Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Fri Oct 21, 2022 2:53 pm

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“Founding Father” George Washington was a rich slave owner who owed his fortune to the stolen labor of kidnapped Africans. Image: Popular Graphic Arts. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons.)

Of, by, and for the elite: The class character of the U.S. Constitution
Originally published: Liberation School on October 19, 2022 by Crystal Kim (more by Liberation School) | (Posted Oct 21, 2022)

Contrary to the mythology we learn in school, the founding fathers feared and hated the concept of democracy—which they derisively referred to as “tyranny of the majority.” The constitution that they wrote reflects this, and seeks to restrict and prohibit involvement of the masses of people in key areas of decision making. The following article, originally written in 2008, reviews the true history of the constitution and its role in the political life of the country.

The ruling class of today—the political and social successors to the “founding fathers”—continues to have a fundamental disdain for popular participation in government. The right wing of the elite is engaged in an all-out offensive against basic democratic rights and democracy itself. This offensive relies heavily on the Supreme Court and the legal doctrine of constitutional “originalism”. Originalism means that the only rights and policies that are protected are ones that are explicitly laid out in the constitution, conforming with the “original” intentions of the founders. As the article explores, this was a thoroughly anti-democratic set up that sought to guarantee the power and wealth of the elite.


Introduction

In history and civics classrooms all over the United States, students are taught from an early age to revere the “Founding Fathers” for drafting a document that is the bulwark of democracy and freedom—the U.S. Constitution. We are taught that the Constitution is a work of genius that established a representative government, safeguarded by the system of “checks and balances,” and guarantees fundamental rights such as the freedom of speech, religion and assembly. According to this mythology, the Constitution embodies and promotes the spirit and power of the people.

Why, then, if the country’s founding document is so perfect, has the immense suffering of the majority of its people—as a result of exploitation and oppression—been a central feature of the U.S.? How could almost half of the population be designated poor or low income? Why would the U.S. have the world’s largest and most extensive prison system? If the Constitution, the supreme law of this country, was written to protect and promote the interests of the people, why didn’t it include any guarantees to the most basic necessities of life?

This contradiction between reality and rhetoric can be understood by examining the conditions under which the U.S. Constitution was drafted, including the class background of the drafters. Although it is touted today as a document enshrining “democratic values,” it was widely hated by the lower classes that had participated in the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War. Popular opposition was so great, in fact, that the drafting of the Constitution had to be done in secret in a closed-door conference.

The purpose of the Constitution was to reorganize the form of government so as to enhance the centralized power of the state. It allowed for national taxation that provided the funds for a national standing army. Local militias were considered inadequate to battle the various Native American nations whose lands were coveted by land speculators. A national army was explicitly created to suppress slave rebellions, insurgent small farmers and the newly emerging landless working class that was employed for wages.

The goal of the Constitution and the form of government was to defend the minority class of affluent property owners against the anticipated “tyranny of the majority.” As James Madison, a principal author of the Constitution, wrote:

But the most common and durable source of factions [dissenting groups] has been the various and unequal distribution of property.1

The newly centralized state set forth in the Constitution was also designed to regulate interstate trade. This was necessary since cutthroat competition between different regions and states was degenerating into trade wars, boycotts and outright military conflict.

The U.S. Congress was created as a forum where commercial and political conflicts between merchants, manufacturers and big farmers could be debated and resolved without resort to economic and military war.

Conditions leading to the U.S. Revolution
To understand the class interests reflected in the Constitution, it is necessary to examine the social and economic conditions of the time. In the decades leading up to the U.S. revolutionary period, colonial society was marked by extreme oppression and class disparities.

The economies of the colonies were originally organized in the interests of the British merchant capitalists who profited by trade with the colonies. These interests were guaranteed by the British monarchy headed by King George III. In the southern colonies like Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, a settler class of slave-owning big planters grew rich providing the cotton that fed Britain’s massive textile manufacturing industry.

In the northern colonies, merchant economies in the port cities and associated small manufacturing industries formed the basis for the division between rich and poor. In the countryside, huge landowners who owed their holdings to privilege in Europe squeezed the limited opportunities of small farmers.

In 1700, for example, 75 percent of land in colonial New York state belonged to fewer than 12 individuals. In Virginia, seven individuals owned over 1.7 million acres.2 By 1767, the richest 10 percent of Boston taxpayers held about 66 percent of Boston’s taxable wealth, while the poorest 30 percent of taxpayers had no property at all.3 Similar conditions could be found throughout the colonies. Clearly, there was an established ruling class within the colonies, although this grouping was ultimately subordinate to the British crown.

On the other hand, the majority of society—Black slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants and poor farmers—experienced super-exploitation and oppression. Women of all classes had, like their peers in Europe, no formal political rights.

With these growing class antagonisms, the 18th century was characterized by mass discontent, which led to frequent demonstrations and even uprisings by those on the bottom rung of colonial society.

Between 1676 and 1760, there were at least 18 uprisings aimed at overthrowing a colonial government. There were six slave rebellions as well as 40 riots like the numerous tenant uprisings in New Jersey and New York directed against landlords.4 Many of these uprisings were directed at the local elite and not the British Empire.

This local elite in colonial society found itself squeezed between the wrath of the lower working classes, on one side, and the British Empire, on the other.

Following the 1763 British victory in the Seven Years’ War in Europe, which included the so-called French and Indian War in North America, the French position as a colonial power competing with Britain was seriously downgraded as a result of their defeat. The French did send troops and military aid to support the colonists in their war for independence from Britain a decade later.

Following the defeat of the French in 1763, George III attempted to stabilize relations with Native Americans, who had fought primarily alongside the defeated French, by issuing the Proclamation of 1763. This decree declared Indian lands beyond the Appalachians out of bounds for colonial settlers, thereby limiting vast amounts of wealth the settlers could steal from the indigenous people. Chauvinist expansionism thus became fuel for anti-British sentiment in the colonies.

Making matters worse for the colonists, the British Empire began demanding more resources from the colonies to pay for the war. In 1765, the British Parliament passed the fourth Stamp Act, basically increasing taxes on the colonists. The Stamp Act of 1765 incited anger across all class strata, including British merchants, and was ultimately repealed in 1766.

The struggle around the Stamp Act demonstrated a shift in power relations between the colonists and the British Empire. While the local American elites were in less and less need of Britain’s assistance, the British Empire was in ever growing need of the wealth and resources of the colonies.

In summary, there were at least four factors that would motivate the American “new rich” to seek independence from the British crown. First, the anger of the poor and oppressed against the rich could be deflected from the local elite and channeled into hatred of the British crown—developing a new sense of patriotism. Second, the wealth produced and extracted in the colonies would remain in the pockets of the local ruling class rather than being transferred to the British Empire. Third, the local ruling class would greatly increase its wealth through the confiscation of property of those loyal to Britain. And lastly, independence would nullify the Proclamation of 1763, opening up vast amounts of Native land.

Two points qualified the drive to independence, which ultimately manifested itself in the sizable “Loyalist” or pro-British population during the revolution. First, despite the conflict between the colonists and the British government over wealth, colonists and colonizers were united against the Native American population, whom both tried to massacre and loot. The revolutionary struggle was not against exploitation, but to determine who would do the exploiting.

Secondly, in spite of the disputes over who got how much of the wealth generated by the colonies, this wealth primarily depended on the integration of the economy with British merchant capitalism. While the revolutionists wanted political distance from the empire, they could not afford a complete break.

The leaders of the U.S. Revolution

Revolutionary sentiment among the lowest classes of colonial society was largely spontaneous and unorganized. Leadership of the anti-British rebellion, groups like the Sons of Liberty, originated from the middle and upper classes. Some poor workers and farmers did join their ranks, allowing their leadership to garner popular support.

These leaders were conscious of the fact that only one class would be really liberated through independence from Britain: the local ruling class. However, in order to carry this out, they would have to create a façade of liberating the masses.

This is why the 1776 Declaration of Independence—the document used to inspire colonists to fight against Britain—includes language that was so much more radical than that of the 1787 U.S. Constitution. In fact, Thomas Jefferson had originally drafted a paragraph in the Declaration of Independence condemning George III for transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce”.5 Jefferson himself personally owned hundreds of slaves until the day he died, but he understood the appeal such a statement would have.

Instead, the final draft of the Declaration accused the British monarchy of inciting slave rebellions and supporting Indian land claims against the settlers. “He [the king] has incited domestic insurrection amongst us,” the final version read,

and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.

Sixty-nine percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence held colonial office under England. When the document was read in Boston, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up for a draft to fight the British. The rich avoided the draft by paying for substitutes, while the poor had no choice but to fight.

Slavery existed in all 13 British colonies, but it was the anchor for the economic system in the mid-Atlantic and southern states.

Thousands of slaves fought on both sides of the War of Independence. The British governor of Virginia had issued a proclamation promising freedom to any slave who could make it to the British lines—as long as their owner was not loyal to the British Crown. Tens of thousands of enslaved Africans did just that. Thousands managed to leave with the British when they were defeated, but tens of thousands more were returned to enslavement after the colonies won their “freedom” in 1783.

Following the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which established the independence of the colonies, vast amounts of wealth and land were confiscated from Loyalists. Some of this land was parceled out to small farmers to draw support for the new government.

While most Loyalists left the United States, some were protected. For instance, Lord Fairfax of Virginia, who owned over 5 million acres of land across 21 counties, was protected because he was a friend of George Washington—at that time, among the richest men in America.6

The drafting of the Constitution

In May 1787, 55 men—now known as the “Founding Fathers”—gathered in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention to draft the new country’s legal principles and establish the new government. Alexander Hamilton—a delegate of New York, George Washington’s closest advisor and the first secretary of the treasury—summed up their task: “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people… Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government”.7 Indeed, the task of the 55 men was to draft a document that would guarantee the power and privileges of the new ruling class while making just enough concessions to deflect dissent from other classes in society.

Who were the Founding Fathers? It goes without saying that all the delegates were white, property-owning men. Citing the work of Charles Beard, Howard Zinn wrote,

A majority of them were lawyers by profession, most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing or shipping, half of them had money loaned out at interest, and 40 of the 55 held government bonds.8

The vast majority of the population was not represented at the Constitutional Convention: There were no women, African Americans, Native Americans or poor whites. The U.S. Constitution was written by property-owning white men to give political power, including voting rights, exclusively to property-owning white men, who made up about 10 percent of the population.

Alexander Hamilton advocated for monarchical-style government with a president and senate chosen for life. The Constitutional Convention opted, rather, for a “popularly” elected House of Representatives, a Senate chosen by state legislators, a president elected by electors chosen by state legislators, and Supreme Court justices appointed by the president.

Democracy was intended as a cover. In the 10th article of the “Federalist Papers”—85 newspaper articles written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay advocating ratification of the U.S. Constitution—Madison wrote that the establishment of the government set forth by the Constitution would control “domestic faction and insurrection” deriving from “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal distribution of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.” During the convention, Alexander Hamilton delivered a speech advocating a strong centralized state power to “check the imprudence of democracy.”

It is quite telling that the Constitution took the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and changed it to “life, liberty and property.” The debates of the Constitutional Convention were largely over competing economic interests of the wealthy, not a debate between haves and have-nots.

The new Constitution legalized slavery. Article 4, Section 2 required that escaped slaves be delivered back to their masters. Slaves would count as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of deciding representation in Congress. The “three-fifths compromise” was between southern slave-holding delegates who wanted to count slaves in the population to increase their representation, while delegates from the northern states wanted to limit their influence and so not count slaves as people at all.

Furthermore, some of the most important constitutional rights, such as the right to free speech, the right to bear arms and the right to assembly were not intended to be included in the Constitution at all. The Bill of Rights was amended to the Constitution four years after the Constitutional Convention had adjourned so that the document could get enough support for ratification.

As a counter to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution gave Congress the power to limit these rights to varying degrees. For example, seven years after the Constitution was amended to provide the right to free speech, Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to say or write anything “false, scandalous or malicious” against the government, Congress or president with the intent to defame or build popular hatred of these entities.

Today, many people look to the Constitution—and especially to the Bill of Rights—as the only guarantor of basic political rights. And while the Constitution has never protected striking workers from being beaten over the heads by police clubs while exercising their right to assemble outside plant gates, or protected revolutionaries’ right to freedom of speech as they are jailed or gunned down, the legal gains for those without property do need to be defended.

But defending those rights has to be done with the knowledge that the founding document of the United States has allowed the scourge of unemployment, poverty and exploitation to carry on unabated because it was a document meant to enshrine class oppression. A constitution for a socialist United States would begin with the rights of working and oppressed people.

During the period leading to the second U.S. Revolution, commonly known as the Civil War, militant opponents of slavery traveled the country to expose the criminal institution that was a bedrock of U.S. society. On July 4, 1854, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution before thousands of supporters of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He called it a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” referring to its enshrining of slavery.

The crowd shouted back, “Amen”. 9

Although slavery has been abolished, the property that is central to the Constitution—private property, the right to exploit the majority for the benefit of the tiny minority—remains. In that sense, Garrison’s words still ring true.

Features:
↩ James Madison, Federalist Papers, No. 10. Available here.
↩ Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few, 9th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 1974/2011), 5.
↩ Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Longman, 1980), 65.
↩ Ibid., 59.
↩ Ibid., 72.
↩ Ibid., 84.
↩ Cited in Howard Zinn, Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 152.
↩ Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 89.
↩ Zinn, Declarations of Independence, 231.

https://mronline.org/2022/10/21/of-by-a ... the-elite/

A quibble with the image caption. While Washington did own many slaves and profited greatly thereby the greatest source of his wealth was in land speculation. Land that he was instrumental in stealing from Native Americans with bullet and bayonet. What a guy, flat out evil motherfucker. It is also to be noted that he was the richest man in the country when he was elected prez. So mebbe he got the nod not because he was the general in charge(a poor tactician but pretty astute strategist) but cause he had the deepest pockets.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 14, 2023 2:00 pm

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A 2011 rally hosted by No Labels on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

America’s first dark money ballot line
Originally published: The Lever on April 10, 2023 by Andrew Perez (more by The Lever) | (Posted Apr 12, 2023)

In 2024, billionaires and corporate executives are preparing to go from using shadowy front groups that influence politics and policy to fielding handpicked candidates on their very own ballot line, which is being secretly purchased outside disclosure rules that have long governed election campaigns.

That may sound like a conspiracy theory, but it is happening right now out in the open. Donors and political operatives at the corporate front group No Labels are actively exploiting a campaign finance loophole to buy themselves direct access to ballots nationwide, in an effort that Democrats warn could swing the upcoming presidential election.

The scheme–which is based on a campaign finance law carve-out for groups seeking to draft candidates–could create an entirely new path to elect candidates even more beholden to billionaires and corporate interests than major party politicians. And here’s the kicker: The public might never be able to know who is paying to make it happen.

Right now, all the public knows is that No Labels is leading a $70 million campaign to lay the groundwork for a potential 2024 “unity” ticket–which would feature one Democrat and one Republican. Democrats and media outlets have been raising alarms that the move could undermine President Joe Biden and help elect a Republican.

Compared to moneyed groups’ previous failed efforts to field alternate candidates, the No Labels initiative is more ambitious, secretive, and corrupt: Under the guise of bipartisan consensus, the corporate influence machine is buying its own national ballot line, funded by ultra-wealthy, anonymous donors.

Thanks to a 2010 court ruling, No Labels doesn’t have to disclose anything about who’s funding its campaign. It’s also planning to employ a top-down candidate selection process: No Labels has indicated that candidates would be chosen by a group of people handpicked by the organization, which has close ties to corporate lawmakers like Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (Ind.-Ariz.), and Susan Collins (R-Maine).

Now, as No Labels pursues its own nationwide ballot line, experts say the group will likely never have to reveal to the public who’s financing the effort–not even if the organization does decide to field a presidential ticket.

Of course, the Democratic and Republican political parties have both become increasingly reliant on dark pools of outside cash to help elect their politicians. But the official party committees must still regularly file public reports detailing their donors and expenditures.

No Labels, by contrast, is a tax-exempt nonprofit and is not required to publicly disclose its donors–even as it’s reportedly spending tens of millions getting ready to run candidates on the “No Labels Party” line around the country.

A spokesperson for No Labels did not respond to a request for comment.

Low Risk of Corruption
Long funded by billionaire investors and corporate executives, No Labels has up until now made its name forging alliances with key lawmakers in Washington–cheering on those politicians and helping raise money for their campaigns as they’ve pushed policymaking in the Biden era to the right–to the benefit of their corporate donors.

Now, as it gets involved in the 2024 election contest, No Labels’ strategy can be traced back to a 2010 court ruling and a subsequent 2014 Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision that concluded nonprofits seeking to draft federal candidates are not considered political committees until they officially nominate a candidate.

What that means, in practice, is that dark money groups do not have to disclose their donors or expenses as they work to procure ballot access around the country and consider potential candidates.

The stage was set for this development in the lead-up to the 2008 presidential campaign, when a group called Unity08 pushed a plan to obtain ballot access and field a unity ticket–and raise unlimited contributions to fund the effort.

With Law and Order actor Sam Waterston as its spokesman, the group said it planned to host a political convention on its website to nominate presidential candidates–with the idea being that Americans in the “fed-up middle” would rush to support politicians who were less ideological than those in the two major parties.

When the FEC said that Unity08 needed to register as a political committee and comply with contribution limits, Unity08 sued the agency. The group ended up abandoning its ballot access program, blaming the FEC for hamstringing its efforts, and continued its fight in the courts.

In 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in favor of Unity08, citing a prior 1981 decision involving a union that funded several “draft groups” encouraging Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) to run for president.

The 2010 ruling found that organizations that seek to obtain ballot access and draft undetermined candidates do not have to register as political committees and comply with FEC regulations until they select a candidate for federal office.

The judges argued that such a scenario would not pose much risk of corruption.

“Of course under Unity08’s plans, potential donors can anticipate that in due course nominees will emerge and be able to benefit from the ballot access that Unity08 will have by then secured,” they wrote.

The nominees might feel grateful or even beholden toward donors who effectively conferred such ballot access.

However, the judges downplayed concerns that this would allow for “quid pro quo” corruption, reasoning that “Unity08’s proposed method of generating nominees was such that neither donors nor candidates would know at the time of the donations which candidate would ultimately benefit from the group’s convention.”

A few years later, the FEC blessed a similar plan from Americans Elect–another centrist group proposing a bipartisan unity ticket selected via an online convention. While Unity08 was a 527 political group that disclosed its donors, Americans Elect was a dark money nonprofit, like No Labels is today.

FEC commissioners unanimously voted in 2014 to “find no reason to believe that Americans Elect, a nonprofit organization, was required to register with the commission as a political committee.”

Americans Elect reportedly raised $35 million as part of its 2012 unity ticket plan, but shut down after announcing that no candidate had reached the national support threshold needed to participate in its online convention. (Former Republican Louisiana governor Buddy Roemer came closest with 5,979 votes, but that was still 4,000 short of the minimum.)

Although New York Times columnist Tom Friedman reported that Americans Elect was “financed with some serious hedge-fund money,” taxrecords show the group only raised $8 million from 2010-12. The effort was primarily funded with $23 million in defaulted loans from its chairman, the late billionaire venture capitalist Peter Ackerman.

A Front For Wealthy Interests
Thanks to the precedent set by Unity08 and Americans Elect, No Labels will not have to register as a political committee with the FEC and begin disclosing its donors until the organization selects a candidate for federal office.

The goal is to put forward a national unity ticket, though the group has said it could also back House and Senate candidates. The group plans to hold a nominating convention in Dallas in April 2024.

But even then, the No Labels Party would only need to disclose its donors moving forward and not retroactively, according to Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer and deputy executive director at the watchdog group Documented.

“No Labels can avoid registering with the FEC or disclosing its donors because it has not yet nominated a candidate, and has been careful to say that it may not even nominate a candidate at all,” said Fischer.

That means that the public may never know who is behind the $70 million spending blitz that could reshape the 2024 election.

No Labels has framed its ballot access campaign as “an insurance policy in the event both major parties nominate presidential candidates that the vast majority of Americans don’t want,” explaining that the organization “itself will not run a candidate, but we will have the launching pad, specifically in the form of ballot access across the country.”

Its process for selecting candidates, however, appears fairly simple and substantially more controlled than past unity ticket efforts, which involved seeking out hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans to vote for potential presidential nominees on a website.

No Labels says it will select “a diverse and distinguished group of Americans who will serve on a formal nominating committee” to vet and determine candidates. Those candidates would then be ratified by No Labels delegates at its convention.

This does not sound like a particularly high bar to clear.

And unlike its predecessors, No Labels is already a well-known corporate influence operation. Originally launched in 2010, the organization has significant sway with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans.

While No Labels characterizes itself as “the voice for the great American majority who increasingly feel politically homeless,” the organization is best understood as a front for Wall Street and other corporate interests who want to affect policy.

Major donors to No Labels have included billionaires in the private equity, hedge fund, real estate, and oil and gas industries, according to a leaked donor list obtained by the Daily Beast in 2018. The group has also courted Republican mega-donors.

No Labels’ CEO, Nancy Jacobson, was a fundraiser for both Bill and Hillary Clinton, while her husband, corporate consultant Mark Penn, was a top Clinton campaign advisor. The group is co-chaired by lobbyist and former Sen. Joe Lieberman (Ind.-Conn.), as well as ex-Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R). Manchin and Collins are “honorary co-chairs.”

No Labels also sponsors the Problem Solvers Caucus in the House of Representatives–an influential group of lawmakers from both parties that pushes supposedly bipartisan policy solutions in Congress.

In the first two years of President Joe Biden’s first term, No Labels played a key role in helping gut the Democratic Party’s legislative agenda.

The organization worked closely with conservative Democrats–including Manchin and Sinema in the Senate and Problem Solvers Caucus co-chair Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) in the House–to slow and ultimately block the Build Back Better Act, Biden’s anti-poverty, health care, and climate spending package, which would have been financed with higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

No Labels also boosted Manchin and Sinema for opposing efforts by Democrats to end or reform the Senate filibuster. The rule, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation, functions as corporate America’s kill switch over any bills that affect their interests.

As a result, last session, Republicans successfully filibustered a measure to force the disclosure of dark money donors as well as the Democratic Party’s voting rights legislation.

In a leaked 2021 audio recording obtained by The Intercept, Jacobson, No Labels’ CEO, spoke candidly about working to raise $20 million worth of direct campaign contributions for allied lawmakers in order to “reward” them for voting in lockstep with the organization.

In February, No Labels held a strategy conference in Miami with corporate-friendly lawmakers, including Collins, Manchin, and Sinema.

“The session featured robust discussions surrounding the most pressing issues facing America ranging from the debt ceiling to immigration,” the group wrote in a press release.

“I Don’t Rule Myself Out”
No Labels is now working to secure federal ballot access in every state and D.C. So far, the group has made the ballot in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, and Oregon.

Democrats in Arizona have raised the possibility that Sinema might run for reelection next year on the No Labels ballot line.

No Labels has not yet laid out its stances on most major political issues. Its website instead features messages about how politicians “need to listen more to the majority of Americans and less to extremists on the far left and right,” and that “America isn’t perfect, but we love this country and would not want to live any place else.”

However, the group does declare,

We support, and are grateful for, the U.S. military.

This summer, No Labels says, it “will release our Commonsense Policy agenda, which articulates common sense solutions–supported by a broad majority of Americans–to some of America’s toughest problems.”

The organization additionally says it will only offer a ticket if “neither the Democratic nor Republican party presidential nominees embrace or embody the values and commitments expressed in the No Labels mission statement.”

That mission statement says that Americans should “have the choice to vote for a presidential ticket that features strong, effective, and honest leaders who will commit to working closely with both parties to find common sense solutions to America’s biggest problems.”

If that all sounds exceedingly vague, there may be a good reason for it.

As Fischer, the campaign finance lawyer, points out, the lack of specifics from No Labels about its policy platform and what it hopes to see from the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees leaves plenty of room for dealmaking.

“At this point, No Labels isn’t saying what ‘values and commitments’ they are looking for from a major party candidate,” said Fischer.

This raises the specter of No Labels officials or donors using this leverage to extract backroom concessions.

In recent interviews, Manchin has refused to rule out running for president in 2024 on the No Labels ballot line, and praised the group’s strategy.

“If enough Americans believe there is an option and the option is a threat to the extreme left and extreme right, it will be the greatest contribution to democracy, I believe,” Manchin told the Washington Post, adding:

I don’t rule myself in and I don’t rule myself out.

https://mronline.org/2023/04/12/america ... llot-line/

Same as it ever was...the Supremes just formalized it.
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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Wed Jul 05, 2023 3:01 pm

The Supreme Court and Political Corruption
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 05 Jul 2023

Image
Image: Library of Congress

The Supreme Court has always been a political institution. Racism, political expediency, and outright corruption have always dictated its decisions.

“They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”
Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, Dred Scott v. Sandford

The Supreme Court of the United States is enshrined in the Constitution as one of three branches of government, the other two being the Executive branch, the presidency, and the Legislative branch, the Senate and House of Representatives. In other words the Court is a lawmaking body. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was a landmark, a case that most Black people commit to memory. The Court declared that public accommodations could not be considered equal if they were separate, and thus began the long road to ending segregation in the law. The 1971 Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal. There are numerous other instances of the Court making significant changes in this country’s political trajectory.

The Supreme Court is a revered institution, but the presidential nomination and Senate confirmation process make it a very politicized institution. When anyone on the left expresses doubts about voting for a Democratic Party presidential candidate they are immediately scolded about the need to protect the Supreme Court and keep it out of republican hands. But a funny thing happened on the way to the conservative super majority.

Millions of people voted for Barack Obama thinking that his presidency would protect abortion rights for example. During his 2008 campaign he said as much and promised to pass legislation which would codify the Roe v. Wade decision and take it out of the hands of the judiciary. But after his first 100 days in office he announced that the proposed Freedom of Choice Act was not his “highest priority .” In other words, he wasn’t going to lift a finger to protect abortion rights.

Not only did he betray his supporters but he dithered and dallied and allowed 80-year old cancer patient Ruth Bader Ginsburg to stay on the court when he knew that democrats might lose control of the Senate. She didn’t leave, and republicans won the Senate. Hillary Clinton’s inability to get 78,000 more votes in the right states put Donald Trump in office and Obama wouldn’t take the step of making a recess appointment to the court. Ginsburg died while Trump was in office and he chose her successor. The rest is history.

In 2022 the Court overturned Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision and now only 16 states guarantee a right to abortion. Recently the Court ruled that race cannot be a factor in college admissions, perhaps the 1,000th cut that kills off affirmative action for good. In another case the Court ruled that freedom of speech allowed a web site designer to refuse her services to a gay couple. The case is bad on the merits. It means that discrimination is now legal if one proclaims a right to discriminate based on personal feelings.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that no such gay couple even existed. The person named as a gay man who wanted to create a wedding site isn’t gay, is in fact married to a woman, and found out his name was used in court documents only after he was contacted by the media.

Where have the democrats been in all this turmoil? They have been pointing at republicans, deplorables, extreme MAGA, Donald Trump and anyone else they can find to name and blame. A combination of miscalculation and not wanting to put up a fight have led to this point. They now claim to have been ardent abortion rights supporters, for example, but like Obama they just didn’t care. In 2017 House Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly said that focusing on abortion was hurting the democrats.

There is political malfeasance, cynicism and political corruption but the court itself is little more than a place for billionaires to buy the justice they want, literally and figuratively. Billionaire and republican donor Harlan Crow has paid for luxury vacations for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for more than 20 years, with Thomas and his wife accepting trips on Crow’s yacht and private jet. Crow also paid boarding school tuition for the Thomases’ nephew and purchased a property from Thomas. None of these transactions were disclosed as gifts, which is what the law requires.

Not to be outdone, Justice Samuel Alito was also caught accepting a luxury vacation from billionaire Paul Singer, whose hedge fund was represented in cases before the Supreme Court. Like Thomas, Alito hadn’t disclosed his connection to Singer, nor did he recuse himself from the cases that involved Singer’s fund. When Pro Publica reporters sent questions to Alito about his relationship with Singer he didn’t respond. But he did wangle a Wall Street Journal rebuttal of a story that Pro Publica hadn’t even published.

So we have political corruption by democrats who used the Supreme Court as a vote getting and fund raising device while refusing to use the legislative power they had in order to do what they claim they wanted to do. Rich republicans cut to the chase and buy their justices fair and square.

Of course the Court could be expanded. Biden could fight for that right but he isn’t interested in fighting for what millions of people want him to do. As Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Biden played a pivotal role in getting Thomas confirmed in 1991. According to former Senator Orin Hatch , Biden didn’t believe Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment. He certainly wanted her to disappear so that he could continue the time-honored practice of deal making and going along to get along with his putative opposition.

It is important to keep these facts in mind as Black people live and die by Supreme Court decisions. Plessy v. Ferguson made segregation the law of the land for some 60 years. We now see that those bad old days are never far away. Nearly every Black person knows that Dred Scott’s claim to be a free man was nullified by the Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Taney stating that Black people had no citizenship rights whether they were free or enslaved.

“It is obvious that they were not [60 U.S. 393, 412] even in the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they were conferring special rights and privileges upon the citizens of a State in every other part of the Union. Indeed, when we look to the condition of this race in the several States at the time, it is impossible to believe that these rights and privileges were intended to be extended to them.”

The Dred Scott v. Sandford case was another example of corruption. Newly elected president James Buchanan wanted the outcome of Scott’s appeal for his freedom to end any and all debates on slavery. He corresponded with several of the justices before he was inaugurated and put his thumb on the scale. The ruling that not only was Scott still enslaved but that Black people had no citizenship rights at all didn’t end any debates over slavery and a civil war ensued four years later.

It is important to remember Scott and Plessy and to reconsider the inclination to hang onto illegitimate relics like the Supreme Court in hopes of securing justice. Victories may come but they can’t be counted on, even when the allegedly correct party is in office. The cycles of elation and disappointment have been going on ever since the 1875 Civil Rights Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. For decades Black people voted for the party they believed was friendliest to their interests, republicans at the time, in hopes of resurrecting the legislation but help never came from the electoral process. There was no Civil Rights Act until 1964.

There are no saviors in congress, the white house or in the Supreme Court. There won’t be as long as the system is corrupt. It isn’t really surprising that billionaire rule extends to the Supreme Court. Why would the lords of capital leave Thomas or Alito to their own devices when they can buy them off? Why would democrats protect abortion rights when they can fool the public and cut backroom deals with the people they claim to oppose?

The Supreme Court is clearly undeserving of the reverence with which it is treated. It exemplifies everything that is wrong with this country. Vote shaming and arm twisting efforts to secure democratic judicial appointments is the last refuge of scoundrels. No one should fall for the con job any longer. It is time to pave the way for a new politics of liberation that doesn’t depend on false hopes.

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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 13, 2023 2:41 pm

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Shays’ Rebellion. C. Kendrick, circa 1902. Public domain.
Sober Up Liberals: The U.S. Constitution Sucks
By Chad Pearson (Posted Jul 12, 2023)

Review of Robert Ovetz, We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few (London: Pluto Press, 2022).

People in the United States generally have confidence in the country’s political system, believing that it has the capacity to solve meaningful problems. Conservatives and liberals alike sincerely respect what they consider the nation’s sacrosanct Constitution, established following the victorious outcome of the Revolution, internal class struggles, and intense debates between Federalists and anti-Federalists. In short, the creation of it represented, in the eyes of many, a political victory. That subsequent lawmakers have added amendments to it offers proof, defenders maintain, that the Framers (delegates to the Constitutional Convention who helped draft the Constitution) created “a living document,” one that is accountable, flexible, and democratic.

Robert Ovetz’s We the Elites: Why the U.S. Constitution Serves the Few provides a necessary and forceful corrective to these popular notions, revealing that the wealthy men responsible for establishing the Constitution never wanted it to protect or promote popular democracy. This is not a new argument, but Ovetz has updated it with fascinating reflections on the myriad ways that the Framers’ creation continues to serve as a practically insurmountable barrier to our most persistent environmental, public health, and social challenges. In ten well-argued chapters, Ovetz, a prolific and gifted scholar best known for his labor studies books, echoes insights articulated by Charles Beard, the Progressive Era historian who exposed the Framers’ clear class interests in his 1913 An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.1 Beard has few defenders in today’s academy, and his scholarship has been eclipsed by the output of subsequent generations of historians who tend to hold a far less critical view of the nation’s founding fathers.

Both institutionally based scholars and the popular presidential historians whose books adorn the shelves of big chain bookstores generally believe that the Framers were flawed but profoundly enlightened visionaries, shrewd men who were guided by more than their own narrow economic interests. Ovetz, who approaches his tasks with methodical precision, has given renewed legitimacy to the Beardian-style analysis, one that ultimately helps us better comprehend the Framers’ core intentions while acknowledging their damaging legacy. Above all, these men formed the Constitution to safeguard a capitalist economy, a system that, since its inception, has benefited the few at the expense of the many. Ovetz has produced an urgent call to action, insisting that liberals and leftists get out of their comfort zones and fully abandon their trust in the Constitution.

In making his case, Ovetz gives necessary context, including an exploration into the conflict-ridden atmosphere that plagued many communities after the American Revolution’s triumph. Here he investigates one of the central problems identified by Carl Becker in his 1907 study: “the question, if we may so put it, of who should rule at home.”2 The common people, the many toilers who were subject to unfair tax burdens, growing debts, and involuntary dislocations due to foreclosures, participated in a series of agrarian protests, which deeply frightened the power-hungry landowners. Ovetz gives much importance to Shays’ Rebellion, sparked in 1786 in response to excessively heavy taxes—at least four times higher that year than during British colonialism—in western Massachusetts. The elites’ feelings of overwhelming dread in the face of this conflict, Ovetz explains, “is what motivated the Framers to meet in the Convention” (42). That rebellion pit American Revolutionary veteran leaders, including those who were not present during it, against its rank and file. George Washington voiced disgust at the uprising, and another famous war hero, Samuel Adams, helped his class by authoring Massachusetts’s 1786 Riot Act, which allowed authorities to suppress the rebellion. The Framers sided squarely with the creditors.

Ovetz takes needed aim at other renowned figures from this generation. Few deserve more critical attention than James Madison, who is venerated in liberal circles. In Ovetz’s telling, the so-called Father of the Constitution comes across as excessively arrogant and almost obsessed about the ways demographic changes had the potential to harm the long-term interests of what he called the “opulent.” Ovetz refers to Madison’s famous Federalist #10 as “a classic treatise on the role of class conflict over both government and economy from an elite perspective” (32). The prolific essayist and future president followed up by producing additional pamphlets, including Federalist #51, which called for the development of policies meant to ensure “that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority” (37). Madison was explicit.

What about the document itself? Doesn’t the Constitution’s preamble, which starts with “We the People of the United States,” indicate inclusivity? Ovetz says no, and proceeds to systematically breakdown the preamble’s features, explaining that the Framers used words like “the people” to refer to themselves—wealthy, well-educated white men. Ovetz is necessarily blunt here: “The Framers did not mean the same ‘We the People’ as we do today” (43). And how did these individuals acquire their wealth in the first place? They, like others from their class, obtained it by plundering and exploiting the common people across racial lines. This involved expropriating land from Native peoples and profiting immensely from the forced labor of enslaved people and the low wages of “free” workers. The many victims of exploitation and repression had zero say over the framing of the Constitution.

Ovetz presents penetrating observations and meticulous takedowns of the different branches of the U.S. government formed by the Framers. Liberals who might start reading this book as patriotic true believers might come away from it with renewed criticisms of Congress, the executive, and the judiciary. At a minimum, they will come to recognize that representatives of all branches have, for generations, unequivocally protected property interests.

The Congressional branch, which Ovetz explores in three chapters, was “designed,” he claims, “to be inefficient when it serves the interests of the economic majority and efficient when it serves the interest of the elites” (71). Historically, it has also assisted the country’s brutalist exploiters (71). Congress, for example, had long defended the institution of slavery due to the three-fifth clause, which enhanced the power of southern states. Moreover, Congress protected the spread of slavery into the new territories acquired in the decades after the Revolution. And then there is the question of taxation. Section I.9.4 of the Constitution, Ovetz points out, was “designed with the intention of impeding or preventing the power of Congress to tax the property of elites” (95).

Ovetz offers a particularly hard-hitting analysis of the executive branch. Many of us recognize that presidents enjoy immense privileges, but Ovetz shows that these powers remain “virtually unlimited” (100). Republican and Democratic Party presidents have, for example, issued thousands of executive orders. Presidents have unilaterally deployed military forces international and domestically, declared national emergencies, and incarcerated people without due process. Moreover, they have aggressively used their veto power. Of course, Congress can override vetoes, but the record demonstrates that it has succeeded in very few cases. Taken together, the country’s presidents, ending with Donald Trump in 2020, have issued 2,584 vetoes; Congress has overturned a mere 112. Furthermore, the threshold for Congress to impeach the executive for high crimes and misdemeanors is, as Ovetz explains, “ill-defined and the supermajority vote threshold to remove is so high that impeachment has yet to be successfully used” (101). Finally, there is the matter of the electoral college, which the Framers created to undermine popular democracy. Alexander Hamilton explained its purpose in Federalist #68: to establish “effectual security against this mischief” and thus prevent “tumult and disorder” (102).

The judicial branch has played its own critical roles in preventing mischief, tumult, and disorder. Ovetz fittingly refers to it as “the last line of defense in the gauntlet of minority checks set up to protect property, and the final arbiters of elite minority rule” (128). Prior to the Constitution’s formation, the always class conscious Framers expressed disapproval of the roles of local and state judges, complaining that they were too sympathetic, and ultimately too responsive to the interests of ordinary people. Judges were popularly elected, subject to term limits, and often reluctant to punish indebted farmers. Irritated by these democratic practices, the Framers opted to establish a system in which federal judges were chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. They ultimately succeeded: federal courts have routinely issued decisions that protect property at the expense of ordinary people.

The court system’s practices of protecting property and capitalism were clearest in the context of the extraordinary labor struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In these years, the Supreme Court repeatedly coddled union-busting employers, essentially serving, in historian Gustavus Myers words, as “the most powerful instrument of the ruling class.”3 For many decades, strikers have endured the wrath of court-ordered injunctions, preventing them from pressuring others to join picket lines and thus cutting down expressions of solidarity. In dramatic cases, including the Pullman boycott and strike of 1894, American Railway Union president Eugene Debs was arrested for violating an injunction, which he then appealed to the Supreme Court. In the In Re Debs case (1895), Justice Brewer gave the labor leader a painful lesson about the sheer force of this powerful instrument: “If the emergency arises, the army of the nation, and all its militia, are at the service of the nation, to compel obedience to its laws” (144). The Supreme Court’s actions during the so-called Progressive Era, expressed by the 1905 Lochner v. New York decision, which struck down a New York law that forbade bakers from working a ten-hour day, offers further evidence of its obvious class biases. Employers were the primary beneficiaries of these rulings.

Making changes to the Constitution remains a herculean task. Of course, we can identify several significant developments following struggles for greater racial and gender rights: the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments offered protections to African Americans and the 19th Amendment expanded suffrage rights to women. However, we have witnessed very few others over the course of more than two hundred years. The numbers speak for themselves: out of more than 11,000 attempts to add amendments, lawmakers have succeeded only 27 times. The fundamental problem stems from what Ovetz identifies as “the nearly impossible hurdle of achieving two-thirds support in both houses before proceeding to the states for three-quarters approval” (80).

After vigorously outlining the Constitution’s innumerable and practically unsolvable weaknesses, Ovetz makes sensible recommendations about moving forward. Unsurprisingly, he calls for abandoning it altogether and forming something far more accountable and democratic. Building something new, which must be generated from below while promoting and protecting “direct political and economic democracy,” Ovetz admits, will obviously be a difficult task (163). It will require convincing large numbers of fair-minded people to ditch their seemingly undying faith in the entrenched institutions empowered by the Constitution. Yet, what probably appears entirely unreasonable to many today, seemed like commonsense to Thomas Jefferson in 1789: “Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right” (149). Creating a fundamentally new political system that is truly accountable while upholding the rights of the actual “people” will inevitably involve a tremendous amount of organizing, discussions, and debates. But recent social movements in the era of COVID have illustrated the capacity of self-organizing and mutual aid networks. “We don’t need a constitution to tell us how to organize ourselves,” he writes at the end, “because we already do it without realizing it” (174).

We are left with serious questions. Above all, will it be possible to get this book into the hands of the many liberals who sincerely think that the threats to “our democracy” are limited to the activities of right-wing figures in and outside of official political positions? Will they read it? The urgency is obvious in our undeniably high-stakes period: global warming, increased labor strife, grave public health emergencies, persistent official and covert U.S. military interventions, institutional racism, gender oppression, attacks on queer and trans people, and the increasing widening economic gap between ordinary people and elites. These stubborn ills have plagued us under political leaders represented by both mainstream parties. By reading this book, we can hope that fair-minded liberals, those who bristle at the activities of today’s conservative judges and policymakers, shake their heads in disgust at the January 6, 2021, attempted insurrection, and shudder at the thought of a dystopian Trumpian future, will come to realize that our most pressing problems are structural rather than partisan. Then we will begin to make progress.

Notes
1. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913).
2. Carl Lotus Becker, “The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1776” (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1907), 22.
3. Gustavus Myers, “Prospectus of History of the Supreme Court of the U.S.,” Montana News, July 27, 1911, 2.

https://mronline.org/2023/07/12/sober-u ... ion-sucks/

Told ya....))

And fuck the liberals, who willreform a system which cannot stay reformed even if ya manage a little reform here or there. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be destroyed sooner rather than later unless we destroy the capitalist system first.
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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Wed Feb 21, 2024 4:36 pm

The US Political System and the 2024 Elections
FEBRUARY 21, 2024

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Washington Crossing the Delaware, painting by Emanuel Leutze (1851).

By Carlos L. Garrido – Feb 7, 2024

Author’s note: The following is a paper that was presented on October 23, 2023, at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), a public univerity on the outskirts of the Mexican capital in one of the poorer regions of the country. I was asked to give an overview of the foundation of the American state, its structure, and my views on the upcoming 2024 elections. It kicked off the Congress on Interculturality, Juridical Pluralism, Human Rights and Critique of Law, hosted by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

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A sign of the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), where the author presented his paper. Photo: Author.

The presentation could not have gone any better. The auditorium was filled with workers and indigenous people. The level of class consciousness was astounding. While presenting most heads nodded in agreement, something quite hard to imagine happening in the US with a lecture so critical of US capitalist-imperialism. All the questions were terrific, most of which expressed a curiosity as to what the American people felt about x or y event. It was clear to me that they understood very well the difference between the American people and the imperialist state which wrongly acts in their name. In replying to one of the questions on the on-going genocide of the Palestinians I almost found myself in tears, both because of the gravity of the topic I was discussing, but also because of the heartfelt reactions I saw from the crowd. I did not have a doubt that most people in that room sympathized with the Palestinian plight, seeing in it their own struggles against capitalist-imperialism.

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View from inside UACM. Photo: Author.

“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” — Terence.
​This was Marx’s maxim; it was also the motto at UACM.


The United States was founded out of an intense class struggle against British colonialism. It produced the first anti-colonial revolution in the hemisphere, serving as an inspiration for virtually all other bourgeois revolutions in the late 18th and 19th century. The revolution, and the subsequent contradictions which ensue after its success, were a reflection of the contradictions within the colonists themselves, many of which were temporarily placed aside to coalesce forces against the principal contradiction of British colonialism.

While it was a historically progressive bourgeois revolution, a lot of the fighting was done by the popular classes, folks who made their livings as carpenters, blacksmiths, shoemakers, etc. These popular classes were driven to action, not just by the immediacy of their deteriorating situation, but by their democratic desires for popular sovereignty and a democratic state controlled by the people as a whole. These desires, while given lip-service throughout American history, have never been actualized. The American state, like every other state in human history, has been a tool for protecting the interests of the economically dominant class. The class in whose hands control over the means of production is, also controls the politics, judicature, media, and all other social institutions, shaping their central function to the smooth reproduction of the existing state of affairs.

That the American state has warped itself into being the bulwark of reaction and counterrevolutionary struggles, does not mean that its founding revolution did not have a historically progressive kernel. It was the first state in history to proclaim its freedom with appeals to a universal humanity, where all are created equal and endowed with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights, when oppressed by a government, offer the citizens not only the right, but the duty, to overthrow such a government. It brought into being a successful struggle against feudal absolutisms, radically transforming the whole mode of life – its economic, political, social, and juridical dimensions. It ushered in the separation of church and state; a republican state; public education; the elimination of laws of entail that allowed the monopolization of wealth within a select few families; the elimination of primogeniture; it expropriated the lands of the king and Tories, redividing them on a significantly more equitable basis; it made efforts to abolish indentured servitude, and limited African slavery to the southern states; and, by removing the feudal fetters to the development of the productive forces, it stimulated the onslaught of capitalism, moving history forward.

It was, in general, a step forward in universal history. In many of the European states, teachers in the late 18th century could be blackballed from the academy if they taught the Declaration of Independence. The democratizing potential, although never fully realized, was evident to the elite across Europe at its time. Even well into the 20th century the radicalism of the Declaration of Independence was still being appealed to, by, for example, Fidel Castro in History Will Absolve Me, and Ho Chi Minh, in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence.

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Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson (left to right) draft the Declaration of Independence. Photo: Library of Congress.

Thomas Jefferson, himself a figure riddled by contradictions, condemned the concentration of wealth within a few hands. He felt that the revolution was threatened by a small aristocracy of wealth that was in constant contrast with the misery of the many. For this, he proposed various measures for preventing such grotesque wealth inequality – some of these measures, such as progressive taxation, are still being fought for by social democrats today. In 1779, the Virginia Gazzette, caught up in the democratic fervor of the revolution, made a call for what today we would describe as the nationalization of property put under administration by the people for the people. It urged that we must “take the whole trade of the continent out of the hands of individuals and let it be carried on for the benefit of the public by persons authorized by the legislature under stated but liberal salaries.” In 1776 Connecticut adopted price-fixing legislation to combat the profiteering of the capitalists, whom they described as the “great pests of society, who prefer their own private gain to the interest and safety of their country.”

It is not hard to see the danger that this general democratic fervor presented for the bourgeois order that ushered it in – an order that would create its own forms of tyrannical absolutisms rooted in the modernized form the master/slave relation takes with the capitalist and the worker. The American elite was not oblivious to this. While the progressive elements favored a more expansive democratization of society, other segments fought vehemently against it. Their rejections of feudal absolutisms were less based on a democratic fervor than on the limitations these presented for their class interests. The embryonic development of the American state is a product of these contradictions, of the compromises each faction of the revolutionaries took to usher in a new state.

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Constitutional Convention. Photo: Library of Congress.

The revolution would go on to produce a constitutional federal republic with a presidential system. Taking its cues from John Locke, Montesquieu, and other bourgeois political philosophers, the US constitution would enshrine the separation of powers between three branches of government destined to check each other and sustain the balance of power between them.

The executive branch is composed of the President which is the head of state, leader of the federal government, and Commander in Chief of the United States armed forces. While there are presidential elections, the voters elect the president only indirectly, as it is ultimately the electoral college that picks the president. Within the executive branch you also have the Vice-President who becomes president if the President is unable to serve, and who presides over the US Senate and breaks ties in Senate votes, and the Cabinet advisors to the president, which include the vice president, heads of executive departments, and other high-ranking government officials nominated by the president and approved by the Senate.

The legislative branch is composed of a bicameral congress that drafts proposed laws, confirms or rejects presidential nominations for heads of federal agencies, federal judges, and the supreme court, and has authority to declare war. The senate, known also as the upper chamber, is composed of 100 members, two for each state. Originally, the senators were selected by the state legislators. This would change with the 17th amendment, ratified in 1913, where senators would be directly elected by the people. Once elected, senators stay in power for 6 years. The House of Representatives, known as the lower chamber, is dictated by the proportion of the population of each state, with small states like Wyoming having one and large states like California having 53. The House has the power to initiate all revenue bills, impeach federal officers, and elect the president if no candidate receives a majority of votes in the Electoral College. They are in power for two years once elected. Both senators and house members are not subject to term limits. There are currently around eight people who have been in congress for more than 40 years, with Iowa’s Chuck Grassley at the lead with 48 years in power.

​Lastly there is the judicial branch, which is composed of the Supreme Court and other federal courts. Its task is to interpret the meaning of laws, apply the laws to individual cases, and decide if laws violate the Constitution. Federal judges are selected by the president, and, if approved by the senate, can serve for life, without any term limits.

The US constitution also includes the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments of the document. The Bill of Rights was produced as a compromise between the federalists and the anti-federalists, who were skeptical of governmental power and wished to guarantee individual freedoms within the constitution. Amongst these are the rights to free speech, religious freedom, media and assemblage, the rights to bear arms, the prohibition of soldiers quartering private dwellings in peace time, the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the right to a grand-jury indictment for serious offenses, protecting against double jeopardy in criminal cases, the prohibition of compelling testimony by a person against himself, the rights of the accused to a speedy trial, an impartial jury, and guarantees to the right of legal counsel and to the obtaining of witnesses in his favor, the prohibition of excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment, and the reserving to the states and people any powers not delegated to the federal government.

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The US Constitution. Photo: Library of Congress.

While the American state was shaped with an eye to the rejection of feudal absolutism, there was another class feared by a good number of the founders: working people. Most founders deeply distrusted the people, the tyranny of the majority as De Tocqueville would say. In many ways, the priority of the state they established was not democracy—as today’s narrative urges—but the liberty of capital. Like Locke in the Second Treatise of Government, the American constitution is a document deeply embedded in a tradition that holds that the government’s central purpose is the protection of property and propertied individuals. Instead of Lincoln’s assertion of a government of, by, and for the people, what the US state has actually produced is a government of, by, and for capital, or, extending Lincoln’s understanding of people, government of, by, and for people with capital.

This is clearly seen in James Madison’s Federalist 10, where he provides a lesson in divide et impera. Discussing the topic of factions, he notes that the most common and dangerous forms of factions are those rooted on the “unequal distribution of property.” To prevent a faction of the majority/people that can threaten the order of the rich elite, it is necessary, Madison observed, to factionalize them as much as possible. As he argued, to prevent a majority faction from emerging: “you [must] take in a greater variety of parties and interests… make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens [i.e., the rich]; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.”

The struggle to overcome the divisions the elite thrust on the people has been at the heart of class struggles in the US. The Civil War, in some ways the second American revolution, overthrew the institution of slavery and the South’s cotton kingdom. It was, as W.E.B. Dubois shows in Black Reconstruction, a revolution of the black or enslaved proletariat, who won the war through a general strike where millions of black workers fled to enemy lines in the North – providing the North with new soldiers, spies, workers, and denying the South their productive base. For a period of less than a decade the Northern army would defend what Dubois called a dictatorship of the working class in the South (for my analysis of the importance of Dubois’s Black Reconstruction as a foundational text of American Marxism see HERE). This will end with the counterrevolution of property in 1876, where a fascist order would take hold in the South, making Jim Crow and unfettered Lynching the order of the day. This apartheid order would be overthrown, de jure, in 1964 with the Civil Rights act, the product of the political revolution Martin Luther King Jr. led. In each of these cases, the advancement of American society was premised on the overthrowing of the anti-democratic and factionalist aspects of the state’s founding—always with an eye to fulfilling the genuinely democratic and egalitarian aspirations of the progressive faction of the founders. In some ways, the class and ideological contradictions at the founding of the state have merely taken new forms in accordance with new contexts.

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Martin Luther King Jr. gives his “I have a dream” speech. File photo.

Political scientists often talk about the founder’s anti-democratic sentiments as a form of “distrust of the people.” But is it? Is it trust that is lacking? Or is it the awareness that the business interests they upheld clashed with the interests of the vast majority of propertyless working people?

​This was the view that many radical historians of the early 20th century like J Allen Smith, Charles A Beard, Richard Franklin Pettigrew and others took, lambasting the anti-democratic character of the constitution. However, even superficial understandings of democracy, such as those that reduce it to elections and each person having equal power with their vote, would come to see the deeply anti-democratic character of the constitution the American state is based on. The bourgeois political theorist Robert Dahl, for instance, displays a variety of undemocratic aspects of the American constitution in his book, How Democratic is the American Constitution. He notes how at the time of writing, the antifederalists were already calling the constitution an “aristocratic document calculated to create an undemocratic government benefiting the few at the expense of the many.” While Dahl was himself a supporter of the constitution (and the status quo in general), he would nonetheless point to the following various areas where the constitution was deeply undemocratic. Some of these are a result, Dahl and others argue, of “compromises” given to the small slave-holding states that were needed to establish a central government.

The Constitution defended slavery, considering slaves three-fifths of a person.
There were limitations to suffrage. At first, only white men with property could vote. It was not until 1856 that all states in the union had removed property qualifications for white men voting. In 1870, following the victory of the North in the Civil War, the 15th amendment prohibits the denial of voting rights on the basis of race. In 1920, following the women’s suffrage movement, the denial of voting rights on the basis of sex is prohibited. Lastly, in 1964, following the success of the Civil Rights political revolution, the 24th amendment prohibits the conditioning of the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax—measures which were used to disenfranchise African American voters in the era of Jim Crow segregation.
Each state, regardless of size, gets 2 senators. Considering that the president is elected, not directly by the voters, but by the electoral college, a number of electors proportional to the state’s representation in congress (and hence, not to their population), this means that one can win the popular vote and lose the election. In fact, in our century, the presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump occurred after both lost the popular vote but won in the electoral college. An individual vote in Wyoming, for instance, is 3.6 times more influential—because of the 2 senators’ system—than one in California.
Until the passage of the 17th amendment in 1913, the senate was not elected by the people, but by state legislators.
Unelected judges who are in power for life have the power to reject the passage of any legislation—popular though it may be—simply by calling it “unconstitutional.”
At the most basic structural level, it is evident how deeply anti-democratic the Constitution was, and how its democratizing over time has been the product—not of the good will of the rulers of the people—but of people’s struggles.

However, democracy is not reducible to elections. Elections are but one mean, and surely not the only one, through which democracy can be realized. Democracy, in its etymological sense, simply means that common people (the demos) are in power (kratos). Democracy is when power is in the hands of common people.

​The factor fettering real democracy the most is omitted from Dahl’s discussion. Let me ask you all a question. If the richest companies in the country give tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of political candidates, ensuring that if those candidates win, an agenda friendly to their business will be passed, what would one call this other than corruption? Well, in the US it is perfectly legal and normalized, and it goes by the name of “lobbying.” In the US, the candidate that raises the most money is more than 90% likely to win. Considering that most of the money raised comes from big capital and the wealthiest individuals, it is easy to track a candidate’s policies in office to the donors that ensured that their campaign had enough money to win. In America, the dollar is the real voter. It is a “money democracy,” a democracy for the rich, the insignificant minority (as Lenin would say).

This isn’t just some partisan Marxist analysis saying this, regular liberal political scientists have shown, statistically, how the will of the people is virtually irrelevant in policy outcomes. The only will which they could correlate to policies taken and those rejected by politicians was the will of the elite, of the richest in the country. As Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page show,

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagree with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

How can a political system where the people have virtually no control over policies, while the elite have virtually all control over it, be called a democracy? Isn’t it more accurate to say, as Andrés Manuel López Obrador recently said, that the US is an oligarchy with the façade of being a democracy?

It is natural that the American people, in the face of their powerlessness to affect policy change, have demonstrated some of the lowest voter turnouts in the so-called developed world. In presidential elections 40% of the population eligible to vote does not vote, and in local elections this number goes up to 73%. Only 20% of them approve of what Congress does, and more than 60% of them have expressed dissatisfaction with the two-party system and an openness to third parties. Amongst the younger generations, around 70% of them have said they would vote for a socialist party. In general, more than 90% of the American people distrust the media, almost all of it which is owned by a handful of companies. The same companies that fund the campaigns of their political puppets are the ones that control what we watch in the media, in movies and shows, they control what we eat, when we go to war and who with, they own all the land, factories and banks, they poison our food, get us addicted with pills, keep us enslaved with debt, and always, and I mean always, make a killing out of killing. They are profiteers of death. Subject to only one goal and God, Capital and its accumulation.

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A homeless person covered with the US flag. File photo.

The American people today are experiencing, for the first time in the nation’s history, generations which will have a lower living standard than their parents. The average American is around 60,000 dollars in debt, most of which was acquired either because they wanted to get a university education, or because they got sick and lacked insurance or were underinsured, or simply because they wanted to have a home for their families. Basic necessities for human life, things like education, health care, housing, etc., are not only not guaranteed for most Americans, but their struggle to attain these things are often the source of the crippling debt they deal with for most of their lives, functioning as an ever-present engine of stress, trauma, and slow forms of death. More than 60% of Americans are a lost paycheck away from joining the 600,000 homeless wandering around in a country with 33 times as many empty homes as homeless people. The American people today are impoverished, indebted, and powerless in the face of the systemic policies that have placed them in these conditions which intensify and worsen by the day.

It is difficult to imagine that things could continue in this way for much longer. As the people suffer at home, all the politicians from both parties have to offer is more war, more invasions and imperialist meddling in other countries’ affairs. More than a third of the world is currently under sanction by the US, often done in the name of democracy and human rights. These are things that in the US itself the people don’t experience. Not only is democracy absent, as we have shown, but even the individual rights enshrined into our bourgeois constitution are stripped once they inconvenience the status quo and those in power. Where was, for instance, the right of free speech and press for Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and others who’ve been condemned by the US for exposing the crimes of its leaders and state institutions? Where is the right to free speech and media for the hundreds of journalists and outlets censored during the beginning of the proxy war against Russia? Or those that have been censored recently for speaking out against the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people? The Institute I work for, for instance, has had 7 of its social media accounts banned, these where accounts where we would reach tens of millions of people weekly with an anti-imperialist message. There are many others like us who suffer the stripping of their constitutional rights as soon as they challenge the narrative of the elite, especially on affairs pertaining to its imperial ambitions.

In general, this is the historical and contemporary panorama grounding the upcoming 2024 elections. I would like to run through 5 central candidates before I wrap up this presentation.

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Donald Trump and Joe Biden, frontrunner presidential candidates for Republican and Democratic Parties.

Leading in the polls by significant percentages is former president Donald Trump, someone whose success is premised on passing himself off as a populist people’s candidate who fights the deep state (the national security state) and who will drain the swamp and stop involving us in wars. He’s been able to pick up a significant base of discontented working people thanks to his hollow anti-elite discourse. In reality, of course, he was—like all the others—simply a puppet of the rich, whom he gave great tax breaks too at the beginning of his term. While he did normalize relations with the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, Trump intensified the hybrid warfare against Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, where he murdered their beloved general Qasem Soleimani (scaring the world for a while with the potential of a third world war), he intensified the war against China that started with Obama’s pivot to Asia and was, in general, as much of a Warhawk as anyone else in the deep state he, like a good sophist, claimed to oppose.

Trump announced his 2024 candidacy by postulating himself as the peace candidate, opposing the US and NATO’s proxy war against Russia. However, within just a couple of months, this same so-called peace candidate is saying that he will invade Mexico if he wins. The reason? The drug and crime epidemic in the US. Invading Mexico for a drug epidemic that has been proven to be manufactured by the American pharmaceutical-industrial complex in collaboration with the government, universities, doctors, and NGO’s is as stupid as invading Iraq because CIA-trained Saudis blew up the World Trade Center. But hey, stupid is as stupid does.

​The other major candidate in 2024 is decrepit Joe Biden. Biden and the democrats’ whole strategy is rooted in postulating themselves as less evil than the republicans: they might be horrible, but at least – so the myth goes – they aren’t worse than the republicans. For the last three years, Biden has not fulfilled any of his campaign promises. While calling himself the most pro union president in history, he squashed the rail workers democratically chosen right to strike for a better contract, illegalizing the worker’s ability to fight for some days off to spend time with their families. He’s done virtually nothing to improve the problems of student debt, health care or environmental issues. On the contrary, by blowing up the Nordstream pipeline, as investigative journalist Seymour Hersh showed, Biden’s administration led to the most catastrophic act of environmental and economic terrorism in human history. Biden’s hawkishness does not end with the role he’s played in escalating the world towards nuclear Armageddon in the proxy war against Russia. He’s been as much an enemy of the Cuban, Iranian, Nicaraguan, Chinese, and Venezuelan people as the administration before him. Currently, he is using Kenya to invade Haiti, and is pledging—like everyone else in American politics—unflinching support for Israel’s genocidal war against the colonized people of Palestine.

This party fearmongers Americans into voting for them by claiming that they are defending democracy from Trump’s fascist threat. But can a party that sends hundreds of billions to nazis in Ukraine, a party that supports the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, a party that uses the state to repress peace activists and journalists exposing the lies of empire, that fights to prevent third parties from being on state ballots, a party that has outlawed debates for the party’s presidential nomination, and that has ensured that certain states can only vote for the incumbent, can such a party really be called the best vehicle we have to fight fascism? Wouldn’t it be the case that, on the contrary, this party—and the dialectical interdependency it is in with the republicans—is itself a part of the growing threat (and presence) of fascism we are witnessing, both in the US and abroad?

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Robert F Kennedy Jr., independent US presidential candidate.

The next candidate of prominence is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy, who many on the left—following the work of Oliver Stone and others—think was killed by the security state for his lack of compliance to empire’s irrational wishes. RFK started the campaign in the Democratic Party, he has since left to run as an independent. RFK, like Trump, posits himself as an anti-establishment, anti-security state, anti-Big Pharma candidate. He’s been an ardent critic of the US narrative surrounding the war in Ukraine and the pandemic. However, he is perhaps more hawkish than the rest when it comes to the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians and has worked closely with some of the most fascistic of the Zionist voices in the US. Despite the areas where RFK is in full alignment with the elite, his run as an independent is a positive progressive development that, if successful in breaking some of the key parameters (such as 5% of the vote for federal funding and 15% of the vote for being on the debate stage with the other two parties), can help undermine the two-party duopoly that controls the US political spectacle.

While the Democratic Party, as Assange showed, cheated Bernie Sanders in 2016, and then again in 2020, the manipulation of democratic processes within the party has been more explicit with this election. RFK Jr. and other challengers of Biden within the party were not allowed to debate the incumbent, and RFK, when running as a Democrat, was denied the usual access to the secret service protection. The significance of the absence of security is intensified by the apparent assassination attempt on RFK’s life that occurred mid-September.

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Cornel West, independent US presidential candidate.

The fourth most noteworthy candidate is Dr. Cornel West, perhaps the most notable American philosopher of the century, deeply rooted in the tradition of American pragmatism, the black freedom movement, and revolutionary socialist Christianity. Dr. West is, for those on the US left, almost a national treasure. However, many on the left, while appreciating West’s work and life-long commitment to working and oppressed people, have fallen for the Democratic Party propaganda that labels West a “spoiler” candidate that will only lead to the election of Trump and the destruction of so-called American democracy.

Since his announcement the reactions of the US left have been mixed. First, some criticized him for running with the small People’s Party, a break off party from the 2016 Bernie movement that had ballot access only in a couple of states and that was led by people whom the left considered reprehensible. Then West switched to the Green Party, an eco-socialist party that the anti-Peoples Party left was more satisfied with. After two months of dealing with Green Party politics, Dr. West has recently announced that he will be running, like RFK, as an independent. He made this choice because he preferred to engage directly with the people than to have to be mediated by the party politics of the Greens.

Some on the left, however, have questioned the strategic value of this choice, since now he would have to achieve ballot access in all states—a process that is incredibly difficult as well as time and resource consuming. The Green Party at least already had ballot access in 17 states and had a whole team working on it for the other 33 states. Dr. West’s biggest challenge will not necessarily be his ideas or platform, but obtaining ballot access and building a movement for a radical transformative politics that lasts well beyond the 2024 election. While he has explicitly stated this as his aim, it seems very difficult to make this a reality without a party.

The difficulties that the two-party duopoly has created for third party and independent candidates are formidable. Since each state has different parameters needed to meet ballot access, there is no copy-paste strategy that could be used, each state requires careful attention. This makes third party presidential runs extremely difficult. Additionally, most third parties do not have the experience, or access to, the resources that the uniparty has for campaigning. Since the campaign managers who do have this experience and technological expertise are blackballed from politics for working outside of the two parties, the current system has been incredibly effective in restricting third parties’ access to the technological tools of modern campaigns, putting them necessarily a few-steps behind the ruling parties. Perhaps West could break this spell by working with his new campaign manager Peter Daou, a former campaign staffer for the Democratic Party who had a change of heart in 2020 and became a democratic socialist. However, most on the left have been more skeptical about Daou, considering his fierce establishment past, than those who have been cheerful about the campaigning experience he could bring to West’s run. (Note: since the presenting of this paper Daou is no longer West’s campaign manager).

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Claudia De La Cruz, US presidential candidate for Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL).

Finally, there is Claudia De La Cruz, running from the Marxist-Leninist Party for Socialism and Liberation. While policy-wise the platform would look great for anyone on the socialist left, the candidate and party do not (at least not yet) have the notoriety that makes Dr. West’s campaign hopeful for the radical left. The PSL has been able to double its votes in each of the last election cycles, which is a positive sign of growth. However, with Cornel being in the race outside of the duopoly, many are afraid that the campaign of West and Claudia will split the vote of the socialist left. Since they share, ideologically, a lot more points of commonality than those of difference, it would seem intuitive that some effort at uniting both campaigns in a unity ticket ought to be sought. However, considering West’s leave from the Greens and the reasons for it, and considering the PSL’s announcement well after Cornel had launched his campaign, it seems unlikely that this unity effort will flourish.

All in all, if you were betting money on it today, you’d be a fool to not bet on Trump’s victory in 2024. Especially since, following the security state’s lawfare against Trump, he has a renewed source of appeal to show his anti-deep state credentials to his masses. Everything the democrats have done to attack Trump has actually emboldened him and his base. It has fed his fake anti-establishment rhetoric, giving apparent substance to his claim that he will drain the swamp and abolish the deep state.

Regardless, whether it’s Trump’s irrational sophism or Biden’s decrepit sophism that wins, both are appropriate metaphorical embodiments of the state the US empire vacillates around. It is unlikely that any major transformational politics will arise out of the 2024 election. What is likely, however, is that it will serve as a moment, in a long spree of others, pointing the masses towards the necessity of a radical transformation in their mode of life. If they genuinely want an order of the people, by the people, for the people (as Lincoln would say), then the current form of life, destined to reproduce the social relations which keep the capitalist class dominant, will have to be overturned. Only socialism can actualize the democratic and egalitarian rational kernel of the progressive faction of the founders.

(Midwestern Marx)

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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