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The Democratic Party Is A Big Fraud

By: Dave Lindorff
September 10, 2012

Source:  Eurasia Review

Just looking at the video images of the two conventions — the Republican one last
week in Tampa, Florida, and this week’s Democratic convention in Charlotte, NC —
one can see the fundamental contrast between the rank-and-file of the two parties.

They are really and truly different cohorts.

Scanning the Republican delegates and convention-goers in Tampa, one labors
mightily to find even one black face, or even an obvious brown latino face or an asian
face. It is a white, and predominantly male, crowd that one sees. It is also an angry
crowd, cheering at the venom spewed against Democrats, welfare recipients,
immigrants and others who are not part of the “real America,” of allegedly self-reliant
white men.

Scanning the Democratic convention’s delegates and attendees, meanwhile, one is
immediately struck by what an ethnic stew it is, with blacks and latinos, whites, asians
and even Native Americans all mixed together, with straights and gays standing side
by side. And these people are cheering passionately when speakers talk inspiringly
about the need to take action to support those who are less fortunate — the poor, the
immigrants who came to the US with their parents as little children, and grew up in the
US, who could now be deported to countries of their birth where they may not even
speak the language, the disabled, the unemployed.
Democrat Party Logo

Democrat Party Logo

The big difference between these two groups of people, and the masses of rank-and-
file supporters of the two parties across the nation, is clear: Republicans are, by and
large, a selfish, smug, and angry group of white people who don’t want anyone cutting
in on their turf, who don’t want to have the government do anything to help the less
fortunate with their tax dollars, and who, by the way, want their own taxes lowered, but
also want all kinds of benefits from the government, like tax credits for their
businesses, and to send their kids to private schools. Democrats are, for the most
part, a multi-racial group who believe that government should help the less fortunate,
whether it’s getting access to health care, paying for food, sending small children to
daycare so the parent(s) can work, getting job training, ensuring access to clean
water and clean air, or having good schools for their kids. They are generous people
who are concerned about others, not just themselves.

What is different about the Parties themselves is also apparent.

The Republican Party, in terms of both its organizational leadership and its elected
officials, is closely aligned with its rank-and-file membership. The membership wants
immigrants deported and wants a military-style policing of the nation’s borders to
prevent illegal entry. Its elected officials also favor such action. The membership
wants more military funding and more wars. The elected leaders from that party also
want those things. Its members want lower taxes for the wealthy, and that’s what the
elected officials in Congress want to give them. There is a strong congruity between
what the Republican base favors, and what the elected officials push for in Congress.

With the Democrats, something else is going on.

The Democratic base wants to cut military spending and end the wars, but the
Democratic President, Barack Obama, and most of the Democrats elected to
Congress, support more war, support a militarist foreign policy, and keep pouring
money into the military budget, which is at this point about as large as the rest of the
world’s military budgets combined, and consumed half of the tax dollars collected
each year, when the cost of military-related debt interest, veterans’ care and benefits,
and intelligence costs are added in. The Democratic base wants more funding for
schools, action on global climate change, a public jobs program, a national health
care program, more scholarship aid for college students, a break-up of the big banks,
a strong defense of Social Security and Medicare, new laws protecting and expanding
the rights of unions to organize and bargain with management, and other such
progressive change, but the Democratic president and Democrats in Congress won’t
give them any of that.

What they do instead is promise at the convention and on the campaign trail to do
such things, but then when they get elected, or re-elected, they forget all those
promises, or just enact tiny largely meaningless changes in some of those areas, or in
other less significant areas, to try to appease their membership.

Evidence of the split between the Democratic base and the party’s leadership became
apparent Wednesday, when the party leadership introduced a motion to re-insert into
the party’s “platform” document a phrase saying that a “unified” Jerusalem would be
seen by the Party as the real capital of Israel — a change which under party rules
required a two-third vote. When the matter was put to a vote of the delegates, the
chair of the convention called for a voice vote. When it seemed clear to all that the
“No” vote was far louder, thus rejecting the change, the chair called for a second vote.
When that one also resulted in a much louder “No” vote, the chair tried one more
time. When the “No” vote remained louder, the chair simply declared that the “Yes”
vote had won. The platform now says that the Democratic Party believes that
Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. It was a shameless display of corrupt power ignoring
the wishes of the party rank and file. But the only thing unusual about it was how
obvious it was.

In short, while the Republican Party and its elected officials do a fairly good job of
representing its troglodyte voter base, the Democratic Party is a gigantic fraud. It
pretends every four years to be representing those voters that it needs to keep going
to the polls and electing its candidates to office, but time after time, it turns around,
once the election is over, and betrays its voting base.

President Obama and the people who ran as Democrats for Congress in 2008 and
2010, promised to defend Social Security and Medicare, to help make it easier legally
for workers to organize unions in their workplaces, to re-regulate the banks that
caused the financial crisis, to act aggressively to combat climate change, to end
America’s pariah status by closing the Guantanamo prison and bring an end to
torture, and to end George Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Except for winding
down (but not really ending) the war in Iraq, none of those things were done over the
course of the last four years. The Afghan War is bigger and more violent today than it
was when Obama took office. So are the Wall Street banks. The president appointed
a commission on the budget that recommended cutting Social Security and Medicare
benefits. Democrats gave up on even trying pass legislation to protect labor unions.
And not only was nothing done about climate change, but the Obama administration
actively worked to prevent the reaching of a new international agreement on limiting
carbon emissions.

It is a sorry spectacle, indeed, and not one that is likely to change anytime soon.

The Republican Party has become almost a brown-shirt party of the white race in
America, fearful and bitter about gradually losing its primacy in a nation that is
becoming one of the most multi-ethnic societies in the world. What should be a cause
for excitement and hope is being fought tooth and nail by a dangerous movement that
seeks to roll back the clock by 100 years to a time when black people had to drink
from separate fountains, go to separate schools and hotels, and use separate
bathrooms.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is basically run by and in the interest of large
corporate interests, but since those interests don’t bring many votes to the table on
election day, has to keep pretending to be the party of the people, so that it can send
its deeply compromised or outright bought-and-owned candidates back to
Washington to do the bidding of those corporate interests.