“Progressive” members of the Democratic Party (if they are in a good mood) sometimes pat and fondle our dear little heads, and say that our opposition keeps their own chosen party “honest.” On the contrary, our opposition throws the political dishonesty of the Democratic Party into high relief. We must teach the corporate parties that some voters are not pets on leashes. We will put some bite back into elections.
Unsurprisingly, the two corporate parties make rules and regulations designed to disable any genuine party of anti-corporate populism. The Green Party certainly stands within the spectrum of ecologically conscious social democracy. As for parties that are explicitly socialist, the Democratic Party is not above using the old red-baiting tactics of the Republicans and the far right. Nevertheless, the public in Seattle voted Kshama Sawant into public office on City Council, and other class conscious campaigns against the corporate state and parties will continue. Were voters in Seattle voting for the Trotskyist affiliation of Kshama Sawant? A very few did so, but Sawant won because the demand for a living wage of fifteen bucks an hour vaulted her over a deadbeat career Democrat. By only a slim margin, surely? Yes, but given the corporate rigging of elections, that margin meant a historic level of class conscious friction against the fiction of “free” elections.
The aging hipsters of MoveOn will try the old bait-and-switch routine once again, dangling the bait of some “progressive” candidate until the eleventh hour of an election. Then they will make the case for the “pragmatic candidate,” likely a member of the Clintonistas if not an actual Clinton. In past years, the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania leaned on “the independent judiciary” to frame and fine two Green Party candidates for daring to run independent campaigns. So sleazy and yet so unsurprising, given the gangsterism of “progressives” in Pennsylvania.
Let’s speed forward to Massachusetts, where a candidate of the Green – Rainbow party, Jason Lowenthal, recently collected 3000 voter signatures in his run for Congress against a Democratic incumbent. (See message from the Green Party below.) But the town clerks told Lowenthal that he had collected signatures on white forms intended for the Democratic and Republican parties, and not on the tan forms intended for use by independent and opposition parties. How white of the Democratic and Republican parties to reserve tan forms for any political “minority” they hope never becomes a majority!
This is how the corporate parties repeatedly put the knife to their own throats, with a real genius for suicidal public relations.
When citizens make a good faith effort to gather voter signatures and practice democracy against corporate totalitarians, the career politicians demand that the rabble must jump through hoops of corporate design. And in this case, hoops of their chosen color! What they like to call “our two party system” is neither an act of God nor any kind of binding Constitutional form of government. It is, however, an obstacle course designed to preserve a corporate two-ring circus. If that corporate Big Tent is not big enough to include anti-corporate campaigns and parties, then the public should invite the career politicians to pace in their chosen partisan cages, or balance beach balls on their noses like trained seals. This is a free country (so we are told), and they are free to be corporate apparatchiks. They have the means to dazzle and hypnotize some of the people some of the time. But not all of the people all of the time. Political hope therefore springs from the solid ground of class consciousness and common sense.
Am I being an “objective” journalist here? No, but the question is also absurd. Anyone raising that question must answer another. How many of the talking heads on TV broadcast news are committed to any serious and consistent coverage of anti-corporate campaigns? Never mind the regular writers for the big business newspapers, who know the rules of the house so well that they behave like bellhops in a Grand Hotel. I make no secret of my views, and I dare say that Obama would have hired Paul Krugman already, if he really gave a damn for the views of a neo-Keynesian economist who is an op ed writer for The New York Times. Yes, I tell readers plainly that I support both the Socialist Party and the Green Party. Now you might ask the hired help at the big business papers and TV stations what parties they join and support. Keeping that news secret certainly serves no “objective” purpose other than drawing seven veils over the naked corporate politicking of regiments of journalists.
War is a barbarous instrument of the state, and any free citizen must also be free to detest empire entirely. Congress has become the front office of the ruling class, and that class is still engaged in what the imperialists of the past once called the Great Game. A game in deadly earnest, a geopolitical 3 D chess game that drags nations repeatedly into war and massacre. A recent 100 to 0 Senate vote in favor of the bombing of the ghetto of Gaza, created and policed and punished by the colonial regime in Israel, is one more stark proof of the corporate regimentation of career politicians. Not one voice of protest, not one vote of dissent? In those marble halls of Congress, no, not one. Only the echo chamber of imperial loyalty to a colonial regime.
We, the people, are increasingly disenchanted with the two corporate parties, as the more honest public polls and surveys demonstrate. Each of the two corporate parties has a base of loyalists, of course. That does not change the larger historical trend, however. There is also a larger moral issue, concerning both political liberty and personal freedom. Public opinion polls are finally only public opinion polls. Would any one of us on the democratic left willingly abandon the free exercise of reason and conscience, even against a demonstrable majority? We are not obliged to pick a team in that dismal spectator sport of bipartisan corporate elections. Otherwise the whole electorate is only marginally more democratic than any official Congress of a one party state, with the difference that we get to split roughly half and half when career politicians demand our votes and loyalty. We can have democracy in this country, or we can have “the two party system,” but we cannot have both.
What they really demand is that we vote for the party of their choice. They even try to pick our pockets for campaigns we just do not buy. In both mid-term and presidential elections, the “progressives” of the Democratic Party grow progressively more hectic and fervent, even as the moral stock of their chosen party crashes through the political bargain basement. My suggestion is that we treat them as dotty relatives devoted to a hobby we do not share. If they want a serious conversation, however, we are within our rights to say, “Stop threatening me with a broken skull, just because your candidate only threatens to break my arm.” If they persist in crowding our personal space, we may ask more pointedly, “Are you quite sane?” If that doesn’t work, try the old classic: “Get the fuck out of my face.”
Within those bipartisan limits, we may indeed get a veto over one personality or another, but we get no substantial choice in public policies. Thus (for the second time in my life, and I am 59) the Democratic Party leaders labored to push a single payer plan off the table during Congressional debates on health care, and collaborated with Republicans in giving a “free market” once again to private insurance companies. The high-minded call to remove politics from health care reform simply leaves working people exposed to the brutal class machinery of the state.
The rule of capital trumped every other cause, including public health, in the course of this so-called “health care reform.” The Affordable Care Act (or “Obamacare”) was founded upon the quicksand of corporate competition. Day by day, the corporate lawyers and lobbyists are laboring to take back the better functional elements of that reform, or to convert the sick and poor into a new conglomerate of niche markets. Do they deliver less bureaucracy, better service, or consistent care regardless of class? On the contrary, the class system infiltrates every incremental reform, unless a class conscious public makes such reforms the real foundation of a socialist republic.
A republic is a republic in name only if the poorest and weakest members of the public are abandoned to the whims and prejudices of any local majority. Otherwise, what was the point of the Enlightenment, and of the eighteenth century republican revolutions? Those revolutions were not immaculate conceptions, and revealed fractures along lines of sex, race and class. And yet a beginning was made.
The unfinished work of the Enlightenment includes economic democracy and ecological sanity. I know some “progressives” who hope that each state in the union might be an independent laboratory for sane public policies. A degree of regionalism in economy and in ecology even appeals to our common sense. Yet the dodge ball game of carbon caps and carbon trading, for example, will serve neither regions nor nations well, since the mobility of capital and of all pollution goes sideways without respect of borders. Or take the proposal that health care reform has the best practical chance precisely state by state. Maybe, but let’s be honest. In Canada, the national health care system truly did get a boost in the province of Saskatchewan. But Canada had a strong labor movement, a functional party of social democracy, and indeed their genuine national health care system gained some credit from the national government.
Does that sound like the United States today? Our reality is a political minefield, a country in which the ruling class deliberately bludgeoned the labor movement, and in which the social democratic left has adopted ever paler shades of pink camouflage. The choice of “the left wing of the possible” led, historically, to a corporate huckster of hope and change in the White House. Yes, he is a black man, and that counts against our rabid racist national history. But he also extended the reach of drone wars, and the reach of the surveillance state. If a woman is next in line to break the stratospheric glass ceiling of the White House, then yes, let’s acknowledge a change in the culture. But Hillary Clinton is also a more deeply committed militarist than Barack Obama, which troubles certain liberal feminists not at all.
This is a problem of scale, and a problem of production, and a problem of political representation. All at the same time and in a dynamic and problematic unity. We are a clever species but not yet wise, and a retreat into privacy is finally the refuge of the very rich. The republican question, in this “classical” sense of the public realm, is inescapably a question of class conscious solidarity across all borders.
The working class never surrenders entirely to the corporate state, even what that state labors to turn labor unions into arms of management, or to bust unions to bits. Social memory of past struggles is never entirely erased. The embers of class consciousness in a workplace or neighborhood may suddenly leap into open flame. No friction, no traction. Every reform gained through class conscious independent politics hastens the day when the ruling class must earn an honest living. And that would spell the end of all class rule. Until the end of a class divided economy, however, every reform gained by the great majority of working people will not stay won for long without a fight. Therefore the best defense of any past reform means taking a class conscious offensive strategy against ruling class reaction. For the ruling class is indeed class conscious, and is deeply committed to counterinsurgency.
The moral and political fiasco of Obamacare is only one consequence of bipartisan faction fights that undermine democracy and strengthen the rule of the very rich. Some of the culture wars are in earnest, of course, but both parties are shamelessly theatrical in their phony populism. The Democrats and the Republicans keep each other in business. Really big business, despite their Congressional gridlock and mud-wrestling.
The same institutional class violence is evident in the actual policies enforced by the state in housing, education, welfare, prisons, and foreign policy. The strip-mining of the planet and the renewed collision of imperial spheres of interest likewise condemn the human species to remain wage slaves under corporate rule, unless we become class conscious rebels. Crusading monotheisms (whether Christian, Jewish, or Islamic) would have a less powerful hold over human minds if we would commit ourselves to class conscious solidarity across national borders. Unfortunately, this also means committing ourselves to “forty years in the wilderness,” at a time when the human species is running out of time. Some of our old bad habits must be broken. At the cellular (and personal) level of the body politic, we can begin the metabolic change between human production and the natural world. Even these decisions close to home will have a wide secular horizon, and a class conscious appeal to common ground: the ground under our feet, of course, and the wider ground where all creatures live and die. Certain forms of political “pragmatism” work best only for career politicians, and work against the best interests of the workers of the world.
This crisis in “representative democracy” has been grinding on for decades, and even centuries, like a rusty locomotive slowly sliding off the rails. This crisis is engineered in the very Plutonic depths of a class divided society, and not because the most “progressive” capitalists choose this course of action of their own free will. Instead, the global “free market” long ago became an objective political power. The economic war between capitalists is punctuated by recurring banking and financial crises, and repeatedly breaks out into actual war between nations and imperial spheres of interest.
The corporate politicians sometimes do our work for us, revealing not just their greed for power but also the dry rot of the corporate state. They have done so once again in Massachusetts, essentially dismissing a public petition for greater democracy in elections. Meanwhile, local police forces are trained in the arts of counterinsurgency and given military weapons to crush any open class revolt. When ruling class power is projected beyond our national borders, the fever of nationalism is sometimes broken by class conscious soldiers who turn against their commanders. Indeed, soldiers and sailors sick of war have always been among the practical prophets of peace. The hundredth anniversary of the First World War was recently commemorated in the capitalist media, but barely a word was said in honor of the German sailors and soldiers who turned against their imperial rulers and generals. Those workers in uniform exercised real if temporary power against the ruling class, even though the new German republic became an unstable coalition between an officially socialist regime and an ultranationalist camp of gangsters and aristocrats.
There is no mystical power in the mere round number of a century. Rather, the global fractures of class and nationalism still run through our daily lives and daily news.
Delivering democracy through bombing campaigns is one of the brutal reflexes of capitalist globalism. No one has the magical power to uproot fanatical and dictatorial movements, including the colonial and imperial schemes of the ruling class. Imagine if we, the people, created democracy once again, in disregard for the commands of the ruling class, and in tender regard for our brief lives on earth. Democracy is radical, in the original sense of the Latin root word for radical, which is radix and means root. Radicalism, in this sense, even conserves the ground of our humanity.
On every election day we can choose to make our votes count against the corporate state. Every other day of our lives we can create communities of hope and resistance. The vital balance of our power is therefore in daily life, and not merely on election days.
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From: Green News – DC <dcsgpnews10@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, August 26, 2014 7:40 PM
To: dcsgpnews2 <dcsgpnews2@yahoo.com>
Subject: RELEASE Mass. Greens sue over rejection of voter signatures based on paper color
(Distributed by the Green Party of the United States, online at http://gp.org/newsroom/press-releases/details/4/731)
For immediate release:
Monday, August 25, 2014
Secretary Galvin Sued over Rejection of Voter Signatures
Rejection of Ballot Petitions Clears Way for Democratic Incumbent to Run Unopposed
State election officials have rejected all 3000 voter signatures collected by Green-Rainbow Party candidate Jason Lowenthal who is running for Congress against Democratic incumbent Michael Capuano in the 7th Congressional District of Massachusetts. This clears the way for Capuano to run unopposed for a seventh term.
Lowenthal had assumed that the 3000 voter signatures he had collected would be more than enough to put his name on the November ballot since only 2000 certified signatures were required. But when he tried to turn in his signatures, town clerks, after consultation with state officials, told him that the signatures were invalid since they were on white forms intended for use by the two recognized major parties – Democrats and Republicans. If he had only used the tan forms intended for use by smaller parties, they said, all the signatures would have been acceptable.
Lowenthal has filed a lawsuit against Secretary of the Commonwealth William F. Galvin seeking an order to place his name on the ballot. In the brief to Suffolk Superior Court, Lowenthal claims that election officials misled him regarding the forms to be used, and that rejection of the signatures constitutes a violation of the intent of state election law.
According to Lowenthal’s lawsuit, the white signature collection forms were given to him by state officials who said they were the proper ones for him to use. When he pointed out that the forms had fine print that mentioned deadlines for Democratic and Republican primaries, election officials replied that the white forms were required for federal races. In actuality, there are separate tan-colored signature forms are intended for both federal and state level races when the candidate is not a member of the two state-recognized political parties.
According to Lowenthal’s lawsuit, the rejection of the signatures constitutes a violation of the rights of the 3000 signers who have the right under state law to place candidates on the ballot by signing nomination papers. Lowenthal is invoking the legal principle that executive agencies are not allowed to impose regulations that frustrate the intent of laws passed by the legislature.
John Andrews, co-chair of the Green-Rainbow Party commented that “the Lowenthal case is an example of the type of thing that discourages newcomers from challenging entrenched political forces. In Massachusetts, our entire Congressional delegation is Democratic and incumbents often run unopposed. In the state legislature, over 60 percent of incumbents run unopposed year after year. The difficulty of just getting your name on the ballot discourages challengers. And when all the work a candidate does to demonstrate voter support is tossed aside by a technicality, it contributes to the sense that the seats of big party office holders are being protected from competition.”
Danny Factor, Green-Rainbow candidate for Secretary of the Commonwealth added that “the number of unopposed races in Massachusetts is disgraceful. We go to great lengths to protect the right to vote. But when you go into the voting booth and find only one name on the ballot, the value of your vote has been stolen. The lack of competition contributes to a sense of entitlement on the part of office holders. We must reform ballot access laws so that at least 95% of the races in Massachusetts are contested. This will give voters the power they should have to hold incumbents accountable.”
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