Russiagate Shows the Democrats’ True Corporate, Warmongering Colors

“The Democratic Party is seeking to ride Russiagate into the far sunsets with its suit against Trump, the Russians and Wikileaks.”

For the Democrats, Donald Trump’s surprise Electoral College victory meant that the 2016 election campaign will not end until the next go-round, in 2020, punctuated by a battle for control of Congress, next year. White Democrats cannot accept that the majority of their race (63 percent of white men, 53 percent of white women) voted for Trump -- a truth that does not comport with white Democrats’ self-image as leaders of a cosmopolitan, “progressive” America. Greg Palast and others have shown conclusively that the GOP stole the 2016 election the old-fashioned way, through Black voter suppression, just as in 2000 and 2004, but the Democrats are much more comfortable blaming the outcome on a fantastical “collusion” among the Russians, Trump and Wikileaks. This conspiracy theory is abetted by the imperial Deep State, encompassing most of the public and undercover actors of the U.S. foreign policy establishment who fear Trump cannot be relied on to militarily prevent Russia and China from “colluding” to end Washington’s imperial hegemony over planet Earth.

“Greg Palast and others have shown conclusively that the GOP stole the 2016 election the old-fashioned way, through Black voter suppression.”

In delegitimizing the election (for all the wrong reasons) the Democrats and their corporate media allies have created a crisis of legitimacy for the whole U.S. political order -- which, from a radical perspective, is quite a good thing. Unfortunately, the systems of ruling class social and economic control are not nearly as fragile as the Russia-baiters would have the masses believe and, in any case, have little do with the tweedle-dee, tweedle-dum choices made at the polls by a bare majority of the people every couple of years. The two-corporate-party electoral arrangement negates the possibility of real democratic choice, providing only a menu acceptable to corporate campaign contributors and corporate media gatekeepers. However, it is the illusionof U.S. democracy that is crucial to popular support of the system -- a mirage that dissipates by the day under the relentless onslaught of the “news,” as interpreted by the likes of Rachel Maddow.The Russia-baiters are defecating in their own nest -- and claiming the stink comes from the Kremlin and its “useful idiots” here at home: meaning, folks like us at Black Agenda Report, the Black Alliance for Peace, and a short listof other lelft-wing websites.

“The two-corporate-party electoral arrangement negates the possibility of real democratic choice.”

As a result, over the past year and a half we have witnessed an hysteria of McCarthyism in a nation where there exists only a tiny organized Left, yet where the masses of people have little to no confidence in the institutions and parties of governance -- a political environment that is super-heated by constant threats of all-enveloping war. This suits the militarists and CIA spooks just fine, of course, but also serves the purposes of a Democratic Party that has nothing to offer its base of economically besieged and intensely disaffected voters, most of whom are significantly to the left of the Party on both core economic issues and on questions of war and peace.

Nowhere is the cleavage on critical issues between the Party and its base more evident than in Black America, the most loyal (captive, actually) Democratic constituency, composing a quarter of its reliable voters. For Blacks, there is no two-party system, since the Republicans have chosen to fill the role of White Man’s Party. Yet African Americans are far to the left of the Democrats on social and economic justice issues. Most resemble “Swedish social democrats” or are “even more radical than that,” according to Dr. Michael Dawson, the esteemed Black social demographer at the University of Chicago. Only 7 percent of Blacks favored an invasion of Iraq if would result in the “death of thousands of Iraqi civilians,” compared to majorities of white males, a third of white females and 16 percent of Hispanics, according to the Zogby poll taken in February of 2003.

“African Americans are far to the left of the Democrats on social and economic justice issues.”

Although Black people’s anti-war sentiments were muffled during Barack Obama’s presidency, there is no reason to believe there has been a sea change in Blacks’ historic opposition to U.S. military adventures abroad. But the post-2016 Democratic Party now assumes an even more hawkish posture than the GOP, including most of the Congressional Black Caucus, a majority of which votes whatever way House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi instructs. The Democrats backed Trump’s obscene war budget, swallowing a death pill for all the big social programs proposed by the party’s “left” wing, none of which can survive such military outlays -- and they know it.

The Democrats are -- there’s no other way to say it -- full of shit. Their “big” social programs are meant to be poisoned on the vine by trillion-dollar deficits mandated by the Russian “threat” to “our democracy” that is shrieked every day and night by…the Democrats, themselves. Every time they scream “Russians,” they are providing the “national security” excuse for why they can’t pass the social legislation they claim to champion. Simultaneously, they demonize as “colluders” the radical domestic opposition to these same corporate forces. The Democrats are counting on Russiagate to both bring them back to power and to inoculate them from the wrath of their base when they fail to provide relief from austerity. They will never give up such an elixir.

“The post-2016 Democratic Party now assumes an even more hawkish posture than the GOP.”

So, when The Week shouts that Bernie Sanders has “conquered” the Democrats, because a number of his potential competitors, including abject corporate servants like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, have endorsed the idea of Medicare-for-all and the party is now thinking “big” -- think again. Wall Street will force a split in the Democratic Party rather than allow its supplicants to press for a true single payer health care bill or a federal job guarantee. And a split is exactly what is needed.

The Sandernistas will face the same Democratic Party corporate organism in 2020, should their champion’s health hold up, as they did 2016. I hope they do well, just as I did in the last go-round, but only in order that they become so ferociously frustrated at the dirty tricks and dirty money of the party’s corporate controllers that they make the final break and create a new, social democratic party, potentially the biggest in the country and, hopefully, a true party of its members, rather than a front for corporate backers.

“Wall Street will force a split in the Democratic Party rather than allow its supplicants to press for a true single payer health care bill or a federal job guarantee.”

The U.S. is a nation of 300-plus million people without even one sizeable political party that serves a definable social constituency, other than the very rich: a true desert in which only the bourgeoisie have a voice, controlling both big party megaphones and virtually all the means of communication. Russiagate, a political contrivance manufactured at a time of the empire’s perceived crisis -- the unexpected election of the undependable Trumpster – serves only the forces of war and domestic repression. The Democratic Party – ““objectively, the truer and more fully explicit ruling class party in the country,” as Paul Street puts it, ever since go-for-self Trump took over the GOP -- is seeking to ride Russiagate into the far sunsets with its suit against Trump, the Russians and Wikileaks. As Glenn Greenwald points out, the suit, seeking damages for the “theft” of its emails, could cripple journalists’ ability to expose corporate and government wrongdoing. If the Democratic National Committee is successful,

“any media outlet that publishes misappropriated documents or emails (exactly what media outlets quite often do) could be sued by the entity or person about which they are reporting, or even theoretically prosecuted for it, or that any media outlet releasing an internal campaign memo is guilty of ‘economic espionage.’”

“The U.S. is a nation of 300-plus million people without even one sizeable political party that serves a definable social constituency, other than the very rich: a true desert.”

The DNC doesn’t give a damn about gutting U.S. journalism. It is an agent of its corporate masters, for whom the rights of property (or, the propertied classes) are sacrosanct -- and that includes the pro-war Sanders camp “progressive,” Rep. Keith Ellis, the DNC deputy chair. “As Americans, it is our duty to respond when our democracy is attacked,” Ellis tweeted. “The DNC is filing this lawsuit because Russia, and anyone who supported their interference in the 2016 election, must be held accountable.”

There has been no great protest from the corporate press, either, reflecting the fact that they are corporate first, and “press” only when the needs of the owners calls for it. And what the oligarchic owners and the U.S. empire need is endless Russiagate and war.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected]