democrat
It is in this context, where massive disillusionment with and alienation
from “traditional” capitalist parties and politics has reached new
heights, that one can also understand the rise of long-time registered
“independent,” now “socialist,” Bernie Sanders, as well as the racist
social dissident, Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders is now an official Democrat, having pledged in advance to
support whoever of his party competitors emerges from the upcoming
election primary contests as the winner. In some recent polls in the early
primary states, like New Hampshire and Iowa, Sanders’ ranking appears to
be in the political ballpark—that is, he could win.
It was perhaps some 50-60 years ago, when I first encountered the “lesser
evil” dichotomy at work—Kennedy vs. Nixon and Johnson (LBJ) vs.
Barry Goldwater—that I half seriously predicted that the time would come
when the ruling-class elite, when it believed it was necessary to head off
a likely working-class move toward a break with the capitalist two-party
duopoly, would run a “socialist” for president, under the Democratic Party
imprimatur, of course.
That day has arrived, with “Bernie” filling the bill almost perfectly as
today’s central sheepherder of the unwary back into the Democratic Party
fold.
Sanders’ service record on capitalism’s behalf falls well within the
boundaries of ruling-class politics. He supported the Obama
administration’s wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and
Yemen—although he, like most other liberals who feigned opposition to the
Iraq War, including Obama, now claim that this war was a ”mistake.”
The Saddam Hussein government after all, they have been compelled to
admit, never had “weapons of mass destruction.” The U.S. slaughter of
1.5 million Iraqis, we are told with a straight face, was a mistake!
“Socialist” Sanders gave his assent to countless trillion-dollar military
appropriations bills, including all congressional measures that supported
Israel in its genocidal drive to eliminate any Palestinian presence in
their historic homeland.
Thus, campaigning for and organizing mass forces to demand the immediate
and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from every nation on earth
is not within the Sanders campaign’s calculated political territory. He
knows full well that any real socialist would view U.S.
imperialism’s wars everywhere as nothing less than the extension and
embodiment of U.S. ruling-class policies at home.
Sanders has indeed disappointed some of his liberal and even “socialist”
supporters today due to his perceived “weakness” on foreign-policy issues
and his failure to unequivocally challenge and condemn the ever-increasing
brutality and police murder of unarmed Blacks. When confronted with a
Black Lives Matter representative who jumped onto the stage demanding to
know where Sanders stood on America’s deepening racist attacks, the
“political revolutionary” was speechless and quickly exited, leaving the
audience stunned. When he was soon afterward advised that his well-crafted
liberal image had to include a modicum of support to Black rights, he
meekly assented, but only to the point of not significantly interfering
with Clinton’s prior turf “claim” to the Black vote.
Sanders has also made clear that he is not the kind of socialist that
seeks the social ownership of the nation’s wealth and the establishment of
a revolutionary state that once and for all places society’s means of
production and wealth in the hands of and under the democratic control of
those who produce it, in the framework of a government of the working
class and its allies. Sanders’ “socialism,” he insists, includes respect
for private property—operating, perhaps, in a bit more humanely manner.
In short, Sanders, like his “socialist” counterparts in France or in the
Scandinavian countries, seeks a “kinder gentler capitalism.” The fact that
he seeks to emulate Europe’s historically bankrupt social-democratic
capitalist model while these nations are engaged in supporting all of
NATO’s wars and imposing the same, if not worse, austerity measures
against their respective working masses is not unexpected.
In these troubled times “Bernie,” in fact, perfectly fills capitalism’s
needs for legitimacy. His chatter about the need for a “political
revolution” in the U.S. is subordinate to his quarter-century service as
Vermont’s leading elected official—unchallenged by the Democratic Party.
His current assignment, for which he will undoubtedly be richly rewarded
down the line, is to corral working-class discontent back into the
capitalist framework and, when the Peter Pan fairy dust has cleared, to
back Hillary Clinton.
Santa is in exile!
There is no Santa Claus on Wall Street, dear friends—neither in the form
of Bernie and Hillary nor charitable gift-giving billionaires like Gates
and Zuckerberg. Indeed, the real Santa likely abandoned his North Pole
abode at the first signs of Industrial Revolution capitalist-caused global
warming.
That once pristine ice-capped area, increasingly barren today, is the
domain of happy Obama’s helpers, including the Chevron Corporation, which
seeks to mine the exposed earth for the very fossil fuels whose continued
use spells doom for all human kind. The real Santa likely moved his
helpers to cities around the world to join the fight to restore his
homeland and ours, and to return to the people of the earth the
opportunity to collectively build a joyous world, free from those who
would irrationally destroy it in the pursuit of profit.
Another Christmastime hero, a young Jewish rebel who lived a bit more than
2000 years ago, may have left us with some insightful words to ponder.
“Drive the money changers from the temple,” he exhorted. Not a bad holiday
admonition! Indeed, the socialist movement of the early 19th century did
include followers of Jesus, who believed that socialism was the modern-day
expression of the teachings of the Lord.
Today’s Marxist revolutionaries base themselves on a qualitatively
grounded or materialist understanding of the roots of capitalist society’s
countless horrors. As the gap narrows between workers’
mounting hatred of the dread consequences of capitalist exploitation and
oppression and their reluctance to enter the fray to challenge it in all
its fundamentals, we will see countless millions of new and clear-sighted
fighters break with all of capitalism’s ruling-class-based institutions of
coercion and control.
That day is not far over the horizon. Today, the conscious organization of
a deeply-rooted mass revolutionary socialist party—aimed at ending
capitalist rule forever and bringing forth a new world dedicated to
advancing the finest yearnings for freedom, justice, and equality—is
Socialist Action’s reason for being. Join us!
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