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This Isn’t A Way To Defeat Trump
At Counterpunch Professor David Schultz sees a final fracturing of the Democratic party, labor, and civil rights coalition:
George Floyd being killed by a police officer in Minneapolis is not simply about the death of one Black man. His death also killed an historic but uneasy alliance among the Democratic Party, labor unions, and the civil rights movement. The reaction to his death is ending the last vestiges of the historic New Deal coalition that defined progressive politics in American for at least 50 years, ushering in an era where it now appears that the Democratic Party and the civil rights community are at odds with labor and unions.
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What was the last time these posturing millionaires with political power have done something for the working class?
The 'autonomous zone' in Seattle seems to be run by 'Black Lives Matter':
They come from a variety of groups and interests, ranging from Black Lives Matter organizers to labor and neighborhood groups. Most want the police precinct to be turned into a community center and much of the department’s funding to be redirected to health and social services.
“What you see out here is people coming together and loving each other,” said Mark Henry Jr. of Black Lives Matter. “I see people coming from different walks of life … learning from each other.”
The zone was set up after the police left the Capitol Hill precinct.
Police Chief Carmen Best said the decision to leave the Capitol Hill precinct wasn’t hers and she was angry about it.
So who told the police to leave the precinct?
Pepe Escobar suspects that the Democrats are using the 'autonomous zone' as a 'color revolution' method to contrast themselves to Donald Trump:
Capital Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) is supported by the city of Seattle – run by a Democrat – which is supported by the governor of Washington State, also a Democrat.
There’s no chance Washington State will use the National Guard to crush CHAZ. And Trump cannot take over Washington State National Guard without the approval of the governor, even though he has tweeted, “Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game.”
It’s enlightening to observe that “counter-insurgency” can be applied in Afghanistan and the tribal areas; to occupy Iraq; to protect the looting of oil/gas in eastern Syria. But not at home. Even if 58% of Americans would actually support it: for many among them, the Commune may be as bad if not worse than looting.
But then there are those firmly opposed. Among them: the “Butcher of Fallujah” Mad Dog Mattis; color revolution practitioners NED; Nike; JP Morgan; the whole Democratic Party establishment; and virtually the whole U.S. Army establishment.
Escobar points out that 'Black Lives Matter' as an organization has no real political program at least when compared to the movements of the 1960s. It is fed by corporate money and the Ford foundation. The Donate button on its web page goes to Act Blue, a Democrat donation collection service which also works for the Sanders and Biden campaigns.
Do the Democrats believe that they can win the election with such a 'strategy of tension' against a 'law and order' Trump?
If so they are making a huge mistake.
The 'silent majority' that voted for Nixon will also vote for Trump.
Just because the media in its continual search for easy definitions sticks labels on everything, generalising & simplifying complex situations about complicated human beings with a variety of motivations down to a simple easy to comprehend driver, it doesn’t mean that any real thinking human should do the same.
Trying to reduce the protests against the Floyd murder to a ‘race war’ or conversely a ‘class war’ only serves to obscure the reality that tens of thousands of people have stepped out in the middle of a pandemic for tens of thousands of differing reasons.
Even among some african american protesters who quite reasonably see Mr Floyd’s death as a public lynching, it will have been a combination of economic & racial oppression which has caused them to decide they’re not gonna take anymore.
And as has been discussed endlessly, some of the whitefellas who joined the protest are no less racist & condescending towards black amerikans than the whitefellas on the other side.
Thr dimocrats don’t want to acknowledge any of this, they had penciled out a campaign where Herr Trump & his incompetent corruption was going to be the focii of their public utterances. African amerikan pols were gonna go along with that by silently accepting Biden’s lies about being some sort of civil rights ‘leader’ at the time he was in fact cosying up to the disgusting dixiecrats.
WTF would african american pols agree to such an obvious deception? Because for decades the dimocrat party has been the only feasible route for a black political leader in amerika.
The dims selected and corrupted generations of black leadership to make sure that even when an african american Harvard professor was arrested by campus police and then prez Barak Oblamblam called the cops ‘stupid’ instead of what they were, racist pigs, the bulk of the protest was from white rethugs upset the president had called any bent copper stupid.
Black civil rights leaders mostly remained silent about Oblamblam’s copout.
I know from what happened albeit on a much smaller scale in Aotearoa, that a minority focussed political movement can only succeed if it separates from the much larger neolib movement that it was forced to connect with in order to gain a profile.
Before Tangata Whenua political parties grew so tired of the meaninglessly patronising bulldust about indigenous issues which the Clark Labour government were perpetuating in the noughties, going on to form the the Māori & Mana political parties, Māori concerns were buried under partisan politics.
The neo-lib Labour Party would use Maori issues whilst in opposition in much the same way as the Dims in amerika do, highlighting the horror stories and offering cliches about compromise but then once in power doing SFA apart from half-arsed tokenism telling Tangata Whenua that “we cannot move too fast lest we upset the Pakeha (whitefellas), lose power and that will be much worse.
To a certain extent that was true, because by putting all their eggs in the neolib basket, Māori leaders had made themselves an easy target for conservative National party politicians.
However those rightist politicians tended to overestimate the level of antipathy conservative voters felt towards Tangata Whenua.
When one extreme economic rationalist Natz leader campaigned on the basis of “Māori getting too much from the reinvigorated Treaty of Waitangi process”, he went down like a cup of cold sick with kiwi voters. I dunno how racist he actually was, even though today he is still regarded as the gold standard in white supremacy with Aotearoa, I suspect he was just following a road-map for victory laid out by some really stupid advisors. The bloke who had been boss of the reserve bank or some-such wanted to show the voters that there was more to him than just being an extreme economic conservative, I reckon.
Of course his advisors displayed their ignorance, not understanding that rule number one of being a white supremacist is the need to be able to deny you are a racist.
When the prick started mouthing racist policies, rather than just hinting at them most of the racists jumped ship.
Anyway back to Māori pols finally leaving labour, the final straw was when PM Helen Clark (A disgusting careerist who failed in her attempt to play the fem card during the last ‘election’ for UN secretary general) set up her own minister with the media, trying to make this Māori minister appear to be cowardly fleeing some faux confrontation Clark had set up, that was the last straw, nearly all the Māori members of parliament left the neolib Labour Party & set up their own political movements, the neolib Māori Party and the actual left Mana Party.
Labour got creamed in the 2010 election when zionist (well wannabe cos he never did get the backing from his own party to do what he wanted, Aotearoa does mucho trade with the ME) John Key won government.
However and this is the bit that amerika’s african american pols should really take heed of; this Natz government was the first conservative government which didn’t put the boot in to Tangata Whenua. Oh there were still a few racists from rural constituencies where Māori tended to vote in seats allocated for Maori, so that the rednecks were generally unopposed, but government policy was much less racially divisive than previous Natz governments had been.
Why? Because the Natz needed support for policies that they believed would appeal to the neolib Māori Party, some of whom who eventually joined the government.
If african amerikan leaders were to take the plunge and it is a big plunge considering that so many of them have invested so much in the dimocrats for so long, then they could, particularly in Congress where most of their power already resides, play the role of kingmaker.
That is under the current gerrymander of districts, it is most likely that it would be the african american congress people who held the balance of power.
By not being tied to any one of the two amerikan empire parties, African americans would finally be in a position of ensuring that the era of meangless compromise finished as well as the ability of the white supremacists to drive the rethug policy.
In the end 99% of both dim & rethug pols are amoral selfish careerists, as soon as it became evident that a mob of blacks had the power to determine whether or not their own particular pork barreling boondoggles got passed by congress a huge chunk of the nasty shit from above which perpetuates whitefella supremacy, would end.
Of course it wouldn’t just be in politics, there was quite a feud within the media in Aotearoa about which way various media outlets shifted -would they stay with Labour or support Māori policies? Māori won a considerable number of those and that in turn slowed the perpetuation of racial stereotyping.
IMO, if african american leaders did split from the dims, the odds of a racist turd such as agent orange ever getting nominated let alone winning a prez beauty contest would be severely curtailed.
In addition leaving the dims to stand naked, exposing their hypocrisy would allow a true class focussed political movement to get going. As long as both half lefties & african amerikans follow the dims, nothing good can happen and fascism will continue to feature in amerikan politics.
Posted by: A User | Jun 14 2020 2:55 utc | 92
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