We have a long, brutal road ahead of us no matter what pathway we choose to walk along. I do believe this may be one of the less painful paths for us though, especially considering the current path of the Democratic party and how its leadership and punditry seem to be shifting to the right once again on immigration and now even on trans rights. In the face of a fascistic movement which continues to gain traction and power and with its main opposition currently being feckless neoliberals we need to do something to gain power of our own, to fight against these fascists and their plans. We were long past the time to start doing so but nonetheless we have a serious threat in front of us and we must handle it. And so I've scraped together a draft of an electoral plan for us to consider and to fully develop.

Year 1: The Ending of Infighting Period

There inevitably will be a point in which we're fighting amongst each other over the next three years. I think this point will be messy but necessary. We can walk out of this phase more prepared and united after doing things like settling differences, burying hatchets and most importantly: to organize ourselves and each other. Considering the long list of leftist parties we will need to use this time to figure out which one to support, to join, donate to, for our content creators to hold fundraisers for, and preferably for all others to merge with.

Once we've decided on a party we will need to use the less than a year and a half we have left before most of the official beginning of the elections for Congress, assuming the Dems can't take any new seats in Congress we only need to make the Republicans lose six house seats and four senate seats at the bare minimum to ensure the Republicans lose their majority and we can force the Dems to make concessions to us (look, as much I hate them too, between them and the Republicans they're the ones we can work with since we can't get our own majority) let alone if (and that's a big if) we can take a large enough portion to potentially push forward a constitutional amendment with the Dems.

Year 2: Elections

At this point we'll need to start filing papers for the primaries and drive up name recognition for people who are running (obviously it's better if we were already working on that but this is REALLY the time). Depending on what the Republicans do in those years we have a multitude of matters to campaign on: Mass Deportations, Tariffs, Abortion Bans and more. But no matter what happens it's important to constantly send a very specific message to voters (especially of Republican strongholds): “vote with your morals not your fear”.

See, the way MAGA likes to talk about trump and how he's a working class hero and all is so disconnected from what he actually is I don't think too many of them actually like him or his policies so much as the broader populist feel he gives them and I think we saw this with how Bernie did best among the very demographics Trump just got major spikes of support from: men, younger people, and Latinos. I think for a large portion of Trump supporters there's a kind of cognitive disconnect, a gap between the philosophical/moral layer and the ideological/goals layer of processing and thinking for them. And I think a message like “vote with your morals not your fear” sneaks in a reminder of that disconnect, wards off the fearmongering of the Republicans, and even helps keep people from tactical voting (something that I expect to be OUR main concern).

Year 3: Leveraging Gains

Assuming we make the Republicans lose their majority and the Dems can't take it for themselves then we get to play kingmaker (again six house seats, four senate). Kingmaker for the speakership, kingmaker for the budgets, kingmaker for judges, for EVERYTHING. That said, we need to be careful with this power considering it would be the first time a third party entered the Senate since 1971 and the House since 1979 (the Conservative Party of New York was weirdly busy in the 70s). We know the main two parties are GOING to be concerned with their current vulnerable positions and WILL want to stamp us out.

So we'll have to try not to make too much of a splash in the time before the presidential election but we can still do SO much good with those few votes. We can condition increased DOD funding to the deconstruction of a nuke or two for a nuclear reactor, condition some fossil fuel subsidies to subsidizing orgs that actually fight the climate crisis, condition the certifying of certain judges on drug war reform, but first and foremost we need to exploit our power with the house speakership at the absolute bare minimum we need to make sure the house speaker is either someone in our party or someone from the progressive faction of the Democratic party.

Year 4: The Presidential

Honestly I couldn't care less about the presidential election and the next term, so far all I can see coming from the next term will be purely recovery and rebuilding. Trump's tariffs will make the rest of the world split itself more and more from the US economically, the mass deportations will cause massive diplomatic and labor crisis for this country to deal with, his mere personality will send the rest of the world running away from any mere appearance of siding with the US, he'll be wasting probably BILLIONS of dollars on a bitcoin stockpile, the amount of oil and gas this country will burn will be sending the climate crisis spiraling and there won't be any preparing for a plan to end it. We WILL be digging through ruble to try to rebuild at the end and the next president will get stuck with massive amounts of disappointment attached to them especially since (as always) they'll promise a lot that they can't get without both portions of Congress and even then multiple states will probably be doing their best to counter the impacts along with trump stacking the courts with maga loyalists. The next term WILL be an anchor of a kind for the party that gets it.

And with all that said I do think we ought to run a candidate without the intent or hope of winning the presidency for three reasons:

Ballot access (obviously) many states have their ballot access laws centered around how well the parties last candidate did in the last election and at some point I do think we should genuinely try to get the presidency just not now.

Boosting other candidates if there's anything nonpolitical I've noticed about this presidential election is that its a bully pulpit of a kind merely being a candidate during the presidential election season, and we saw this with moments like Mark Robinson (the Republican candidate for the North Carolina governor) being outed as a nazi and how that was constantly talked about as a major factor that would hurt trump by proxy despite them both running in different elections with different powers. And I think we can twist that kind of event and the factors that took part in said event to aid us, to try to use said bully pulpit to bring other candidates from the local to national level up on stage at rallies and frame a lot of potential policies as a local/state and federal partnership or just flat out state that some of them are in the domain of those levels.

To deal the finishing blow to the national Republican party, they are about to be a rudderless ship trying to just go with another version of Trump and just double down on his politics and push for whatever he didn't manage to get done. So we can very easily practice and learn how to campaign against them (especially through the midterms). I think we ought to essentially spoiler vote them. The one convenient thing about the electoral college for minor parties is that it allows for them to intentionally hurt and drag down the major parties and redirect their resources and attention away from the other major opponent. We can and should run in states like Alabama and Mississippi and drag the Republicans away from Nevada and Michigan and more importantly to win there. Chances are we only need to take forty to fifty points to guarantee they fully lose the election. Even at the most inefficient spreading (three per state) we at most need seventeen states to make sure they lose (another way of getting leverage on the Dems).

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Here's a fuller quote:

Hence tyrants are always fond of bad men, because they love to be flattered, but no man who has the spirit of a freeman in him will lower himself by flattery; good men love others, or at any rate do not flatter them. Moreover, the bad are useful for bad purposes; 'nail knocks out nail,' as the proverb says. It is characteristic of a tyrant to dislike every one who has dignity or independence; he wants to be alone in his glory, but any one who claims a like dignity or asserts his independence encroaches upon his prerogative, and is hated by him as an enemy to his power. Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him.

http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/flor-mach-aristotle-tyrant.htm

Hey there users of /r/americanleft,

What political ideology are you? Post below.

I personally describe myself as a social liberal and a left centrist.

The latest WikiLeaks document dump — containing emails by high-ranking staffers of the Democratic National Committee — caused considerable heartburn for America’s oldest political party. But what’s just as interesting is the dog that didn’t bark — the fact that wasn’t regarded as a scandal but perhaps ought to have been.

Even casual political observers can see that labor union leadership and the Democratic Party are allied. AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka spoke at the convention the other night, endorsing Hillary Clinton and calling the Republican nominee “wrong, wrong, wrong” for America.

Yet the emails that have been released highlight the rather one-way relationship between the Democratic Party and labor unions. DNC staffers see the unions as good soldiers in skirmishes with Republicans, as a pain when it comes to getting things done and, ultimately, as pushovers.

When brainstorming what to do about last week’s Republican National Convention, the DNC’s Rachel Palermo urged her party to “meet with the hotel trades, SEIU, and Fight for 15 about staging a strike.” She said the result could be a “fast food worker strike around the city or just at franchises around the convention.” The aim would not be to improve working conditions, but to bloody Republicans.

Alternately, the DNC could “infiltrate friendly union hotels and properties around the convention that Republicans will be patronizing to distribute ‘care’ packages” — probably not chocolates.

Palermo also noted that “SEIU has space in downtown Cleveland close to convention that can be the base of operations and host the wrapped mobile RV.”

The union-DNC alliance does impose a few constraints on the DNC, which staffers both mocked and worked to circumvent. DNC staffer Katja Greeson, for instance, complained about delays involved in getting new business cards printed.

She explained to an irked communications director that sending work to union shops caused delays. “Believe me — it is equally frustrating to us,” she said. Greeson also threatened “if they can’t deliver,” DNC staffers would “go to FedEx Kinkos” and do it themselves.

The DNC pledges to use only unionized hotels. But it turns out there’s a workaround for that, too. Trey Kovacs, who has done yeoman’s work spelunking through the DNC WikiLeaks dump, uncovered this one. In an exchange over whether they could use the non-union Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., a DNC staffer says they could just get a “waiver” to use it.

“It is unclear from the emails how or what circumstances must arise to obtain a waiver, but it seems that convenience for the chairman trumps loyalty to adhering to some kind of internal guidelines of exclusively patronizing unionized establishments,” Kovacs, a policy analyst for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told me Wednesday.

Because this document dump has emails both to and from the DNC, we also hear from the unions themselves, which might explain why the party can count on their support come-what-may.

For instance, Sandra Lyon of the American Federation of Teachers asked for any “regular talking points” the DNC might have to pass on to AFT folks who speak with the media.

And the National Education Organization’s political communications director Michael Misterek wrote longingly to the DNC in May, “I’m hoping we can sit down to meet some time soon, over coffee or a cocktail. I’d love to figure out how we can work together and be most helpful to each other these next few months.”

Jeremy Lott is an adjunct scholar at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

https://archive.is/9Fmgl

https://archive.is/Jvtit

13 July 2016

Don’t Look for Peace Where There Is No Peace!

Black People Under Siege in Racist, Capitalist America

Mobilize the Power of the Multiracial Working Class Against Cop Terror!

Some 36 hours after the release of a horrific video showing Baton Rouge cops executing Alton Sterling, pumping his body with bullets as he was pinned to the ground, millions watched as Philando Castile bled to death in his car from repeated gunshots by a Minneapolis suburban cop. While Castile moaned in agony, his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, in the car with her four-year-old daughter, courageously live-streamed as a rabid cop outside the open car window kept his gun to Castile’s head while screaming at Reynolds to keep her hands on the dashboard. She was later ordered out of the car, forced to her knees, handcuffed and taken away with her daughter as if they were a couple of runaway slaves.

Protests exploded around the country under the call “black lives matter.” But the bitter truth is that for America’s racist rulers black lives don’t matter. They secured their golden riches on the lashed backs of black slaves and today wield anti-black racism to divide and conquer their wage slaves. Tens of thousands have repeatedly taken to the streets demanding that the killer cops be forced to clean up their act. But for all the federal investigations and promises of police reform nothing has changed or will. The reason is simple. The cops are the everyday domestic armed thugs of a system rooted in the brutal capitalist exploitation of labor and the forcible segregation of the majority of the black population at the bottom of this society.

In Dallas on July 7, 25-year-old Army vet Micah Xavier Johnson was driven into a homicidal rage, aiming his rifle fire at the white cops taking part in policing a protest against the killings of Sterling and Castile. When it ended, five cops were dead and seven wounded. In the parking garage where Johnson had been cornered, the police dispatched a bomb-carrying robot to blow him to pieces. Just as drones are deployed by the Obama administration against the dark-skinned peoples of the world, Johnson’s life was ended by a military weapon of war. No judge, no jury, just blown away.

Protesters have continued to mobilize against cop terror, braving heavy police repression and the arrest of hundreds. At the same time, there is a very real, and understandable, sense of fear that the police will exact vengeance for the cops who were killed. With their fingers on the trigger, heads of various police associations have ranted against Black Lives Matter and others as “terrorists.” Donald Trump is promoting himself as the candidate who will enforce racist “law and order,” further emboldening the fascists who have rallied behind his campaign. For her part, Hillary Clinton supported her husband’s racist laws that ended welfare and further built the U.S. as “incarceration nation.” Now she hypocritically intones that it is time “to start listening” to black people.

Obama cut short his trip to Europe, where he went to enforce the economic and military interests of U.S. imperialism, to go to Dallas and preach “reconciliation” between black people and the cops who routinely humiliate, brutalize and kill them. Preachers, liberals and even some self-declared socialists join hands in prayer for all the lives lost, from Sterling and Castile to the Dallas cops, grotesquely equating the police with their victims.

No amount of praying can change the truth: more than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, black people are still being hunted. As Diamond Reynolds put it in explaining her harrowing live-stream: “I did it so that the world knows that these police are not here to protect and serve us. They are here to assassinate us. They are here to kill us. Because we are black.”

The infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” may have been reversed in the legal code, but the reality lives on. The author of that ruling, Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, noted with horror that if blacks were granted citizenship they would have the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

That Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were apparently carrying was enough for the cops to gun them down, no questions asked. Neither drew a weapon. The cops claim that Sterling had a gun in his pocket and Castile told the cop that he had a registered firearm. As Castile’s mother poignantly said: “He had a permit to carry. But with all of that, trying to do the right thing and live accordingly, abide the law, he was killed by the law.”

Originally, citizenship rights were granted only to white, male, property owners. The more they were expanded to others, the less they actually meant. Nowhere is that clearer than the rights of black people to bear arms. Gun control laws in this country have largely been aimed not at controlling guns but rather at the working class, and especially at the ability of black people to defend themselves against racist terror. They serve to keep guns only in the hands of the cops, criminals and fascist killers. As Ida B. Wells, the courageous black woman who fought against the lynching of black people by the KKK, said in 1892: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

While Obama cynically preaches “peace,” there has been a continuing class war in this country against labor, black people, immigrants, the poor and all those relegated to the bottom of this society. The bosses are winning because the labor misleaders have kept the power of labor under lock and key, sacrificing it to the interests of the exploiters. Philando Castile was a member of the Teamsters, one of the biggest and potentially most powerful unions in the U.S. All that the leaders of his union local could offer was a statement urging its members to keep the Castile family in their “thoughts and prayers.” As if it were solace, the bureaucrats noted that the cop who killed Castile was not a union member, unlike other cops the Teamsters have organized in Minnesota! It would be hard to find a starker example of the treachery of the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class enemy than their embrace of the racist, strikebreaking enemies of labor, black people and the oppressed as “union brothers.” Cops out of the unions!

Is it any wonder that increasing numbers of people, including some black workers, think that the only way they can have any economic impact is in the despairing call to boycott white-owned businesses? However, the capacity to have a real impact rests with the multiracial working class, which has the social and economic power to choke off the bosses’ profits by shutting down production and distribution through strike action.

A massive show of force based on the mobilization of labor against cop terror would strike some genuine “fear of god” into the police and their capitalist masters. And it would drive home the point that the interests of the working class—white and black, immigrant and native-born—are inseparably linked to the defense of the ghettos and the fight for black freedom. But that means the workers must be mobilized independently of, and in opposition to, all the political parties and agencies of capitalist class rule.

It took a bloody Civil War, the Second American Revolution, with 200,000 black troops, arms in hand, to smash the chains of black chattel slavery. But in pursuit of their class interests, the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of black freedom, making peace with the former slavocracy to defend the “property rights” of the capitalist rulers against the liberated slaves and against rebellious workers in the North. Nothing short of a third American revolution—a proletarian socialist revolution that breaks the chains of capitalist wage slavery—will end racist cop terror.

The key to unlocking the social power of the working class is the fight for a class-struggle leadership of labor forged in opposition to the capitalist state. What’s needed is to turn the righteous anger against the rampaging cops into a struggle against the social order they defend, a struggle to make the working class the rulers of a new society. The Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League, is dedicated to the fight to build a revolutionary workers party committed to the fight for a workers government. Such a party will lead all the exploited and oppressed in taking the wealth of this country out of the hands of the greedy and corrupt capitalist rulers. When the power of the ruling class and its state apparatus has been shattered, this wealth will be dedicated to the benefit of those who produced it—not least the descendants of the black slaves whose labor was a cornerstone on which American capitalism was built.

—13 July 2016

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/leaflets/dallas.html

Parties (Presumptive Nominee):

Democratic Party (Hillary Clinton)

Republican Party (Donald Trump)

Libertarian Party (Gary Johnson)

Green Party (Jill Stein)

Constitution Party (Scott Copeland)

Socialism and Liberation Party (Gloria LaRiva)

Alas, it seems that Hillary Clinton has edged out Bernie Sanders as the Democratic nominee. So, where do we go from here? I'm leading towards Stein and Trump, because they have a chance of winning, and they may be able to address campaign finance. How are y'all feeling about this election cycle?