Showing posts with label Democratic Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Democratic Party. Show all posts

Friday, December 2, 2016

When the Big Tent Collapses

Hillary Clinton's loss to Donald Trump has triggered the collapse of the "party of the big tent," and the only two poles left standing for the Democrats are plainly labeled "Wall Street" and "war profiteering."

If you're concerned about potable water in Flint, Michigan, the Democrats don't have a solution for you. But they'll happily promise to pay lip service to the problem in exchange for your vote. "That's more than the Republicans will do," they'll chide. And if you object that paying lip service doesn't amount to doing more, but merely to saying more, they'll shrug and say, "Take it or leave it."

The negotiation will follow the same lines on any other issue that matters--from climate change to the school-to-prison pipeline to election integrity to toxic trade deals.

In every case, if you want the Democrats to pretend to care about the issue that matters to you, you must first support their death- and usury-based profit models. That is the only deal on the table. To reject it is to be branded a right wing nutjob or a white nationalist.

2016 has already been disastrous for the U.S. and the planet. The only way it can become more disastrous is if we, the members of the voting public, fail to learn anything meaningful and actionable from the experience of our most recent presidential election.

Sadly, each time I hear a Democratic supporter of the NoDAPL movement imply that the Sioux of Standing Rock are somehow getting Trumped (when they are in fact getting Obamaed), it seems that the most obvious lesson of 2016 has failed to register with many of my fellow citizens.

That lesson is simple: The Democratic Party is not the party of opposition to the GOP; it is the party of controlled opposition. Instead of resisting the economic, racial, and environmental injustices advocated by Republicans, the Democrats enable and advance those injustices by mounting phony and feckless opposition to them. That is their job, their only role in our society. And it's killing us. 

An examination of four prominent surrogates for Hillary Clinton (each representing a distinct aspect of the Democratic Party's putative commitment of justice) should make this case plain to anyone who doesn't insist on viewing the matter through cobalt-tinted glasses.

After all, it should be weird that Josh Fox (who opposes fracking), Nomiki Konst (who opposes election rigging), Michael Moore (who opposes job-killing trade deals), and Jay Z (who opposes the prison-for-profit industry) all ended up supporting the presidential candidate whose political career has been dedicated to championing everything they oppose. But it isn't weird. It's how the Democratic Party works.

The Curious Case of Josh Fox


Josh Fox is an independent filmmaker best known for Gasland, which exposes the environmental dangers of fracking.

So how did he end up supporting the "queen of fracking" for president?

The explanation seems to get back to the Republican Party's denial of climate change. Like Bill McKibben and other climate change activists loosely affiliated with the Democratic Party, Fox appears to believe there's an important difference between denying climate change and ignoring it.

In the minds of pro-Hillary eviros, Republicans like George W. Bush are bad because they refuse to acknowledge climate change, but Democrats like Barack Obama are good because they sign unenforceable international climate treaties while expanding pipeline networks throughout the US and turning the Gulf of Mexico into a dumpsite for fracking chemicals. For Democrats, the solution to the problem of greenhouse gas emissions has less to do with reducing those emissions than with saying loudly and clearly, after every oil spill and pipeline explosion, "There there, atmosphere. We feel your pain."

You might expect a climate activist like Fox to gravitate to the Green Party, but Fox's contempt for the Greens is unbounded. He asserts that he "never saw Greens" when he participated in environmental protests, which is a page straight from the DNC playbook. Supporters of Bernie Sanders will recall that John Lewis used the same rhetorical tactic in a failed attempt to undermine Sanders' involvement in the Civil Rights movement.

Fox doesn't simply loathe Greens in general. He has a specific grievance against Jill Stein because her investment portfolio (like the investment portfolios of most Americans with 401k accounts) includes holdings in the fossil fuel industry through index funds. From Fox's perspective, Stein's hypocrisy for owning these stocks is unforgivable, but his own hypocrisy in supporting the candidate who spent her time as Secretary of State peddling fracking technology to the rest of the world is a justifiable form of political expedience.

That's an absurd double standard if Fox is truly committed to preventing fracking. But he isn't. Instead, he's committed to convincing you that if someone as opposed to fracking as he used to be can get behind the pro-fracking Democrats, you should too.

That's the way things work in the big tent.

The Curious Case of Nomiki Konst



Nomiki Konst is a political analyst best known for The Accountability Project, which exposes corruption in politics.

So how did she end up supporting the deeply corrupt Clinton campaign?

She followed the time-honored Democratic formula of supporting the candidate who spoke out against corruption in the primaries (Sanders) en route to supporting his establishment rival (Clinton) in the general election.

Democrats have relied on this formula for decades. It's how Jesse Jackson's backers in 1992 ended up supporting corporatist Bill Clinton; how Lyndon LaRouche's backers in 2000 ended up supporting corporatist Al Gore; how Howard Dean's backers in 2004 ended up supporting corporatist John Kerry; and how Dennis Kucinich's backers in 2008 ended up supporting corporatist Barack Obama.

As a vocal and committed Democrat, Konst spent her adult life developing the political muscle memory necessary for an effortless transition from Sanders to Clinton. As with Stockholm Syndrome, the victims of the Democratic Party become adept at self-abnegation in support of their abusers even when the abuse is physical, as Konst revealed in this video:


Konst wasn't merely present when a Clinton supporter struck a Sanders supporter with a cane for daring to stand up for her rights at a New York delegation. To her credit, she took pains to speak out against the injustice of the incident on the spot and to publicize it online.

But having observed the violence inherent in the Democratic establishment's oppression of insurgent voices--having documented and commented on many incidents of intimidation and voter suppression that Democrats used against their own voters and delegates in the primary process--Konst would later come to support Clinton.

That seems like an absurd position for Konst to take if she is truly committed to the elimination of corruption. But she isn't. Instead, she's committed to convincing you that if someone as opposed to corruption as she used to be can get behind the deeply corrupt DNC, you should too.

That's the way things work in the big tent. 

The Curious Case of Michael Moore

Michael Moore is a documentary filmmaker best known for chronicling the urban blight that besets industrial towns after massive job losses (as in his hometown of Flint).

So why would he support a candidate who championed NAFTA and helped push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)?

Part of the explanation seems to be the willingness of Democrats like Moore to focus entirely on what people say in public rather than what they do in private. Even though the Podesta emails from WikiLeaks confirm what most voters already knew about the TPP (i.e. that Hillary Clinton's public opposition to the international trade deal was a ruse), Moore was able to pretend that Clinton's phony opposition to the TPP was the political equivalent of Donald Trump's genuine opposition to it.

Democrats like to point out that words matter. For Democrats like Moore, it turns out that words are, in fact, the only things that matter.

While Clinton was in Flint, she spoke publicly and passionately about how the water crisis there needed to be seen as "a national priority." She outspent Trump by over $100M on campaign advertising (nearly double the amount needed to solve the water crisis in Flint)--even though any political advisor worth his salt could have told Clinton that one meaningful political action on her part--one gesture to people who couldn't pay her for making it--would have resonated with voters more profoundly than ten thousand political advertisements.

But of course, as Moore knows very well, Clinton's mission was never to help the people of Flint--not with their water problems or their job loss problems. The fact that they're broke because their jobs are gone is precisely why politicians like Clinton couldn't care less about the people of Flint. If they wanted nontoxic water, they never should have become too poor to bribe a politician into helping them in the first place. So even though corporate Democrats like the Clintons have done more to create cities like Flint throughout the country than any other kind of politician, Moore tells us we must support precisely such candidates--apparently to teach the communities they've blighted a lesson!

That seems like an absurd position for Moore to take if he is truly committed to opposing toxic trade deals such as the TPP. But he isn't. Instead, he's committed to convincing you that if someone as opposed to toxic trade deals as he used to be can get behind the pro-TPP Democrats, you should too.

That's the way things work in the big tent.

The Curious Case of Jay Z
Jay Z is a rapper best known in political activist circles for his opposition to the school-to-prison pipeline.

So how did he end up supporting a candidate who helped build that pipeline with her support for the 1994 Crime Bill, her advocacy for gutting welfare, and her characterization of urban youth as "superpredators" who must be brought "to heel"?

I suspect that the answer has something to do with the integral role played by the black misleadership class in the Clinton media machine. The Clintons have always understood the advantage of using people of color as their loudest cheerleaders just when they are imposing their most exploitative policies on the communities those spokespeople are presumed (usually by ignorant television viewers) to represent. By speaking out against the prison-for-profit industry while championing one of its chief stakeholders, Jay Z merely performed the same role as other professional black misleaders (such as Al Sharpton, Joy Reid, and John Lewis) who make the Clinton agenda look as if it has the support of the black community. 

Anyone familiar with Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow understands that the true superpredators who walk among us are the Joe Bidens and the Bill and Hillary Clintons of the world--the politicians whose donors figured out how to use a criminality clause in the Thirteenth Amendment (along with racially biased enforcement of anti-marijuana laws and a purposely arbitrary distinction between cocaine and crack) to create a new slave-based economy in America within the prison-industrial complex.

Jay Z understands the injustices of this system well enough to have made calls for "more schools, less prisons" a part of his onstage persona. He helped publicize the outrageous ordeal of Kalief Browder (who was confined to Riker's Island for three years simply for refusing to take a plea deal on a crime he didn't commit). And yet he supported a candidate who believes that marijuana should remain illegal (even though blacks are almost four times more likely than whites to be convicted for marijuana use) and that the death penalty is a necessary component of our criminal justice system (even though it is inflicted disproportionately on black convicts).

That seems like an absurd position for Jay Z to take if he is truly committed to opposing our racist incarceration state. But he isn't. Instead, he's committed to convincing you that if someone as opposed to mass incarceration as he used to be can get behind the prison-pushing Democrats, you should too.

That's the way things work in the big tent.

The Lunacy of the Reform-from-within Strategy

The Democratic Party isn't built to help you realize your objectives as a voter. It's built to appropriate your strength at the ballot box and to co-opt your sense of injustice.

When you join the Democrats, you can fall in line behind the people who want to stop climate change and corruption and job-killing trade deals and institutional racism and any other objectionable thing you can think of. The only satisfaction you will take from allying with Democrats is that your issue (unless it happens to be pro-Wall Street or pro-war) will be just as thoroughly ignored as everyone else's.

Eventually, you may become frustrated enough to say, "I'm tired of donating my time, energy, and money to a party that never does anything ordinary people want because it's too busy doing what the donors want."

You'll be scolded for your impatience and reminded that the Democrats are the party of the big tent, where everybody has a seat at the table--which is more than the Republicans can offer.

But here's the thing: It doesn't even matter whether they're right about the Republicans. The seat you're given might as well have a "Kick me!" sign taped to the back of it. If you choose to remain seated in that pointless chair at that pointless table inside that pointless tent, don't you dare blame the Republicans for how pointless the exercise is. That's the trap that keeps on trapping.

You can blame the Democrats a little bit for being treacherous and manipulative.

But you should mainly blame yourself for remaining seated.








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Friday, November 18, 2016

The Democrats Have a Donor Problem that Even Bernie Sanders Can't Solve


Like a lot of people, I'm woke because of Bernie Sanders.

And like a growing number of people, I'm too woke for the post-election DNC propaganda Sanders is peddling to have its intended effect.

Correct-the-Record operatives on Twitter harass me non-stop about how my antipathy for Hillary Clinton helped elect Trump. That doesn't bother me. I believe we're better off with Trump than we would have been with Clinton because—asJimmy Dore has long argued—Trump puts an ugly face on the ugly policies at the center of American life.

Progressivism would have remained asleep under Clinton the same way it's slumbered under Barack Obama for eight years. Although I don't expect Trump's Department of Justice to protect children like Tamir Rice from homicidal cops any better than Obama's did, I do expect people to pay closer attention to such injustices under Trump.

But there's a different form of Brockbot harassment that does bother me because I see it working on some people. It takes the form of tweets like this:

The purpose of Lockett's tweet is 1) to remind people that a Trump presidency is a horrifying prospect (which it certainly is); and 2) to drive those horrified people back into the arms of the Democrats as their only protection (which the Democrats certainly aren't, as their neoliberal corruption is precisely what led to Trump's rise in the first place).

Instead of acknowledging the glaring flaws of Clinton's candidacy (FBI investigations are no big deal) and platform (even though the generals know that a no-fly zone in Syria will lead to war with Russia, that doesn't really count as long as CNN finds something else to talk about), Brock's minions continue to focus on fearmongering about the GOP:
If Brock had not just met behind closed doors with George Soros, Neera Tanden, Keith Ellison, and the other neolib masterminds who brought us the Trump presidency, this hillbot nonsense would be easy to ignore.

But it's difficult to ignore when Sanders himself participates, as he does in this speech:


It's great to see Sanders calling out the failure of the Democratic Party, but chilling to see him transition immediately to cheering for a Soros puppet like Ellison, who is simply a male embodiment of Clinton's warhawkishness. (The fact that Ellison also happens to be black and a Muslim is simply part of the identity politics screen behind which the DNC loves to hide its most destructive and oppressive policy priorities. Just as Obama's pigmentation was an effective diversion from the racist incarceration state over which he presided, Ellison's religion deflects attention from his eagerness to bomb Muslim children in Libya and Syria and anywhere else Soros desires.)

I don't deny that Ellison supports some genuinely progressive policies. The problem is that the Democratic Party funnels all progressives to the same group of donors, and the insidious influence of those donors invariably compromises the progressive instincts of these candidates. Ellison's progressivism is the window dressing that makes him palatable enough for voters to support him. But the end result is that the donors always get what they want from these candidates--while the voters who put them into office never do.

That's too grand a claim for me to prove in one blog post, but I hope to make the case watertight with additional entries in the coming weeks.

For the time being, I want to make my overarching thesis as clear as possible:

Since the Democratic Party is, as Kshama Sawant observes, a "graveyard" for progressives, the most important step the woke community can take towards defeating Trumpism is to move away from the Democrats as quickly as possible. I'm not saying we automatically have to get behind the Greens. I'm not saying we automatically have to form a new national third party. But I am saying that any progressive energy expended on behalf of the Democratic Party will be systematically opposed and dissipated by that party--even if the great Sanders says otherwise.

This truth is as painful for me as it is for anyone else who simply wants to fall back in line behind Sanders, but I have reached this conclusion based on evidence that I look forward to examining publicly (via this blog) as systematically as time permits.

The upshot is that when a hillbot asks me what I'm doing to stop Trump, my answer is that I'm trying to persuade Nina Turner to leave the Democratic model of fundraising-via-bribery. Accepting such a challenge will require bravery on her part, as she would have to cut her ties to the dark money (almost certainly from Soros and other prominent DNC donors) that taints 501c4 outfits such as Our Revolution.

I look forward to donating my time, energy, and money to the first political leader with nationwide recognition who has the courage to stand up to Trump by recognizing that we must first stand up to the Democratic machine that created him. In the meantime, the hillbots harassing me are wasting their time (except that I guess they aren't, since they're getting paid by Brock, who's getting paid by Soros, who's also paying Ellison).

For now, I'll just let this tweet from Smithee sink in:









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Thursday, April 14, 2016

If Hillary Secures the Nomination, the Next Casualty of Regime Change Will Be the Democratic Party



Hillary Clinton has a talent and a propensity for toppling established systems of authority and leaving power vacuums in their place. This usually happens in places far-flung from the average American voter (such as Honduras, Libya, etc.), but the chickens of Clinton’s chickenhawkishness are about to come home to roost for the Democratic Party.

The Democrats can only send one message to the American people by nominating Hillary Clinton: that they would rather preserve the current system of pay-to-play politics than win the presidency.

We all know that’s true, of course. But we also expect our professional politicians to do a better job of concealing their cupidity and corruption. This reasonable expectation of the electorate puts Hillary in a bind, since it’s difficult for one to conceal what one embodies. 

Every speech Clinton makes and every press stunt in which she participates is a dazzling display of disconnectedness from voters whose concerns she cannot fathom. From her perspective, however, it’s only fair to hold ordinary American citizens in contempt. If we commoners wanted to avoid economic hardships in our own lives, then we should have been more eager than Clinton was to trample on people weaker than ourselves. Those of us who didn’t seize the opportunity to profit from the school-to-prison pipeline or to advocate fracking in struggling economies all over the globe or to exploit worldwide sympathy for Haitians to line the pockets of our friends and family members—well, we only have ourselves to blame.

If Hillary could really win a general election in November, then the Democratic party might be able to survive her nomination. But she can’t win an election because there are only two kinds of people who will vote for her: the misleaders and the misled.

The misleadership class that supports Clinton consists of the people who are already on her payroll and others who seek to be on her payroll. Their motives are clear; their incentives are real; and their support of Clinton is perversely genuine inasmuch as they are championing the candidate who is most like themselves. Some of them work in politics; some work in churches; some work in the media; but they are united in their purpose of putting themselves as far ahead as possible by making sure the people whom they influence stay as far behind as possible. These folks will vote for Clinton, but there aren’t as many of them as Clinton likes to pretend. 

The class of the misled includes rank-and-file citizens who trust their local politicians, their local clergy, and the corporate media to tell them what is in their best interest. Such people are often overworked and underpaid. They are too busy and exhausted to pay close attention to national politics, and they may only have access to information via frequencies approved in advance by the Clinton machine. These folks will also vote for Clinton, but the existence of the internet means that the ranks of the misled are dwindling by the hour. 

The misleaders and the misled who support Clinton do not even constitute half of the Democratic Party—much less half of the general electorate. Clinton therefore has no realistic chance of winning. She has relied on the foil of Donald Trump to prop up the sputtering viability of her own candidacy, but as we watch the wheels falling off the Trump campaign, we must realize that Clinton is going to have to beat another actual politician with an actual ground game. She can’t do it. 

But as I indicated earlier, the elite members of the Democratic Party are determined to nominate her not because they believe she will win in November, but because they know that her Republican opponent (whoever that turns out to be) will pose less of a threat to their gravy train than Bernie Sanders does.

I understand why the DNC leaders believe this strategy will work. They’ve seen how successful Clinton has been at destabilizing and disenfranchising people throughout the world by removing their leaders from power. Why should it surprise anyone that she’s willing to destabilize and disenfranchise the Democratic base by running as an unelectable candidate—a candidate who cynically relies on her own toxicity to prevent the people she purportedly represents from having a voice in government?

But there’s a critical difference between cutting power off at the head and cutting it off at the base. If you remove the democratically elected leader of Honduras from power, Honduras doesn’t cease to exist. But if you remove the voting base from the Democratic party, all you have left is a train starving for gravy.

So good luck, Paul Krugman. Good luck, Barney Frank. Good luck, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Good luck, Queen Hillary. Good luck with your glorious future of presiding over nothing and no one.
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