Clinton primary contest losses intensify Democratic Party crisis
28 March 2016
Bernie Sanders scored landslide victories over Hillary Clinton in
Democratic Party caucuses held Saturday in Washington state, Hawaii and
Alaska.
The scale of the defeats for Clinton, the presumptive front-runner in
the contest for the presidential nomination, was overwhelming in all
three states. In Washington’s caucuses, Sanders beat Clinton by 73
percent to 27 percent. In Alaska, the margin was 82 percent to 18
percent. Sanders won the Hawaii caucuses by 70 percent to 30 percent.
The Vermont senator has won six of the last seven Democratic Party
contests, including last Tuesday’s victories in Utah and Idaho. Clinton
won in Arizona the same day.
Turnout for the weekend caucuses, which generally involve far fewer
participants than elections, approached or exceeded records set in 2008,
including at least 225,000 in Washington. A report in the
Atlantic
noted that Sanders “won from wall to wall,” adding, “He took every
county in Washington, and in Alaska, he posted double-digit margins in
all 40 districts.”
These votes have deepened the political crisis in the Democratic
Party. Even a Clinton victory over a candidate who describes himself as
“socialist,” if the margin of victory were small, would be of great
significance. During the 1968 Democratic Party primary campaign, which
unfolded amidst growing opposition to the Vietnam War, Senator Eugene
McCarthy’s performance in the New Hampshire primary, in which he won 42
percent to Lyndon B. Johnson’s 49 percent, was considered a near-fatal
blow to the sitting president. It helped precipitate Johnson’s decision
to withdraw from the presidential race three weeks later.
It is extraordinary that Clinton, who has emerged as the political
personification of the status quo, is not only losing, but being
trounced in so many states. She is being routed in many contests under
conditions where she is presented as the all-but-inevitable winner of
the nomination process. Her defeats are a repudiation of calls from
leading Democratic Party officials, including President Obama, for
Sanders to end his campaign. In a political system that was in any way
responsive to popular discontent, Clinton’s candidacy would be
considered doomed.
The general media line notwithstanding, the issue is not so much who
has the most delegates, but the political dynamic at work. Even if
Sanders is not able to surpass Clinton’s still sizable lead, due to a
significant degree to the pledges of so-called “super delegates”—party
operatives, officeholders and politicians who are not elected in
primaries and caucuses—it will be impossible to conceal the fact that
the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer is deeply unpopular.
The eventual outcome of the nomination process—for both the Democrats
and Republicans—remains highly volatile and unpredictable. What is
clear, however, is that the two-party system, through which the American
capitalist class has exercised its rule nearly 150 years, is breaking
apart.
The social anger that has built up over decades, vastly intensified
since the crash of 2008, is beginning to find political expression. The
United States is riven by extreme levels of social inequality, with a
handful of billionaires controlling more wealth than the bottom half of
the population. To this must be added the destabilizing consequences of a
quarter-century of unending war, particularly in the decade-and-a-half
of the “war on terror.”
More and more, this underlying reality is breaking through the
ossified structure of American politics. Expressing the shock this has
produced within the political establishment, the
New York Times’
Nicholas Kristof recently made the remarkable admission that he—along
with the rest of the media—“were largely oblivious to the pain among
working class Americans.”
While Kristof was referring to the support for Trump among sections
of workers, the basic trajectory of the American working class is not to
the right, but to the left.
Support for Sanders is the initial expression of a broadly felt
anticapitalist sentiment among workers, and particularly among younger
voters who have seen nothing but economic crisis and war for their
entire politically conscious lives. Sanders, who has had far less media
coverage than the other major candidates, has received 1.5 million votes
from those under 30 in the primary process prior to Saturday, 300,000
more than Clinton and Trump combined.
These numbers express deeper social trends and corresponding changes
in political consciousness. A survey by YouGov released earlier this
year found that Americans under the age of 30 rated socialism as better
than capitalism (43 percent had a favorable opinion of socialism versus
32 percent who had a favorable opinion of capitalism). Sixteen percent
of those under the age of 30 described themselves as socialist, while
only 11 percent said they were capitalist.
Another recent poll found that among those age 18 to 35, 56.5 percent
described themselves as “working class”—a term that is virtually
proscribed in American politics and banned from the media. The
percentage of those describing themselves as “middle class” has fallen
steadily, from 45.6 percent in 2002 to a record low 34.8 percent in
2014.
While the evident willingness of millions of American workers and
young people to consider socialism as an alternative to the existing
capitalist system has come as a shock to the political establishment,
this development is a striking confirmation of the political program and
perspective published by the Socialist Equality Party in 2010. The SEP
anticipated a profound shift in the political consciousness of the
working class:
In the final analysis, the vast wealth and power of American
capitalism was the most significant objective cause of the subordination
of the working class to the corporate-controlled two-party system. As
long as the United States was an ascending economic power, perceived by
its citizens as “the land of unlimited opportunity,” in which a
sufficient share of the national wealth was available to finance rising
living standards, American workers were not convinced of the necessity
of socialist revolution.
The change in the objective conditions, however, will lead American
workers to change their minds. The reality of capitalism will provide
workers with many reasons to fight for a fundamental and revolutionary
change in the economic organization of society. The younger generation
of working people – those born in the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade
of the twenty-first century – do not know, and will never know,
capitalist “prosperity.” They are the first generation of Americans in
modern times who cannot reasonably expect to achieve a living standard
equal to, let alone better than, their parents’ generation.” [The Breakdown of Capitalism and the Fight for Socialism in the United States]
The scale of his support has taken the Sanders campaign itself by
surprise. It reflects an emerging revolutionary potential that is
entirely unacceptable to the candidate and the mildly reformist sections
of the Democratic Party establishment for which he speaks. It has never
been Sanders’ intention or desire to lead a popular movement against
capitalism. From the beginning, his campaign was intended to serve as a
safety valve for the political establishment.
As the campaign progresses, the contradiction between Sanders’ own
objectives and the aims of those who have supported him will inevitably
emerge. Aware of the dangers involved, Sanders spoke out of both sides
of his mouth in interviews over the weekend. Asked whether he had any
conditions for endorsing Clinton if she won the nomination—including
that she support his campaign planks of Medicare for all, a $15 minimum
wage and free tuition at public colleges—Sanders evaded the question. He
said it was a “misinterpretation of what I said” to suggest that there
were any conditions, while refraining from saying directly that he would
back Clinton.
But when he announced his bid for the Democratic nomination last
year, Sanders pledged to support the eventual nominee, whoever he or she
was. And in the course of the primary contests, he repeatedly promoted
his campaign as the most effective means of increasing the turnout for
the Democratic Party in the November general election.
Sanders’ campaign slogans—denouncing the “billionaire class” and a
political system dominated by corporate money—address only certain
surface aspects of American society, but by no means go to the source of
mass discontent—the capitalist system itself.
The issues that are driving the working class into political
struggle—the fight against war, inequality and the destruction of
democratic rights—cannot be resolved without a decisive break with the
Democratic Party and the building of an independent political movement
of the working class on the basis of a genuinely socialist program. This
means a fight to unite workers throughout the world in a common
struggle to overturn the capitalist system, replacing it with a
rationally planned and democratically controlled economy based on social
need, not private profit.
The crisis of the two-party system revealed in the elections
underscores the urgency of the building of the Socialist Equality Party
to intervene in the struggles of the working class and provide the
necessary revolutionary leadership.
Joseph Kishore
...........................
Will Mexico elect America's next President? Didn't LA RAZA FASCIST
PARTY, which is funded by Barack Obama and operates out of the Obama
white house under Cecilia Munoz, reelect Obama???
DON'T BELIEVE THE LIES! IT'S ALL LA RAZA PROPAGANDA TO EXPAND MEXICO'S OCCUPATION!
MILLIONS
OF MEXICANS HAVE MILLIONS OF AMERICAN JOBS WITH STOLEN IDENTITIES. THEY
ALSO DRIVE ILLEGALLY, CONTRACT ILLEGALLY AND SEND BACK TENS OF BILLIONS
IN DRUG PROFITS TO NARCOMEX.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS LONG BEEN SABOTAGING STATES' ATTEMPT TO CURB LA RAZA FASCIST FROM VOTING.
MEXICO KNOWS THAT THE 40 MILLION LOOTING MEXICANS DON'T HAVE TO BE "PERMANENT RESIDENTS" TO GO VOTE FOR MORE!
HILLARY CLINTON HAS ALREADY PROMISED THE MEX OCCUPIERS 49 MORE MEXIFORNIAS!
March 21, 2016
Mexican government urging US immigrants to become citizens and vote
Mexican
consulates in the U.S. are hosting citizenship clinics across the
country, hoping to convince permanent residents from Mexico to become
U.S. citizens so they can vote against Donald Trump.
The pious declaration from the Mexican government that they are not "interfering" in the U.S. election fails the smell test.
Bloomberg:
Joel
Diaz doesn’t want to wait to see how it all turns out. The
Mexican-American, who has been a permanent resident of the U.S. for six
years, arrived at the Mexican consulate in Chicago on Saturday with his
wife and four adult sons to register all of them as U.S. citizens in
order to vote against Trump.
"We’re
very worried," Diaz, 47, an evangelical pastor, said. "If he wins there
will be a lot of damage against a lot of people here, and to us as
Hispanics, as Mexicans."
Laura
Espinosa, deputy consul in Mexico’s consulate in Las Vegas, said the
main goal of the program is citizenship, and while that includes the
right to vote, the government doesn’t press people to do so. "Those who
use this to vote, that’s up to each individual," said Espinosa, who
confirmed that most consulates have begun citizenship campaigns. "We
don’t have any opinion on that, because that would be totally
interfering in internal affairs of the country."
The
government in Mexico City is holding off on engaging the Trump campaign
directly until he becomes the nominee, said Francisco Guzman, chief of
staff to Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Speaking with reporters
on March 1, Guzman said the government plans to communicate with the
campaigns of the nominees once they’re chosen and try to dispel what it
considers misinformation about Mexico and Mexicans.
The
public-relations offensive now under way includes using news outlets
and social media to highlight the strides Mexicans have made in
business, the arts and academia in the U.S., said Paulo Carreno, the
former spokesman of Citigroup Inc.’s Mexico unit who oversees the
country’s international branding strategy.
Promoting
Mexico in the U.S., from its scholars to artists, is meant "not to
influence an election, but a whole generation and those that follow,"
Carreno said in an e-mailed response to questions. "The strategy will be
an important anchor in our consular network in the country."
It
should be noted that the chances of the Mexican government succeeding
in getting enough of their people to become U.S. citizens so that they
can make a difference in the 2016 election are low. But over a period
of years, that could change – especially if the Republicans continue to
refuse to compete for the Hispanic vote. Immigration issues are not the
end-all and be-all for Hispanics in the U.S. They have the same
concerns as any American about the economy and the culture.
Not
even trying to persuade Hispanics that the GOP's agenda would be better
for them than the Democrats will continue to make any national election
and uphill climb for the Republican candidate.
The
study shows that about 10% of all persons in their early 30s are
undocumented. In addition, 23% of illegal immigrants live in California,
7% reside in New York, and 15% live in Texas.