From zmag.org
Democratic Party?
by Don Fitz; February 25, 2004
Discussions of the 2004 presidential race often leave
out the very important question of whether it is in
the best interest of progressive movements for the
Democratic Party to run someone for president. I
believe that the Democratic Party should stand down in
2004. Here are 10 reasons why.
Reason No. 1. The Democratic Party was responsible for
the election of George W. Bush in the 2000 election.
In the 2000 elections, the Green Party brought at
least a million voters to the polls who would have
selected the Democratic Party candidate as their
second choice if they had been able to. For years,
Greens have been advocating "Instant Runoff Voting,"
(IRV) which lets voters rank order candidates and, if
their first choice is not among the top contenders,
transfers their vote to another choice. Since the
Democratic Party knew that IRV is used around the
world and that Green votes could be the difference in
a close race, they knew that IRV could be the
difference between winning and losing the 2000
election. [1]
But the Democratic Party power brokers also knew that
if voters had access to IRV, tens of millions would
have shown their disgust with Gore by ranking him
below Nader. Thus, they decided they would rather risk
losing the election than see this happen.
Democratic Party bosses concluded they had far more in
common with George W. Bush than with Ralph Nader. They
intentionally kept Nader out of the presidential
debates, despite more voter apathy and a lower
turnout. They refused to aggressively challenge the
illegal disenfranchisement of African-American voters
in Florida or even to demand that every vote be
counted. They consciously put George W. Bush in the
White House as their "lesser evil."
Reason No. 2. The Democratic Party opposes Bush but
does not oppose Bush's political program.
During the US slaughter in Vietnam, many commented
that World War II defeated Hitler but fascism won. The
2004 Democratic strategy is the same. The Democrats
want to replace Bush, the personality. But they do not
care if someone else continues Bush's policies.
Their mantra "Anyone but Bush" blurs and confuses
these two concepts. The average person thinks, "Stop
the horrible things Bush is doing; anyone who replaces
him will act differently." But smoke-filled Democratic
Party plotting sessions will select a candidate who
can capitalize on anti-Bush sentiment and what he
would do in office would be irrelevant. In fact,
"Anyone but Bush" ignores that the Democratic Party is
responsible for each and every one of the atrocities
associated with the one they demonize.
If the Democrats are against the Bush program, why do
they wait until the election to fight it? Why don't
they mobilize, as a party, [not as individual people,
but as a political party] to demonstrate, strike, etc.
to stop the Bush program now? Why would they tell us
"Wait until the 2004 elections" to stop the Bush
program?
Democratic candidates pretend to be less pro-war, more
pro-labor, and more pro-human rights; then they move
to the right to get the nomination, and further to the
right to win the election. The Democrats only nominate
a 2004 presidential candidate to lull voters into
believing they are an alternative. Voters need an
honest choice in 2004, therefore the Democratic Party
should stay out of the presidential race.
Reason No. 3. The Democratic Party made Richard Nixon
the most progressive president in the last 30 years.
The following occurred during the Nixon reign:
a. an end to the Vietnam War;
b. beginning of the Food Stamp program;
c. creation of the Environmental Protection Agency;
d. recognition of China;
e. passage of the Freedom of Information Act;
f. formal dismantling of the FBI's COINTEL program;
g. decriminalization of abortion;
h. creation of Earned Income Tax Credits;
i. formal ban on biological weapons; and,
j. passage of the Clean Water Act.
These did not happen because Nixon and Kissinger
tiptoed through the tulips concluding that warm fuzzy
feelings beat genocide in Southeast Asia. They
happened because corporate heads and agents in
government were terrified of the convergence of
anti-war, Black power, women's and environmental
movements and their potential impact on the labor
movement. The Nixon years prove beyond a doubt that
mass movements can force good things from horrible
people in power.
The Democratic Party presidencies after Nixon prove
that people in power without mass movements have no
value no matter which party selects them.
No presidency since Nixon reaped so many progressive
results. This is because the Democratic Party defuses
mass movements and channels them into dead-end
politics.
Reason No. 4. The Democratic Party is responsible for
the non-stop attack on labor.
Lyndon Johnson was a Democratic President with a
Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. For
years the Democratic Party whined that this was what
they needed to repeal the odious anti-labor provisions
of the Taft-Hartley Act. Yet they did nothing when
they had the chance.
Throughout labor history, struggles were led by rank
and file activists supporting "social unionism," which
is unions' taking a major role fighting racism,
sexism, war and environmental destruction. Workplace
victories have often been co-opted by thugs advocating
"business unionism," the attitude that unions must be
blind to society and restrict labor issues to wages,
working conditions, pensions and health plans.
For over a century, the Democratic Party cultivated
the business unionists, helped them destroy rank and
file movements, and worked to extinguish any vision of
social unionism in the minds of labor organizers.
Backward union bureaucrats collaborate with the
Democratic Party to create fake corporate "unions" in
the third world which imprison, torture and kill
social unionist rivals.
A symbiotic relationship exists between the Democratic
and Republican parties. When elected, Democrats
strengthen the labor bureaucracy, undermining the will
of the rank and file to organize and resist. When
Republicans are in power, they reap the benefits of
the Democrats' work by attacking and crushing the
weakened unions. Then business unionists tell their
members Republicans are responsible, therefore they
must vote Democratic. The cycle repeats and union
activism and membership decline.
Reason No. 5. The Democratic Party is responsible for
cutbacks in social services at the federal, state and
local levels.
Cutbacks began during the final years of the Carter
presidency, not during the first year of Reagan, as is
often claimed. The Democratic Party, over decades,
designed, voted for and implemented cutbacks that
destroyed jobs, pensions, medical coverage, public
transportation and schools.
St. Louis has a Democratic Party school board a
Democratic mayor and a Board of Alderman with 27
Democrats out of 28 members. This Democratic Party
machine closed 16 schools (14 in predominantly Black
portions of the City), fired custodians, secretaries,
and half of all teachers aides, eliminated bus routes,
packed up to 50 students in a classroom, attempted to
raid the teachers' pension fund, and paid over $6
million to management firms from outside the City to
carry out the attack.
Many people with the best intentions work with the
Democratic Party and some get elected to local and
state offices. The Democratic Party sucks these
organizers into accepting that "there are not as many
funds as there used to be" and deciding which social
services will be eliminated. The Democratic Party does
not lead communities in linking up with others to
demand an end to the destruction of essential
services. It persuades local leaders to look out for
their own neighborhood, and ignore other communities
and the plight of the rest of the world by supporting
candidates of war and plunder.
Reason No. 6. The Democratic Party is responsible for
attacks on civil liberties such as the PATRIOT Act.
The Democrats wrote it. They voted for it. The PATRIOT
Act was a bipartisan attack on civil liberties fully
supported by the Democratic Party. It was a
continuation of legislation from the Clinton years,
and its history goes much further back.
The Democratic Party undermined civil liberties from
Woodrow Wilson's attack on the Wobblies through LBJ's
COINTELPRO campaign against Martin Luther King.
In the early 20th century, the Democratic Party was
the party of Jim Crow. In the early 21st century, the
Democratic Party is the party of prisons and the death
penalty. Punching a card for the Democratic Party
abets the execution of someone who cannot afford a
good lawyer.
Reason No. 7. The Democratic Party is the Party of
environmental destruction.
The Democratic Party co-opts environmental movements
by cultivating Washington DC-based bureaucrats more
interested in their own salaries than in stopping
environmental destruction. Whether by supporting
Clinton's "salvage logging" or fawning over genetic
engineering or supporting nuclear plants, nuclear
transportation and nuclear weapons, Democrats destroy
any meaningful distinction between themselves and the
Republicans.
In 1992 Al Gore promised to stop the East Liverpool
incinerator, whose poisonous fumes blew directly into
an Ohio working class elementary school. After the
elections, the promise was history.
In the 1980s, a flood washed dioxin-laced oil onto the
working class town of Times Beach, Missouri. It was
the second dioxin poisoning for those exposed to Agent
Orange during the Vietnam War and the third dioxin
poisoning for many who had worked in industrial
settings. Democrats Clinton, Missouri Governor Mel
Carnahan, and County Executive Buzz Westfall helped
ensure that they would be poisoned a fourth time by a
dioxin incinerator in the 90s.
Similar episodes fill volumes. If undeterred, the
Democratic Party will turn the globe into a toxic
wasteland.
Reason No. 8. The Democratic Party is the grand chef,
the big cheese, the glory hog of international trade
deals.
In the early 1990s, George Bush Sr. was not able to
push NAFTA through Congress. So big business decided
that a back-stabbing Democrat would serve its
interests better than the iron-fisted Republican.
Enough money poured into Democratic Party coffers to
make Bill Clinton president.
Dick Gephardt of St. Louis supposedly led efforts to
stop congressional passage of NAFTA. I wrote an
article documenting that when Gephardt spoke in,
Mexico, he said that he would help get NAFTA approved.
It was a pleasant surprise when St. Louis' corporate
paper, the Post-Dispatch, published it. I waited for
Gephardt's denunciation. It never came. To this day,
Gephardt has not refuted my documentation that he
faked his resistance to protect his union base in St.
Louis.
One can only wonder how many other "progressive"
Democrats pretend to defend labor and the environment
or oppose cutbacks in order to save their skins at
election time while party bosses allow them to do so
because enough votes are already lined up to win a
victory for big business.
The Democratic Party spins the myth that, compared to
the wicked Republicans, it is the "lesser evil"
regarding labor, environment, and civil liberty issues
and cutbacks.. Yet, no one doubts that Democrats bear
primary responsibility for international trade deals
such as NAFTA, GATT and the WTO. The point of these
trade deals is to undermine labor and environmental
protections and civil liberties.
The Clinton regime was so incredibly successful at
pushing trade deals to subjugate the global South to
the greed of the US, EU and Japan that it rushed ahead
of the mechanisms of violence needed to enforce those
deals. Bush's attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq warn the
rest of the world that the US will back up the
Democrats' negotiated control of trade and economics
with violence.
Therefore the brutal assaults of the Bush Republicans
are the natural outgrowth of the slick deals of the
Clinton Democrats. It is false to claim that George W.
Bush breaks qualitatively from the Democrat preceeding
him or that his presidency is uniquely dangerous. One
can only believe that falsity by ignoring what has
gone on during Democratic administrations.
Reason No. 9. The Democratic Party is the party of
war.
The Democrats are also more likely than Republicans to
lead the US into war.
Those who disagree with this should remember Democrat
Woodrow Wilson won reelection with the slogan "He kept
us out of war" and then promptly went to war and
jailed anyone who didn't like it. They should remember
that the only leader of any nation who ever ordered
the use of a nuclear bomb was Democrat Harry Truman.
Democrat Truman bombed Hiroshima after ignoring
Japan's attempts to surrender, and, just to see if
plutonium worked as well as uranium, ordered the
bombing of Nagasaki three days later.
Any who hallucinate that "progressive" Democrats are
peaceful should remember that Democrat John Kennedy
risked global nuclear war over USSR missiles in Cuba
that were further from the US than US missiles in
Turkey were from the USSR. They should remember that
Democrat Lyndon Johnson won reelection ridiculing
Barry Goldwater's promise to bomb Vietnam back to the
stone age and then attempted to implement Goldwater's
program.
The illusion of the peace-loving Democratic Party
requires a failure to recall that the Clinton-Gore
regime was responsible for the murder of 5000 Iraqi
children per month by sanctions. As hideous as the
current administration is, Clinton-Gore's silent
slaughter exceeded the number of deaths caused by
Bush.
Reason No. 10. The Democratic Party matches the
Republican party in treason while exceeding it in
cowardice.
Any who find it severe to charge the Democrats and
Republicans with "treason" should ponder the fact that
current international trade deals allow secret
tribunals of bureaucrats to trump US laws. Though
"treason" usually refers to service to a foreign
enemy, it makes sense to apply the term to those who
destroy their country by making its air too foul to
breathe, poisoning its land so crops will not grow,
making international waters too contaminated to
support fish and producing enough nuclear material to
create genetic diseases for eternity.
When these are combined with increased extinction of
species, accelerated global warming and an explosion
of genetic pollution of animals and plants, it is
clear that, at some point, the world will not support
human life.
Republicans may well eliminate humanity in 10 to 30
years. The Democrats claim that they are far more
reasonable, which means that their policies might
result in human life limping along for 50 to 100
years. This is what we are supposed to be excited
about.
The Democratic Party warns that we must not campaign
against corporate power and for the complete reversal
needed to stop the advance of biodevastation. They
suggest that a Green program will "scare people" and
get Republicans elected. Their basic plan is to accept
destruction of the planet but try to make sure it
doesn't happen until we are all dead and gone, leaving
the devastation for our children or grandchildren.
That is the Ultimate Cowardice of the Democratic
Party.
"A Seat at the Table"
The major parties differ in the way they dispense with
opposition to corporate objectives. The Democrats
co-opt organizational leaders to sign onto whatever
they are maneuvering. They believe this will win wider
acceptance. The Republicans believe it is more
efficient to go directly to the public with rhetoric
of nationalism and racism.
In outrage, the Washington lobbyist sobs, "Clinton and
Gore heard us out, while Bush won't even give us a
seat at the table." While they may be oblivious to the
fact that both parties have the same ultimate goals,
they are not blind to the bloated paychecks they get
from Democrats for selling corporate programs to their
constituencies.
There is no better example of the self-interests of
Washington lobbyists than the seven "environmental"
organizations that helped Clinton/Gore pass NAFTA.
They preached to their members the necessity of
accepting "regulated" clear-cuts, "acceptable" levels
of toxic poisons, "the best-we-can-negotiate" labor
give-aways, "unfortunate" slashes in social services,
and bipartisan PATRIOT Acts.
A political party is more than the individuals it
nominates for public office. A party is also its
political program: both its formally declared program
and its informal program consisting of its
relationships with economic classes and social groups.
The Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of
corporate America.
One or two maverick Democrats campaigning for the
presidential nomination do not alter the fundamental
nature of their Party. One of them may get the
nomination-if the country is desperate and if the
candidate is sufficiently astute at promising left
while delivering right. But if the mavericks do not
get the nomination, they will still draw in local
organizers committed to proving their sincerity by
supporting the nominated Democratic candidate in the
general election.
The huge social changes we need will not happen
because people select the lesser of two evils whose
careers depend on begging for financial contributions
from the very corporations that profit from planetary
destruction. To preserve life, we must replace
corporate control. This includes building an electoral
party outside the parties of big business. It means
linking many movements against oppression with a
vision of a new society. It means using elections as
one of many ways to mobilize people and insuring that
candidates belong to progressive movements and remain
accountable to them.
The Democratic Party is not a vehicle for ending
corporate control of our lives. It is an obstacle to
building a new society.
This is based on presentations given by Don Fitz to a
meeting of the Green Party USA at the New York Law
School on November 8, 2003 and at Genesis House in St.
Louis on December 3, 2003.
Note
1. The implication by Democratic Party apologists that
all 2000 votes for Ralph Nader would have gone to Al
Gore is dishonest in the extreme. Exit polls showed
that if Nader had not been in the race, then of the
almost 3 million who voted for him, 25% would have
voted for Bush, 38% for Gore, and 37% would not have
voted. Two things are clear: [a] the net gain from
Nader voters for Gore would have been 13% (=38% -
25%), not 100%; and [b] Nader brought at least a
million voters to the polls who Gore could not bring
out and whose votes the Gore machine threw away by not
endorsing IRV.
