What the Democrats really want to "do over" is their 2008 election victory, using populist demagogy to mask policies that uphold the interests of the banks, corporations and super-rich. This is where they see the Wall Street protests as potentially useful. If they can somehow identify themselves with popular protest against these conditions, they hope to mask the real record of the Obama administration.
They are desperate to breathe new life into the illusion that the Democrats are somehow a "lesser evil" and a means of combating the Republicans and Wall Street. With the aid of the unions and pseudo-left groups like the International Socialist Organization, they are trying to promote this fraud within the Wall Street protest movement itself.
The Democrats are, in fact, a party of Wall Street, evidenced both by Obama's receipt of the greatest amount of Wall Street campaign cash in history and, more decisively, by the policies he has pursued since his election.
Historically, the Democratic Party has been the graveyard of social struggles of working people in the United States, going all the way back to the Populist Movement of the late 19th century, to the industrial union movement of the 1930s, to the Civil Rights and the antiwar movements of the 1960s. All of them were channeled into the Democratic Party and thereby not only rendered harmless to the financial elite, but turned into new props for capitalist rule.
The same essential fate was shared by the mass protests against the war in Iraq, which became regulated according to the electoral calendar and then wound up once Obama entered the White House.
If those who are protesting against Wall Street are to avoid a similar fate, they must begin by rejecting the "lesser evil" fraud and fighting to develop an independent political movement of the working class in opposition to both parties of big business and the profit system they defend.
Only the working class -- mobilized in a mass socialist movement -- has the power to put an end to social inequality and reorganize economic life to meet the needs of the majority of society, rather than further enrich the top one percent.
Capitalism has failed. The burning need now is to prepare the revolutionary struggle of the American and international working class for socialism. We urge all those who want to fight Wall Street to join and build the Socialist Equality Party.
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