A coalition of leftist groups is “secretly” discussing how to mobilize and prepare for what it envisions as a “political apocalypse” full of violence and chaos if Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden fails to win a landslide victory on November 3, the Daily Beast reported Monday.
“Occupy shit, hold space, and shut things down, not just on Election Day but for weeks,” an unnamed source said in describing the coalition’s effort, dubbed the “Democracy Defense Nerve Center.”
The leftist group, convened by the relatively secret Fight Back Table (FBT), reportedly discussed their plans in secret during a Zoom virtual meeting.
Referring to the meeting, the Daily Beast reported :
Over the course of two hours, participants broached the question of what the progressive political ecosystem can functionally do in a series of election scenarios. They began charting out what it would take to stand up a multi-state communications arm to fight disinformation, a training program for nonviolent civil disobedience, and the underpinnings of what one official described as “mass public unrest.”
An unnamed aide to the Biden campaign told the Daily Beast it is “aware of the concerns expressed by many of these [leftist] groups” that are “actively planning for all contingencies and scenarios.”
Before officials get a chance to tally the votes, the FBT alliance is pushing the Democrat assumption that the election will be illegitimate absent a huge Biden victory.
The leftist coalition is explicitly making preparations to deal with a situation where the “November election ends without a clear outcome or with a Joe Biden win that Donald Trump refuses to recognize,” the Daily Beast noted.
“Inside the coalition, there is [a] dispute over whether Biden should even concede if he wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College,” the news outlet acknowledged.
In that event, the coalition may take a page from the election “war games ” report by the vehemently anti-Trump Transition Integrity Project (TIP), which urges Biden to push Western states, namely California and Oregon, “to secede from the Union” unless their potential demands for reforms — abolishing the Electoral college, dividing California into five states, and statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C. — are met, the Daily Beast indicated.
Secession precipitated the U.S. civil war.
“It’s the hardest scenario,” an unnamed source participating in the FBT discussions said, referring to the possibility of an Electoral College-popular vote split.
“I think both sides are going to fight this till the very end,” the source added.
The coalition is making its post-election plans around the 22-page TIP report, titled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition.”
Any other scenario, except a Biden landslide, will spark “catastrophe,” including “violence in the streets and a constitutional impasse,” Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor and co-founder of TIP, wrote in a September 3 editorial for the Washington Post summarizing the report.
Democrats are baselessly promoting the notion that President Donald Trump will refuse to leave office if he loses, calling on their supporters to prepare to mobilize in case that happens.
“The
multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, sanctioned with the nearly
unanimous support of Congress in late March, produced massive growth in the
wealth of the oligarchy. On Tuesday, Forbes published its
latest update on the wealth of American billionaires, reporting that the wealth
of the richest 400 people has reached a record $3.2 trillion, up $240 billion
from a year ago.”
“A massive diversion of social resources away from the
bailout of the rich and the financing of militarism and war is required. The
wealth of the oligarchs must be seized, and the gigantic corporations and banks
turned into public utilities to create the conditions for a globally
coordinated program to save lives.”
The Civil War Election
9 September 2020
The US
presidential election is now eight weeks away. The campaign between Trump and
Biden is pitting an administration that is making an increasingly open appeal
to violence and police state repression against a Democratic Party campaign
that, as always, offers no genuine alternative to the drive toward
authoritarianism and war.
The Trump
administration is utilizing the election campaign in an attempt to build up a
right-wing, fascistic movement on a ferociously antisocialist basis. Trump has
followed up his praise of Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two protesters and
injured a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin last month, with calls for vengeance
directed against opponents of police violence.
At his press
conference on Monday, the president hailed the killing of protester Michael
Reinoehl by US Marshals last week. “If somebody is breaking the law, there has
got to be a form of retribution,” Trump declared, condoning extrajudicial
reprisals from his supporters. The same day, he retweeted a statement from
right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza declaring that political unrest would
lead to the “rise of citizen militias around the country”—that is, fascistic
vigilante organizations like Patriot Prayer, responsible for terrorizing
protesters in Portland, Oregon.
As noted,
Trump is not running for president; he is running for Führer. His campaign
seems to be modeled on Hitler’s bid for German chancellor in 1932. Using
language that is unprecedented in American history, Trump is seeking to create
conditions, regardless of the outcome on November 3, in which he will emerge as
the leader of an extra-constitutional, right-wing movement.
There is no
doubt that if Trump wins, he will immediately escalate the suppression of
democratic rights and implementation of police state forms of rule.
Under these
conditions, the argument of the Democratic Party is that all opposition to
Trump must be directed behind the election of Biden. For workers to allow their
struggles to be subordinated to the electoral considerations of the Democratic
Party, however, would be a fatal political error.
Trump did
not emerge from nowhere. He expresses in the most unvarnished form the
essentially fascistic, antidemocratic impulse of the American ruling class as a
whole. That Trump is not some sort of demon unleashed from hell is revealed in
the fact that the growth of authoritarianism and fascism is a universal
phenomenon, from Brazil and India to France and Germany.
The working
class must direct its opposition to the underlying disease of which Trump is an
expression. What are the conditions that are fueling this crisis?
First, the
coronavirus pandemic has exposed the catastrophic state to which capitalism has
driven society. It is an extreme expression and product of the subordination of
everything to the profit interests of the corporate and financial oligarchy.
The ruling
class has effectively adopted a policy of “herd immunity,” allowing the virus
to spread without restraint. The back-to-work campaign, spearheaded by Trump
but implemented by both the Democrats and Republicans, has already led to an
enormous surge in the death toll, which is now approaching 200,000 people. The
University of Washington now estimates that the number of deaths by the end of
the year could rise to above 400,000.
Second,
alongside the health impact of the pandemic is a deepening social and economic
crisis for millions of people. Despite the back-to-work campaign, there are more
than 11 million fewer jobs now than before the pandemic hit. It is six weeks
since Congress allowed federal unemployment benefits to expire, throwing
millions into poverty. The number of Americans facing hunger this year is
projected to increase by 45 percent, to more than 50 million.
The
multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, sanctioned with the nearly
unanimous support of Congress in late March, produced massive growth in the
wealth of the oligarchy. On Tuesday, Forbes published its
latest update on the wealth of American billionaires, reporting that the wealth
of the richest 400 people has reached a record $3.2 trillion, up $240 billion
from a year ago.
Third, the
deepening economic, social and political crisis increases the danger that the
ruling class will see war abroad as a means of resolving its problems at home.
Trump is making aggressive moves in the South China Sea as part of its
offensive against China, while the Democrats, if they come to power, are
committed to an intensification of the conflict with Russia and war in the
Middle East.
To downplay,
let alone deny, the fact that the Trump presidency is metastasizing rapidly
into a right-wing authoritarian regime, with distinctly fascist
characteristics, is to close one’s eyes to political reality. The old refrain,
“It can’t happen here”—i.e., that American democracy is eternally immune from
the cancer of fascism—is hopelessly out of date. The very fact that a thug like
Trump ascended to the White House testifies to the terminal crisis of the
existing political system.
These
processes have only intensified over the past year, vastly accelerated by the
coronavirus pandemic. Trump’s fascistic rhetoric is an attempt to beat back a
growing social movement of the working class against the policies of the
corporate and financial oligarchy.
BLOG EDITOR: THERE IS A REASON WHY WALL STREET AND THE
BANKSTERS STAND BEHIND BIDEN AND KAMALA HARRIS!
THEIR RECORD OF PROTECTING AND BAILING OUT BANKSTERS IS DOCUMENTED.
The
Democratic Party, however, represents another faction of the same oligarchy. Its appeal is to
dominant factions of the military and the intelligence agencies as the arbiters
of political power to whom it will turn if Trump refuses to leave office. Its
main aim is to suppress any form of social opposition that threatens the
interests of the ruling elite.
Over the
past week, Biden has denounced protests over police violence, attacked
socialism, and made clear that he will run his campaign on the most right-wing
basis possible. In the final stages of the election, the Democrats are
attempting to revive their anti-Russia campaign to ever more explicitly target
left-wing opposition within the United States as the work of “foreign
adversaries.”
Biden
presents himself as the “man in the middle” under conditions of a developing
civil war situation. His campaign offers nothing to address the social
catastrophe confronting masses of people. The Democrats’ open embrace of
militarist violence—welcoming as part of their “coalition” the leading
architects of the Iraq war—even allows the fascistic Trump to posture as an
opponent of the “military-industrial complex.”
BLOG EDITOR: THE BIGGEST WAR PROFITEER IN U.S.
HISTORY IS SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN, ALSO AGENT FOR RED CHINA. SHE HAS ENDORSED BIDEN
WHOLEHEARTEDLY.
The
Democrats are above all opposed to raising any issues that undermine the
economic and financial interests of the ruling elite. An indication of the
social policies that a Biden campaign would pursue if in office was given in an
article published in the Washington Post on Monday.
Referring to the economic proposals released by the Biden campaign—consisting
of milquetoast reforms that were the product of discussions with the
“Sanders-Warren” wing of the party—the Post wrote:
But in private calls with Wall Street leaders, the Biden
campaign made it clear those proposals would not be central to Biden’s agenda.
“They basically said, ‘Listen, this is just an exercise to keep the Warren
people happy, and don’t read too much into it,’” said one investment banker,
referring to liberal supporters of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-mass.). The banker,
who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks, said that
message was conveyed on multiple calls.
The
Democratic Party, for all its denunciations of Trump, makes no mention of the
essentially fascistic character of the policies he is pursuing. It should be
recalled that even though Trump lost the last election by three million votes,
the immediate response of the Democratic Party was to offer its collaboration.
The election, Obama said, was an “intramural scrimmage” between two sides of
the same team.
If the
Democrats were to lose on November 3, or even if they were to win, the response
would be no different. They would immediately offer an olive branch to Trump
and the Republican Party.
The ability
of Trump to attract and maintain a following is largely a product of the
inability of the Democrats to offer anything to address the social crisis. In
the end, the actual differences are marginal, focused above all on foreign
policy. The fact that the contest is even close, under conditions of mass death
and social devastation, is an indictment of the Democratic Party. It is
incapable of making a popular appeal precisely because of the class interests
that it represents.
The strategy
of the working class cannot be guided by the arithmetic of an election, but the
logic of the class struggle.
This is
combined with the continued protests over police violence and racism, sparked
in late May by the murder of George Floyd. While fueled by the unending
epidemic of police violence, the protests have given expression to deep social
anger and a desire among millions of workers and youth to fight back.
The
struggles of different sections of the working class must be organized and
united through the formation of independent factory, workplace and neighborhood
safety committees. The fight of teachers against the back-to-school campaign
must be connected with the fight of students against the reopening of the
universities, the fight of workers against the horrific conditions in the
plants, the fight of the unemployed against social devastation, and the fight
of the youth against police violence.
At issue in
every struggle is the question of political power: What class rules and in
whose interests. The only solution to the crisis is one that is directed
against the capitalist system. A massive diversion of social resources away
from the bailout of the rich and the financing of militarism and war is
required. The wealth of the oligarchs must be seized, and the gigantic
corporations and banks turned into public utilities to create the conditions
for a globally coordinated program to save lives.
The fight
against the pandemic is not primarily a medical question. As with every great
problem confronting the working class—social inequality and poverty, war,
environmental degradation and dictatorship—it is a political and revolutionary
question, which raises the need for the working class to take power in its own
hands, overthrow capitalism, and restructure all of society on the basis of
social need.
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