Thanks to the Occupy Movement, an old white leftish politician found
his voice and ran for president in 2016 on a New Deal reform program he
called “socialist,” putting the term back in polite conversation. But
you can’t “occupy” the oligarch’s party; you can only be co-opted by it.
The best thing that can come out of Bernie Sanders’ second attempt to
force the Democratic Party to disobey the Lords of Capital would be a
breakup of the Party, leading to significant desertions of leftish
activists and rank and file. Nothing changes on the electoral scene, and
little at the grassroots level, unless the structure of capitalist
hegemony over political discourse in the U.S. -- the corporate duopoly
-- is broken.
Sanders’ platform – Medicare for All, $15 wage, free public college,
Green New Deal – is supported by super-majorities of 80 percent and
more. These reforms would bust the austerity regime wide open, an
absolutely unacceptable outcome for a ruling class that is trying to
prepare the people for a future of mass precarity. That’s why the Lords
of Capital have allowed/instructed Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and
others to pretend to support Medicare for All and other Sanders
proposals -- to confuse and dilute super-majority sentiment. Cory Booker
took more money from Big Pharma than any other senator in 2014, and will return to his sugar daddies’ pockets when his 2020 election season diversion is over.
If four out of five voters support Medicare for All, then upwards of
90 percent of Blacks want to see the program passed into law. But only 32 of the 53 Black
lawmakers in the House have signed on to Rep.
Pramila Jayapal's companion measure to Sander’s Senate bill. And half
of them are lying, following Booker’s lead, as an election season scam.
A party that works for the 1% must lie all of the time – but collapses once we stop believing them.
-- Glen Ford, "How the Democratic Party Strangled Black Politics" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).