Philip Storch

Ralph Nader’s public letter to Hakeem Jeffries on CounterPunch: “How do you explain the Democratic Party’s failure at numerous critical junctures to stop Trump’s presidential campaigns? Trump’s energy levels to overcome impossible odds in 2016 and even more in 2024 tower above the feeble, indecisive ways of the Democratic Party. Your Party totally bungled, letting Trump continue to destroy our Democracy despite serious indictments, becoming a convicted felon, being sued, and being credibly charged with sexually abusing five dozen women. Trump is a foul-mouthed racist/bigot who constantly used defamatory language, such as against fallen GIs in World War II (a serial draft dodger, no less), and who was profiteering in suspect manners. He was low in the polls, and was widely condemned for his initiatory role inciting the January 6, 2020 insurrection in Congress, taking lives and causing injuries of many defending Capitol Police and other casualties. Still, he defeated your Party in 2024! “Who could overcome such odds and win the presidency? Someone with towering egomaniacal energy, opposed by the anemic, indentured Democratic Party that refuses to replace losers with new progressive energy. Indeed, losers get promoted, such as heading the Democratic National Committee, while presumptive presidential winners like Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 are sabotaged by Party apparatchiks and their large donors. “More basically, the Party has become about raising money in place of credibly advancing progressive policies and programs. The almighty campaign dollars leave raising the paltry federal minimum wage ($7.25 per hour) to one-liners that your voting public doesn’t believe, or not taking up authentic full Medicare for all – which you just stunningly came out against!! Throwaway one-liners, like cracking down on corporate crooks, are not believable, because of the Party’s terrible record regarding corporate crime waves and massive corporate welfare. The same is true for not challenging Trump’s enormous 2017 tax cuts for the rich and big corporations when the Democrats took the House in January 2019. House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA), astonishingly announced on opening day that he was not going to reopen these deficit-ballooning tax cuts, depriving investments in public works and services throughout communities nationwide. “Then, of course, there is the long-sustained Democratic Party of overseas Empire, of a runaway unaudited – as long required by federal law – military budget and the aiding and abetting of Netanyahu’s genocidal mass murder and starvation of infants, children, mothers and fathers in Gaza, using U.S. bombs you voted for to drop the TNT equivalent of over eight Hiroshima bombs on that tiny enclave, the geographical size of Philadelphia, crowded with defenseless families having nothing to do with October 7, 2023, and the prior bombing raids by Israeli F-16s in the previous decades. Still, you proudly remain one of the top beneficiaries of AIPAC, which is the reason you and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) didn’t endorse your newly elected Mayor, Zohran Mamdani.”