The Democratic Party Is Telling You to Throw Yourself Into the 2018 Elections If You Really Want to Stop Trump.

Before You Do, Check Out How That Worked Out Last Time Around.

January 4, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

George W. Bush began his second term as president in 2004. In 2006, as Congressional mid-term elections loomed, millions of people rightly saw the danger presented by the administration of Bush and his partner in crime, Vice President Dick Cheney, and wanted it removed from office.

Among Bush’s crimes:

• He seized upon the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to institute the PATRIOT ACT. This law gave extraordinary powers of spying and repression to government agents charged with opposing “terrorism.” It opened the floodgates for virtually unlimited monitoring of electronic communication. It allowed for indefinite detention of immigrants the government accused of terrorism.
• Bush invented a new legal status of “enemy combatant,” outside the reach of the regular legal system. As one of his legal advisors put it, this allowed the U.S. to detain people not because they were criminals, but because they were said to be the “enemy.” Bush’s administration used and oversaw torture against many of the people it labeled “enemy combatants.”
• Bush set up a special program, National Security Entry-Exits System (NSEERS) to fingerprint, interrogate, photograph, and register as “terrorist suspects” males over 16 from 25 countries, all but one of which have Islam as the dominant religion. About 140,000 people were placed in NSEERS, and over 13,000 of them were put in deportation proceedings. None of them was charged with a criminal offense.
• Bush then moved to launch a massive and utterly unjust war against Iraq which resulted in the deaths of over a million people. This war has indirectly led to horrendous suffering throughout the Middle East, and actually further propelled the growth of Islamic fundamentalist jihadism.
• Bush callously left people in New Orleans, a majority of them Black, to suffer from Hurricane Katrina. Over 1,800 men, women and children died needlessly—abandoned in a devastated, flooded city and region, left for days without food, water, or medical supplies while the world watched in horror.
• Bush promoted Christian fascism and hammered at the boundaries between church and state. All that and more.

Millions of people were sickened and angry at this. They were told to vote for the Democrats as the way to stop all these horrors, and they did.

So what happened?

The weekend after the Democrats took back Congress, Nancy Pelosi, then the Speaker of the House, went on TV and ruled out impeaching Bush, saying it was “off the table.”

Bush escalated the war in Iraq, and the Democrats went along. They had a majority in the House of Representatives, and they assisted Bush & Co. in normalizing the “enemy combatant” status. Congress passed and Bush signed the “Military Commissions Act,” which essentially embedded “enemy combatant” status in law, and allowed imprisonment in the U.S. torture chamber of Guantánamo to continue, without the right to habeas corpus.

With a majority in Congress, the Democrats did nothing about torture, Guantánamo, the meaningful rebuilding of New Orleans, the steady assault on the barrier between church and state launched by Christian fascists associated with or in the Republican Party, or the continuation of virtually all of the PATRIOT Act, in a slightly modified form.

Then Obama came in. Deportations soared to all-time highs. Detention centers for infants and children were authorized. Assassination by drone became government policy. The U.S. military carried out occupations and bombings in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, the Sudan, and other countries. Relentless attacks eroding women’s right to abortion went unopposed by the Democrats. Government spying powers increased under Obama—in his final days in office he signed an executive order handing the Trump/Pence regime expanded powers to collect massive information with little oversight.

And why? Because, as Obama said after Trump was elected, the Democrats and Republicans are all on the same team. Their uppermost concern is the stability and survival of that team and the system it defends. They will do all they can to prevent and contain any turmoil, at most utilizing it for their narrow advantage in disputes with each other ... unless there is upheaval from below that they can not contain and must maneuver some cosmetic changes, in some fashion ... in order to “preserve the team.”

In 2006, the Democrats thought they could best advance their interests by further silencing the masses they had corralled into the electoral cattle pen, even though this meant effectively forcing those masses to go along with the very horrors they wanted to end by voting Democrat. The consequences of masses of people not mounting meaningful opposition outside the electoral framework were catastrophic for humanity, and for the planet.

In 2018, a fascist regime is rapidly consolidating power. The consequences of containing opposition to this within an electoral framework because of the illusory wisp that the Democrats will change things if they “control Congress” will bring incalculable and lasting damage to all humanity and the earth we share.

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