Two parties, same bosses

Dime's worth of difference: Beyond the lesser of two evils

By Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
Canada: AK Press, 2004, 289 pages, $15.95.

By Mark Yu

Many progressives in the United States, including some who jumped onto the "Anybody But Bush" bandwagon during the recent election, realize that the Democratic Party does not stand for the cause of peace, jobs, and justice. Often, however, this understanding is accompanied by a faint hope that, at some grave and climactic moment, the Democratic Party leadership will discover its long lost "backbone" and finally resist the steady rightward march in American politics.

If only the Democrats would return to their alleged historical roots and champion the class interests of workers and oppressed people, who they supposedly represent, there would no longer be any problems with the two-party system. Ralph Nader and all of his awful, uncompromising supporters would at last be pulled into the Big Blue Tent or driven into retirement. This argument, put forth by liberal critics of the Democratic Party, receives a powerful rebuttal in the book Dime's Worth of Difference. Compiled by Counterpunch editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, the collection of essays offers a different explanation for the apparent sheeplike behavior of the Democrats.

Focused primarily on the last decade and a half, through the Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations, the book details the close relationship between each of the two reigning political parties and the upper echelons of US monopoly capitalism. It describes the bipartisan character of the ongoing war on poor people, women, oppressed nationalities, and the environment, which accelerates regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican sits in the White House. The real problem with the Democratic Party is not that it lacks "backbone," but that the interests of its corporate-owned leaders, who make up the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), are fundamentally opposed to any progressive agenda. To say that Democrats have "failed" is to misinterpret their role in the American political system. The party has been wildly successful at demobilizing and derailing popular movements, as well as implementing a program written by the Wall Street puppetmasters in charge.

The DLC, as we learn in JoAnn Wypijewski's essay "The Instructive History of Jackson's Rainbow," emerged formally in 1985 as a reaction against the grassroots activism unleashed by the first of Jesse Jackson's two campaigns to win the Democratic presidential nomination. Unlike the recent Howard Dean challenge, which revolved almost solely around its ability to raise funds outside the control of the Democratic National Committee and its boss Terry McAuliffe, the Jackson insurgency was waged on both structural and ideological grounds.

Jackson's Rainbow Coalition brought together veteran social-movement organizers with new activists and found a broad audience for its left-leaning platform. Even more importantly, it introduced issues into mainstream American politics that were previously considered outside the parameters of acceptable discourse, such as environmental racism, "no first use" of nuclear weapons, opposition to South African apartheid, US intervention in Central America and Africa, and the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Despite the failure of the '84 and '88 Jackson campaigns to produce a permanent mass organization independent of the two-party system (it remains to be debated whether this was ever an option), the mere possibility they raised of a progressive revolt within the Democratic ranks encouraged reactionary elements in the party to mobilize. The result was the DLC, an organization of "backlash Democrats" formed to stifle any future insurgent campaigns and to embody, in the blunt words of Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., the "Democratic Legacy of the Confederacy." These are critical words to remember next time it's argued that the Republican Party alone represents the remnants of US white supremacy. After DLC Democrats restructured party rules to their liking, they began doing "outreach." Wypijewski explains:

"Al From, intellectual architect of the Democratic Leadership Council, paid a visit [in the spring of '89] to Governor Bill Clinton in Little Rock, suggesting that the DLC could be a vehicle for his ambitions and laying the ground for the policy, personnel and financial relationships that would become the infrastructure of Clinton's 1992 campaign."

In 1988, the DLC had tried and failed to win the presidential nomination for its favored candidate, none other than Al Gore. The Clinton/Gore administration was a direct offspring of the DLC's efforts to reassert the domination of rich white men in the Democratic Party, who were deeply disturbed by the Jackson campaigns. Financed by a tremendous stream of corporate money, the DLC generals in the party would soon aim their guns directly at the Rainbow base. (It should be noted that Kerry and Edwards were both members and preferred candidates of the DLC in the past election.)

In 1996, Clinton, strongly encouraged by the populist-imposter Gore, signed a Republican bill that slashed funding for the welfare system and subsequently battered the livelihoods of the most poverty-stricken stratum in American society. In their essay "War on the Poor," Cockburn and St. Clair cite an Urban Institute study that found that 2.6 million people, almost half of them children, would be pushed into poverty and 11 million would suffer declines in their income as a result of "welfare reform." Clinton and Gore, aware of the 1996 study because it had been commissioned by the White House, chose to carry on. Under the measure, welfare recipients in many states were required to take public jobs for their benefits, pushing out municipal workers, crippling unions, and forcing down the wages of the working poor. While many are familiar with this story, fewer people know that the Clinton administration was preparing to repeat the welfare debacle on the Social Security program.

In his contribution, "How Monica Lewinsky Saved Social Security," Robin Blackburn, an author of a book on pensions, describes how Clinton created a secret White House team to prepare for the privatization of Social Security and the handover of its enormous, mouth-watering funds to the financial barons of the mutual funds industry. Led by Gene Sperling, head of the Council of Economic Advisors, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who as chief economist at the World Bank authored the infamous memo extolling the economic logic of dumping toxic waste on poor nations, the team mapped out a plan. The group considered the establishment of individual private accounts, the con job currently being pushed by the Bush gang. The team got as far as to determine "how many digits an ID number would have to be for each [private] fund and how many key strokes would therefore be required to enter all of the ID numbers each year."

Fortunately, for the crown jewel of the New Deal and the future generations of retirees who will depend on it for a basic income, the Monica Lewinsky scandal arrived just in time. The gathering momentum of the privatization scheme, more appropriately named the "give-money-to-Wall-Street" scheme, was quickly dissipated. Under pressure to protect his popularity and reluctant to carry out anything too risky, Clinton did a 180 degree turn, transformed overnight into a defender of Social Security. Disaster was averted.

Each of twenty other essays in Dime's Worth of Difference deal with equally important and relevant topics. These include the Democratic Party's abandonment of women's issues beyond a token defense of Roe v. Wade (which it is moving away from today), the relentless expansion of the US prison system and its grossly disproportionate impact on African Americans, the intimate ties between corporate donors and prominent Democratic and Republican leaders, the spread of US hegemony under the cover of the bipartisan "War on Drugs," and much more. Though a book like this tends to inspire cynicism rather than idealism, a hard look at the ugly realities of the American political system is not at all a bad thing.

Source: Left Hook