by Jeff Mackler, published on Socialist Action, August 25, 2024
24,500 full size posters reading “We ♥ Joe” [See photo above] were held high by virtually every Democratic Party Convention delegate and attendee jammed into Chicago’s United Center to cheer for yesterday’s disgraced and withdrawn presidential candidate, Genocide Joe Biden.
That the Biden-Harris administration presided over a new congressionally approved $20 billion for the racist Zionist, apartheid Israeli slaughter of the Palestinian masses – now over 40,000 murdered and 10,000 more buried beneath the rubble of destroyed communities – was instantly disappeared from the DNC’s proceedings. The DNC’s 90-page platform statement placed zero blame for the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide of the Palestinian masses. Indeed, not a single speaker condemned the record of “Genocide Joe.”
Democratic warmakers recast their image as peace makers
To the contrary, in the face of four days of expected massive protests outside the convention hall and in the face of repeated polls indicating that 2/3 of the US voting population supported an arms embargo on Israel, the ruling rich and the corporate media near instantly and meticulously manufactured the lie that both the US and the Zionist regime had reached an accord on a ceasefire agreement. This agreement, they claimed, was blocked only by the intransigence of the Palestinian liberation organization, Hamas! The murderous warmongers became instant peace mongers!
The impressive weekday protests, nevertheless, were organized by the Coalition to March on the DNC as well as by a coalition of Palestinian organizations, and yet another by pro-choice organizations – all demanding a ceasefire and an immediate end to all US aid to Israel.
In this context Genocide Joe and his admirers were paraded on stage prime time one after another. Biden’s now touted “old friend” Bernie Sanders sang his praises to the high heavens disappearing Biden’s record as mass-murderer-in-chief, the world’s leading environmental polluter and recent advocate of a reactionary immigration bill that matched or exceeded Trump’s racist border wall policies in every respect.
Prime time with Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and billionaire Pritzker
Sanders was joined prime time by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to showcase the Democrats’ unity behind today’s Kamala Harris and yesterday’s Joe Biden, while blurting out a barrage of left-sounding rhetoric outlining the “radical” views that both had long ago abandoned as they pledged, uncritically, allegiance to Biden’s campaign. They continued to do so long after the Democrats’ billionaire elite signaled that Biden could only be a loser and had to be dumped. Only then did these Biden loyalists become the faithful latecomers needed to quickly help manufacture the warmongering Democrats’ new image. But, to be sure, these working class posturing radicals were followed on the prime time stage by Illinois’s billionaire hotel magnate, Governor J. B. Pritzker, who assured the cheering delegates that he too was a champion of the working class!
Biden’s environmental record was instantly buried
During the Trump administration, there were two years when some 400 fossil fuel drilling licenses were granted, and two years of about 200. Under Biden in 2021, the first year of his administration, some 250 licenses were issued. That number jumped to some 400 in 2022, and then to 758 in 2023!
That Biden-Harris presided over yet another trillion dollar military budget, the largest in history, that facilitated death and destruction by the world’s largest war machine, with 1100 US bases in 110 countries, was disappeared from the DNC proceedings. Kamala Harris, in Biden’s tradition, did pledge to maintain US imperialism as the most lethal power on earth, policing the planet to defend what she defined as the country’s vital “national security interests.”
The past corporate politician-presidents, Obama and Clinton, who, along with Biden, presided over unprecedented tax cuts for the super rich and similarly bloated super-profits for the military-industrial complex, were feted as near saints, spewing liberal platitudes when they had presided over massive cuts in vital social policies.
But not all the US warmakers were ordered to pose as peacemakers. Former CIA Director, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Arizona Senator/Astronaut Mark Kelly could not be contained. They took the stage to tout all US wars, past and present, promoting what Biden and Harris daily affirmed – minus the four days in Chicago – that the US military remains the chief cop of the world. Their off-script patriotic nationalist warmongering were a bit of an embarrassment to the pre-prepped delegates, who were instructed that US wars, including the ongoing US-backed genocide in Gaza and the current US-abetted Zionist bombing of Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Iran and Syria, were to be left unmentioned.
Meanwhile, the DNC stage was primed with adorable children and teenagers, family members and relatives, and musical groups singing joyous melodies – all geared to humanizing the nation’s leading genocidal capitalist party engaged full throttled in mass murder.
UAW’s president says “Vote Harris”
The UAW’s President Shawn Fain was thrown into the prime time mix revealing a T-shirt that read, “TRUMP IS A SCAB; VOTE HARRIS.” The UAW had previously endorsed Biden, despite its resolution supporting a ceasefire, apparently in return for Biden’s walking a UAW picket line. That the Democrats defaulted on all their previous promises to pass legislation to make it easier for workers to form unions was forgotten. There was no mention of the fact that US trade union membership today is the lowest in the past century, an undeniable fact in great part attributable to the bureaucracy’s total subordination to the Democratic Party.
Kamala Harris closed out the evening combining vacuous promises to sign a bill, if presented to her, legalizing abortion rights, a promise that no Democratic Party administration has ever implemented even when they controlled both houses of congress and the presidency.
Harris’s “wrong side of history” CA attorney general record
Killer Kamala’s record as California’s top cop and rightwing Attorney General was similarly disappeared. But a January 17, 2019 New York Times editorial article entitled, “Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor,’” wherein The Times concluded, “The senator was often on the wrong side of history when she served as California’s attorney general,” did record her history well.
The Times’ “wrong side of history” included Harris’s refusal to prosecute killer cops, her record of promoting racist mass incarceration policies, of supporting sentencing Blacks convicted of crack cocaine possession under state laws that carried longer prison sentences than under federal laws, more often used for whites. Harris’ policy of sentencing parents in Black communities convicted of truancy law violations, The Times reported, also resulted in their disproportionate jailings. And her infamous failure to come to the defense of innocent California murder frame-up victim, death row inmate Kevin Cooper, still fighting for his freedom today, will never be forgotten by serious human rights activists.
Harris closed her acceptance speech with a promise that her election as the first female president would in no way signal to the world that US imperialism was now to be headed by a more compassionate figure. In an implied response to Trump’s sexist attacks, she almost angrily assured the widely applauding delegates that a female US president would be no less ruthless in pursuing US imperialist objectives than a male.
No speaker for ”uncommitted delegates”
The 30 elected “uncommitted Democrats” who attended the convention were denied a request for a speaker and were relegated to expressing their professed solidarity with the Palestinian people via a quiet “sit-in” outside the convention. Denied any convention podium speaking time, they were given a room – size unknown and media ignored – for a panel discussion. During the convention’s near unanimous roll call votes on Harris’ presidential nomination, with a single exception, their votes were cast as “present.”
Burnishing Democrat’s “progressive” image
The DNC, aided by the Chicago and Illinois political establishment, the corporate media, and a massive police mobilization, emerged from their four-day orchestrated disguise as a “peace and social justice” party, momentarily, at least, unscathed from the Biden-Harris abetted Palestinian genocide and the rest of their reactionary policies.
Chicago Democratic Party Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former Chicago teacher union official, who cast a tie-breaking city council vote on a ceasefire resolution several months earlier, was among the early featured speakers. A month earlier Johnson attended a sumptuous Biden-hosted White House lobster dinner honoring Kenya’s President, who has just ordered his troops to open fire on a Nairobi’s tax increase protest. Biden’s 500 invited dinner guests feted the Kenyan president after he had agreed to send 1,000 Kenyan police to back whatever government the US decides to impose of the Haitian people.
Mistakenly, in an interview with Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! on the eve of the convention, Hatem Abudayyeh, an organizer of the March on the DNC protests and a leader of the US Palestine Community Network, praised Brandon Johnson for his City Council tie-breaking vote on a ceasefire resolution. Abudayyeh’s statement could only serve to undermine the antiwar coalition’s excellent statement rejecting support to both the Democrats and Republicans.
No doubt that among the US ruling class and its Democratic Party tops a central objectives was to avoid at all costs a repeat of the 1968 Chicago DNC spectacle when then Democratic Party Mayor Richard Daley’s cops brutally beat and tear gassed anti-Vietnam War protestors.
While Chicago’s cops were there in massive numbers for every day of the DNC, highly visible at every point where protestors assembled and marched, no doubt thousands more were close by on the ready.
But the Chicago Police Department also prepared for months with “de-escalation training” sessions aimed at strictly managing the protests. “Let’s stop talking about 1968,” Larry Snelling, the police superintendent, said. “It is 2024.”
Indeed, the ruling elite has learned a thing or two over the decades, including how to better pose itself as in accord with the needs and interests of the vast majority while presiding over punishing policies that gutted social programs and transferred unprecedented $trillions to the infamous “one percent.” While it has proved incapable of hiding the horrors that it has monstrously imposed on the Palestinian people, it went to significant lengths to change its image in the face of its decision that today, at least, US capitalism can best advance its interests in the framework of a liberal-appearing democracy.The DNC’s contrasting this to the crude proto fascist and racist hatemongering politics and person of Donald Trump was the order of the day. The decision to dump Biden and orchestrate the DNC as an open, multi-racial, inclusive, democratic and cheering cross section of the American population was no accident. We are reminder that the fascist demagogue Adolph Hitler named his party the National Socialists Nazis)!
Movement illusion in Democrats and Harris defuse turnout
Without doubt the re-configured Harris-led Democrats met with some success, measured at least in part by the fact the originally projected size of the DNC protests, at 50,000, turned out to be significantly less, despite impressive and broad-ranging organizing efforts and clear and principled democratically adopted antiwar, social justice and pro-Palestine policy positions.
The March on the DNC organizers estimated that the largest day of the coordinate and nationally organized protests, Monday, August 19, drew some 20,000 activists. Socialist Action’s activists present, who counted the crowd as it proceeded along its scheduled route, put that figure at closer to 8,000. The police estimate was 6,000.
The march and rally for abortion rights and for Palestinian freedom the day before, August 18, drew some 1,000 activists, again by our count. The Wednesday, August 21 protest organized by a broad coalition of Palestinian and Islamic groups, attracted 4,000. On the closing day of the convention some 5,000 joined the protests.
No doubt these more modest figures were a product of Biden’s replacement by Kamala Harris and the conscious DNC and mass media portrayal of Democrats and Harris as “ceasefire” supporters. Harris’s acceptance speech , warmongering braggadocio notwithstanding, included an obligatory statement of “sympathy” for the suffering of the Palestinian people, as if she and her party were not fully responsible for today’s US-backed Zionist genocide.
Indeed, Harris made sure to also proclaim US imperialism’s unconditional support for Israel, the largest recipient of US weapons of mass destruction in the world today. That Harris privately met with the genocidal butcher Netanyahu during his recent US visit and pledged unconditional and continuing support to Israel was disappeared from the DNC “ceasefire” hoopla.
The capacity of Harris/Biden and their imperialist Democrats, who preside over every aspect of US domestic and foreign policy, to significantly defuse a principled mass movement aimed at challenging a genocidal imperialist war, is important to evaluate.
It informs us that the forces on the US left today are a far cry from building the kind of massive independent movement that forced an end to the genocidal Vietnam War. That horror slaughtered four million Vietnamese and took the lives of 57,000 US soldiers.
Had the DNC protests been on an order of magnitude qualitatively larger than the DNC turnout of August 18-21, the future power, political coherence and confidence of the movement would have been qualitatively advanced.
Mass working class mobilizations on critical issues, especially in the tens, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, take on a new dynamic all by themselves. They tend to bring forth a new generation of fighters along with new organizations, democratic mass action oriented coalitions and leaders focused on a qualitative break with the capitalist status quo.
What was politically impossible yesterday becomes urgently necessary and on the immediate agenda today. Unfortunately, and through no fault of the March on the DNC leadership coalition of some 200 organizations, these propitious times are not presently on the horizon. But the courageous Palestinian masses and those in the US and worldwide inspired by their example have brought them closer than in a long while.
As the 2024 elections approach lesser evilism maintains its sway on the reformist left
With but a few months before the November election, we are witness to yet another ruling class orchestrated “lesser evil” spectacle, with much of the reformist and social democratic left rapidly shifting to Harris and the Democrat, with a hope and a prayer that they can only be an improvement over the more overtly reactionary Donald Trump. The concluding section of a recent article in the liberal CounterPunch magazine, by Eman Abdelhadi, reprinted from In These Times, stated equivocally:
“Vice President Harris, if you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, WE ARE SPEAKING.
Hear us. We will not be placated by tone. We need you to act and we will not leave the streets until you do.”
Rhetoric aside, no serious movement to end US imperialist war can ever be constructed by forces that aim to buttress either of capitalism’s twin parties or its candidates of war, racism and inherent anti-working class policies, no matter which face the ruling rich decide as their standard bearer. Yesterday, the “democratic socialist” Democrat Bernie Sanders was the reformists’ great hope for social change. Today, the same Sanders claimed Genocide Joe as his longtime friend, and agreed to support Harris only after Biden had formally withdrawn. Sanders, who has never been lacking in historic memory, could not have forgotten that his “close friend” Joe Biden was the Democratic Party’s historic liaison between its southern racist segregationist wing and its northern capitalist liberals. To put it more accurately, Biden served as the unifying link between the heirs of the old southern slavocracy and the modern-day northern corporate capitalist class.
In 2020 the refurbished Biden, whose faltering Democratic Party primary campaign had him trailing Bernie Sanders, was catapulted to the Democrat’s presidential spot when his party’s billionaire elite withdrew their own multiple primary candidates. Biden then became the instant civil rights champion of the largely Democratic Party-funded African-American religious community. He rode to the presidency in large part as the claimed candidate of the [Ford Foundation funded, but election time disappeared,] mis-leadership efforts of the Black Lives Matter “movement.” This “Black mis-leadership class,” a term aptly coined by Black Agenda Report‘s founder Glen Ford, proved capable of transferring the mass anti-racist sentiments of some five million protesters who had dramatically mobilized against the US’s “systemic racism” and virtually unpunished twice or thrice daily police murder of unarmed Blacks, into Biden’s election campaign.
Similarly, former segregationist Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson ran as the Democratic Party’s 1964 “peace candidate” against the rightwing hawk Republican Barry Goldwater. Johnson proceeded to escalate the Vietnam War to unprecedented proportions, including the massive US bombing of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand.
The trail of “lesser evil” defeats inflicted on fighting social movements cannot be underestimated. In the modern era the 2000-member International Socialist Organization disappeared after its ventures supporting the Green/Democrat Ralph Nader and then Bernie Sanders. The Socialist Alternative party similarly aimed to promote Bernie Sanders as an “independent” and otherwise supported local Democrats, while the Greens and DSA routinely campaign for Democratic Party candidates.
Democrats: The historic “graveyard of social movements”
With zero exceptions, not a single fighting social movement has emerged within the framework of US capitalist politics. Indeed, the Democratic Party has an unbroken record as the graveyard of all social movements.
History has demonstrated with a vengeance that only a massive, independent, democratic working class-led and controlled movement is capable of bringing forth critical social, economic and political change. A starting point in the US today would be a qualitatively expanded fighting democratic trade union movement that enters the political arena in its own name, with its own candidates and fights at the point of production against the bosses and in the political arena. Such a Labor Party, in alliance with all the oppressed and exploited, that aims to establish a workers’ government that fights for socialism, can represent a qualitative break with the present two-party capitalist monopoly dominated electoral system.
Building the revolutionary socialist movement
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