[Peace-discuss] FW: The Democratic Party Obsession with Capitalism and Militarism Will Grow Worse by 2020

Thu Jan 17 21:49:37 UTC 2019

My understanding is that the CPC extracted a concession from Pelosi that
pay-go would be "waived" on "anything important," including Medicare for
All and Green New Deal.

===

Robert Reuel Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898 x1

On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 7:20 AM David Johnson via Peace-discuss <
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

> Nancy Pelosi has made it clear that she is a “capitalist”
> <https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/317639-pelosi-town-hall-question-on-capitalism-wasnt-planned-report>seeking
> to undermine even the most marginal of progressive policies advocated by
> the likes of Bernie Sanders. Pelosi’s “pay-go” policy
> <https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/02/stop-fiscal-madness-dems-urged-vote-down-brainless-republican-idea-pelosi-plows?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork>recently
> voted in by House Democrats ensures that any increase in federal spending
> is offset by an equal number of cuts. In other words, “pay-go” makes
> Medicare for All or the Green New Deal impossible to fund under current
> arrangements. Of course, Pelosi is a wholly owned representative of the
> medical industrial complex, the military industrial complex, and Silicon
> Valley, all of which make up her largest donors.
> <https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors?cid=N00007360&cycle=2018>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> https://www.blackagendareport.com/democratic-party-obsession-capitalism-and-militarism-will-grow-worse-2020
> The Democratic Party Obsession with Capitalism and Militarism Will Grow
> Worse by 2020
> <https://www.blackagendareport.com/democratic-party-obsession-capitalism-and-militarism-will-grow-worse-2020>
>
> Danny Haiphong <https://www.blackagendareport.com/author/Danny%20Haiphong>,
> BAR contributor
>
>
>
> 16 Jan 2019
>
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> [image: Image removed by sender. The Democratic Party Obsession with
> Capitalism and Militarism Will Grow Worse by 2020]
> <https://www.blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/2019-01/Haiphong__845x400%20%281%29_1.jpg>
>
> *The Democratic Party Obsession with Capitalism and Militarism Will Grow
> Worse by 2020*
>
> The Democratic Party is a political trap designed to capture the most
> progressive constituency in the United States: Black America.
>
> *“The Congressional Black Caucus has sided with the forces of imperialism
> when it comes to war, surveillance, and the police.”*
>
> For a movement, especially a *Black left* movement that has yet to emerge
> in this period, the critical task is to develop mass consciousness of the
> fact that U.S. imperialism is incapable of providing concessions to the
> poor and oppressed. History has shown that the Black left has always been
> in the most favorable position for bringing this reality to light. After
> all, Black workers struggled to throw off the yoke of slavery only to find
> themselves mired in the murderous jaws of Jim Crow and mass Black
> incarceration. A significant shift occurred in the Obama period, one that
> ultimately marked the culmination of three decades of a complete assault on
> the Black condition through neoliberal capitalist and white supremacist
> policies. The Black left has been decimated by the assault and has yet to
> recover from the economic and political ruin imposed by U.S. imperialism.
>
> It is from this vantage point that the Democratic Party’s obsession with
> capitalism and militarism must be approached. The Democratic Party is
> accountable only to its donors on Wall Street and in the military
> industrial complex.A splintered and weakened Black left and left-wing
> political movement in general in the United States has taught us invaluable
> lessons about the Democratic Party and the two-party duopoly more broadly.
> The so-called “Blue Wave” of the mid-term elections of 2018 has been more
> of a low tide that has continued to drown Black America and poor people
> generally. Nancy Pelosi is the new Speaker of the House and Elizabeth
> Warren is the first Democrat to announce her bid to replace Trump as
> president in the 2020 election. The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) was
> sworn in on January 3rd, complete with fifty-five seats.
>
> *“The Democratic Party is accountable only to its donors on Wall Street
> and in the military industrial complex.”*
>
> This modest “wave” of Democrats is sure to bring with it an even bigger
> wave of militarism and capitalist plunder. This is not to say that the
> Republican Party represents an alternative. The Republican Party has been
> known as the White Man’s Party for good reason and is a wholly owned
> subsidiary of the Pentagon and monopoly capital. However, this epoch of
> U.S. imperialism is not like any prior. At no other point in U.S. history
> has the two-party duopoly experienced a crisis of legitimacy of this
> magnitude. And at no other point in history has it been more apparent that
> the Democratic Party is a political trap designed to capture the hearts and
> minds of the most progressive constituency in the United States: Black
> America.
>
> The words and policies of the Democratic leadership reveal the danger of
> the trap. Nancy Pelosi has made it clear that she is a “capitalist”
> <https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/317639-pelosi-town-hall-question-on-capitalism-wasnt-planned-report>seeking
> to undermine even the most marginal of progressive policies advocated by
> the likes of Bernie Sanders. Pelosi’s “pay-go” policy
> <https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/01/02/stop-fiscal-madness-dems-urged-vote-down-brainless-republican-idea-pelosi-plows?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork>recently
> voted in by House Democrats ensures that any increase in federal spending
> is offset by an equal number of cuts. In other words, “pay-go” makes
> Medicare for All or the Green New Deal impossible to fund under current
> arrangements. Of course, Pelosi is a wholly owned representative of the
> medical industrial complex, the military industrial complex, and Silicon
> Valley, all of which make up her largest donors.
> <https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors?cid=N00007360&cycle=2018>Her
> so-called political opponents in the party are little better. “Socialist”
> Ocasio-Cortez voted in favor of funding the Department of Homeland Security
> with the first vote of the new Democrat-led House despite her promise to
> fight to “abolish ICE” once in office.
>
> *“Pelosi is a wholly owned representative of the medical industrial
> complex, the military industrial complex, and Silicon Valley.”*
>
> Unlike Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi speaks and acts more like Reagan and
> has never tried to speak to the conditions of Black America. Neither did
> Elizabeth Warren until a month ago. In mid-December, Warren spoke at Morgan
> State University’s commencement ceremony where she outlined her position
> that the government was “rigged” against Black people.
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-president.html>The
> speech was made in obvious preparation for her announcement of a 2020
> presidential run that came just weeks later. Yet while Warren talked a big
> game to begin her effort to galvanize the Black vote, her record of action
> is less impressive.
>
> Warren has often spoken of being a “capitalist to her bones”
> <https://www.boston.com/news/policy/2018/08/16/elizabeth-warren-capitalism-bill>and
> her politics are even further to the right than Bernie Sanders’
> pseudo-socialism. As BAR editor Margaret Kimberly explained in first
> issue of the new year
> <https://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-elizabeth-warren-and-trap-black-voters>,
> Warren is no friend of single payer healthcare or any of the modest reforms
> that Bernie Sanders proposed in his 2016 campaign. Warren has no
> substantial record of addressing the issues of police brutality and mass
> incarceration which are so fundamental to the condition of Black people in
> the United States. And just as she is an enthusiastic champion of
> capitalism, Warren is a stalwart of militarism. Warren supported Israel’s
> military assault on schools and hospitals in Gaza during the 2014
> invasion
> <https://theintercept.com/2014/08/28/elizabeth-warren-speaks-israelgaza-sounds-like-netanyahu/>and
> voted for the massive increase in the military budget in 2017,
> <http://www.leftvoice.org/Elizabeth-Warren-Votes-for-Massive-Increase-of-War-Budget>a
> budget that was far larger than the one Trump originally proposed.
>
> *“Warren has no substantial record of addressing the issues of police
> brutality and mass incarceration.”*
>
> The Democratic Party’s thirst for war and unbridled capitalism is set to
> worsen in 2020 and there exists no better measure of this than the
> Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). Fifty-five CBC officials were sworn in
> earlier this January, which *The Root *called
> <https://www.theroot.com/from-big-daddy-clyburn-to-wakanda-salutes-the-biggest-1831498896>“the
> tip of the spear in the resistance against Trump.” Maxine Waters greeted
> her fellow CBC members with the “Wakanda” salute. It is fitting that Waters
> would reference a Hollywood film that promoted “diversity” as the
> equivalent of Black uplift. The truth is that the CBC has used diversity to
> actively collaborate with the U.S. imperial state in the destruction of the
> lives of Black Americans and their allies for decades. The CBC has sided
> with the forces of imperialism when it comes to war, surveillance, and the
> police, with 29 CBC members having voted in favor of a law last year that
> made the police a protected class in America
> <https://www.blackagendareport.com/black-caucus-sells-out-its-constituents-again-cops>.
> CBC members can be depended upon to put on a show of “diversity” while
> working hand over foot to show their loyalty to the monopolists and
> militarists in control of U.S. imperialism.
>
> Diversity is a cruel con game employed by the Democratic Party to
> delineate who is and isn’t “fit” to rule the system of imperialism. The
> white racist ogre Donald Trump is unfit to be president by the calculations
> of Democrats, yet these same Democrats refuse to admit that it was their
> party that placed him into office. Instead, so-called evil *Russia*has
> been blamed in the never-ending Russiagate saga for the Donald’s rise to
> political stardom even though Russian history and its current political
> trajectory is categorically different from that of the United States. The
> United States is the birthplace of whiteness and its “purebred” capitalist
> system has only itself to blame for the current political and economic
> crisis embodied by Trump. However, there is no room for investigation when
> the political discourse in the United States has been reduced to what
> *type*of individual should hold political office and whether Washington
> is under constant electoral attack by the Russians.
>
> *“Russiagate has given people in the U.S something to blame other than the
> rulers of their own system.”*
>
> Diversity and Russiagate are interrelated. The former has been employed to
> make the rule of imperialism *more effective *under the auspices of
> “diverse” oligarchs such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Russiagate is
> the spawn of diversity’s failures. Diversity did nothing to intervene in
> the declining living standards of working and poor people, especially Black
> people. Rather, it complimented the system’s race to the bottom. Now that
> the War on Terror has lost legitimacy, and the two-party duopoly along with
> it, Russiagate has given people in the U.S. someone and something to blame
> other than the rulers of their own system.This won’t last forever, as
> Russiagate and its architects in the ruling class are built to wage war,
> drive the system into economic collapse, or both. The real question of 2020
> is whether a truly *left *political insurgency will develop in opposition
> to the obsessions of empire.
>
> *Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area.
> He and Roberto Sirvent are co-authors of the forthcoming book
> entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History
> of Fake News- From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror(Skyhorse
> Publishing). He can be reached at *wakeupriseup1990 at gmail.com.
>
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>
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>
>
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