US elections:The best Democracy money can buy

According to Andy Kroll in Mother Jones Magazine, Barack Obama is outpacing his predecessors when it comes to raising money.  You wonder how they manage to govern anything all the hand slapping and schmoozing they do. Obama has attended Sixty-nine fundraisers this year so far which is an average of one every five days.

Kroll points out that this election is, "shaping up to be one of the most bruising, cash-drenched campaigns in history."  Other reports have predicted that Obama will raise more than one billion dollars to help him stay in the White House four more years.  There is not doubt that the heads of organized Labor as they usually do will fork over hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and kind for this political candidate and party of Wall Street.  The financial industry donates huge sums of money to their candidates in both of their parties.

It is fruitless for the Labor movement to compete with capital by throwing Union members' hard earned dues money in to the coffers of the Democratic Party, a party of bankers and the rich. We can't beat them with money, they have more of it.  What they don't have is numbers.  The capitalist class is numerically a minority in society which is why they use all sorts of divide and rule tactics to set us against one another.

What is missing in this election cycle as in all election cycles is an independent working people's candidate(s).  A mass working people's political party and candidates waging a campaign against the parties of the 1% and their policies and for issues that provide us with what we need to live a decent and productive life not what the politicians and the media of the 1% tell us is realistic would attract millions of workers. It would change the mood and therefore the balance of class forces in US society.

The public sector strike in the UK that has been pretty much censored in the US mass media is an example how powerful we are when we stop work.  Shutting down production, not smashing windows or other acts of arbitrary vandalism, or camping out on the mayoral lawn is what terrifies the 1% most and what will bring us victory. Strikes, sit downs, occupations of our workplaces, institutions of learning and homes, this direct action coupled with independent political action is how we start begin to move forward.  Through such struggles, the issue of society, capitalism and the market and the need to build a democratic socialist alternative economy will come to the head of the line once again.