------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug. 12, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
ANALYSIS OF THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION: HOW A MILLIONAIRE WAR HAWK GOT NOMINATED By Deirdre Griswold Based on a talk at a July 30 Workers World Party forum in New York. Surprise, surprise. John Kerry was named the Democratic Party nominee for president last night. You're not surprised? You should be. Polls showed that 90 percent of the delegates who elected him are against the war in Iraq and want the troops brought home. But Kerry is for continuing the occupation and sending 40,000 more troops over there. Most of the delegates want the government to do something quickly about the disappearance of decent-paying full-time jobs with benefits that is impoverishing millions of workers in this country. But Kerry's economic program is nothing more than Reagan's old "trickle down" fraud, giving more tax breaks to businesses with the vague hope that they'll turn the money into jobs. Most of the Democratic delegates represent constituencies of working and middle-class people and hate the corporate connections of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. But they chose a millionaire from an old New England ruling family, one who's married to a billionaire, making John and Teresa Heinz Kerry the richest couple ever to expect to live in the White House. So what happened? At the convention there were of course the political elite of the party, many who have held positions in former administrations, as well as those from the national and local party apparatus. Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke there, as did Jimmy Carter, Madeleine Albright, Al Gore, Tom Daschle, Gen. John Shalikashvili--head of the Joint Chiefs Of Staff during the Clinton administration and now a director of the Boeing company--as well as Sen. Joseph Biden from Delaware, the Dupont state. But there were also people who represent mass organizations like labor unions, women's groups, and so on. John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, was there along with many other union leaders. There were rank and file and elected officials representing many communities of oppressed nationalities. Many of the rank-and-file delegates belonged to organizations that try to pressure the government to get reforms and improvements for the masses on various social issues. When it comes to politics, however, they surrender their independence-- and that of their constituents--to become a transmission belt to the masses for the representatives of big capital, who only go there once in a while, to kiss babies and slap backs. WHAT HAPPENED TO DEMOCRACY? Each delegate had a vote. This party calls itself the Democratic Party. Democracy--isn't that where there is freedom of debate and the majority rules? Didn't the Democratic Party make a big issue of vote tampering in Florida that cost Al Gore the election? Don't they berate Republicans for not being democratic? But this convention was totally stacked and scripted--by a master of illusion, Steven Spielberg--to force the delegates to vote for a pro-war candidate without even having a debate on the subject. Couldn't they have refused? In the early days of the two big capitalist parties, there were sometimes boisterous debates at nominating conventions. Vince Copeland in his book "Market Elections: How democracy serves the rich," tells of the Democratic Convention of 1896, when opponents of Wall Street's choice spilled out into the streets of Chicago and succeeded in changing the scripted outcome. Some over-anxious newspapers of the day even called it a "Red Revolution"--which it wasn't by a long shot. But that convention did show some life, unlike the canned outcomes of today. So what happened? Did each delegate have a gun to their head? In a sense, yes. The gun was Bush. For months and months, the line has been "anyone but Bush." Dire warnings have come from Democrats--especially the social democratic reformers in the party's ranks--that every progressive gain of the last half century will be endangered if Bush wins a second term. Some go farther than that and predict a fascist coup. The Democrats have called Bush's endless rhetoric about terrorism "the politics of fear." But this is also the politics of fear. It is telling the working class and progressive movements that they have no strength on their own, that they must fall behind a section of the billionaire ruling class or be crushed. Outside the convention the Boston streets were full of heavily armed police of various kinds. Even delegates felt intimidated by the force that was supposedly there to protect them. Progressive opponents of Kerry in the primary, like Al Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich, had agreed not to oppose his program. As expected, Sharpton gave probably the most militant and eloquent speech to the convention. In all his rousing words, he didn't have much to say about Kerry, just this reluctant appeal: "The only choice we have to preserve our freedoms at this point in history is to elect John Kerry." Millions of dollars were spent by the state, not to protect the delegates from some shadowy menace, but to create an atmosphere of intimidation and fear. And it worked--for those in the system. For those opposing the system, like the thousands who demonstrated and marched to the Fleet Center on Sunday, or the smaller protest on Thursday, mostly by young people, it didn't. Hard cop, soft cop: This is the same old scam that has been worked successfully for years. That's why the ruling class is so happy with their two-party system. The Democrats and Republicans are not twin parties; they appeal to different social strata. But at the end of the day, they are both loyal to capitalism at home and imperialist expansion abroad. And that's why no one was surprised that Kerry was nominated--even though everyone knew he didn't address the most important issues and didn't share the views of the vast majority of the delegates. RANK AND FILE DEMOCRATS NOT HAPPY However, this time there is much greater unhappiness among rank-and-file Democrats over having to toe the line. They are concerned about two huge areas: workers' economic conditions and the war and repression. The Washington Post of July 30 observed that: "Like other speakers during the four nights of the convention, Kerry only briefly touched on Iraq, the issue that has shaped and dominated this presidential campaign, divided the Democratic Party and at times bedeviled his own candidacy. At a time when many Americans are looking for an exit strategy and may wonder whether Kerry has a plan for Iraq that is different from Bush's, he offered only the assurance that he knows how to get it right. "All week the convention program was shaped with a single aim, to project Kerry and the Democratic Party as committed to the nation's security." This was the thrust of the speech by John Edwards, Kerry's running mate, who promised to "strengthen and modernize our military," to "double our Special Forces, and invest in the new equipment and technologies so that our military remains the best equipped and best trained in the world." Of course, even with its "old" technology, the Pentagon can outshoot and outbomb the rest of the world combined. But its military-industrial complex friends are always looking for new, lucrative contracts. London Telegraph reporter David Rennie wrote from Boston on July 29: "Rand Beers, the national security adviser to the Kerry campaign, opened a high-level briefing with a warning: 'In many ways, the goals of the two administrations are in fact not all that different.'" Beers had been on Bush's National Security Council until March 2003, when he resigned over the unilateralism of the war. Another top adviser to the Kerry campaign is Richard Holbrooke, a key player in the Clinton State Department during the war on Yugoslavia. During the Carter administration, Holbrooke in 1977 okayed U.S. arms to Indonesia, which were then used to kill 200,000 people in East Timor. The rumor is that Holbrooke will be Kerry's secretary of state. Dan Feldman, another adviser putting together Kerry's foreign policy, told an interviewer it would have a lot of similarities to that of Brent Scowcroft, George Bush senior's national security adviser, who helped craft the first Gulf War and impose murderous sanctions on Iraq. BANKERS SHAPE ECONOMIC POLICY GovExec.com reported on a panel discussion in Boston by people expected to shape Kerry's economic policy. "[O]n the stage were such Clinton alumni as Gene Sperling, former National Economic Council director; Roger Altman, former Treasury deputy and a Kerry friend [and investment banker--D.G.]; Robert Shapiro, a former Commerce undersecretary; and Steven Rattner, managing principal of the New York investment firm Quadrangle Group. All are likely to be on some transition leader's list to fill out John Kerry's administration if he wins in November." Where are the union leaders who have put hundreds of millions of dollars into the Kerry campaign? Where are the others from progressive organizations fighting for the economic rights of seniors, of the unemployed and underemployed, of those crushed by debt, of the evicted and the homeless? The last time a labor leader was added to the cabinet was when Richard Nixon appointed Peter J. Brennan, president of the New York Building and Construction Trades Council, to be secretary of labor. It was a humiliating tradeoff. In exchange for a few crumbs to labor, racist, right wing "hardhats" were used to attack youthful demonstrators opposed to the Vietnam War. But it's a different working class and a different union movement today. The bosses have stabbed the more privileged, more loyal and less militant workers in the back, downsizing and outsourcing them while "Wal- Martizing" their jobs. This has brought an influx of more women, immigrants and people of color into the workforce, and many don't accept organized labor's shrinking role in the United States. Andrew Stern, head of the 1.6-million-member Service Employees union, was one of the notables at the convention. He represents low-paid service workers, and has called for a broad-based organizing drive to take on Wal-Mart. His union has given the Kerry campaign $65 million, but it clearly hasn't gotten much in return. An article in the Washington Post on July 26, opening day of the convention, quoted Stern as saying a Kerry victory in the election would stifle needed reforms underway in both the Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO. Stern's comments, which he quickly moderated under great pressure, were but a pale reflection of the more outspoken demands that labor "speak with its own voice" being raised by the organizers of the Million Worker March, set for October in Washington. It will not be an "elect Kerry" demonstration. Its organizers, from the Longshore Workers on the West Coast to Teamsters and food service workers in the East, are instead projecting a show of independent workers' power. Workers World Party is proud to have our own candidates running in this campaign. John Parker, Teresa Gutierrez and LeiLani Dowell are not gagged and bound by any ties to the big business parties. They will tell it like it is and encourage all progressive forces to step up their struggles, because these are not just perilous times, they are times of great opportunity for the vast, multinational working class and all its allies to move onto the offensive against this corrupt, class-divided and war-driven imperialist system. And they will talk about socialism, because there is an alternative to a system that despoils the world just so a small class can make immense profits. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe wwnews- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] Support the voice of resistance http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. 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