The message is loud and clear from the Hillary Clinton campaign: Bernie, it’s time to pack it in.
That might not be surprising since Clinton is running against Sanders. But the same message is coming from the mainstream media, which claim to objectively report the news, but seem to echo the conventional wisdom of the Washington political establishment.
They can’t wait for Sanders to get out of the picture so they can settle down for the “real” election between Clinton and Donald Trump. Then the campaign debate will be free of any trace of progressive rhetoric – except for the occasions, probably rare, when Hillary Clinton thinks she needs to bolster the Democratic base.
It’s true that the delegate arithmetic is aligned for Clinton. As of this writing, she has 1,768 pledged delegates who will vote for her at the Democratic convention in July – which is still some distance away from a majority, but Clinton has an estimated 525 superdelegates in the bag, which means she needs fewer than 100 to get over the line.
But whether the media or the party leaders like it or not, there are still Democratic primaries to go, including the biggest contest of all in California in June – and the people who live there want to cast their ballots as if this is actually, you know, a democratic process.
From the very beginning of his campaign, Bernie Sanders has promised to support the eventual Democratic nominee if it isn’t him. For the last several decades, he’s shunned any independent presidential candidate like Ralph Nader and lined up behind the Democrats at election time, despite his nominal identification as an independent.
As SocialistWorker.org has stated in response to the illusions of some left wing figures and organisations that Sanders will break from the Democrats, there’s no reason not to take him at his word.
Now, various members of the Democratic Party establishment are peddling the same claim, but as part of an effort to drive Sanders out of the Democratic primaries and strengthen Hillary Clinton in time for November.
With Sanders having the gall to keep asking people to vote for him, Clinton’s surrogates have turned to more underhanded methods. Enter the so-called “riot” at the Nevada state party convention on 14 May, where Sanders supporters were accused of violence on the convention floor.
There were terrifying tales of Sanders thuggery all around – a New York Times story headlined “From Bernie Sanders Supporters, Death Threats Over Delegates” began this way:
“Thrown chairs. Leaked cellphone numbers. Death threats spewed across the Internet. No, this is not the work of Donald J. Trump supporters, some of whom have harassed critics of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. It was angry supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders.”
Except that isn’t what happened. For example, the press reported claims from state party officials that Sanders supporters threw chairs, but no one has substantiated the accusations. There’s video showing someone lifting a chair – and then setting it down after the people around him urged him to.
This isn’t to say there wasn’t outrage, including a lot of yelling and pushing, on the convention floor in Nevada. Sanders supporters had a good reason to yell – the party officialdom organised the convention to favour Clinton. Chair Roberta Lange regularly ignored motions from the floor and miscalled voice votes obviously favouring Sanders’ supporters.
But then again, the fix was in well before any of this happened.
The Nevada Democratic primary is a long and complicated process. First come precinct-level caucuses. You might remember those from back in February – Clinton won by a narrow margin according to the results that night, though there were a lot of complaints from the Sanders campaign. Then came county conventions in April, which elected delegates to the state convention that happened this month.
Going in, Sanders had 2,124 delegates to Clinton’s 1,722. Until convention officials changed the rules – and changed the rules for challenging rules changes. They also disqualified 64 delegates and didn’t allow 58 of them to appeal the decision. By the end, the Clinton camp had a slight lead.
Clinton is no newcomer to, ahem, election irregularities in Nevada. In her race against Barack Obama in 2008, there were widespread reports of trouble at caucus sites, including doors closing 30 minutes early and IDs being requested and checked in a non-uniform fashion, according to the Obama campaign.
The same kind of dirty tricks protested on behalf of the current president of the United States eight years ago were perpetrated again in Nevada – but the Sanders supporters were labelled troublemakers for speaking up about them.
You might not have known any of that from the mainstream media accounts, where the leading lights of unbiased American journalism repeated unsubstantiated claims about Sanders supporters – and then got on with the business of chastising Sanders for refusing to just let Clinton win.
For his part, Sanders protested the accusations against his supporters’ supposed “penchant for violence”, pointing out that his Nevada campaign office was fired on and his staff’s living quarters ransacked. But Talking Points Memo editor Josh Marshall didn’t want to hear about it. He let loose on his blog:
“This … is the problem with lying to your supporters. Sanders is telling his supporters that he can still win, which he can’t. He’s suggesting that the win is being stolen by a corrupt establishment, an impression which will be validated when his phony prediction turns out not to be true. Lying like this sets you up for stuff like happened over the weekend in Nevada.”
And ill-tempered ranting like this sets you up for being dismissed as a cheap hack.
For her part, Clinton hasn’t said anything about the incident in Nevada – because she didn’t have to. While her supporters piled on, Clinton simply repeated the delegate math equation and shifted the discussion to the candidate she’d rather be running against, Donald Trump.
Sanders’ status as a Washington outsider – even though it’s not exactly true given his two decades spent in Congress, working with the Democrats throughout – has been the bread-and-butter of his campaign, gaining him a wide hearing among people tired of political business as usual.
It’s that same label that’s irritating the Clinton campaign, which is trying to shift the discussion from hopes for what’s possible to the cold calculation of what Corporate America is going to let you have.
The Clinton campaign would like Sanders to step aside and just endorse her already – the way he said he would from the start – and stop criticising her conservative record and lousy stances on any number of issues. To that end, Sanders is being denounced for spoiling and splitting the Democratic Party, and so are the people who want to vote for him because they want to see an alternative to the status quo.
The Democratic Party establishment’s attitude toward Sanders was probably best articulated by an anonymous senior Clinton aide after the New York primary in April, who told Politico, “Fuck him”.
The all-out assault on Sanders could make it awkward for him to call on his supporters to vote for Clinton in July, even if Democratic leaders let them have some input in crafting the party platform. For sure, Sanders is getting visibly angry at the behaviour of the Clinton campaign.
But that doesn’t mean that Sanders won’t follow through on his promise. In the end, the rancorous debate in the run-up to the Democratic convention might even make it look to some people like there’s an actual democratic process going on.
But the main take away from this election for many people will be the depths that the Democratic Party will go to silence any forces to its left. That will be felt even more strongly when the primaries are done, and those who don’t fall in line behind the Democratic candidate against Donald Trump won’t just be accused of disuniting the party, but of paving the way for a Trump presidency.
The lesson for people who care about the issues that Sanders is talking about can’t be that the Democratic Party needs to be fixed along the lines that Sanders hopes – but that it’s not their party at all.

Elizabeth Schulte

Is Sanders spoiling the party?

Hillary Clinton thinks she has the perfect comeback to Donald Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”.
Using a debating technique popular on playgrounds across the country – the same one responsible for zingers like “That’s what you are, but what am I?” – the Clinton campaign is producing baseball hats emblazoned with the words “America Is Already Great”.
If “America is already great”, it has a funny way of showing it to the massive number of US workers who struggle in various ways each day – the 15 million workers who have jobs, but get by on $10 an hour or less; the 7.4 million homeowners who are “seriously” underwater on their mortgages; the 31 million people who go without health care because they can’t afford the expense.
But that isn’t what Clinton has in mind. For her, for the Democratic Party establishment and for the corporate rulers they represent, America is great. Really great.
For them, the Great Recession is part of the past – corporate profits, Wall Street gambling and skyrocketing CEO compensation haven’t just recovered, but are flourishing like never before. Plus, they have a political representative they can count on poised to win the White House: Hillary Clinton.
The Clinton campaign is acting like it has the Democratic presidential nomination in the bag – with the general election soon to come – even though Bernie Sanders has won the most recent primaries and seems likely to continue doing well through the final voting in early June.
The truth is that Clinton was the choice of the American ruling class before Sanders even announced his campaign. That’s only being confirmed as Donald Trump – who’s really no more bigoted than the average member of the US ruling class, but who probably is more unstable and unreliable – comes closer to clinching the Republican nomination.
Clinton and her campaign advisers know they won’t need to do much for Democratic voters to fall in behind her, even if her allegiance to Wall Street stands exposed, and not only because of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Clinton’s secret weapon is the widespread fear of Donald Trump.
The gap between the attitudes of the anointed Democratic candidate Clinton and the concerns of the majority of working class people is big and getting bigger all the time – yet she will be the person they will be told to vote for in November.
Left wing author Thomas Frank put it well in a recent column in the Guardian, calling Hillary Clinton the “complacency candidate”:
“Seven years have passed now since the last recession officially ended, and yet the country’s fury has scarcely cooled. To this day we remain angry at Wall Street; we rage against career politicians; and we are incandescent that the economic system seems to have been permanently ‘rigged’ against working people.
“Listening to the leading figures of the Democratic Party establishment, however, you’d never know it. Cool contentment is the governing emotion in these circles. What they have in mind for 2016 is what we might call a campaign of militant complacency. They are dissociated from the mood of the nation, and they do not care.
Seven years have passed now since the last recession officially ended, and yet the country’s fury has scarcely cooled.
“Hillary Clinton is more or less openly offering herself as the complacency candidate.”
Not only are the movers and shakers in the Democratic Party completely removed from the daily struggles of working class Americans, but they are more comfortable than ever in their dedication to Corporate America and the status quo.
The Clinton campaign demonstrates this in an obvious way, with the huge support it has received from corporate interests. Election 2016 is expected to break all previous spending records, and Clinton has already amassed some $4.2 million in total from Wall Street, $344,000 of which was contributed in March alone.
But the relationship between the Democrats and big business is about more than campaign contributions, and the Obama administration has been a perfect illustration of this little-discussed reality of the two-party system.
Expectations were high when Obama beat out Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Voters everywhere, even in reliably conservative areas, were fed up with eight years of George Bush and angered by the banks that enriched themselves while workers saw their only assets, their homes, disappearing.
A record number of people voted in 2008, and among them, more than six in 10 said the economy was the most important issue, according to Pew Research Center. One in three voters said they were very worried about being able to afford the health care services they need – among them, 65 percent went for Obama.
So voters’ expectations were high as Obama entered the White House after a long campaign promising change. But if Wall Street had any apprehension about Obama, it didn’t take long for its fears to be put to rest.
In his book The Democrats: a critical history, Lance Selfa describes a meeting between the new president, his treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and the CEOs of the 13 largest banks:
“New reports quoted Obama lecturing the CEOs that ‘my administration is the only thing between you and pitchforks’. But the main result of the meeting was the administration’s reassurance to the bankers that it had no intention of forcing a change in the way Wall Street does business.
“Journalist Ron Suskind quoted one of the CEOs who attended: ‘The sense of everyone after the big meeting was relief … The president had us at a moment of real vulnerability. At that point, he could have ordered us to do just about anything, and we would have rolled over. But he didn’t – he mostly wanted to help us out, to quell the mob. And the guy we figured we had to thank for that was [Geithner]. He was our man in Washington’.”
In the years to come, bankers and CEOs not only dodged the “pitchforks” – they made out better than they ever had before. Once the economy was back in positive territory, almost all the economic benefits went to the tiny minority at the top.
Since the official end of the Great Recession, wages have not just stagnated but declined, once inflation is accounted for, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project. Low-wage workers were hit hard; for example, cooks and food preparation workers experienced wage declines of 8.9 percent and 7.7 percent, respectively, between 2009 and 2014. Yet the administration refuses to take action for a significant increase in the federal minimum wage.
There’s more of the same in store under a Clinton administration, if the Democratic nominee can win in November. And she doesn’t need to meet with CEOs to assure them she’s on their side – they already know.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Wall Street donors are already moving their financial support from Republican candidates who dropped out of the race, such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, to Clinton.
There are lots of reasons why business leaders might abandon Corporate America’s preferred party and choose Clinton over Trump. There’s Trump’s recent statement that the wealthy might (maybe, possibly) see a tax increase under his presidency. Plus, the billionaire reality TV star has based his right wing populism partly on opposition to international economic agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Just as importantly, Hillary Clinton is a known quantity. Corporate America understands that she may – like her husband Bill Clinton and her former employer Barack Obama – talk left to win votes during an election campaign, but she will ultimately come through for them.
Even during the campaign season, when Democrats are expected to make promises that energise the party’s voice, Clinton resisted pressure from the Sanders campaign and opposed an increase in the federal minimum wage or the reconsideration of single-payer health care.
In his Guardian article, Frank references an illuminating quote from Barack Obama’s recent interview with the New York Times, in which Obama reaffirms the hard choices his administration has made and challenges his critics:
“[B]oth on the left and the right, [there is] a temptation to say, ‘If we could just go back to an era in which our borders were closed’, or, ‘If we could just go back to a time when everybody had a defined-benefit plan’ or ‘If we could just go back to a time when there wasn’t any immigrant that was taking my job, things would be OK’.”
That says a lot about how Obama and the Democratic Party establishment think about the party’s base. Obama equates people who want a decent pension to retire on after they are too old to work with racists who want a border wall to stop immigrants from “stealing” jobs.
In other words, for the “party of the people”, racists are basically the same as workers who dream about a decent retirement – at the least, irritants to the smooth running of the government, and at the most, threats to Democratic rule who need to be defeated.
Instead of making good on his promise of hope in 2008, Barack Obama has only made the situation more hopeless. As for Hillary Clinton, she isn’t even bothering to make the promise.
The Bernie Sanders campaign, with its goal of shaking up the Democratic establishment, should be changing this dynamic. But besides forcing Clinton to answer for her corporate ties, it hasn’t changed the fundamental priorities of the Democratic Party.
The most important impact of the Sanders campaign has been on the large numbers of people energised by his message and inspired to do something political in response. That something may be limited to Sanders’ primary campaign for now, but it can be the basis of protest, activism and independent politics in the future, both short term and long term.
If Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party represent the absence of hope, the left can set its sights on putting forward a hopeful vision, based on left wing politics and principles – and on the struggles from below to win real change.

Hillary thinks America’s great. Why don’t you?

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast, <a href="http://www.SocialistWorker.org">SocialistWorker.org</a>’s Elizabeth Schulte remembers the impact on how Americans thought about politics and government.
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A family standing on a rooftop, holding a sign pleading “HELP US”. The Superdome packed with tens of thousands of tired, hungry, thirsty people. Others trapped on expressways, as the floodwaters swirled below, sometimes carrying dead bodies with the current.
Along with these images of misery and desperation during the Hurricane Katrina disaster 10 years ago, there were other indelible pictures: troops atop tanks, their rifles trained on Katrina victims. President George W. Bush peering down at New Orleans through a window during Air Force One’s “flyover”. The president congratulating Michael Brown, the incompetent head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA): “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”.
Poverty, racism and the federal government’s cruel disregard for human life were exposed for the world to see. The dark underbelly of the United States – the richest nation in the history of the world, the country that claimed to be bringing “democracy” and peace to Iraq and the Middle East – was revealed.
It became known as the “Katrina moment” – when the mask was ripped off American society and its true face revealed.
Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast on 29 August 2005, wreaking destruction from central Florida to Texas. The greatest number of deaths was in New Orleans, where the levees broke, and 80 percent of the city was flooded.
But this level of destruction wasn’t only – or even mainly – the result of the power of the storm itself. The worst aspects of the Katrina were manmade.
For starters, the federal government failed New Orleans before the storm even hit. New Orleans had been evacuated for Hurricane Ivan the previous year. It was also known well before Katrina that the city’s levee system wouldn’t survive a more severe storm. The obvious priority in any competent, rational system would have been to prepare for the inevitable, with vast new spending on infrastructure.
Nothing happened. As left wing author Mike Davis pointed out in a 2005 interview with Socialist Worker:
“Despite the unparalleled foreknowledge that this was the single biggest disaster scenario and should have been the absolute priority of the so-called Department of Homeland Security, the Republicans – with little Democratic opposition – have cut back spending on levee improvement in New Orleans designed to help protect the city from a storm surge event.
“At the very same time, of course, they were spending money to fortify the border with Mexico. So you had this obscenity of undersized and sinking levees in New Orleans, and this gigantic triple wall between San Diego and Tijuana. I’m sure there are a lot of folks in New Orleans who wish they had had a wall that big.”
Why did no government entity – city, state or federal – prepare for a nightmare that was entirely predictable? The reasons for the neglect of New Orleans were simple: race and class.
New Orleans was and is one of the most famous cities in the world and a magnet for tourism. But before Katrina and the massive dislocation of its population that followed, it was also one of the poorest cities in the US, with a population that was 67 percent African American. The Lower Ninth Ward, one of the hardest-hit areas of the city, was 99 percent Black, with 36 percent of residents living under the poverty line.
So the evacuation “plan”, as Katrina bore down on the Gulf Coast, was to tell people to leave the city. Residents who didn’t have a car – and, of course, many of the poor did not – or were too ill to leave, were told to go to the giant indoor sports stadium, the Superdome.
Untold numbers of people didn’t make it out or downtown, and so when the levees were breached, and water poured into large parts of the city, they were stranded in their homes or on freeway overpasses, trying to escape the rising waters, filled with filth and debris from the storm, including corpses.
Evacuees who did reach the Superdome had to wait in lines for hours before entering – so they could be searched. The supposed refuge from the storm soon became a place of desperation. There was no food or water, and temperatures in the electricity-less stadium rose above 35 degrees.
There wasn’t enough government assistance to provide for the sick and the dying – but when it came to protecting private property, it was all hands on deck. Quickly, stories of criminals on the rampage became the news of the day – in order to rationalise the savage treatment of African Americans by law enforcement.
Like any war zone, hired mercenaries stalked New Orleans after the storm. As independent journalist Jeremy Scahill reported at the time, operatives of the Blackwater security company were hired to be an occupying force, just as they were in Iraq. Heavily armed soldiers of this private army patrolled the streets of New Orleans, with automatic weapons at the ready.
There was another side to Katrina, one that almost never made the mainstream news, but was confined to alternative media like Socialist Worker.
Ordinary people filled in where the government refused to, as community groups and individuals organised their own relief system. Malik Rahim, a former member of the Black Panther Party, helped organise the Common Ground Collective to aid people after the storm.
As he and others tried to provide food and water to those who needed it, they faced systematic harassment from law enforcement.
Across the Gulf Coast region, an estimated 2,000 people were killed as a result of Katrina, and at least half a million were displaced. Evacuees were put on buses and planes to places as far away as Utah, often not knowing where they were headed, much less what they would find when they got there. With no money, no place to live, no family or friends, the poor and working class of New Orleans were scattered to the four winds to fend for themselves.
The president’s mother, Barbara Bush, after touring a Houston relocation site, said it was all working out for the best, though. “[S]o many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway”, she told a reporter. “So this is working very well for them.”
Tonda Taylor, who evacuated New Orleans to Austin, Texas, had a different reaction. Talking to Socialist Worker in 2005, she described digging through the trash at the airport to find food. At one point, she saw a mother who had tied her dead infant’s body to a pole – to keep animals from eating it.
“I served my country for six years”, said Taylor, who was in the Army. “I was there, putting my life on the line for six years. And in turn, my country turned its back on me. And my husband served. I don’t understand – how can you do this to your own people.”
Similar questions were on the lips of tens of thousands of people at the time: how is it that a country with this much wealth and power, that can send planes to bomb Iraq at the drop of a hat, can’t send food and water to New Orleans?
By late summer in 2005, growing questioning of the war, especially after the scale of Iraqi resistance to the occupation was revealed, began to chip away at the Bush administration’s armour. The wider public had begun to doubt that the Bush administration was telling the truth about the alleged connection between 9/11 and Iraq.
Then Katrina hit, and the simmering discontent about the war was magnified by the Bush administration’s callous response and utter contempt for poor and working-class Blacks on the flooded streets of New Orleans.
The warped priorities of the US government were revealed, and even the most loyal voices of the media establishment were driven to anger.
Warped priorities were revealed again – though unfortunately with less attention from the corporate media – when the displacement and misery of Black New Orleans became an excuse for redevelopment and profit. New Orleans was turned into a laboratory for the privatisation and destruction of public services – starting with the school system.
Ten years after then-governor Kathleen Blanco seized what she called “the opportunity of a lifetime” and handed the New Orleans public education system over to charter school operators, poor students bear the brunt of this turnaround. Untold numbers were disappeared from the school system as a result of dislocation or simply “skimmed out” by the new school bosses.
But this hasn’t stopped proponents of privatisation from applauding the New Orleans “success” story. In 2010, Barack Obama’s education secretary Arne Duncan called Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans”. He wasn’t topped for another five years, when a Chicago Tribune editorial board member, Kristen McQueary, insisted that “Hurricane Katrina gave a great American city a rebirth” – and wished a similar disaster on her hometown.
There are no words to properly respond to obscenities like these.
Since Katrina, other events have helped expose the racism and inequality at the heart of US society – and also the possibility of resistance to it.
Now – after the dashed hopes that a Black president elected seven years ago might change the status quo for Black America – there is a new movement of people who are determined to make Black lives matter.
Remembering the horror of what happened in New Orleans – but also the outrage that made Katrina into a “Katrina moment” for American politics – can be another part of that struggle.
[This article was first published at <a href="http://www.SocialistWorker.org">SocialistWorker.org</a>.]

Is Sanders spoiling the party?

Hillary thinks America’s great. Why don’t you?

The legacy of Hurricane Katrina

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