A Very Undemocratic Democracy
July 30, 2024
Nat Parry reflects on a Democratic theme — which Biden raised in his withdrawal announcement last week — that their party will protect democracy from Donald Trump.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump at a 2024 rally in Phoenix in June. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Nat Parry
Special to Consortium News
Election 2024 veered into surreal and uncharted territory this month with an assassination attempt on the Republican nominee and the withdrawal of the Democratic nominee within eight days of each other, unprecedented events in a single campaign that have cast a pall over the democratic process in the United States.
Many questions remain to be answered about the near-murder of Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13 — including how the shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks managed to carry out his act despite the Secret Service identifying him as a suspicious person who was allowed to fly a drone over the rally site that day and why Trump was allowed to take the stage instead of delaying the event to investigate the situation. Some are naturally wondering whether a conspiracy may have been involved.
“I think most reasonable people can conclude based on all of the statements, media reports, law enforcement statements, whistleblowers et cetera that this was allowed to happen,” stated conservative commentator Tim Pool on his podcast.
After all, as some Trump supporters have posited, the Washington establishment has been trying and failing to neutralize Trump for nearly a decade through the so-called Russiagate hoax, two impeachments, four indictments and numerous attempts to remove him from the ballot. The assassination attempt, according to this view, would follow a pattern of escalation in the ongoing campaign to eliminate “the Trump threat” once and for all.
In this vein, nearly a year ago, Tucker Carlson predicted that Trump would fall victim to an assassination attempt, pointing out that it is the last option available to his political enemies after trying nearly everything else.
Aerial photograph of Butler Farm Show Grounds, on right, in Butler, Penn., taken 10 minutes prior to an attempted assassination of Donald Trump on July July 13. (Designism, Wikimedia Commons, CC0)
“If you begin with criticism, then you go to protest, then you go to impeachment, now you go to indictment and none of them work. What’s next? Graph it out, man. We’re speeding towards assassination, obviously,” Carlson said on The Adam Carolla Show in August 2023.
At the time, Carlson was lambasted by the mainstream media for “stoking conspiracies” and making outlandish claims that were “presented without evidence.” Following the July 13 assassination attempt, however, right-wing activists insisted that Carlson had been vindicated, and demanded apologies from those who had criticized him a year earlier.
Kimberly Cheatle in 2018. (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Of course, there is still no clear evidence that a conspiracy was involved in the Butler shooting, but there was at minimum a high level of ineptitude that helped enable the assassination attempt, leading both Democrats and Republicans to demand accountability.
Following a contentious House Oversight Committee hearing in which Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was told she was “full of shit” and faced repeated calls for her resignation, she decided to step down the next day. In her resignation letter on July 23, Cheatle stressed that the Secret Service is “based on integrity and staffed by individuals of exceptional dedication and talent,” acknowledging though that it “fell short” of its mission “to protect our nation’s leaders.”
Trump, however, placed the blame squarely with the Biden administration. Following Cheatle’s resignation, the former president posted on TruthSocial: “The Biden/Harris Administration did not properly protect me, and I was forced to take a bullet for Democracy. IT WAS MY GREAT HONOR TO DO SO!”
Biden Steps Down
The day after Cheatle resigned, Joe Biden addressed the nation to try to explain his withdrawal from the presidential race three days earlier. The 81-year-old stated that his primary motivation for suspending his campaign was to protect American democracy — echoing a theme that the Democratic Party has been touting for years, namely, that Trump and his MAGA movement pose an existential threat to the republic and that electing Democrats is the only hope for preserving American liberty.
Just a few lines into his address, Biden cited “the defense of democracy” in justifying his decision to withdraw, which he had been vehemently resisting since his disastrous debate performance in June. “Those of us who cheri[sh] that cause — cherish it so much — the cause of American democracy itself — must unite to protect it,” Biden said. He added that “nothing — nothing — can come in the way of saving our democracy.”
In order to do so, Biden declared that he had “decided … to pass the torch to a new generation,” calling it “the best way to unite our nation.”
Biden addressing the nation last week about his decision to drop out of the 2024 race. (C-Span still)
Left unsaid by the president was the inconvenient truth that nothing about the transfer of the Democratic Party’s nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris — which will presumably take place at the Democratic National Convention being held in Chicago from Aug. 19-22 — could be considered “democratic” in any traditional sense.
Harris, of course, had not received a single vote from Democratic Party primary voters, who on the other hand cast a total of 14.5 million ballots for Joe Biden during the primary elections. Biden made this point himself in a defiant letter to House Democrats a couple weeks earlier in which he adamantly said “that despite all the speculation in the press and elsewhere, I am firmly committed to staying in this race, to running this race to the end, and to beating Donald Trump.”
Biden pointed out in his July 8 letter that there was a “nomination process” in which the “voters have spoken clearly and decisively,” casting “over 14 million votes” for him, or “87 percent of the votes cast across the entire nominating process.”
Biden with supporters in Atlanta on June 27. (David Lienemann/Biden for President, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Biden claimed that the primary “was a process open to anyone who wanted to run,” and a few people chose to do so, with “one far[ing] so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent.” Candidates running for the nomination included Dean Philips, Marianne Williamson, and Jason Palmer, who received a combined total of more than a million votes.
The most prominent primary challenger, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., could have received more than the totals of Philips, Williamson and Palmer, perhaps, had he not withdrawn from the primary elections in September 2023 after determining that a fair contest was not possible. The Democratic National Committee, Kennedy complained, was implementing rule changes and introducing novel procedures to hinder competition and help the incumbent.
There was nothing secret about these efforts by the DNC to ensure that Biden would be anointed the nominee without the messiness of an open and competitive primary election.
As Democratic Party insider Symone Sanders declared in May 2023, “the Democratic National Committee will not facilitate a primary process,” pointedly stating that “there will be no debate stage for Bobby Kennedy, Marianne Williamson or anyone else.” Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Sanders said that the DNC is “not going to set up a primary process for debate to — for someone to challenge the head of the Democratic Party.”
Not only did the DNC make clear that it would not hold open debates between Biden and his primary challengers, but it also decided to move the first primary from New Hampshire — where Biden had performed poorly in 2020 — to the more Biden-friendly state of South Carolina. The strategy seemed to be designed to ensure that the first contest resulted in a clear victory for Biden to help cement the image of his nomination’s inevitability.
In a letter to DNC Chair Jaime Harrison, then-chair of the Kennedy campaign Dennis Kucinich noted that the Biden campaign appeared to be directly involved in shaping the DNC’s primary rules and that the DNC had created a new class of superdelegates — in contravention of the restrictions on superdelegate voting power implemented after the debacle of 2016 — who were empowered to thwart the will of the people.
Jaime Harrison in 2017. (Edward Kimmel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)
“Unfortunately, it appears that the DNC has created a class of pledged delegates, called Party Leaders and Elected Officials (PLEOs), who are essentially the same as superdelegates, due to the amount of control the party exercises over elected officials,” Kucinich said. “This puts the DNC, once again, in the position of overturning the will of voters across the United States.”
In response to the DNC’s rule changes, Kennedy recalled the long history of anti-democratic practices within the Democratic Party which primary elections were designed to overcome.
“The DNC seems to have forgotten the purpose of the modern primary system to begin with,” Kennedy said, “which was to replace backroom crony politics with a transparent democratic process.” He added that “if the Biden campaign thinks they can win with administrative tricks and evasions, they will be in for a rude surprise in both New Hampshire and South Carolina.”
Ultimately, however, Kennedy reached the conclusion that the DNC would not allow a meaningful challenge to Biden and decided to abandon the Democratic Party. As a Kennedy campaign insider told Mediaite in late September 2023, “Bobby feels that the DNC is changing the rules to exclude his candidacy so an independent run is the only way to go.”
Shortly thereafter, Kennedy announced his independent bid.
Kennedy at a campaign rally in Phoenix in December 2023. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
“I’m here to declare myself an independent candidate for president of the United States,” Kennedy announced at a rally in Philadelphia on Oct. 9, 2023. “We declare independence from the cynical elites who betray our hope and who amplify our divisions. And finally, we declare independence from the two political parties.”
Third Party Alternatives
In declaring his independence, Kennedy had joined a long line of political figures — from Teddy Roosevelt to Robert La Follette to John Anderson — who had previously come to the conclusion that their views could not properly be represented within the limited confines of the two-party system.
By eschewing the Democratic Party, Kennedy also gave voice to some of the millions of Americans who support alternatives to the choices offered by the Democrats and Republicans — a whopping 63 percent of the American public who want to see more options on the ballot, according to polling by Gallup.
He also, however, joined a relatively crowded field of independents and third party candidates vying for the presidency in 2024, who all face an uphill battle in terms of gaining access to state ballots and garnering the attention of the national media.
Not only are the Libertarian and Green parties running candidates, but so too are the Constitution Party, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the American Solidarity Party, with varying degrees of success in attaining ballot access across the country. Navigating the complex patchwork of state ballot access laws — with various filing deadlines and signature requirements — is notoriously difficult, and currently only the Libertarians and the Greens are qualified for enough states to win the Electoral College, appearing on the ballot in 35 states and 23, respectively.
Presidential candidates from left: Libertarian Party’s Chase Oliver, Green Party’s Jill Stein and Constitution Party’s Randall Terry speaking at the Free & Equal Elections Presidential Debate in Las Vegas on July 12. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Independent Cornel West, who has received nominations from a handful of small parties, is currently on the ballot in nine states. For his part, Kennedy is certified for the ballot in 15 states, with a combined total of 192 electors, and is awaiting certification in 17 more states with 218 electors.
The challenges to third party ballot access have been particularly pronounced in this election cycle, with the Democratic Party aggressively filing legal challenges to stop the candidacies of West and Kennedy, as well as the Green Party’s Jill Stein. The calculation seems to be that West, Kennedy and Stein might “siphon votes” from the Democratic Party’s nominee and therefore, in order to “protect democracy,” these candidates should be removed from the ballot.
In Nevada, despite collecting nearly 30,000 signatures — three times the legal requirement for ballot access — the Green Party has been challenged by Democrats who claim that some of the signatures do not meet the state’s requirements. Based on a limited review, the Democratic Party said that some of the signatures were collected before the Green Party filed its certificate of continued existence with state election officials in January and therefore should be invalidated.
The Democrats are also challenging Kennedy’s candidacy in states including Nevada, North Carolina, Texas and Georgia, and appear to be moving towards a challenge of his ballot status in Florida. Kennedy currently is certified for the Florida ballot as the nominee of the state’s Reform Party, but an attorney for the DNC sent the Florida Division of Elections a request for records in May relating to the Reform Party’s registration and its correspondence with the office, indicating that they are mulling a legal challenge.
West speaking in Tempe, Arizona, in January 2018. (Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Cornel West has also found himself in the crosshairs of Democratic Party lawyers, who filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission on July 19, alleging that “West’s presidential campaign’s efforts to gain ballot access in Arizona and North Carolina are largely being funded by illegal in-kind contributions from Republican-allied persons.” Specifically, Democrats claim that the firms Wells Marketing and Blitz Canvassing have improperly offered their ballot petition services.
The West campaign rejected the accusations and asserted that its signature-gathering efforts have been above-board and are fueled by grassroots activism. “This was courageous and visionary leadership,” West said. “And yet, we still encountered unwarranted and unfounded legal challenges and then a smear campaign trying to say that somehow we’ve been manipulated.”
In-Kind Contributions
But while hurling accusations against minor parties, the Democrats have come under accusations of their own, namely that they are benefiting from in-kind contributions by their allies in the mainstream media — particularly in relation to alleged collusion with media companies over the format of televised presidential debates.
Earlier this summer, the Biden campaign announced that it would not participate in events organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), which had been organizing debates for decades under well-established rules. Citing “the interests of the American people [that] are best served by presidential debates that … allow a head-to-head comparison of the two candidates with a chance of winning the election,” the Biden campaign claimed that the CPD’s model for debates “is out of step with changes in the structure of our elections.”
CPD Co-Chairs Antonia Hernández and Frank Fahrenkopf expressed regret over the Biden campaign’s decision, stating that since its founding in 1987, the CPD has offered a neutral format that provides a “focus on the candidate and the issues that are most important to the American people.”
Instead of participating in the CPD debates, the Biden campaign announced that it would take part in two events organized by CNN, and pointedly noted that the “debates should be one-on-one, allowing voters to compare the only two candidates with any statistical chance of prevailing in the Electoral College — and not squandering debate time on candidates with no prospect of becoming President.”
Correspondingly, CNN announced stringent qualifications for participation in its debates, namely that candidates must receive at least 15 percent support in four national polls and have confirmed ballot access in enough states to potentially win a majority in the Electoral College.
The Trump – Biden CNN debate on June 27. (C-Span still)
Despite polling at 15 percent in a HarrisX/Forbes poll, Kennedy hovers at about 9 percent in a national average, falling several percentage points shy of CNN’s criteria. His ballot access efforts also currently fall short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the Electoral College, so, citing its rules, CNN declined to extend him — or any other third party candidate — an invitation.
CNN’s rules on ballot access have been criticized by outside observers as draconian and inconsistent.
It has been pointed out that CNN’s rules would have barred not only Kennedy and other third parties running in this election cycle, but indeed every independent presidential candidate for the last 112 years. With the general election still months away and many states’ filing deadlines not yet passed, the demand that all prospective candidates must qualify on enough ballots to win the Electoral College was premature and “probably written by individuals who had no knowledge of the typical timeline for presidential candidates running as independents,” Ballot Access News noted.
Further, CNN’s rules are not internally consistent, as they require certainty for independent candidates, but only probability for the Democratic and Republican candidates.
Since neither Biden nor Trump had been officially nominated by their parties at the time of the CNN debate, neither could prove that they would be on any ballots in November, and indeed, as we now know, Biden will not be the Democratic nominee after all. Therefore, CNN violated its own rules in giving Biden and Trump a platform while denying one to independent candidates, leading to a complaint being filed at the Federal Election Commission that the Democrats’ and Republicans’ arrangement with CNN amounted to an illegal in-kind contribution.
This, however, would be par for the course in U.S. elections, and largely in keeping with the benefits enjoyed by candidates of major parties. The advantages that Democrats and Republicans enjoy are substantial, with ballot access laws, guaranteed media coverage and massive disparities in funding being the most obvious.
While the two major parties, for example, are guaranteed ballot access in all 50 states, smaller parties must employ considerable resources in the uphill battle of getting on the ballot in just enough states to theoretically win the Electoral College.
Kennedy’s campaign is reportedly spending heavily on the effort, amassing debts, laying off staff members and diverting resources from other efforts as it becomes nearly singularly focused on getting his name on state ballots. This has left little money for events, organizing, advertising, and other traditional campaign priorities.
Meanwhile, enormous amounts of money continue to pour into the war chests of the two major parties, which are unburdened by the legal and procedural obstacles facing smaller parties and independents.
Money Talks
Harris at a primary rally in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in February. (Eric Elofson/Biden For President, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 )
It’s too early to say how much money will be spent in this election cycle, but if recent trends continue, it could be expected to be tens of billions of dollars — almost all of which will benefit the two major parties. The bulk of this money will be spent on media expenditures, which in turn subsidize the lavish salaries of journalists and pundits covering the campaigns.
Four years ago, Open Secrets has reported, campaign financing totaled $14.4 billion, shattering records on political spending. The 2020 spending by Democrats and Republicans more than doubled the total cost of the record-breaking 2016 presidential election cycle and dwarfed the budgets of third parties. While Biden and Trump had more than $2 billion on hand for their campaigns, the Libertarian and Green candidates had just $2.8 million and $500,000, respectively.
When it comes to campaign financing in the 2024 election cycle, Democrats were given a major boost with the replacement of Biden by Kamala Harris, with record-breaking donations flooding in as soon as it was announced that Biden would step down.
Within 24 hours of Biden’s announcement on July 21, Harris raised $81 million — the largest one-day haul in U.S. history — and the following day received another $20 million. This $100 million cash infusion over a 36-hour period more than doubled the $96 million the Biden-Harris campaign had on hand at the end of June.
Although the Harris campaign has not said how much of the $100 million has come from small versus large donors, ActBlue, the Democrats’ online platform for processing donations, reported that small donors gave $46.7 million in the first seven hours.
As impressive as these small-donor numbers are, they may ultimately be eclipsed by the contributions of the Democratic Party’s more deep-pocketed funders. Future Forward USA, a PAC supporting Biden’s re-election, told Politico that it had received $150 million in new commitments from major donors since Harris launched her campaign.
Indeed, this may have been one of the primary motivations in replacing Biden with Harris. Not only were Democrats deeply concerned by his debate performance in June and his obviously declining cognitive state, but contributions from major donors had all but dried up as people began losing faith that he could beat Trump. In fact, several major donors reportedly threatened to halt contributions after the debate, leading to what Chris Hedges has called “Biden [being] discarded by the same billionaire class he assiduously served throughout his political career.”
In a recent article, Hedges noted that Biden “was their creature,” but ultimately, “his billionaire supporters pulled the plug.”
With Kamala Harris now anointed the Democratic nominee, despite not receiving a single vote in the primary elections, those billionaire supporters are supposedly the ones who will “save democracy” from the threat posed by Trump. Just what sort of democracy they are saving, however, is hard to tell.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/30/a ... democracy/
US Veterans Tell Harris: End Siege of Gaza
July 31, 2024
In an open letter, Veterans For Peaces asks the vice president to call for a permanent ceasefire and emergency food and medical aid now, while she is campaigning for president.
Vice President Kamala Harris in January 2024. (White House/ Lawrence Jackson)
By Gerry Condon
Antiwar.com
The national organization Veterans For Peace has written an open letter to Vice President Kamala Harris, asking her to push for an immediate end to the siege of Gaza.
The letter begins:
“Dear Vice President Harris, we are reaching out to you as military veterans who have fought in multiple U.S. wars, and who continue to uphold the U.S. Constitution and international law, to organize for justice and equality in our home communities, and to advocate for a peaceful foreign policy.”
It continues:
“We are appalled by the ongoing Israeli slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children and by the maiming of tens of thousands more. We are outraged by the systematic blocking of food, leading to malnutrition, starvation, disease and the deaths of many more, particularly babies and young children. These are unbearable and unacceptable crimes that will go down in the history books as a terrible genocide – a holocaust.”
The veterans’ letter reminds Harris of her own words after her meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating — the images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third, or fourth time. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent…. It is time for this war to end and end in a way where Israel is secure, all the hostages are released, the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can exercise their right to freedom, dignity, and self-determination… So, to everyone who has been calling for a ceasefire and to everyone who yearns for peace, I see you and I hear you.”
Growing Danger of Nuclear War
Veterans For Peace also reminded Harris of the growing danger of nuclear war:
“As you must know, Vice President Harris, continued U.S. support for Israel amid the Gaza genocide also risks further regional and global escalation, with potentially irreversible consequences, even the unthinkable horror of nuclear war. We urge you to demonstrate the kind of leadership for which so many people are waiting — for which we are hoping and praying. Please use all your influence to end the unfathomable suffering in Gaza.”
Signed by Veterans For Peace President Susan Schnall, the letter encourages the U.S. vice president to take immediate action:
“Don’t wait until January. Do the right thing NOW, even as you are campaigning for president. Please urge President Biden to change course in Gaza, to support an immediate, permanent ceasefire, the opening of Gaza’s borders for massive humanitarian and medical aid, and to stop sending weapons to Israel as long as this massacre continues.”
Veterans For Peace sent the letter to Harris on Tuesday. It can be read in its entirety here.
https://peaceandplanetnews.org/open-let ... la-harris/
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/31/u ... e-of-gaza/
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The Useful Tool: Kamala “Heartbeat Away” Harris
Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor 31 Jul 2024
BAR has republished this article from 2020 by the late Glen Ford.
If Biden wins, Kamala Harris will be put forward as a kind of “co-president,” as a palliative for the lack of substantive relief from the forces that are plaguing Black lives.
“Harris can be trusted to please Power while advancing her personal ambitions.”
If the Democrats prevail in November, Kamala Harris will likely become the highest profile vice president of the post-Vietnam era – but only partly due to Joe Biden’s obvious infirmities. The new regime can count on a brief period of sheer giddiness as their base finally exhales after four years of overt racist rule, but it will be a short honeymoon. Although Donald Trump’s Covid-19 fiascos surely added some tens of thousands to the U.S. death toll, the pandemic would have plunged the world economy into depression (except for China ) and killed in excess of 150,000 disproportionately Black Americans, no matter which of the corporate parties was in the White House – and the people know it. The same super-majorities that supported Medicare for All before the pandemic hit (and who told exit pollsters so , even as they voted for Biden in the pivotal primaries), are now acutely aware that the United States has no healthcare system worthy of the name. Having endured two economic catastrophes in just twelve years, the great bulk of Americans have also come to understand that the corporate consolidation, hi-tech profiteering and general employment insecurity that has so catastrophically accelerated during the Covid depression, is built into the system. They want desperately to call a halt to the 40 year-long Race to the Bottom.
“The United States has no healthcare system worthy of the name.”
The corporate Democrats are no less committed than Republicans to endless austerity and war – the only future the ruling Lords of Capital can envision and, therefore, the common commitment of both halves of the corporate electoral duopoly. Since both parties are wedded to the Race to the Bottom and U.S. imperialism, the major cleavage that separates these political partners in crime, is race – or, in corporate language, “diversity” among the faces in high places. The duopoly electoral configuration requires that the Democrats absorb and smother all popular movements that might threaten the corporate militarist, austerity agenda, while retaining the loyalties of their multi-racial base by posturing as the bastion against Republican racism and reaction. That’s why Hillary Clinton’s campaign instructed its operatives and friendly media to encourage Donald Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination in 2016, as revealed by Wikileaks . Clinton thought Trump’s overt racism made him the easiest Republican to beat. That turned out to be a bad call, but it’s the only formula that allows corporate Democrats to pretend to champion their multi-racial constituency while doing nothing of substance to halt the steady deterioration of working people’s living standards. If Trump is gone in January, then the Democrats must find ways to accentuate the “great victory” that has been won on the racial front, since Biden has promised the donor class that “nothing will fundamentally change ” for them under his presidency.
Nothing will change for the vast majority of Black and brown people, either -- which is why Kamala Harris will be put forward as a kind of “co-president” with Biden, as a simulation of Black Power. This is not to say that Harris will wield the influence VP Dick Cheney was said to enjoy under George W. Bush (some believed Cheney was the actual policy formulator in that administration), but hers will be a much higher public profile than Barack Obama permitted his number two, Joe Biden. Harris can be trusted to please Power while advancing her personal ambitions, as she has since her inaugural electoral run as a law and order, police union-endorsed candidate for San Francisco prosecutor. Harris will gladly play the role of Biden’s Black alter ego and as physical evidence that African Americans are getting their reward for turning out in huge numbers for the Democrats. She’d better be convincing, because her presence, along with Black appointees to the cabinet, is all that Black America will get from Biden’s “nothing fundamental will change” administration – unless the power of the street intervenes.
“Hers will be a much higher public profile than Barack Obama permitted his number two, Joe Biden.”
With a race-baiting president and a Covid-driven economic depression as a backdrop, the George Floyd protests put more than 20 million people in motion under Black Lives Matter banners. Although the movement came into existence under a Black president, causing Barack Obama considerable embarrassment, BLM has since become recipient of many millions of corporate philanthropic dollars that are largely administered by movement notables who have chosen to become Democratic Party players and operatives. If the movement fails to separate from these corporate party collaborators, it will join the “controlled opposition” and cease to be a transformational force. That would be an epoch-shaking tragedy, but not without precedent. Devouring social movements is the Party’s specialty. In place of people’s politics, the Democrats present a simulacrum of popular power that poses no threat to the Lords of Capital and their dictatorship. Kamala Harris’ opportunistic career has taken her to center stage of U.S. corporate political theater where, if the polls are right, she will soon share a starring role in the long running production, Saving Racial Capitalism from Its Deserved Demise, the late stage version. We may soon be seeing more of her than even her fans and AKA sisters can stomach.
The late Glen Ford was co-founder and Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report.
https://blackagendareport.com/index.php ... y-harris-0
BREAKING — Police brutally attack peaceful demonstrators exercising their first amendment right to protest the speech of genocidal war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. But we will not let them succeed! The march is continuing — Free Palestine! pic.twitter.com/xN1aJhzzx9
