Jill McLaughlin (left) and Lena Thorne (right) stand with their Predator drone replica model, complete with Hellfire and Pathmaker missiles. “The Democrats are an imperialist party,” says Thorne.
Outside Community Outreach Christian Ministries, the church where Jesse Jackson is speaking for the Progressive Democrats of America, just before the Democratic National Convention.
“The Democrats are an imperialist party,” says Lena Thorne (right) of worldcantwait.net. Thorne asks “Why should we be surprised” that a Democratic president is drawing up kill lists– even of US citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki and his child, both of whom were killed in drone strikes ordered by the current president.
Jill McLaughlin (left), also of worldcantwait.net, says people should pay more attention to the drone program. “There are even progressive people who know about this and are making apologies and excuses for Obama,” she says. “Just because Obama’s a Democrat doesn’t make it any less wrong. It’s immoral, it’s illegitimate what he’s doing.”
McLaughlin and Thorne do not plan to be at the DNC, but will attend the 12noon protests at nearby Marshal Park.
What do you think? Is the Democratic Party an imperialist party? Sound off!
I think it’s clear that the policies of the Democratic Party — from Afghanistan all the way back to Vietnam, and even before then — are imperialist. But we cannot stop simply at an analysis of the party’s policies; we also have to look at how capitalism in general depends on imperialism to sustain profitability. The wars in the Middle East and North Africa have created huge profits for many sectors of the economy, and not just in the obvious ones (weapons producers, etc). One of the first actions of the new Iraqi government was to privatize almost all of the state-owned assets and open up the economy to foreign ownership. Many people who had no explicit connection to the war became very rich as a result of it. Of course, there are a lot more factors that motivate imperialism than just the economic — the US political class’s need to maintain global hegemony is another important factor — but it has to be considered as well.