{"article":{"id":103976,"heading":"Democratic Party?","author":"Don Fitz","created":"2004-02-28 20:12:02","modified":"2004-02-28 20:12:02","last_modified":"Sun, 29 Feb 2004 03:12:02","article":"

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.



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