No doubt about it. The Empire will not tolerate a candidate who is
not solidly backing a military presence around the world, protecting
the interests of the Corporate Empire.
I seldom see the mass media make a distinction between the interests
of the Empire, and those of the Working Class. They are not the same.
In fact, we taxpayers are sending our dollars off to protect Corporate
interests in those cheap labor nations where our American factories
have relocated. Thus, we are protecting the very companies who have
sold out their American workers, but continue to expect them to pay
taxes to enable them to do business abroad.
It will be a grim day when this Corporate House of Cards becomes so
top heavy that it collapses. It will take down millions of hard
working people with it.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/9/16, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://themilitant.com/2016/8019/801905.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 19 May 16, 2016
(front page)
Trump, Clinton debate best foreign policy to advance US imperialism
BY SETH GALINSKY
As Hillary Clinton heads toward clinching the Democratic Party
nomination and Donald Trump the Republican nod, there has been increased
discussion of their foreign policies. Both defend U.S. imperialist
interests around the globe, and the use of military might to enforce
those interests. But New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd gets at some
of their differences in an April 30 column, where she wrote, “It’s
Hillary the Hawk against Donald the Quasi-Dove.”
Along similar lines the April 24 Times magazine featured the article
“How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk” by Mark Landler, the paper’s White
House correspondent. He writes approvingly that Clinton believes “that
the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national
interests, that American intervention does more good than harm and that
the writ of the United States properly reaches, as [George W.] Bush once
put it, into ‘any dark corner of the world.’” He adds that Clinton “is
the last true hawk left in the race.”
Landler notes Clinton’s “decades-long cultivation of the military,”
beginning when her husband Bill Clinton was president and continuing
during her stint as U.S. senator in New York and later as President
Barack Obama’s secretary of state.
A month after the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade
Center and Pentagon, Sen. Clinton traveled to Fort Drum in New York’s
Jefferson County at the invitation of Gen. Buster Hagenbeck, the new
Army 10th Mountain Division commander. “She sat down,” he told Landler,
“took her shoes off, put her feet up on the coffee table and said,
‘General, do you know where a gal can get a cold beer around here?’”
Clinton for more robust intervention
“Spurning a long tradition of New York senators,” Landler adds, she took
a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee instead of Foreign
Relations when offered a choice in 2002. “For a politician looking to
hone hard-power credentials — a woman who aspired to be commander in
chief — it was the perfect training ground,” Landler said. “She dug in
like a grunt at boot camp.”
During her time as secretary of state, Clinton generally favored “more
robust intervention” than Obama, Landler notes. Obama has been reluctant
to send large numbers of ground troops, preferring to use drones,
airstrikes, special forces and “diplomacy” to advance Washington’s
interests.
Clinton was a proponent of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recommendation in
2009 to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. She supported the
Pentagon’s plan to leave a “residual force” of up to 20,000 U.S. troops
in Iraq. She opposed proposals by aides to Obama in February 2009 to
make symbolic concessions to Moscow as a gesture of “good will in
resetting the relationship,” the Times says.
In 2010 after the North Korean military allegedly torpedoed a South
Korean ship, Clinton backed a plan to send a U.S. warship to the Yellow
Sea between North Korea and China, a move sure to provoke Beijing.
“We’ve got to run it up the gut!” Clinton said. Obama declined her plan.
In one dispute with Obama where she won out, Clinton pushed for the use
of U.S. air power in 2011 to hasten the fall of the regime of Moammar
Gadhafi in Libya.
There are numerous other examples.
Trump’s ‘America First’
In a speech April 27 Trump said that “since the end of the Cold War and
the break-up of the Soviet Union” the U.S. government has “lacked a
coherent foreign policy” and under Obama and Clinton has been “reckless,
rudderless and aimless.”
Trump says he is going to put “America First.” He says he opposed the
U.S. war in Iraq and that Washington should be “getting out of the
nation-building business.”
“Unlike other candidates for the presidency, war and aggression will not
be my first instinct,” Trump said. “A superpower understands that
caution and restraint are signs of strength.”
“We went from mistakes in Iraq to Egypt to Libya, to President Obama’s
line in the sand in Syria,” referring to Obama’s empty threats to take
action against the Bashar al-Assad regime if it used chemical weapons.
“Each of these actions have helped to throw the region into chaos,”
Trump said “and gave ISIS [Islamic State] the space it needs to grow and
prosper.” While Trump says Obama gave too much away with his
“disastrous” deal with Iran, unlike his now-defeated Republican
competitors he has never said he would tear it up. Instead, he says he
will “renegotiate” it.
The Republican candidate also says that to bargain from a position of
strength he will “rebuild our military” and spend more money on new
armaments. At the same time he said he will tell ISIS “their days are
numbered.”
In the increasing disorder in the Mideast, Trump says that Washington
should “seek common ground” with Moscow and Beijing.
Conservatives and liberals alike who are apoplectic about Trump’s march
to the Republican nomination derided his foreign policy speech. The
liberal Huffington Post said it was an “incoherent view of the world,”
while the conservative National Review called it “incoherent and shallow.”
But many working people who have been drawn to Trump’s meetings, seeking
answers to the grinding depression conditions spawned by the capitalist
economic crisis, are skeptical of U.S. intervention around the world.
They are attracted to his portrayal of himself as the candidate of
“peace and prosperity, not war and destruction.”
“More drones or fewer, more diplomacy or less, more special forces or
more infantry, everything Washington does is to defend the interests of
U.S. capitalists around the world, not working people,” said Osborne
Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. vice president, May 3.
“While Clinton and Trump have tactical differences on how to best defend
imperialist interests, nothing they do advances the interests of the
working class. Working people need our own foreign policy independent of
the bosses.”
Related articles:
Workers need international solidarity, not ‘Americanism’
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