Message from Michael Carano
Originally published on 10/17/2019
Mike Carano is a unionist and political activist in Tallmadge, Ohio
Those demanding change must be pragmatic. First, we must organize and call for a national conference of unions and community and justice groups — local to national — to hammer out a two-fold program: a strong platform that takes on the systemic roots that created a 45-year decline in wages for working people and, a practical plan to form a new party whose candidates are embedded in the needs of the mass of Americans, not the needs of the corporate and financial class. It will be tragic once again if we waste our energies on an inside strategy that has time and again borne no fruit.
The inside strategy is a dead end. We should not doubt that the centrist, corporate Democrats will do all they can in a replay of 2016 to keep brother Bernie Sanders from the nomination. And though we applaud Sanders for single-handedly changing the discussion and narratives in this country as no one has done in decades, the Democratic Party will not take us where we need to go. For that reason, we call on all Sanders supporters to join us, if not now then after the DNC and the mass media have cheated Sanders once again. If we want real, systemic change, then we must not allow our energy, time, and money to once again get siphoned into a party that will never serve our needs.
Therefore, our efforts and needed political work must steer us in one direction — a formation of new party of, from, and for the working people of this nation.
The younger generation is onto the two-party game and has no affinity or affection for the Democratic Party. And why should they? Their generation has been bludgeoned by the neoliberal two-party system.
The corporate parties gave them the distinction of being the first generation not to fare better than their parents, not to be able to find decent jobs with livable wages, to be straddled with a lifetime of student debt, to be unable to find affordable housing, and to be incapable of planning a future, if in fact a future is possible with the cloud of climate catastrophe circling over their heads.
So we must act. And therefore we call all like-minded people to join this effort. And those who still hope for a Sanders candidacy, if again disappointed, should know that we are here with the one solution, one that will not end in disappointment if we tirelessly exert our efforts in the needed work, one that runs candidates tied to a platform built around the real needs of working people. The door is open. Get in.
