Why Aren't the Democrats Fighting Back?

 

Trump has repeatedly said there won’t be a peaceful transition of power if he loses. He’s also said he wants to stay in power 3 or more terms. All of these are clearly unconstitutional. They clearly indicate his desire to rule the country as a dictator. And if it were to pass, it would be tantamount to a coup d’etat.

 

Yet no Democrats are calling for impeachment hearings. None are calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office, or Congressional hearings into the coup plot. They’ve even dropped all attempts to delay the SCOTUS nomination until after the election, which essentially hands Trump the most powerful weapon he has for carrying out his coup: Appealing to the Supreme Court to give him the victory, as they did for George W Bush. The only difference is that the Court was already far more right wing before RBG died than it was in 2000. Add one more right-winger, 3 of whom would be Trump appointees, and the odds in his favor go up even more.

 

Pelosi and Schumer, the 2 top Dems, could barely muster feckless pleas for the Republicans to do the “right thing.” Fat chance, and they knew it. The only Dem to make any speech-length argument on Thursday was Bernie Sanders. But the only solution he could come up with was to beg everyone to vote, arguing that a Biden landslide would make it impossible for Trump to deny the vote. He even told us to drop our fight for “an agenda that works for all, and not just a few” until after Biden is elected, in a desperate appeal to win his base over to Biden, while not alienating Biden’s corporate backers.

 

Of course, nothing makes it impossible for Trump to deny the vote. He denies things daily that are far less controversial. And if he is willing to publicly conspire to violate the constitution, why should anyone believe that the scale of his loss would matter to him? He’ll just say it was rigged.

 

The Sanders argument (which is also being made in editorials and by other politicians), is essentially a concession in advance. Biden only needs to win by 1 electoral college vote for it to be a legitimate victory. Not 200, nor even 1000. The Sanders argument implicitly allows Trump to interpret anything less than a landslide as justification to stay in power if he loses.

 

Even Biden has dropped his earlier arguments that Trump was attempting to create a dictatorship, adopting the naïve and conciliatory stance that it’s all just bluster and there’s nothing to it. But if that was true, then why the rush to get a new right-wing supreme court justice seated before the elections?

 

Ultimately, the Democrats would much rather hold their noses and accept another 25-40 years of a right-wing court, and a potential Trump dictatorship, and along with it, all the violence and death he has threatened to unleash against his opponents and protesters, than face the prospect of a working class revolt that spins out of their control. Indeed, that is exactly what Trump’s threats of post-election state repression are intended to do: suppress any resistance by workers, students, immigrants, middle class liberals.

 

This is why Dems focused on Russiagate in their impeachment attempt, instead of the crimes Trump has publicly confessed to (no chance of workers rising up over this issue). This is why the Democratic Party and its billionaire supporters have all embraced the BLM movement, since it corrals mass public outrage into harmless demands for racial justice that pose no threat to capitalism or their wealth. Even better, its philosophical underpinning, Critical Race Theory, is entirely consistent with the identity politics they’ve adopted to replace their traditional base in the labor movement. We don’t need to pay people more or provide them with healthcare or affordable housing. We just need more woman and people of color in the boardrooms and in Congress.

 

Imagine what might happen if the thousands of people who’ve been protesting in the streets for racial justice were to suddenly start demanding the arrest of the CEOs and corporate boards of Amazon, Tyson, GM, Tesla, and Universities, for profiteering off the pandemic that is disproportionately killing Black, Latino and Indigenous people. Or the arrest of Trump for mass murder, for lying to the public about the dangers of Covid (as confirmed in the Woodward tapes), and his herd immunity policy, which has killed 208,600 Americans (again, disproportionately black and brown). Or if they were to change their chant from “Black Lives Matter” to “Workers’ Lives Matter.” What if, instead demanding the cops stop killing black people, they were to demand that the cops stop killing poor people (the overwhelming majority of victims of cop shooting are poor)? Or, instead of handing over trillions of dollars to Wall Street, they demanded trillions to the unemployed, underemployed, and those who don’t earn enough to support their families? “Not Dying for Wall Street!” And how about demanding that trillions more be spent to ramp up testing, contact tracing and PPE for truly essential workers, and free healthcare for all? Or trillions to convert our infrastructure from fossil fuels to renewables, and the creation of a green new deal with good paying, green union jobs for local communities? And what if they demanded that the money to pay for all this came from the trillions we currently spend on subsidies to corporations? And from higher corporate and capital gains taxes? How about increased taxes on stock market transactions and mineral extraction? And slashing the military budget and making peace with Russia, China, Iran, instead of constantly competing with them for hegemony?

 

While all these are completely reasonable demands, and most are desired by the majority of Americans, they would be interpreted by our leaders, Dems and Repubs, alike, as a threat to their wealth and power, particularly if they were being yelled in the street by mobs. Even more so, if those demands were accompanied by trash fires, vandalism and looting.

 

Our leaders know full well that, as the pandemic persists and likely worsens in the coming months; as more and more people become destitute because of lost jobs, evictions, foreclosures, and death and illness to family bread winners; as people become increasingly desperate to go outside and play, socialize, spend time with friends and family; as climate crises (like deadly fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms, floods, droughts and food shortages) become more common and more destructive; people will become more desperate, angry and willing to go out into the streets and protest. And their protests could very well become more aggressive and violent than what we’ve seen so far.

 

This is what both parties of Wall Street fear the most. And what a Trump dictatorship promises to quell, through state violence and the violence of his shock troop supporters.

 

But what if Biden is right and it is all just bluster?

 

Trump could still win legitimately. Or, perhaps Biden will win, despite offering his supporters nothing other than “I’m not Trump.” Either way, there are a lot of quite important things, (possibly the most important things), that simply won’t change. Here’s what we can expect in 2021:

·        a continuation of the herd immunity policy and hundreds of thousands more covid deaths

·        no serious investment in public health or plan to provide free or cheap healthcare for all

·        no effective plan to curtail the climate crisis and, consequently, an increasing number of people displaced and killed because of it

·        no significant change to policing, or reduction in the 1,000 people killed by cops each year, nor even a reduction in the disproportionate number of black people killed by the police

·        no reduction in the number of immigrants deported nor an effective path toward citizenship

·        continuing provocations with China and/or Russia, bringing us closer to nuclear war

·        continued bailouts for Wall Street and the country’s largest corporations; peanuts, or nothing, to the poorest and most destitute members of society

·        a wealth gap that continues to grow worse, increasing class tensions and threat of popular uprisings

·        If we are lucky, we’ll get a vaccine that has an 80% effectiveness, but that still can’t end the pandemic.  Here’s why:

o   51% of Americans have said they would either refuse it, no matter what, or they were scared and unlikely to take the vaccine,

o   Without a public health campaign to educate and encourage vaccine use (and there has been none to date), the best we can hope for would be 40-50% of the public gaining immunity, which is not enough for full herd immunity, as too many people would still be vulnerable and could catch and spread the virus

o   (80% effectiveness x 50% vaccination rate = 40% of the public gains immunity)

The Corona Pandemic Conspiracy

By early next week, the U.S. will hit a terrible milestone: 200,000 officially dead from Covid-19. (The actual number of deaths is likely considerably higher). Those deaths lie squarely in the hands of President Trump, as the Woodward tapes prove. But he did not act alone. Republican and Democratic members of Congress knew of the threat to American lives and either kept silent or actively lied to suppress the truth, as did much of the liberal press.

 

January, 2020, covid 19 cases skyrocketed in Hubei province, China. Trump confered with Chinese President Xi Jinping, who divulged all relevant data, with at least as much transparency as he provided his own press and citizens, clarifying how the disease spread, its mortality rate, and how best to contain it.

 

We now know that community transmission was already happening in the U.S. by early January, 2020, and there was an effective Covid-19 test available from the WHO, yet no tests were done in the U.S. at all during January.

 

January 24, the Senate Health Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee had a briefing, attended by Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr and Senator Kelly Loeffler. After the meeting, Dr. Anthony Fauci told reporters, “I don't think this is something that the United States public should be worried or frightened about.” He added, “I think the risk is very low right now for the United States.” Yet almost immediately after the meeting Loeffler and Burr started dumping stocks they thought would decline when word eventually leaked out that Fauci was lying and that this was indeed something the public should be worried about. Senator Feinstein also dumped similar stocks (worth $1.5-6 million), though it is not clear if she was at that meeting. Furthermore, Loeffler started purchasing shares in the online meeting firm Citrix, whose profits skyrocketed during the pandemic.

 

As these Senators were dumping stocks and raking in millions of dollars, there was still no testing going on. Indeed, no U.S. testing occurred until the end of February, despite the growing number of infections and at least 1 death. On February 27, Burr told affluent Washington insiders at a private club known as the Tar Heel Circle, “There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history.” Yet 3 days earlier, he wrote an op-ed stating that the US was “better prepared than ever before” to respond to a pandemic.

 

Through the entire months of January and February, Democratic members of Congress said virtually nothing about the pandemic or its threat to American lives and livelihood. The NYT had virtually no op-eds about it.

 

No lockdowns of any American cities occurred until mid-March, despite the fact that Democratic and Republican members of Congress knew of the mortal threat back in January. According to researchers at Columbia University, if those lockdowns had started just 2 weeks earlier, which would have been totally feasible considering how many politicians already knew of the danger, 83% of the U.S. Covid deaths could have been avoided.

 

Trump should be removed from office and tried for mass murder. But don’t count on Biden to be much better at protecting American lives or livelihoods. He jumped on the Trump bandwagon early with respect to blaming China for the pandemic, tweeting, “If I were president, I would not be taking China’s word when it comes to the coronavirus.” That lie has been completely debunked by scientists and the press. The evidence is overwhelming that Covid19 was not created in a lab and press reports show that China was completely candid with the world very early on, much more candid than the U.S. government has been with its own citizens.

 

Just this week, Biden spoke to UAW officials and Democratic politicians at UAW headquarters in Warren, Michigan. Most of the highest-ranking UAW members weren’t there because they are all in prison for corruption and accepting bribes from the auto industry. Yet Biden said nothing at this meeting about the murderous role of the UAW in forcing its members back to work during the pandemic, under dangerous conditions, to an industry that produces nothing remotely close to an “essential service.”

 

Biden is just as concerned with protecting the profits of U.S. corporations and U.S. hegemony as Trump, and just as willing to sacrifice American lives to do so. He has flatly refused to consider Medicare for All or a Green New Deal. Last year, he was caught on tape reassuring wealthy donors that their standard of living would not decline, that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he became president.

 

Yet again, the American public is being asked to choose for the lesser evil. Each election cycle, the Democrats move further to the right, hoping to outflank the Republicans, as we’ve seen with Biden’s tough-on-crime ad campaign. And each cycle, the Republican move even more to the right. Consequently, the Democrats today look like Regan Republicans, while Trump looks like a fascist.