US Faces Democratic Crisis While Pointing the Finger at Other Countries

A recent article by activist and former Green Party vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka considers the Democratic Party's substitution of Kamala Harris as its presumptive presidential nominee and the development's significance within the US political system. “The gangster move by the oligarchs that control the Democrats stripped away any pretense that any real structures of democracy exist in that party,” Baraka suggests.

The article argues that special interests appear to hold sufficient power to remove a presidential nominee and quickly fill that role with whomever they choose.

On Thursday, writer and activist Margaret Kimberley joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program to discuss the current crisis of democracy in the US as well as Nicaragua’s struggle against US intervention as they recently celebrate 45 years since the Sandinista revolution, which ushered in a government the United States deems to be undemocratic.

“If this happened anywhere else in the world, we'd call it a banana republic," Kimberly said of Joe Biden's replacement. "We'd say it was authoritarianism. We'd say it's not democratic. All of those things apply here, except we're talking about this country. We see how undemocratic the system is, how undemocratic the Democratic Party is."

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“They pushed Biden through, they rigged it for him four years ago. They lied about his health for the past four years. Told us not to believe our lying eyes when we could see his declining state of health.”

“And when they saw the failure of their plan, they unceremoniously shoved him under the bus. They have anointed Kamala Harris. Everybody fell into line. Millions of dollars for her campaign and all because rich donors, the people that Ajamu points out really run the Democratic Party, had a change of mind about who the nominee ought to be,” she concluded.

Baraka argues that for nearly two years, it seemed obvious that “Biden would not be a credible candidate in 2024 due to his noticeable cognitive decline and the ineptitude of his administration”. Baraka suggested Biden was coerced into taking part in a debate against Trump in order to hasten his removal as the Democratic Party candidate.

“They knew they could not go forward with him and they went along with this early debate to try to speed up the process and get rid of him before the convention,” Kimberley suggested. “I also believe they thought Trump would be out because of all these criminal charges. I think they thought Trump would be out. He either wouldn't run again or that Republican voters would turn to someone else, and they would be running against a Republican with less of Trump's popularity.”

“But, all of this happened because of corruption. And I think that's the way we should discuss it, that these are the people who run everything, and the last thing they want is for the voters to have a choice,” she argued. “We are now – the Democratic Party – going to have a presidential nominee who nobody voted for to be president."

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"There's not one voter anywhere in the country this year or in 2020 who said 'I want Kamala Harris,'” Kimberley emphasized.

“Despite misgivings that many Democratic voters have about her, they're going to go along,” she claimed. “The panic, the fear of a Republican victory, a Trump victory no less, is something that most Democrats will just get behind. So I think she has a chance to win, especially with the money, the corporate media, and all Democratic politicians being behind her.”

Meanwhile, the United States frequently labels other countries which demand self-determination and national sovereignty “undemocratic”, Kimberley wrote in a recent article.

“The US is under the thumb of billionaire oligarchs who restrict what we see and hear. The corporate media play the role of servant and keep the people simultaneously uninformed and misinformed,” Kimberley wrote. “Knowledge of the rest of the world is extremely limited and only those who are sufficiently self-motivated will venture outside of the bubble. Yet doing so is imperative.”

“This is a country that has long struggled against US intervention," Kimberley said of Nicaragua. "We've seen in the 1850s they actually tried to overthrow the government. In the 1900s, they sent in Marines. They put in the [US-backed] Somoza family for decades, murdered the revolutionary leader [Augusto] Sandino, hence the name Sandinista."

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Kimberley noted that Nicaragua has not “aided and abetted a genocide in Gaza,” nor has it killed “thousands of Ukrainians in a proxy war.” Rather, the country is committed to providing free healthcare and university education, yet ironically, both of these policies are declared to be "impossibilities in the US and are dismissed out of hand by Democrats and Republicans alike”.

“The Sandinistas won, then actually lost an election because of the US intervention, the Contra war... The World Court said the US owes Nicaragua money for all the damage that it caused. They won the election again. Trump was behind a coup attempt in 2018.”

“Biden has, as always, gone along with Trump administration policy and has used sanctions to try to weaken this government, which is an elected government," Kimberley said. "Daniel Ortega is the elected president of his country. Meanwhile the United States, as we just discussed, lives under the rule of an oligarchy. So, which country is democratic? Nicaragua or the US?”

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