On 7-11-19, Glen Ford, executive editor of the Black Agenda Report, posted an article entitled “Sanders vs. the Endless Austerity Regime,” in which he cast many doubts on real change occurring as a result of the current election cycle. Let me pick it up somewhere near the middle…

“If you think this column is supportive of the Sanders candidacy, then you haven’t been reading BAR all these years,” Ford wrote. “We are socialists and Black liberationists who do commentary and analysis, and have never backed corporate parties or candidates. The Democratic Party serves its ruling class financiers, and, as one of the two parties of capitalist governance in the U.S., it will self-destruct before it bucks its corporate bosses. That’s why purported ‘socialists’ like Sanders, or the Democratic Socialists that always wind up supporting Democrats, are delusional if they think they can usurp control of the devil’s machine – or they’re trying to fool the rest of us. The ruling class isn’t scared of” Bernie’s purportedly socialist agenda, but it “will viciously resist New Deal-type reforms that threaten its austerity regime, a global Race to the Bottom that ruthlessly diminishes the living standards and economic security of the masses of people, so that they’ll accept any job, under any conditions of employment. Capitalist austerity is designed to provide working people with no options but to take what the bosses offer. Austerity regimes gut the social safety nets not to save money, but to impose abject desperation on working people, so that they’ll accept the ‘shit jobs’ that are now the norm even in the most developed capitalist countries.”

Ford says the Republican Party only has to satisfy its “rank and file whites’ only desire – that their government affirm white supremacy.” He speculates that “it would have been a great political lesson if Sanders’ momentum was such that corporate Democrats had to steal the nomination from him in broad daylight, hopefully prompting a mass exit from the party and creation of a new social democratic formation (or a much bigger Green Party).” Isn’t that what happened in 2016? “Or, if somehow Sanders won the nomination, we could all watch the corporate players pick up their marbles to form a new ‘centrist’ party, leaving leftish Democrats encamped in the hollow shell. As things stand at this early stage in the process, Sanders may simply wind up an also-ran, mobbed and co-opted by the biggest, most multi-colored crowd of Democratic politicians ever assembled for a presidential race. Dollar-drenched corporate hacks like Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have claimed to endorse Sanders’ signature Medicare for All legislation, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, once considered anathema by corporatists, is suddenly a darling of party leaders and media. The corporate strategy is to ensure that the super-majorities of Democrats that support Sanders’ issues are split among the ‘progressive’ pretenders, while Joe Biden soaks up the nervous-nellie voters that desperate to beat Trump with someone – anyone – ‘electable.’ The corporatists’ nightmare scenario, that Sanders might rev up his highly energized and youthful 2016 machine, funded by tens of millions in small-contributions, and smash his way to a first ballot victory at the convention, now seems unlikely. The corporate media have acted in near-unison to alternatively ignore or malign Sanders, often pretending he’s just not there as they fawn over his mimics, who can be counted on to retreat from corporate-opposed issues once the Bernie-bear has been contained.”

Elsewhere on the BAR website are articles detailing how Kamala Harris served the status quo and hurt black people as California’s attorney general and describing Elizabeth Warren as “decidedly to the right of Bernie Sanders on the issue of war and peace. Warren supports U.S. sanctions against Venezuela, for example, estimated to have killed over 40,000 Venezuelans  between the years of 2017 to 2018. When Trump agreed to negotiate directly with Kim Jong-un in Singapore, Warren called for a more aggressive posture toward the DPRK. The Massachusetts Senator proclaimed that Israel possessed the ‘right to defend itself’ during its invasion of Gaza in 2014, which killed thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of children. Warren prides herself in fighting for a kinder capitalism but has no problem with a nasty, murderous imperialism.” Danny Haiphong, author of the article on Warren, concludes by saying that the only hope “is that the political crisis engendered by the struggle between the oligarchs and Sanders, with some help from the likes of Tulsi Gabbard and even Elizabeth Warren, will lead to the splintering of the Democratic Party and more room for independent, left political forces to breath and grow.” In another article, Haiphong says, “We should expect that Gabbard and Sanders will eventually concede to the Democrats once they’re driven from the race. Since we can’t rely on them to lead a struggle for revolutionary change from within the Democratic Party machinery, we’ll need to develop independent political organizations capable of harnessing the anger and rebellion that will surely emerge once their demise at the hands of their own party is assured.”

The corporate two-party system and its mass media don’t serve our needs, and the longer we remain focused on the dog-and-pony show of excessively long presidential campaign seasons, the longer it will take for a critical mass of us to recognize this. Like Russiagate and Mueller investigation, the presidential campaign is nothing but a distraction from the mass revolutionary movement we need to be mounting — not from the top-down, following political candidates within an unreformable system, but from the bottom up. We need to declare that the whole fake, oppressive system that now bamboozles us is illegitimate and create shadow governments and regimes we can respect and give our allegiance to.