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Vol. 81/No. 1 January 2, 2017
(front page)
Trump selects cabinet in face of liberal hysteria
BY MAGGIE TROWE
As President-elect Donald Trump put together a cabinet that looks a lot
like those installed by previous Republican presidents like Dwight D.
Eisenhower, a hysterical six-week liberal-left frenzy that dreamed of
robbing him of the presidency through an Electoral College coup fell
flat. From the pages of the Washington Post to the Communist Party’s
online People’s World, editorial writers mislabeled Trump a fascist.
The “Vote Trump Out” campaign aimed at the Electoral College focused on
charges that Trump is soft on Russian President Vladimir Putin and that
Moscow hackers helped throw the election. Many Republican electors were
flooded with letters, some threatening, urging them not to vote for Trump.
Jill Stein, who ran as Green Party candidate for president, acted as a
shill for Hillary Clinton and went to court in Michigan, Pennsylvania
and Wisconsin, demanding recounts. Perhaps she felt guilty for running
in the first place. In Michigan, Stein was credited with 51,463 votes,
while Trump won by 10,704. But her meritless lawsuits were
unceremoniously thrown out.
President Barack Obama took the wind out of the “Block Trump” campaign
Dec. 16, defending “the integrity of our election system” and denying
ballots weren’t fairly counted. Obama pledged to make Trump’s transition
to the White House as smooth as possible.
Trump won handily Dec. 19. Two Trump electors and five of Clinton’s
changed their votes.
The howl continues. “Congratulations, Trump. Welcome to hell,” headlined
an op-ed in the Washington Post Dec. 21. It signals continuing
Democratic Party efforts to bog down the new administration and prevent
it from conducting business.
Hillary Clinton continues to blame her defeat on a Russian conspiracy.
“Vladimir Putin himself directed the covert cyber attacks against our
electoral system, against our democracy, apparently because he has a
personal beef against me,” she said Dec. 16.
Moscow, like most capitalist regimes, tries to take advantage of every
opportunity to try to influence its rivals. But Washington, with its
vast bipartisan history of orchestrating regime change in Cuba, Haiti,
Guatemala, Libya, Angola, Iraq, Congo, Indonesia, Vietnam and Iran, to
name a few, has no standing to complain.
The anti-working-class record of Bill Clinton’s administrations, her
conduct as secretary of state, and her campaign, which oozed contempt
for workers, especially those who are Caucasian, were more than enough
to torpedo her presidential prospects. Hillary Clinton was one of the
most distrusted and unpopular candidates in modern history.
She convinced many workers that Trump was the lesser evil when she
called his supporters “deplorables” and “irredeemable.”
Union officials and others backing the Democratic Party are attacking
Trump’s cabinet nominations, accusing him of preparing an unprecedented
assault on unions, women’s rights, immigrant workers and gays. Many zero
in on Trump’s nomination of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson for secretary
of state, saying it’s a conflict for an executive of a big company to
represent the government.
But the appointees of both capitalist parties always represent the
interests of the propertied ruling-class families who hold state power.
Wealthy banker and investor Joseph Kennedy was just one of many big
capitalists in Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet. Ford Motor President Robert
McNamara was secretary of defense under John Kennedy. And Eisenhower had
a twofer, with brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, both
partners in the international law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, dedicated to
defending the interests of U.S. big business throughout the world, as
secretary of state and director of the CIA respectively.
Trump will preside over a pro-business administration. Despite
Democratic charges that he will provoke a trade war against China, his
nomination of Terry Branstad, governor of agricultural powerhouse Iowa
and a longtime friend of Chinese President Xi Jinping, to be ambassador
to China, points to growing Sino-U.S. trade.
Democrats claim to be the party of peace, labor and “identity politics,”
a focus on women, gays and other minorities; but their administrations,
rife with “brights” and “experts,” are responsible for imposing some of
the most onerous ceilings on our rights.
The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision brought to an end growing street
mobilizations for the right to choose abortion as equal protection for
women in making decisions about their bodies. These mobilizations were
transforming public sentiment, winning millions to see the rights of
women in a new light.
Instead, the Harvard and Yale-trained Supreme Court justices based a
more limited right to abortion on women’s doctors’ judgments and medical
questions like fetal viability. This, coupled with the refusal of
pro-Democrat leaders of the National Organization for Women and other
groups to mobilize to defend the right to choose — motivated by the
desire not to rock the boat and cost Democratic office holders their
jobs — opened the way for more than four decades of erosion of abortion
rights.
William Clinton led both parties to “end welfare as we know it” in the
1990s, making the future for jobless female workers with children a
nightmare as the economic crisis deepened and jobs disappeared.
And Obamacare was designed to block the road to universal health care
and to guarantee superprofits for the insurance cartels as health care
for working people deteriorates.
Democrats encourage working people, who they fear and view as stupid, to
vote for them and rely on their executive action, bureaucratic
regulation and court rulings. But defending and extending labor and
social gains can only be achieved in struggle in the streets on the road
to workers taking state power.
Trump is no more capable of enacting policies to end the crisis of the
capitalist economy than was Obama. There are no “policies” that can do
so. The infrastructure jobs program he talks of “is more about rewarding
private-equity investors than about rebuilding America’s crumbling
infrastructure,” wrote Princeton economics professors Alan Blinder and
Alan Krueger in the Wall Street Journal Dec. 18.
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