United States: Should the left back Bernie Sanders' campaign? [Three] views

United States: Should the left back Bernie Sanders' campaign? [Three] views.

1. Dan La Botz: Sanders' campaign a political phenomenon that challenges preconceptions

Of all the far left groups, the International Socialist Organization had been the most critical of and hostile to the Sanders campaign—and for all the right reasons: his caucusing with Democrats, his foreign policy, and above all the belief that Sanders will be an obstacle to building an independent left movement and political alternative. The issue is whether these principled objections should keep us from working closely with Sanders’ supporters, while at the same time maintaining our own political independence.

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What the Sanders campaign may accomplish is to popularize a program of social democratic reforms, to deepen the discussion about socialism, to bring together labor, black, female, and LGBTQ activists into a movement with enough cohesion, energy, dynamism, and excitement to continue to build something after the election. The Sanders campaign could contribute to the launching of a new period of social movements and upheavals with a higher level of political consciousness and if it does that, it will be a great contribution.

So, while remaining a registered Green and planning to work for Jill Stein in the election, I plan to work with the Sanders campaign in the primary period, hoping—like other Sanders supporters—that out of this experience we can build a new, stronger, left in America.

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2. ISO (USA): The problem with Bernie Sanders

At the same time, the left shouldn't abandon the electoral arena to the two capitalist parties. If we do, we create a vacuum that the Democrats will fill, co-opting movement activists, demobilizing unions and social movements, and redirecting their precious time, money and energy into electing candidates who then betray workers and the oppressed.

We need to win the new left born out of Occupy, public-sector union struggles and the Black Lives Matter movement to breaking with the Democratic Party and building an electoral alternative as a complement to struggle from below. Bernie Sanders' campaign inside the Democratic Party is an obstacle to that project.

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3. US Solidarity: Connecting Sanders' Audience’s Aspirations to Clear Working Class Political Alternatives

Jesse Jackson, despite winning 8 million votes in 1988, chose to demobilize the ostensibly independent Rainbow Coalition organization after losing the Democratic nomination so no ongoing coalition went on to continue working around issues of economic and racial justice after the campaign ended. This time, the left should urge Sanders supporters to keep the fight going through joining anti-austerity struggles, social movements or building local, multi-racial coalitions, including independent electoral infrastructures, that live on well after the presidential campaign.

We agree with Howie Hawkins when he says: “We should talk about why independent politics is the best way to build progressive power, about the Democratic Party as the historic graveyard of progressive movements, and about the need in 2016 for a progressive alternative when Sanders folds and endorses Clinton. I don’t expect many will be persuaded to quit the Sanders campaign before the primaries. But I do expect that many of them will want a Plan B, a progressive alternative to Clinton, after the primaries.”

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Sanders is getting people involved in politics. However, the problem is how to keep activism going after elections. Then, how to get people to raise their consciousness further into radical politics?

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Ted Rall: L.A. Confidential: How The LAPD Conspired To Get Me Fired From The Los Angeles Times — And How I Proved They Lied

Ted Rall writes L.A. Confidential: How The LAPD Conspired To Get Me Fired From The Los Angeles Times — And How I Proved They Lied.

Classic Streisand effect: In their attempt to discredit me and destroy my reputation as a journalist, the LAPD wound up discrediting themselves and further eroding its own reputation. And they’re taking the Times with them.

But the LAPD’s reputation has, of course, already been destroyed by decades of police brutality, systematic corruption and fatal police shootings of one unarmed black man after another.

Will the Times do the right thing: apologize, issue a retraction, and return my cartoons and blogs to the pages of the newspaper? I hope so.

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We need Rall's incisive journalism as well as his intregity.

The police and mass media are colluding to silence that voice as the support for Capitalism is rotting away under the daily exposure of corruption in the system.

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Israeli squatter-terrorists kill Palestinian toddler, injure 4 after setting their Home Ablaze

Juan Cole re-posts that Israeli squatter-terrorists kill Palestinian toddler, injure 4 after setting their Home Ablaze.

Israeli settlers killed a Palestinian toddler and injured four others early Friday morning after settling their home ablaze in the village of Doma near Nablus in the occupied West Bank, local sources said.

Ali Saad Dawabsha, one-and-a-half years old, died shortly after sustaining serious burns, said Ghassan Daghlas, an official who monitors settlement activity in the northern West Bank.

His mother and father, Riham and Saad, and their son Ahmad, 4, also sustained injuries and were evacuated to a nearby hospital, Daghlas said, adding that their home was left completely burned.

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ISIS burn a Jordanian pilot alive and are justly condemned throughout the world.

Israelis burn a Palestinian child alive and there is silence.

As John Pilger says, Palestinians are unworthy victims. Indeed, they are even blamed for all the violence done to them.

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Did Turkish Pres. Erdogan Make a Historic mistake in dumping Peace Process with Kurds?

JULIE POUCHER HARBIN asks Did Turkish Pres. Erdogan Make a Historic mistake in dumping Peace Process with Kurds?.

Turkey has become increasingly concerned that gains made by Kurds in Iraq and in Syria could encourage its own Kurdish minority to seek independence. Kurdish rebels released a statement on July 25, 2015 following the airstrikes that the conditions for observing the truce had been “eliminated”. The PKK’s military wing, the HPG, denounced this “aggression of war” by Turkey and vowed “resistance”. It described the bombings in northern Iraq as the “most serious military and political error” by Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party.

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What is missed in this analysis is that the Kurds are exploring an alternative political and economic system to Capitalism. This makes them more dangerous than ISIS.

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SYRIZA's dilemma

Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch discuss SYRIZA's dilemma.

The central problem is that even the most detailed plans now being advanced are presented as a set of alternative policies, but in fact amount to demands for an immediate political revolution. They fail to confront whether this is possible given the balance of forces inside Greece, as reflected in mostly unreconstructed institutions of the state itself, as well as by the continuing public preference for staying with the euro. Concrete political analysis, rather than a technical response to a political problem, is what is needed in the present moment.

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A politcal revolution is extremely unlikely, at this time, in Greece, or, indeed, elsewhere in the West. The troika knew this when they punished the Greek government for having the utter gall to even think of opposing austerity.

Workers have to understand what is happening in Greece will soon be happening in Portugal, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere.

A true political revolution is our salvation, not a negotiating ploy.

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On centrist utopianism

Chris Dillow writes On centrist utopianism.

I say all this as a counterweight to a longstanding prejudice — that centrists and moderates are realistic and hard-headed whilst we leftists are utopian dreamers. Of course, this accusation applies to some on the left — anything is true of someone — but for me the opposite is the case. I'm a Marxist because I'm a pessimist. It is those who think that (actually-existing) capitalism is easily reformable so that inefficiencies and injustices can be eliminated who seem to me to be the dreamers.

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Capitalism is all about increasing inequality, speculative bubbles, and recurring crises of over-production. One cannot reform the essential nature of a thing—one can only mollify its effects.

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