Sanders and Class Struggle in the Democratic Party
The article was from a video produced by the Real News Network, and is worth reading and watching. The parts of the article I posted below point to why the Democratic Party is not proving itself to be a vehicle for progressive change (and hasn't, frankly, in my lifetime).
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/05/sanders-and-class-struggle-in-the-democratic-party.html
...And from the beginning, Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been dishonest and double-dealing in how she’s handled this. So I wish that earlier in the campaign, rather than going after them in that same tone or character, that they’d simply made the point it’s time for these people to go. We need a new generation of leaders. And the second thing here, however, is that it isn’t just her. On the one hand it is, it is valid to say that a congresswoman who has really violated the rules of the Democratic National Committee in her conduct of her job relative to this campaign, and who in the Congress itself is a virtual lobbyist for the payday loan industry, it’s valid to call for her resignation. It’s valid to call her out for all the things she’s done.
It’s also valid to say that the entire Democratic National Committee is little better than a closely-held political action committee. That all 456 of the DNC superdelegates who are elected by no one and accountable to no one, who even their DNC posts no one in the country can primary for. It’s one of the very few offices that is absolutely impervious to outside accountability, to new blood, to democratic process. The whole thing has to go. And they’ve been, fooled with him from the beginning. He’s been a victim of the process from when she first cut the number of debates from 26 in 2008 to 6 this year, and scheduled them all on weekends and during popular sporting events if she could. There’s been a point when, from the very first point of this campaign, from the very beginning she’s rigged the system as well as she could for Clinton. She ought to go. I think her going ought to be a precondition of support for the ticket.
But at the same time, it’s not just–you don’t want to just get into name calling. You don’t want to just be re-litigating these factual questions that neither side can prove. The problem here is the entire system. She’s the perfect emblem of it, and she’s done many things wrong and she should go, and then the whole system should go. And last, I’ll just say one thing. The DNC members themselves who are all voting as delegates, when Wasserman Schultz did things like end Obama’s ban on federal contractors giving to the Democratic Party. When she set up this whole money laundering scheme, really, by which Clinton takes these large donations and works the state parties back into her own PAC. When she did all of these things there was never even a meeting of the DNC. There was never notice to the public or a recorded vote or a vote of any kind. There were no minutes. She’s making these huge decisions on behalf of the entire political party in what ought to be the greatest democracy of the world in close consultation with a couple of Hillary people, maybe the candidate herself, a couple of White House people. No one’s even been able to participate in this. And so from top to bottom, including in Nevada, in other caucus states where the party has not played, you know, fairly with the Sanders–. But from top to bottom, this party has not functioned as a political party ought to.
...And what I think you really hit on is that yes we can go into the DNC and personalities and so on, but fundamentally the reason this conflict is happening is that the party elites never have understood what this political revolution is about. They’ve not been, I’ve traveled to dozens and dozens of citizen towns. I’ve been in big rallies, I’ve been in rooms with people who are part of this political revolution, some of them for the very first time being involved in politics. Others had taken a hiatus because they’re fed up with the system but have come back. And really the reason the party elite doesn’t get this idea is when they call for party unity, that’s secondary to a lot of the people who are out there talking about a political revolution, which is what you essentially underscored. What the people who are engaged in this movement are about is completely blowing up the system, or at least demanding the changes that Bernie’s articulated. Single-payer healthcare. Getting rid of these bad trade agreements. You go down the list and many of these are fundamentally in contrast, in contradiction, to the policy not just of the DNC but, frankly, of the president of the United States. And so that conflict is expressing itself out there in terms of actual people going out to vote. They’re voting for a very different thing, in some ways very different from, as you point out, other contests, where at the end of the day in ’92 or ’88 the candidates were pretty much the same. They might have differed about some things, but party unity was simple because it was really about uniting factions about the same, that were part of that same system. Here it’s much different.
= new reply since forum marked as read
