Be Freedom

This article also appeared in Counterpunch.

The Party’s Over

Well, the party is over and the machine has prevailed. Our attempt to revive democracy in the electoral arena failed. Still, we owe Bernie so much. He has raised consciousness and expectations while others appealed to fear and told us there is no alternative to the corporate power. But, the struggle continues both within and outside the electoral arena.

The corporate elites and the Clinton machine have no idea how deep the divisions go. Trump not Clinton will most likely be the beneficiary of the election fraud, voter suppression and discontent. The DNC has made a historic blunder and it’s not going to be pretty either way. Fighting Fascism with the corporate power seems a doomed project since it is precisely the merger of the corporation and government that sets the conditions for the rise of fascism. That is the historical moment we are in and paradox we face.

There is already lots of suffering and there is going to be more; much more. We are just going to have to own up to what this country has become. The system is so rotten and dysfunctional that there is no easy way out. No amount of moralizing is going to change anything — that will take political action and organizing.

I plan on working for Jill Stein and I will count it a victory if we can get 5%. That will allow the Green party to get federal funding for next time and maybe help to create a viable opposition party. But this is no 20th century election. The trend lines on war, class warfare, propaganda, the failure of democracy and the vast militarized penal system all point toward deep trouble. On environmental issues alone the crisis will deepen and most likely in a dramatic way. We are woefully unprepared for what lies ahead.

But at least millions more have learned that the political system and the economy is rigged. That the lesser of two evils argument or the spoiler are forms of social control that have led us to exactly the choices we now have. If we do not have serious social change it is likely the Trumps of the world will just keep coming right out of the social conditions the Clintons of the world have created. I hear a lot from Clinton supporters, reluctant or not, about how they will continuing the struggle. I hope they are serious. How hard you worked for Bernie or other social movements this past year might be one indication of the value of your claims.

No one said revolution was easy, if fact its the hardest thing in the world. I hope mother earth has the patience for us to learn.

People will say I am privileged or childlike or a dreamer for dissenting. In some ways I am all three. And you? I listen to people’s claims of moral superiority, or paternalistic authority, or “realism” as they endorse and obey the political machine of the rich and powerful. We will all have to live with the consequences of our actions. All of us.

And, if you decide to persist in building an opposition movement, brace for a fear campaign unlike any you have seen. It’s all they has left.

“Fear,” Gandhi said, “is the enemy. We thought it was hate but it’s fear.”

This article also appeared in Counterpunch

Actions Express Priorities*

It is far easier to criticize the social order than to change it. And our actions express our true priorities.  The Halle/Chomsky article advocating lesser of two evils voting demonstrate the poverty of radical strategy that does not seek alternatives to the two-party system and the existing order.

The authors do get two big things right: tactics are provisional and there are serious consequences to political choices. But they act as if only those that refuse to vote for Clinton face the consequences of their action. Every political act leads to consequences intended or not. No one is free of that. There have been plenty of negative consequences from four decades of lesser of two evil voting that the authors fail to reckon with. Tactics should be provisional but it is the lesser of two evils has been the in-grained routine tactic for decades.

At the core of the argument the authors damn dissenting voters as selfish moralists seeking only to feel good. Yet, the authors are every bit as involved with selling a morally correct argument that encourages people to feel good about voting for Clinton because it will, they seem sure, results in less oppression of already exploited people. But a truly political and strategic choice is not between voting for the lesser evil and feeling good. The choice is between continuing four decades of failed lesser of two evils voting or attempting to create a strategy and a movement to return the US government to the people.

It is vitally important that we protect historic gains made by the social movements, but that does not require us to sign on to the established order of endless war, mass incarceration and corporate power by voting for Clinton. Quite the opposite — it requires movement building and opposition. The failure of the lesser of two evils is a strategic failure.

One of the political problem with the lesser of two evils line is that it blunts criticism of the two-party system, a system the authors certainly claim to oppose. Not a word is said about the failings of the Democratic party machine. By insisting on a deeply flawed political boss instead of a reformer that would handily beat Trump, by all the evidence at hand, they are counting on compelling people to vote for candidates they despise. Sanders and a vigorous movement is the solution to Trump that we already have at the ready. The writers never mention that. Why? Only the opposition is criticized.

So the opposition is blamed for mass disgust with the two parties candidates not the disgusting candidates of the two parties. Instead we are taught to fear. But, the Clinton Democrats are not afraid of Trump, at least not afraid enough to give up their positions of real political power, control and immense privilege.

One basic fact undermines all the lesser of two evil arguments. There is no scarcity of voters. Why does the vote of a small percentage of activists and dissidents matter so much when 70-90 million people do not vote in America? Why doesn’t Clinton go get them? Why doesn’t Clintons supporters or Halle and Chomsky go and get them? Bernie did and many others helped.

The answer I am afraid is simple. Mobilizing the 70-90 million non-voters, as Sanders and Stein have started to do, demands a program directed at their interests. This the Clinton machine cannot do and serve the 1% at the same time. Instead the social control discourse of the lesser of two evils, the spoiler, and the horserace are deployed to attack dissent.

Despite the highly rational style of writing the authors use, Halle/Chomsky’s core arguments drag the discourse onto the ground of moral politics and psychology instead of the terrain of politics we so desperately need to understand better: evidence, history, strategy, conflicts of interest, community of interest, and questions of power. A more useful political version of the lesser of two evils argument would raise issues of representative democracy, not just feelings. Should people vote for candidates and parties that represent their interests and values? If not, then we are forgoing the basic assumption about how representative democracy is supposed to work in favor of some clever tactic that will, in some unspecified way, allow us to reclaim democracy in some unspecified future despite all evidence to the contrary.

The one attempt at a historical analogy offers a dubious and hotly contested interpretation of the Sixties. in 1968 the liberal democrat Hubert Humphrey gave no indication he was going to do anything but continue the war in Vietnam. Keep in mind it was a Democrat’s war for years under Kennedy and Johnson. Nixon actually ran to Humphrey’s “left” as a kind of peace candidate seeking an “honorable peace,” or what was refined into “peace with honor.” And it is likely that Trump will run to Clintons “left” on a number of issues. Writers like Halle and Chomsky attribute the decline of the left to anti-war opposition to the Democratic war managers.

It was the civil rights revolution and opposition to the Vietnam war that lead many to realize that the war was part of deeply rooted systemic problems: empire, racism and exploitation. The anti-war movement was the passage beyond the liberal consensus into revolutionary territory for millions of people. Martin Luther King and others spoke it aloud.

[T]he Black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggest that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.[1]

The radical movements the authors wrongly see as dying after 1968 never disappeared but were slowed and challenged for many reasons: the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation could not be overcome, to say nothing of government repression and the so-called war on drugs.  Of course, if the authors recognized the powerful institutional obstacles to change then they would also have to reckon with the Clinton machine’s role in continuing and expanding the many forms of power and social control.

Lesser of two evils is an admission that we can never expect fundamental change and must stay forever on the road we are on. Except that road is increasingly unsustainable and crisis ridden. We cannot avoid serious consequences in any event.

Despite the authors moralizing, there is no moral clarity here. It’s just judgement. Some people think that voting for the Green Party will create more suffering. I think that given the history of the last half century that voting for the lesser of two evils has created plenty of suffering we can document in abundance. I blame you, you blame me and the machines are off the hook. Morally, we are all implicated in the existing order. Every one of us. Moral politics of this sort are a political dead-end.

Yet, its true that we cannot completely dispense with moral politics and feelings. So let’s give feelings their due. Its is not “feeling good” but feelings of fear and fatalism that are the psychological and emotional states that contribute most to social control. Halle and Chomsky rely on fear and fatalism and the promise of feeling good to corral people back into line.

If we overcome our fear of change and our fatalism, be that through political vision or sheer desperation, we have a chance of creating a winning strategy. Tactics and strategy are provisional as the authors claim. After four decades of failed lesser of two evils, it is time to create a workable strategy based on mobilizing our latent power.

The inside/outside strategy is a possible starting point. Some of the most productive organizing of this electoral cycle exerted leverage along the inside/outside borderline.  Revolt Against Plutocracy and its Bernie or Bust strategy has urged people to vote Green Party as a counterweight to the Clinton machine. Thousands have already made that move and the Green Party is growing rapidly. “Bernie or Green in 2016” has already changed the face of this election.

We are, by the millions, overcoming the fear and fatalism of the lesser of two evils. We will make mistakes but we will, at long last, be the authors of our own history.

*”Actions express priorities.”  Mahatma Gandhi.

1. Martin Luther King, A Testament of Hope.

This article also appeared in Counterpunch.

Clinton and Trump. Fear and Fascism.

We live in an age of consequences; intended and unintended. If we are to avoid, or at least blunt, the worst of what is to come, then we must look to the root of our problems and to our own roots for solutions.

Fear is the main enemy. Fear will paralyze us and perpetuate the system. That is why fear is the machines’ strongest weapon. Given the unprecedented disgrace of the primary election and the pitiful weakness of both Trump and Clinton as candidates, we are likely to experience a fear-mongering crusade without parallel in American electoral history. Get ready people because fear is all they have left.

But take heart. History has not come to an end. Its almost as if there is a moral order to the universe: as if karmic forces are putting us hard to our lessons; as if “for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” is the new and true law of life.

Those who vote Clinton to fight Trump (or even Fascism) cannot escape the consequences of American politics by traveling down the same road we have taken every four years. We are already way past the bend. Setting aside consistent polling data that has for months shown Sanders far and away the best candidate to defeat Trump, a vote for Clinton is a vote for “more of the same.” And this “more of the same” is precisely the existing order of things from which Trump sprang.

Support for Clinton may, or may not, defeat Trump this time, but, as Green Party candidate Jill Stein has pointed out, Trumps has deep roots in the existing system, a system the Clinton machine has helped to create and will fight to maintain. Trump grows right out of American political soil, he is an expression of our political system and political culture, not an exception to it.

The two party system is a system. For three decades at least, the “mainstream” or official American discourse has drifted steadily to the right preparing the way for the rise of Trump. The lesser evil has paved the way to the greater evil, not prevented it. But, lets keep our heads. The same two party system is showing unmistakable signs of decline. It is up to us to create a democratic resistance with the capacity and vision to defeat Trump.

We cannot afford to adopt the simplistic idea that fascism is a plague, a virus, a disease of the mind and spirit more mysterious or irrational that other political beliefs. It can be understood well enough to combat it. Like all the great “isms” and ideologies, fascism defies easy or precise definition. Let’s leave the ultimate question of what Trump is, and what fascism is, open to debate.

But strategy demands a working definition if not an ultimate one. Trump is without doubt the boogeyman and the biggest baddest boogeymen in modern memory are fascists. But boogeymen do not just appear out of nowhere. Fascism can be understood as a set of institutional relationships.

In an era of rising fascism, President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt wrote to Congress:

The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.  That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.[emphasis added]

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe, if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.

Both lessons hit home.

Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.  This concentration is seriously impairing the economic effectiveness of private enterprise as a way of providing employment for labor and capital and as a way of assuring a more equitable distribution of income and earnings among the people of the nation as a whole.

Since 1938, when FDR warned us, the corporate power has grown dramatically. It is not just “stronger than their democratic state itself,” it has merged with the state. The failure of “assuring a more equitable distribution of income” is part of the on-going crisis that set the stage for Trump and the threat of fascism. In the end however, its all up to what “the people tolerate.”

Who can deny that the merger between the immense wealth of the corporations and the political power of the government is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the US politics since the Sixties? The corporations rule and share sovereignty with the state.  How else can “Citizens United” be interpreted, except as a recognition of this fact, many decades in the making.

Power is the new profit and like prior forms of capital accumulation it knows no bounds even unto ecocide.

The corporatization of our institutions have drained away any democratic content they once contained. More than the direct control of institutions by some corporate board members, corporatization occurs when institutions internalize the corporate model, adopt the managerial mindset, and run some essentially public service like a business. The military has become big business. Generals manage wars not win them. Prisons, schools and universities, political parties, media, hospitals, even some of our labor unions operate on managerial models.

The Clinton machine played a pivotal role in creating the corporate power particularly in the key financial sector.  By abandoning its New Deal voter base, becoming the party of Wall Street, and accomplishing core Republicans goals, the “third way” Democrats embodied triangulation. The Clinton machine took the merger of power and money to its logical conclusion by innovating a new form of global political corporation known as the Clinton Foundation. Profit is power, power is profit.

While the Clintons had to engineer this merger Trump was simply born to it. Trump is wealth inequality, entitlement to unearned riches, and its fusion with political power personified. Trump and Clinton are both, we hope, the final episodes of the so-called “Reagan Revolution. “ A revolution no president since has even tried to reverse. Not Clinton. Not Obama. Since Reagan only one major party candidate has even promised to return government to the vision and policies of the New Deal, and that, of course, is Bernie Sanders.

The consequences of this unchallenged corporate power — economic misery, distress, despair and death — have been pushing the white working class left toward Sanders and Stein and right toward Trump. The hollowing out of institutions like the labor movement, that once achieved some measure of political and economic democracy, are preconditions for fascism. The weakness of labor and the social movements leaves millions with nothing much more than resentment, sexism, racism, homophobia and the glory of our military might to assuage their wounded pride.

If the present trends continue to deliver “more of the same”— and we have no reason to expect Clinton to change course — then the broad economic and social conditions that gave rise to Trump will simply intensify. It is likely that far worse than Trump will arise unless the people make history. Remember, the boogymen of the past, the Bush dynasty, are now allies with Clinton providing political support and funding against this new and seemingly more dangerous threat.

Will Trump reap what the Clinton machine has sown?

Not if we break the cycle and support candidates and parties that actually represent our interests. Not if we build pro-democracy movements of all kinds. That means Sanders or Green Party in 2016 and the kind and scale of demonstrations planned for the Democratic Convention in Philly.

Be there or be triangulated.

Also find this article at Counterpunch

There is no spoiler.  Its just the machine’s fear of democracy.

Spoiler arguments are part of an interlocking set of social control discourses that too-often govern our thoughts and actions regarding elections and representational democracy.

While “the spoiler” is deployed on the wings of the “lesser of two evils” and “electability/inevitability,” it most resembles corporate-inspired arguments about austerity.

Spoiler arguments are the political analog to the “austerity” claims enforced so ruthlessly by corporate elites. Under austerity “we are broke.” But, we must add: except for the trillions of dollars in cash that the big corporations and billionaires are sitting on — at the peak of their wealth — in the richest country in the history of the world. This artificial scarcity is then imposed on the people who, the 1% insists, will have to sacrifice their jobs, incomes, pensions, social services, and security.

In spoiler arguments, the elites insist — and far too many progressives  concede — that there is a scarcity of votes. But, we must add: except for the 70-90 million non-voters that the dismal performance of government, triangulation, and our failure to organize have left disempowered and driven to the sidelines. This artificial scarcity of voters is then imposed on the people who are told by the corporate media to sacrifice their freedom, democracy, and political judgments by yielding to the parties and candidates they no longer believe in.

The spoiler trains us to think that sacrificing democracy to fear is a clever tactic. That is exactly why the spoiler is one of the most powerful rhetorical weapons the machines have. It functions to scapegoat dissenters and limit political engagement and competition when we really need more democracy, more choices, more voices.

Elections are truly spoiled because the existing parties either do not want the American people to participate or make no attempt to register and mobilize the 40% non-voting public or to engage the millions of independent voters.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about social control discourse — given the wide acceptance of such ideas by seemingly rational people — is the degree to which these arguments are counterfactual. Speculation and ideology must masquerade as facts when facts threaten to undermine social control. So it is with “the spoiler.”

2000 Revisited

Since the election of 2000 is the most powerful reference for spoiler argument let’s unpack it.

The horse-race framing for elections has been incredibly effective in shaping the political outlooks of people who consider themselves liberal or progressive. Bush beats Gore “by a nose” in 2000 and we were told is the nose and not the horse that won or lost.

We were told, a million times over, that the 2000 election came down to 560 Florida voters that cast ballots for the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. “A vote for the Green Party is a vote for Republicans,” goes the old saw.

It was not that Gore lost the votes of tens of thousands of white women who voted Republican by a huge margin of 53 % Bush to 44% Gore. Oh no, it was the 600 or so Nader voters.

It wasn’t that 12-13% of registered Democrats voted for Bush. It wasn’t that the Democratic base deserted the party and gave about 300,000 votes to Bush in Florida. That’s right, 12 times more Democrats votes for Bush than Nader. But no, no, no it was the 600 Green voters that elected Bush.

It wasn’t the 30-35%  of union members that vote Republican year after year. Nope.

It wasn’t that 40% of eligible voters stayed home nationwide. Forget the 70 to 90 million voters that decide voting isn’t worth the trouble. Forget, forget.

It wasn’t that Gore could not win Tennessee, his home state where he served as a Congress-member and Senator for 16 years and where his father Al Gore Sr. had a long and distinguished record. Or that he could not win Arkansas the home state of his mentors the Clintons. Nah.

It wasn’t that we use an antiquated and anti-democratic electoral college system that Democrats and Republicans refuse to reform. It was the Green 600 for sure.

Or, as Michael Parenti so well demonstrates, that the Republicans stole the election.  And did again in 2004.

Or that Florida has the most draconian laws in the nation permanently disenfranchising people once convicted of a felony. Or that many eligible voters were wrongly purged from the rolls as ex-felons while they were not. Not our concern, no.

And, the list goes on and on.

The Supreme Court handed the election to Bush in one of the most politicized and nonsensical rulings in American history.

It wasn’t that the strategy of triangulation is a failure. That “third way” Democrats, led by the Clintons, abandoned, even attacked, their New Deal voter base and courted Wall Street. It’s not that Gore was a loser and triangulation a danger to democracy. No, that cannot be it.

Spoiler is scapegoating. So when someone raises the spoiler argument here is what I hear them really saying.

“Given our failure to organize the unorganized and motivate non-voters, we blame the opposition party to cover our shameful disregard for the working and poor.”

“Given my failure to contest power, I will blame whoever I have been told to blame so I blame the opposition.”

Pathetic.  The liberals doth protest too much, methinks.

What the Clinton Machine learned from 2000.

The Clinton machine learned that Jeb Bush is a visionary. Election fraud is easier than building your base. Steal an election and even the Supreme Court will endorse it and the people will accept it. So steal it. And when your game falters and triangulation comes tumbling down blame your opponent for your poor showing. They learned that control over the party machine is more important than the future of the country. Control over media helps to spin the blame.

What We Should Learn

The real lesson of 2000 is that triangulation, the strategy of the Clinton machine, is politically and practically bankrupt. Decades of moving the Democratic party to the right has left a huge political field up for grabs. This political field is otherwise known as the American working class or we the people: so Sanders, so Green Party, so Trump.

As far back as 2000, Jim Hightower documented the decline in the working-class Democratic voting base.

These mostly are middle- and low-income folks, people making less than $50,000 a year. While they make up some 80 percent of the U.S. population, exit polls on Nov. 7 found that for the first time they’ve fallen to less than half of the voting population. As the Clinton-Gore-Lieberman Democrats have jerked the party out from under this core populist constituency, pursuing the money and adopting the policies of the corporate and investor elite, the core constituency of the party has — big surprise — steadily dropped away. In 1992, the under-$50,000 crowd made up 63 percent of voters. In 1996, after Clinton and Gore had relentlessly and very publicly pushed NAFTA, the WTO and other Wall Street policies for four years, the under-$50,000 crowd dropped to 52 percent of voters. After four more years of income stagnation and decline for these families under the regime of the Clinton-Gore “New Democrats,” the under-$50,000 crowd dropped this year to only 47 percent of voters.

And it has only gotten worse since the financial crisis of 2008.

Obviously, the main function of spoiler arguments is to keep people from voting for opposition candidates. But, a real opposition party is essential to changing the system.  And, while there are important differences between the Democrats and Republicans, under no conditions can either party be considered an opposition party.

That honor belongs to the Green Party.

The current two-party system will maintain a monopoly until the logic and power of that system is fundamentally altered or abolished. I have heard the collapse of the Republican party predicted over and over but always they return. We will never rid ourselves of this power-sharing arrangement between Democrats and Republicans until the balance is disrupted. For that, we need real opposition parties and real opposition candidates.

Kudos to Sanders and the Greens for leading a real opposition. And, for raising expectations. As the people come back into the electoral process the social control discourses lose their power.

There is no spoiler no matter how many times the corporate media trumpets these claims. There is nothing but our failure to contest power and the corporate machine’s fear of democracy.