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The legacy of the Black liberation movement helped establish Black America as the most pro-peace constituency in the United States. As Black Agenda Report’s Executive Editor Glen Ford notes, Black G.I.s and military officers resisted efforts to put down the Black uprisings that swept across American cities in the mid-1960s. Such resistance paved the way for the abolition of the military draft.
Black anti-war politics held strong until Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. The presence of the so-called Black president moved the most progressive constituency drastically to the right. By 2013, Black Americans were more in favor of NSA spying and the Obama administration’s plan for U.S. intervention in Syria than any other racial group. Without a Black liberation movement, Black people were left to the political vice grip of the corporate media and the Democratic Party. In the post-Obama era, the corporate media and the Democratic Party fell into a crisis of legitimacy and have since unleashed the dogs of the Cold War on any force that dares to challenge U.S. military supremacy and terrorism.
The crisis of legitimacy afflicting the Democratic Party and the corporate media stems from their inability to address the pressing needs of a vast majority of working people in the U.S., let alone the world. Over seventy percent of the U.S. population believes that the U.S. media reports news that they know to be false.The Democratic Party lost to a billionaire celebrity real estate mogul in the 2016 presidential election not because of “fake news,” but because of its loyalty to the policies of endless war and austerity. While Trump screamed “Make America Great Again” and railed against regime change wars and free trade agreements, the Democrats suppressed Bernie Sanders’ popular campaign and responded to Trump with the slogan, “America is already great.” The Democratic Party ignored the pesky reality that four out of five people in the U.S. live paycheck to paycheck and that its young voters support socialistic policies in large numbers.
After losing to Donald Trump, the Democratic Party took leadership in the New Cold War that began when the Clinton campaign concocted the conspiracy that Trump “colluded” with Russia to win the U.S. election. This narrative, aptly called Russia-gate, has pressured Donald Trump’s administration to renew sanctions against Russia, continue the dangerous NATO build-up along Russia’s border, and wage an unprecedented campaign of surveillance of independent media. Because Russia-gate was a conspiracy with no factual basis, it was never supposed to be an effective means of opposing Donald Trump. Russia-gate has always been the U.S. Empire’s newest weapon for protecting its interests amid the presence of wholesale rot, which is why it is currently being used to demonize and smear leftish elements within the Democratic Party.
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Aisle C 