Should We Disrupt The Democratic Party Or Try To Take It Over?

When trying to figure out how they should interact with political parties, social movements face a common challenge: Should they push from without or seek to operate from within? Should they act as a destabilizing threat to all politicians, or should they work to build strength within a mainstream party?

Frances Fox Piven and Daniel Schlozman are two theorists who stand at opposite poles of this debate. In Piven’s view, movements win by deploying disruptive power from the outside that can polarize the public and create discomfort among politicians. “[M]ovements of mass defiance fired the most important episodes of class and racial reform in the 20th century,” she contends. “This capacity to create political crises through disrupting institutions is … the chief resource for political influence possessed by the poorer classes.”

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Democrats, Abortion And Phony Politics

Most leftists in this country still remain loyal to the Democratic Party despite decades of deception, overt collusion with ruling class interests, and support of U.S. imperialism. The Democrats use a variety of means to keep the support of millions of people who yearn for something other than the excuses and double dealing they are constantly offered.

Pointing to Republicans as the embodiment of all evil is one of their methods, and no issue suits this strategy more than abortion. Democrats point to Republicans’ strict anti-abortion stance to keep their left members in line. Democrats who want to see progressive initiatives enacted still feel tied to their party and convince themselves they have no choice but to be snookered on a regular basis. This dilemma of going along with treachery is particularly acute for Black people.

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Black Lives Matter Inland Empire Announces Break WIth BLM Global Network

Recently, a group of BLM chapters known as the BLM 10 has come forward to voice their concerns and opposition to the Global Network. Those concerns, along with the egregious conduct the Global network demonstrated on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, have brought us to the conclusion that continuing to remain silent would be an act of betrayal. While the issues and problems that have been raised have been well known within our circle for years, it prompted many questions & concerns for us locally. We’d like to let the community know everything outlined in the statement put out by the BLM 10 is valid.

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The Biden Climate Plan, Part One: A Drop In The Ocean

After years of record-breaking heat waves, extreme weather, rapidly melting ice caps and other stark illustrations of intensifying climate change, the Biden administration is presenting itself as a force for climate stabilization.

But the policy proposals of the Biden administration, in the face of global temperatures already increased by more than a degree Celsius, illustrate that the Democratic Party is incapable of even proposing measures that could achieve a stated goal of net zero emissions of climate-warming greenhouse gases by 2050.

Failure dooms humanity to a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius or more, a level beyond which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns of major, irreversible impacts on the world’s weather patterns and ecosystems.

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“The Threat Comes From The Neoliberal Right”

For many of us in the Black Alliance for Peace, for many of us in the Black Left, no fundamental change is going to take place as a result of Biden’s victory. We know that the neo-liberal Democrats have nothing to offer as a solution to the social and economic impact of the coronavirus on the already collapsing American economy. That is why we believe that conditions for the working class will continue to deteriorate. We believe that the political conflict will intensify, there will be no kind of national reconciliation that Biden invokes, because the polarization in the US is very serious.

And the US is in polarization because of the inability of its leaders to provide a solution to the continuing deteriorating conditions…

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You Can’t Shame The Shameless Black Misleadership Class

The Black Misleadership Class continues its descent into utter political irrelevance, dragging 48 million African Americans ever deeper into the abyss with them. Like a soap opera whose central pathologies endure through decades of changing casts of characters, the misleaders cling to their demeaning subservience to the Democratic Party in hopes of one day becoming honored and respected partners. The Black supplicants are always betrayed, of course, but prefer a bad marriage to no relationship at all. Indeed, the Black misleaders and the Democrats have been locked in what Malcolm X would describe as a house Negro/slave master  relationship for so long – certainly since the late Sixties – that the Black junior partner knows no other way to behave.

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Chris Hedges: The Collective Suicide Of The Liberal Class

Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support.

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Scheer Intelligence: Don’t Believe Anything You Were Told About Populism

The word “populism” gets a bad rap these days as corporate media warns of its alleged dangers and President Barack Obama goes so far as to blame Sarah Palin for its recent rise. But, according to Thomas Frank, the founding editor of The Baffler and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas and his new book, The People, No, a detailed account about the history of populism in the United States, true populism is a force for good, not evil. On this week’s installment of Scheer Intelligence, the journalist and historian joins Robert Scheer to discuss in-depth how the Democratic Party chose to quash populism, while the Republican Party decided to use its stripped-down ideals for its own nefarious means.

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Senate Democrats’ New Climate Report Disappoints

Senate Democrats released a climate action report earlier this week leaving green groups, environmental activists, and progressive campaigners disappointed.

Critics of the report are saying there is not nearly enough action involved to fight the threat of global heating that is caused by human activity. “The report fails to address the vital need to end the extraction, processing, and burning of fossil fuels, and instead sees a future for fossil fuels tied to the false promise of carbon capture.”

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DNC Featured Native Speakers But Their Issues Remain Under-addressed

The various caucus meeting speakers repeatedly stated that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be good for Indian Country. Some Native people are skeptical, though. Harris has a record of going against the sovereign interests of California tribal nations. Many Native people haven’t forgotten the broken promises made by the Obama-Biden administration. Not only did the administration advance the Keystone XL Pipeline, but it also sat silently for months as Native people, accomplices and media were arrested, brutalized, and physically and sexually assaulted while trying to defeat the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).

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The Black Caucus And The Dictatorship Of (White) Capital

What makes the U.S. “chattering classes” so worthless is their refusal to talk about anything except those subjects that are approved for public discourse by the Lords of Capital, as certified by the high priests of corporate media. If the chattering classes were permitted to discuss truly important subjects – such as, Who Rules? — their yammering might hold some social value. However, the obvious fact of corporate dictatorship is also the great taboo. When the overarching reality of our times – the Dictatorship of (White) Capital, from which all of the planet’s existential crises flow — is verboten

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Beware Of Right Deviations That Have Emerged From The Crisis Of US Imperialism

The events of the last three-plus months have exposed another political trend to be wary of. COVID-19’s devastating impact on the United States coupled with an economic collapse and a mass uprising against racist policing has activated a long-standing political tendency within the imperialist world: libertarianism.

Libertarianism is often viewed as an anti-government, pro-capitalist ideology that worships the free market doctrine of Adam Smith. However, such a definition does not consider the racist context of the United States. Libertarianism, like all capitalist ideologies, is bound with white supremacy. Libertarians oppose the predations of monopoly capital in words but become most active in their hatred for Black people. While neoliberal Democrats and corporate “resistance” forces have decried the rise of the so-called alt-right throughout the Trump era in part to avoid accountability for their role in the American Nightmare, libertarian forces have played a problematic role in promoting political confusion and racist demagogy over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic with little fanfare.

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The Democratic Party Exists To Co-Opt And Kill Authentic Change

The entire role of the Democratic Party is to enthusiastically agree with American support for movements calling for real changes that benefit ordinary people, while making no actual moves to provide no such changes. The actors read the lines but remain motionless.

Barack Obama made a whole political career out of this. People elected him because he promised hope and change, then for eight years whenever hopeful people demanded changes he’d say “Yes, we all need to get together and have a conversation about that,” express sympathy and give a moving speech, and then nothing would happen. The actors remain motionless, and Godot never comes.

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As Biden Racks Up Delegates The Crisis Among Black Folks And Democrat Party Deepens

Biden wins key state of Michigan and the Democrat Party establishment can barely contain its joy. I am happy also but for a different reason. No matter what happens with this twisted Democrat Party nomination drama, I welcome this period as a period of absolute political clarity. Why? Because for the internal debate and struggles among Black people…

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