The Wild Reed: Voices on the Issues That Really Matter

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) begins today in Chicago amidst protests against the unconditional supplying of military aid to Israel by the current Biden/Harris administration and a potential Harris/Walz administration.

Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel, the U.S. has given the far right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu over $20 billion dollars in unconditional military aid, including direct arms sales. These weapons are U.S.-made. Also, most of the financial military aid is used by Israel to purchase additional U.S.-made weaponry. Not surprisingly, profits are soaring for U.S. “defense” contractors and weapons manufacturers, in particular RTX Corporation, formerly Raytheon Technologies. For its part, the Israeli government is using these U.S.-made weapons in its ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza, a war that has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and which is viewed by many as a “genocidal project.”

I briefly thought about traveling to Chicago with a contingent of local justice and peace activites to participate in the DNC protests but ultimately chose not to. Although I’ll watch some news so as to follow the protests, I doubt I’ll follow the actual convention, just as I didn’t tune-in to any great extent to the Republican National Convention back in July. I dare say I’ll check Democracy Now!’s coverage of the convention, and maybe Rising’s, but I’ll be passing on the corporate mainstream media’s coverage. Why? Because corporate media outlets will be taking their cues from the Democratic Party establishment and focusing on what the late, great historian Howard Zinn once referred to as “election madness,” complete this time around with, in Paul Street words, “big notes of spurious identitarian (race, gender, and age) harmony.”

What we won’t hear from the heavily scripted speakers on the DNC stage, and thus from corporate media, is anything about radical system change, anything about the corporate capture of our democracy, anything about the climate emergency before us. This is both tragic and frustrating, as these deeper realties are what most need to be named and seriously and meaningfully addressed.

Sharing voices

So what I’ve decided to do during this week of the DNC is to share voices that do name and address the issues that really matter. In this sharing there will be no “vibe politics” at the expense of “policy politics,” no rhapsodizing over certain political personalities, no emphasis on identity politics at the expense of the broader issues of classism and economic justice. And most importantly, there’ll be no pandering to working Americans with mere platitudes, progressive buzzwords, and economic plans that fail to acknowledge and challenge both the reality that corporate money has, for all intents and purposes, replaced the vote of citizens and thus their voice in congress, and that a morally bankrupt neoliberal establishment (which has coronated one of its own) continues to pave the way for authoritarianism and fascism.

After all, when the machinary of government (regardless of whether this government is Republican- or Democratic-led) has been seized by a corporate cabal committed to empire and war-profiteering for its own enrichment and empowerment at the expense of the rest of the citizenry, one inevitable consequence is, in the words of author and former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson (left), “large groups of desperate people.” Such groups, says Williamson “have always been and should always be considered a national security risk, a petri dish full of citizens dangerously vulnerable to ideological capture by genuinely psychotic forces.”

“No one should be that shocked by the emergence of Donald Trump in 2016,” continues Williamsom, “and no one should be naïve about the danger that is still lurking [now and moving forward] if the Democrats don’t fundamentally alter the patterns of economic injustice that still plague our society. And incremental change does not represent a fundamental alteration.”

Will presidential nominee Kamala Harris and the Democratic establishment that selected her move beyond “incremental change” and commit instead to “fundamentally alter[ing] the patterns of economic injustice”? I sure do hope so, but at the same time I and many others have serious questions and doubts – none of which I sense will be acknowledged or discussed at the DNC. All the more reason, then, to lift up voices that do talk about the need for fundamental economic change and the radical (in the truest and best sense of the word*) transformation of our political system.

The Wild Reed

Monday, August 19, 2024

Voices on the Issues That Really Matter

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