The only points with which I disagree are:
That the Revolutionary War and Civil War were fought for the rights of working
people.
And
That Donald Trump will meekly function at the behest of the ruling powers if
elected. The reason that so many Republicans and Neo Cons are publicly
distancing themselves from him is that they see him as undependable. They don't
know what he may say or do next.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey ;
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2016 10:24 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Is Hillary Clinton a fascist?
https://socialistaction.org/2016/08/08/is-hillary-clinton-a-fascist/
Is Hillary Clinton a fascist?
/ 11 hours ago
By JEFF MACKLER
Let’s assume for the moment that a fascist is an extremely evil person.
Indeed, in the muck and mire of U.S. politics today the term fascist has been
used quite often, but virtually always to describe the “extremely evil”
candidates of the Republican Party. Recall Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater or
the Bush family candidates, or Republican right-wingers Pat Buchanan and Newt
Gingrich. Very evil men to be sure!
All warmongers, mostly racist, anti-union, witch hunters, anti-immigrant, some
(like Buchanan) even flirting with more overt neo-fascist and anti-Semitic
rhetorical outbursts.With regard to all these “fascists,” or “neo-fascists,” or
“wannabe fascists,” liberals and many progressives sternly warned that we had
to vote Democrat to keep them from running the country. They invariably and
dutifully marched in line, or better, rushed to the front of the line to
support capitalism’s latest “lesser evils,” sometimes vehemently denouncing all
who refused to tow the line.
The liberals’ “lesser evils” included the 1960 Kennedy/Johnson ticket, with the
millionaire cum billionaire JFK clan of Papa Joseph Kennedy Sr., the eighth
richest man in the country, backing his son John F.
Kennedy. Kennedy Sr.’s resume included service in the FDR administration as the
U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, from which position he had to be
recalled because of his steadfast preference for Hitler, with whom he tried to
organize personal and unapproved meetings while Hitler was slaughtering Jews
and bombing British cities. Said Kennedy Sr. at the time, “Democracy is
finished in England. It may be here” (Boston Globe, Nov. 10, 1940).
JFK’s running mate was LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson), the Texas segregationist
who was added to the Northern Democratic Party-led slate to balance JFK’s
liberal image with one more familiar to the racist Democrats in the Southern
states, almost all of whose top elected officials were KKK and White Citizens
Council supporters. But again, they were also and always touted as lesser evil
than the Republicans.
Next came the 1964 LBJ vs. Barry Goldwater election context, when liberals were
told that they had to vote for LBJ because Goldwater was a fascist who
threatened to use nuclear weapons. LBJ, whose pre-election promise was that
“American boys would never be sent to Vietnam,”
proceeded to send over and maintain, on average, 500,000 troops per year to
pursue the U.S. genocidal war that killed four million Vietnamese and 58,000
American young men.
Then we were told that the anti-fascist cause required us to vote for Southern
segregationist stock like Jimmy Carter (Georgia) and Al Gore (Tennessee).
Carter’s racist history was recast as a liberal small farmer. He was perhaps
the last holdout, almost to the end, urging the disgraced President Nixon to
never resign over the Watergate scandal.
In all these cases and others, when it came to running the country, election
time rhetoric aside, the twin parties of capitalism followed their ruling-class
one-percent patrons in implementing whatever the multi-billionaires and
near-trillionaires desired. Such is the case under the reign of the Great
Deporter, warmonger, world’s leading shale gas fracker, and National Security
State top dog, President Obama, who oversees the all-pervasive government
surveillance monstrosity.
Clinton’s reactionary record
With this in mind, let us return to my admittedly provocative opening statement
or question implying that Hillary Clinton is a fascist. Her record as a
warmonger is undisputed, having been among the top leaders of the central
government agencies and institutions that approve, if not administer, all the
wars waged by imperialist America in recent years and decades, including overt
and covert wars, privatized death-squad wars, sanction and embargo wars, and
all the Middle East wars as well as the secret wars waged in Latin and Central
America. This was seen with Clinton’s role in the military coup that removed
the elected president in Honduras, and Clinton’s support for the U.S.-backed
Egyptian military coup that removed the elected president of that country.
I might add here that with perhaps a single exception, Bernie Sanders’
support for U.S. imperialist wars parallels Clinton’s, as does Sanders’
support for the election of Obama, John Kerry, and Bill Clinton in 1992 and
1996—not to mention Sanders’ 98 percent Democratic Party voting record.
On the critical issues of racism, prisons, and the police, Clinton’s record of
support to most of the major racist laws proposed and implemented by the
Democrat Party ranks her as high as any Republican.
Clinton’s record includes support to each and every reactionary and bipartisan
law, from those that aimed at filling the prisons with Blacks and Latinos to
work at near slave labor “wages” (the average prison wage in the U.S. is 50
cents per hour) to the elimination of “welfare as we know it” legislation
proposed and implemented by Bill Clinton.
Clinton lobbied for passage of the notorious Violent Crime Control and Law
Enforcement Act, signed by Bill Clinton in 1994. Addressing the “Women in
Policing” awards that year, she lauded the act, arguing for more police, more
prisons, and tougher prison sentences: “We will be able to say, loudly and
clearly, that for repeat, violent, criminal offenders—three strikes and you’re
out. We are tired of putting you back through the revolving door.”
Hillary Clinton has never disassociated herself from support to AEDPA
(Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act), a bipartisan law signed by
Bill Clinton in 1996, which gutted basic civil liberties and obliterated the
historic presumption of innocence that previously guided, or was supposed to
guide, all legal proceedings. The AEDPA, for the first time in the modern era,
compelled federal judges to grant a “presumption of correctness” to the factual
findings of state court judges in death penalty and related cases.
The law was enacted because, prior to it, a full 40 percent of state court
convictions in murder cases were reversed on appeal to federal courts, usually
based on findings of police and prosecution planting of evidence, intimidation
of witnesses, outright corruption, racist practices, and more. Today, the new
law requires that in appeal proceedings the “facts” used by racist state courts
must be presumed to be correct.
Today, few doubt that Hillary Clinton is the ruling class/Wall Street candidate
that has dutifully served a capitalist class in major crisis due to the
inherent contradictions in this profit over people inhumane capitalist system,
itself. Clinton’s near historic high negative approval ratings are close
Trump’s. That’s why the ruling class decided to give Bernie Sanders a shot at
sheepherding the unwary and questioning back into the Democratic Party fold,
Sanders “political revolution” and “socialist” proclamations notwithstanding.
Inevitably, when the dust cleared, Sanders, dutifully leaped on board the
Clinton bandwagon. His Democratic Party convention speech pathetically
burnished Clinton’s standing by attributing his own “left-sounding” rhetoric
and platform promises to Clinton, as if she had adopted them. The same with
“left-wing” Democrat and former Republican, Elizabeth Warren, the darling of
the liberal apologists for capitalism.
For both of them, their criticism of Clinton as Wall Street’s nominee
evaporated instantly after their sheepherding assignment was completed.
Clinton’s “credentials”
Let’s be frank here and explain why Hillary Clinton is not really a fascist,
despite the fact that her deeds—her support to every key ruling-class policy
during her lifetime of “service” to capitalist America, demonstrates that she
is and has always been the compliant ruling-class and Council on Foreign
Relations think tank-approved choice of imperialist U.S. capitalism.
And Clinton’s lesser evil credentials today?—the reasons daily put forward by
her kept corporate media pundits and paid advocates? Could it be because she
has a better smile than the crooked looking Trump? Pardon my subjectivity! A
better haircut? A nicer family?
Or that she now states, as opposed to yesterday, that she is for free state
college and university tuition? Or that she is for improving the very
health-care system that she previously tried to gut when she headed her
husband’s corrupt and failed 1992 attempted health-care revision?
(See “Clinton’s Health Care Fraud: A corporate cure at workers’
expense,” 1993, by this author.) Or maybe that she is supported by Michelle
Obama and a host of other African-American apologists for racist capitalism?
Indeed, Clinton’s most precious “credential” is that she is running against a
man who verbalizes what Clinton has actually put into practice. In this regard,
rarely a day passes when the front page of The New York Times, and multiple
inside pages as well, coupled with related corporate liberal media
propagandists across the country, bash Trump with abandon, while trumpeting
Clinton’s sanity and earnestness.
Trump’s racist, sexist, misogynist, xenophobic, and moronic remarks about
women, Blacks, immigrants, and Muslims, his alleged draft-dodging, his spurious
gambling casino bankruptcies, his rip-off real estate university scams, his
advocacy of violence against protesters, his claims that he can re-negotiate
ruling-class trade pacts by making better “deals,” his delays in repudiating
support from open racists and neo-fascists like former Klan leader David Duke,
his climate crisis denials, etc. are exposed for all to see. Clinton’s record
is essentially ignored or her poll watching advisers caution her to apologize
for past transgressions and pledge fealty to a better future performance.
One “important difference” between Clinton and Trump is that Clinton listens to
her pollster advisers and appears to be a relatively enlightened person, in
fact, making a habit of nodding agreement with Sanders’ “progressive” rhetoric,
while the bombastic Trump, almost as if he has accepted the assignment to lose
the election, is presented as a man who almost literally seeks out new bear
traps to stick his foot in.
Indeed, Trump’s poll figures are in rapid decline, with the average of the most
recent 10 election opinion polls of registered voters showing him behind
Clinton by seven points and declining. Perhaps to the past credit of the
American people or in homage to their refrain from participating in this year’s
election fraud, close to half of the eligible voters decline to register, and
another half of those who do resister don’t vote. It appears that this year’s
figures might provide evidence of an even greater disgust with what is posited
as “American democracy.”
Clinton’s latest campaign effort, supported by Obama, is the accusation or
suggestion that a unstable or volatile president like Trump, with his finger on
the nuclear button, might just start a nuclear war that could destroy the
world. Most media pundits neglect to “research” the facts that demonstrate that
almost all U.S. wars, including the atomic bombing of Japan, were conducted
under the “sane” Democratic Party president’s auspices.
In this periodically orchestrated election-time charade, Donald Trump says what
Hillary Clinton does. But the blood of millions, the misery of millions, the
lives of millions, are on Clinton’s hands and all her capitalist associates.
There are no pure hearts in ruling-class circles.
And, to be absolutely clear, should Trump be elected, he can be expected to be
the same servant for capitalist America, no less and no more, because like all
“elected” officials, he will become the willing prisoner of the real policy
makers in the U.S., the elite .01 or less who decide how best to advance their
interests and not their elected mouthpieces, whether their tongues are tempered
and polite like Clinton’s or brutally ugly like Trump’s.
What is fascism?
Aug. 2016 Hillary fascist
Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., address
guests at a fundraising event in Chicago, Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2007. (AP
Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)
Now comes the “fascist question.” Fascism is not just an ugly and despicable
term—a word to throw at all kinds of bigots, murderers, racists, and even
dictators.
Fascism, as with the real thing in Nazi Germany under Adolph Hitler, is a
specific form of capitalist rule that the capitalist class brings forth when it
can no longer rule with the consent of the vast majority.
Fascist rule is implemented by the capitalist ruling class itself when the
working-class struggle and working-class consciousness are approaching their
zenith, and massive revolutionary working-class parties and powerful unions are
fully capable of posing a direct and immediate threat to the tiny minority
ruling class.
Fascism is the deadly weapon implemented by a crisis-ridden capitalist class
whose very existence is in question given the mass forces arrayed against it
and its associated incapacity to continue to profit at the expense of the
working class and with regard to the ceaseless competition for markets posed by
its international competitors.
Fascism, above all, has a mass and armed social base in society, almost always
consisting of alienated middle-class elements whose lives have been ruined by
the larger economic superiority of corporate monopolies that drive the “little
guy” out of business, either back into the working class or into abject
poverty. In short, fascism is the political form of rule instituted by the
capitalist elite when only brute force and the massive physical extermination
of the opposing and organized working-class leadership and its organizations
becomes a necessity to keep the capitalist system alive.
This was the situation in Germany, Italy, and Spain, when the ruling classes
turned to the fascist option. In Germany, in 1933, “democratic”
President Paul Von Hindenburg appointed Hitler, the leader or “Fuhrer”
of the Nazis Party (National Socialist German Workers Party) as the German
chancellor. The fascists of yesteryear, like today’s would-be fascists, posed
as populists. In Nazi Germany they went so far as to employ the very name of
“socialism” to win popular support. But yesterday is not today, at least not
now.
In contrast, when capitalist society is relatively stable, the ruling rich
actually prefer a semblance of “democratic” or parliamentary rule rather than
rule by force and violence. This is based on the simple idea that workers tend
to be more efficient or comfortable at the workplace when they believe that are
free to sell their labor to the bosses rather than be forced to endure each and
every imposition on their lives under fascist and overt dictatorial rule. The
latter includes the systematic murder of oppositionists if they pose the
slightest obstacle to the boss’s extraction of profits and the absolute rule of
the Fuhrer.
In the U.S. today the ruling rich face no immediate and serious obstacles to
the relatively smooth functioning of their system. Indeed, today’s unions and
socialist and communist parties are smaller and weaker than at any time in the
modern era. In addition, the ruling class has gone to great lengths to
establish formidable firewalls to absorb social discontent, beginning with the
Democratic Party and including the present often corrupt labor bureaucracy, an
unprecedented number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). All these
consciously function to channel discontent into safe ruling-class politics and
many other well-established institutions aimed at thwarting the development of
independent and anti-capitalist organization of the working class to fight for
their own interest.
In politics, in capitalist elections in particular, the constant refinement and
pursuit of “lesser evilism” is among the most powerful and well-honed
ruling-class instruments, promoted by tens of thousands of professional media
pundits, newspapers, television and radio shows, and the vast educational
system itself. With regard to all of these, the objective is to drill into the
heads of the vast majority that they live in a democratic society where an
elected government operating under the rule of law and all its institutions
treat all equally.
Today, this fundamental myth is under scrutiny as never before, with the
growing majority coming to realize from their direct experiences that in truth
they live in a society governed by the one percent and that Wall Street, the
major symbol of this one percent, (actually closer to .01 percent or less)
makes most of society’s critical decisions. Increasing majorities have come to
understand that this one percent essentially pays no taxes, steals some 90
percent, (according to the official statistics today) of all new wealth and
otherwise organizes society to advance its own interests against all others.
The same one percent organizes wars for profit and plunder around the world
that today the great majority oppose. This same one percent presides over a
society where institutional racism in all its manifestations, is the real “rule
of law” and that the horrors approaching with regard to environmental
destruction and global warming proceed unchecked because capitalists profit
from the continued, if not increased use of fossil fuels, no matter the cost to
life on earth itself.
To conclude, neither Clinton nor Trump are fascists. Neither is driven by the
immediate need to crush a mass working-class and revolutionary-led resistance,
which has yet to emerge. Both, however, in the name of “national security” see
the need to put in place the future instruments of mass repression for when
they are needed. This includes the massive government surveillance operations
that reach into every household in the country and beyond. Both capitalist
parties foster the militarization of the police, the National Guard, and other
repressive institutions, to ready them for action should the ruling class feel
threatened by an insurgent working-class opposition.
Contrary to their belief and expectation that the inevitable and massive
working-class risings of the future can be defeated by brute force and massive
repression of the fascist type, history has demonstrated that the opposite
outcome is the more likely.
When tens of millions—the vast majority—reach the point when they can no longer
tolerate capitalist injustice, exploitation and oppression, the
99 percent can and will prevail and usher in a new social order.
American citizens and their non-citizen allies have two revolutions to their
credit to date—the revolutionary war that ended British colonial rule and the
civil war that ended chattel slavery. Both of these momentous battles
nevertheless left behind large sectors of the population that remained under
the whip of capitalist oppression.
Today, these constitute the 99 percent. Their conscious organization and
education now, and in the course of struggle, will bring forth a mighty power
fully capable of ending minority capitalist rule and bringing into being a
socialist society that will change the face of the earth and free its peoples
from the horrors of the present crisis ridden predatory capitalism.
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August 8, 2016 in Elections, Vote Socialist Action. Tags: Hillary Clinton, Trump
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