Philadelphia, July 25, 2016 — Protesters gathered in the streets and parks outside of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), hosted in the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Philadelphia. Demonstrators were mostly Bernie Sanders and/or Jill Stein supporters, recently outraged further by a Wikileaks email dump which revealed proof of corruption taking place within the Democratic Party. Among the revelations were the Democratic Party’s deliberate turning of the election in favor of Hillary Clinton, as well as – to name an example that will largely go unmentioned in the press – to “reward top donors and insiders with appointments to federal boards and commissions in coordination with the White House.” (Alec Goodwin, Huffington Post).
I was in Philly the first day of the protest/convention. The city had received approximately $43 million for security for the DNC and protests. A long, fenced pathway wall stood in between the parking lots of the delegates and the streets of the protestors. Many delegates ignored the protestors as they walked into the convention, laughed at them, or looked at them confused, and many also embraced them, riling up the crowd, chanting with them as they walked through the fence among the quieter delegates, “Hell no, DNC! We won’t vote for Hillary!” The heat was in the high 90s. Police lined the streets of every corner in the neighborhood. Occasionally a protestor would ask an officer, “Who are you protecting?”
In FDR Park, across the street, more Sanders supporters gathered. When I met Brian and Sarah, who travelled from New Orleans to be here, Brian, who wore a Bernie T-shirt, told me, “You grow up your whole life being told politicians are crooked. Even my mom used to tell me that. It’s true. They are. And it really disconnects you from the process. And to have someone come along who wants to change that – and, I mean, I trust the guy [Bernie]. I’m gonna be honest: Bernie’s my hero. I don’t think he ever wanted to be president in his life; I think he’s just doing this because he really cares. So we felt like we really had to be here to support what he’s started, but it’s also hard, you know.” Across the street we heard protestors chanting at the delegates, “If we don’t get it! Shut it down!”
Meanwhile, the March for Our Lives, attended by figures such as Cheri Honakala, Cornell West and Chris Hedges, organized by the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign and attended largely by Jill Stein supporters, began at City Hall and marched 3 miles down Broad Street to FDR Park where marchers, Stein supporters and Sanders supporters merged their demonstrations into one Jill Stein “Power Rally” in the park, attended by hundreds to 1,000 people.
Demonstrators I encountered were enraged at the Democratic Party and have been since long before this election season. Now, unlike in years past, it does not seem las if they will vote for Democrats in spite of their distrust. As a young person at the threshold of my future, I believe Hillary Clinton is a dangerous candidate and I believe Donald Trump is more dangerous, but we have to figure out ways to begin to defy both of them, to defy the political class itself that constantly defies us.
I am 21 years old. The three greatest threats to my future, I believe, are climate change, war, and economic collapse. The Democratic Party has been playing with fire in all of those categories for a long time. The insanity of the Republican Party does not make the Democrats good. I wonder how far to the right the left will let the Democratic Party move. Hillary Clinton has long been a supporter of the fracking industry and the Democratic Party has not sufficiently realized the threat of climate change to our lives, our children’s lives. Tim Kaine has long-standing ties to the oil, drilling and fracking industry (Alleen Brown, The Intercept). Just because the Democrats admit that climate change exists does not mean they acknowledge its reality. Even the best legislation passed on climate change since the early 1970s has come up well short of satisfying the scientific community and much of the damage seems irrevocable.
Hillary Clinton is a poster child of the corruption caused by and causing wealth and inequality, environmental destruction and perpetual war, and many other forms of capital slaughter in this country. It is a corruption in which a small cabal of corporate figures, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both included, can endlessly feed from a politically and economically helpless population – no matter who is president – in a kind of super-capitalism economics. The following are facts, just to name a couple of examples of this kind of corruption on the part of Hillary Clinton while she used the liberal mask of the Democratic Party. In addition to her full backing of the drone and targeted assassination campaign and her support for wars in “Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Syria,” and many others, including the seeming complete destruction of Lybia, “there is [also] the little under-the-table exchange of $900,000 from Boeing to the Clinton Foundation as the Secretary of State granted the company the right to sell warplanes to Saudi Arabia; an additional $10 million has flowed into Clinton coffers from Saudi Arabia, which bought more arms from us than ever before while Clinton was Secretary of State. The $10 million went to the Clinton Foundation” (Lila Garret, Truthdig; and David Sirota, International Business Times). If that’s not enough, as Rupert Neale reports at The Guardian in his article “Trump and Clinton share Delaware Tax ‘Loophole’ Address with 285,000 firms,” “ […] the candidates [Trump and Clinton] for president share an affinity for the same nondescript two-storey office building in Wilmington [Delaware]. A building that has become famous for helping tens of thousands of companies avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes through the so-called ‘Delaware loophole,’” and notes that “Clinton, who has repeatedly promised that as president she will crack down on ‘outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere,’ collected more than $16m in public speaking fees and book royalties in 2014 through the doors of 1209 [the address for the office building], according to the Clintons’ tax return.” Many people will say that Clinton-bashing is part of a decades-long mudslinging campaign created by Conservatives, but the left has offered a far more thorough and factual critique of the Clintons for a long time, from her corporate involvement, from Wall Street to Walmart, to her willingness to shed blood that is not her own. The mudslinging toward the Clintons from the right is, indeed, a distraction, but more of a distraction away from their similarities than toward their real differences. I don’t really give a damn about her emails, either.
I went to the protest because I feel I have been given no choice. This is what many Sanders and Stein supporters seemed to feel. I do not want Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or their like to determine any part of my relationship to the economy, the environment, or war and peace. It seems this is a good time to think for ourselves and withhold our vote from candidates as dubious as these. In a democracy, it absolutely says something to withhold our votes from candidates who are not electable. If you’re on the left, accept that Hillary Clinton is dangerous on all sorts of issues and vote for Jill Stein and, if you’re on the right, accept that Trump is toxic and vote Gary Johnson. If we grow our third parties, our movements will also grow and they will have an essential impact on our democracy. And if Stein and Johnson and their parties grow simultaneously, then it will have the same effect on each of the primary parties, in case you are too afraid of Trump or Hillary to vote third party. In other words, Gary Johnson could steal just as many votes from Trump as Jill Stein could from Hillary, thus canceling each other out (Johnson currently beats Stein in the polls). Therefore, nobody would “steal” the election and both third parties would grow, and we would have more of a say in their growth than in the growth of the primary two parties.