Da’Monte Trevino of Los Angeles waves the American flag as people celebrate at Pershing Square the victory of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in Los Angeles on Saturday, November 7, 2020. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/ SCNG)
Freedom Rider: The Real Resistance Begins
Angela Davis speaks in Detroit Oct. 24, 2012.
Editor: In 2012, as the re-election of the nation’s first Black President Barack Obama was in the works, Professor Angela Davis spoke at a mass rally in Detroit Oct. 24. She supported Obama’s re-election, but cautioned that people must continue the battle in the streets to achieve real victory.
“People were waiting for Obama to emerge as new FDR,” she said. “But was it really FDR who gave us on his own accord unemployment insurance and social security? No, it was the masses of the people in the street, struggles led by communists in the 1930’s, sit-down strikes, marches all over the country, unemployed councils, eviction defense committees. . . .We will never elect a president who will lead us to the promised land. We have to take it on ourselves. As the great Black poet June Jordan said, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for.” VOD’s story on her talk is linked below this article.
Freedom Rider: The Real Resistance Begins
Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Margaret Kimberley
11 Nov 2020
“Kamala Auntie” and Joe from Scranton will do as little as possible so that “nothing will fundamentally change” that would halt endless wars and the Race to the Bottom.
When Pennsylvania announced that Joe Biden won in that state it became clear that he had enough Electoral College votes to become the de facto president elect. When the news became public, millions of people responded with spontaneous celebrations. There was quite literally dancing in the streets in many cities across the country. The public reaction was unprecedented in its scope and demonstrated the depth of antipathy towards Donald Trump, who is one of the most hated presidents in modern history.
Vice-Pres. Elect Kamala Harris and Pres. Elect Joe Biden.
The vagaries of that same Electoral College that put Biden over the top brought Trump into office in 2016 even though he lost the popular vote. The trauma of his victory, one we were told would never happen, was deep and was constantly aggravated by Trump’s own words and deeds.
The celebrations were difficult for those on the left. Obviously there was no feeling of connection for the awful team of Joe Biden, a right wing Democrat who once said he didn’t want his kids to “grow up in a racial jungle,” or Kamala Harris, the California prison matron who committed herself to locking up as many people as she possibly could.
“Dancing in the streets.”
The level of exaltation was reminiscent of the Barack Obama victory in 2008, when doubters were told not to bring skunks to the party. After the Trump experience, the imperative to support the new neo-liberal, imperialist administration will be even worse. Kamala Harris in particular is lionized as the first non-white vice president and the first female, too. The Democratic Party’s propagandists have gone into overdrive as they milk her ascent for all that it is worth.
U.S. Rep. James Clyburn listens as Pres. Elect Joe Biden speaks.
Biden and Harris are not the only people who must be resisted. The black political class, the misleaders, are being credited as “king makers” who brought victory to the entire race. Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina is one such individual, who did the dirty deed of deep-sixing Bernie Sanders and endorsing Biden, just as the party establishment wanted him to do. Clyburn acted on orders from the top and as such is a lackey, and not a king maker of any sort.
Clyburn isn’t the only misleader getting questionable praise. The closeness of the race in Georgia has burnished Stacey Abram’s credentials too. Even Biden’s small lead in Georgia is significant in this previously red state and Abrams is lauded for her work getting out the vote. The achievement is real, but it is not a good thing when we are given new political stars to adore and to worship. Abrams has her own presidential ambitions and invitations to globalist meetings such as the Bilderberg Group and the Council on Foreign Relations are a sign that her interests are not ours.
Clyburn is a lackey and not a king maker of any sort: COINTELPRO doesn’t figure into the Clyburn version of history.
Black Lives Matter protesters: “Defund the Police.”
None of these people pushed into prominence are working on behalf of black people. Clyburn is one of the leading recipients of Big Pharma campaign contributions and now says that the loss of Democratic House seats should be blamed on progressives.
“John [Lewis] and I sat on the House floor and talked about that ‘defund the police slogan’ and both of us concluded that it had the possibilities of doing to the Black Lives Matter movement and current movements across the country what ‘Burn Baby Burn ’ did to us in the 1960s. We lost the movement over that slogan. A lot of people don’t realize.”
Apparently COINTELPRO and the state’s well documented destruction of the movement doesn’t figure into the Clyburn version of history.
There was a half-hearted fake resistance movement after Donald Trump was elected in 2016. They said nothing when Democrats went along with Trump’s Space Force and other defense spending programs, but they did wear pink pussy hats. In short, they resisted very little.
Now is the time for serious push back against the duopoly, and that means Biden and Harris. Biden is already talking about “healing” the country but he is neither a physician nor a clergyman. No one voted for him to heal anything. He is just repeating what he told rich donors: “Nothing will fundamentally change.”
Trump is an outlier as a persona, but not as a president
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures and declares “You’re fired!” at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, June 17, 2015. REUTERS/Dominick Reuter
“Kamala Auntie” and Joe from Scranton will do as little as possible. That is their goal after all, to fool people into thinking that there will be differences.
Trump is an outlier as a persona but not as a president. Biden and Harris will bring comfort to nerves frayed by four years of crazy tweeting and epic incompetence. It is their job to do what their voters want. Millions of people took part who ordinarily do not. They stood in long lines at polling places because they want change and not because they are enamored of Kamala Harris’s choice of suit color.
Of course, when Trump truly differed with the “resistance” by imposing sanctions that deprive people of medicine in Venezuela and Iran and Syria and Cuba, and assassinating Iranian generals, the pink pussy hat wearers were unconcerned.
They hit the streets in protest to protect old school segregationist Jeff Sessions because of a bizarre Russiagate theory, but said nothing when Trump passed the biggest tax cut for rich people in history.
The United States desperately needs a real resistance, people who will organize to defend themselves and to hold elected representatives accountable. If they want to party it can’t be because one of the most right wing Democrats in history will be president. We have already lived through phony change and emotional theatrics instead of political action.
Obama’s two terms in office gave us a health insurance bailout of the for-profit industry responsible for a failed system, the destruction of states like Libya, and Black people deprived of the little wealth they had. Unless the Democratic Party scam is called out, we will end up with more of the same.
Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at https://www.patreon.com/margaretkimberley and she regularly posts on Twitter @freedomrideblog. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.
Related:
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/513377-biden-harris-is-the-most-regressive-possible-ticket
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