GUILFORD-This last election proves once again that the Democratic Party is like Lucy with the football - and we are Charlie Brown.
The Kamala Harris we saw in the first week of her campaign, who seemed like a real human being, a breath of fresh air after all the darkness and rage and fear coming from Trump, was quickly put back under wraps by the party handlers and sages.
She had to appeal to white wealthy Republicans, of course, not youth agonizing over Gaza or poor people. A Palestinian American, an official delegate, could not even address the Democratic National Convention for five minutes?
Asheville, North Carolina, lay devastated from a climate-change-supercharged hurricane, and she could not bring herself to say the word "climate" even once?
And they wonder why so many young and poor people sat this one out.
No, the Democratic Party will not save us - ever. And it is long time we stop putting time and energy as though they will be different next time.
The U.S. empire has ruled unchecked through each successive presidency: Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden. Really, for the people under the bombs, what changed? This election would not have changed that, not more than a few percentage points one way or the other.
Had Harris won, she may well have been more likely to start World War III (if Biden has not already started it). Trump will just give everything away to Putin. Who knows?
Even more serious than this election is the total failure of the just-concluded 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 29) climate negotiations. COP 28 and COP 29 were a total, abject farce, a fossil fuel lobbyist's feast. Trump will pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords, but honestly, Paris is dead in the water anyway.
Harris would just have continued to wring her hands and tweak around the edges. The Earth is speeding toward a climate hell, and no one is willing or able to take on capital and its need for constant expansion. The Democratic Party is just the other wing of the party of big capital. They will never, ever rein in their true masters.
May this election be a wakeup call to us: to face soberly that we are on our own. Truly, we see more clearly than ever that we face only two possibilities: an ecological socialism, or extinction. "Socialism or barbarism," as the great German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg said. It is still more than ever true.
They accuse us all of being "marxists." Let's scare the hell out of them and find out what that means.
Bert Picard
Guilford
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