https://socialistaction.org/2020/03/15/vote-socialist-action-in-2020/
Vote Socialist Action in 2020!
Socialist Action / 2 days ago
Break with two-party capitalist duopoly!
By JEFF MACKLER
Glory hallelujah! If the Lord’s “terrible swift sword” had descended
from the heavens to witness the Democratic Party’s congressional
delegation’s standing ovation in response to Donald Trump’s State of
Union introduction of his despicably appointed Venezuelan presidential
pretender Juan Guaidó, the Democrats would be dead in the water. But
there is no God in American politics; the only certainty lies in a clear
understanding that the election game is rigged from start to finish,
that the only serious entrance fee to the current two-year $8 billion
spectacle is a war chest of hundreds of millions—even billions—of
dollars, privileged access to the corporate media and a pledge in
advance to abide by whichever Democrat or Republican emerges as the
candidate.
And what is true for the present election charade is magnified a
thousand fold with regard to the corporate control of every aspect of
the multi-trillion dollar U.S. economy, where every critical decision,
every budget item, every penny, more or less, allocated in Trump’s
present $4.7 trillion budget proposal is determined in advance by a slew
of corporate technocrats in the pay of the billionaire elites who really
run the country.
Bernie Sanders’ pledge of Democratic Party unity at the outset of his
campaign, repeated to cheering supporters before and after his
previously unexpected Super Tuesday, March 3 defeats at the hands of the
now united Democratic Party cabal, informs us that Bernie’s “revolution”
and “democratic socialism” notwithstanding, nothing will change should
he beat the ever-diminishing odds to advance as the Democrats’
candidate—or even if he emerges victorious in the November presidential
elections. Capitalism will remain intact, unless and until the mass
independent power of the working class is brought to bear to smash
it—from its foundations to its superstructure.
The bi-partisan ovation for Juan Guaidó, the rightwing U.S.-chosen agent
of Trump’s CIA-orchestrated coup in Venezuela, gave proof that the
warmongering Democrats are indistinguishable from their Republican
counterparts. Indeed, the Democratic Party-controlled House of
Representatives upped Trump’s proposed military budget by some $40
billion. Similarly, the Democrats’ failed Trump impeachment effort was
based on the proposition that the Democrats favored arming the Ukrainian
government that was brought into being by the U.S.-backed fascist coup
of 2014. Of the thousand issues that could have been raised to discredit
the monstrous racist, sexist, imperialist president, the Democrats
raised none! Their calculations of gaining an electoral leg up
dramatically backfired when post-impeachment polls showed Trump
registering his highest approval ratings—49 percent against the
Democrats’ 42 percent.
After voting throughout his congressional career for nearly every
military budget before him, Sanders today claims that he might seek to
trim that budget somewhere down the line. The U.S. currently maintains
troops in 150 nations along with 1100 military bases. Its death squad
Special Forces, according to a February New York Times report, operate
in 90 nations – in every instance to guarantee U.S. “national security”
interests by any means necessary. Trump’s new budget includes
constructing state-of-the-art submarines capable of launching “tactical”
nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. These are to be complemented by
Trump’s plan to build untold numbers of “tactical” nuclear weapon,
perhaps with the president’s own finger on the launch button. The last
and only finger to launch such weapons belonged to the liberal Democrat
Harry Truman whose doomsday decision in 1945 instantly obliterated
500,000 Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The construction
of the bomb was authorized by the great corporate liberal of the time,
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who died of natural causes several
months earlier.
Trump’s touted economic gains
The economic achievements Trump claimed in his State of the Union,
politely applauded by the Democrats, were lies pure and simple. His
“lowest unemployment rates ever” were the same fabrications touted by
the Democrats under the Obama administration.
• 83 percent of Trump’s claimed new jobs are low quality jobs in low
wage sectors, that is, where pay is usually at the poverty level or
lower.Thirty-seven percent of these, where 57 million people are
“employed,” are in the “gig economy,” wherein hours are part time and
uncertain from week to week, and wages are low.
• Trump’s overall unemployment figure of 3.5 percent excludes
“discouraged workers” and other Bureau of Labor Statistics categories
that disappear the unemployed and underemployed and include workers who
appear on the books for just one-quarter of the year and are jobless
thereafter. A more accurate figure indicates that the overall employment
rate, the “labor force participation rate,” as it is called, was 63.4%
in January 2020, up from 63.2% in December 2019. That is, according to
government figures, some 37 percent have no jobs!
All these figures generally replicate those of the Obama administration.
NAFTA and the tax cuts for the rich
Trump’s $1.4 trillion December 2019 tax cut bill for the corporate elite
was a bi-partisan affair as was his new NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Agreement), named USMCA (U.S.-Mexico-Canada). The latter simply rewrote
various tariff provisions to further advantage the U.S. corporate elite.
These two aspects of ruling class economic policies are instructive, if
not decisive in understanding “how the system works.” Two thousand pages
of the old NAFTA were revised last year to further benefit U.S.
corporations over their Canadian and Mexican competitors. The remaining
7,000 pages were left intact. A single, seemingly innocuous change from
the old NAFTA to the new USMCA was the insertion of a tiny provision,
perhaps a few sentences, that requires Canadian supermarkets in British
Columbia to allocate equal shelf space to California wines alongside
displays of British Colombia-grown and British Commonwealth wines.
Trivial? Perhaps. But California winemaking and distribution are
multi-billion-dollar enterprises that operate worldwide. I can only
imagine seeing one of their representatives handing over to Trump’s
NAFTA re-negotiators their proposed written insertions to USMCA that
guarantee a greater market share to California billionaires as against
their lesser Canadian competitors. Multiply this minute example
several-thousand-fold and a pristine picture emerges detailing how
corporate America defends and advances its corporate interests at the
expense of its rivals.
The same holds for the U.S. Tax Code and the U.S. Budget, both enormous
tomes of virtually impenetrable figures known only to the literal
handful of its overseers and perhaps a few thousand lobbyists and their
experts who craft U.S. economic policy. The latter always alternate from
the corporate world to high government posts. The generals and top
executives of the military-industrial complex routinely exchange their
corporate posts for government positions, where they advise the House
Armed Services Committee on how to construct their annual
trillion-dollar, ever-rising budget requests that exceed the combined
military spending of the next ten nations.
Trump’s ever-privatizing public school, Secretary of Educating Betsy
DeVos’s family tree is instructive. Her years of duty to several NGOs
that specialize in undermining pubic education is a family matter. She
is married to Dick DeVos, the former CEO of the multi-level marketing
company Amway and is the daughter-in-law of Amway’s billionaire
co-founder, Richard DeVos. Her brother, Erik Prince, a former U.S. Navy
SEAL officer, is the founder of Blackwater USA, the private army
corporation that contracted with the U.S. government to send paid
mercenary armies to the Middle East and elsewhere to police the world
for U.S. corporations.
The same interpenetration of the corporate and government worlds is the
rule with regard to literally every decisive aspect of the U.S. economic
and political-juridical system. They are inseparable, aside from an
occasional dispute among them as to which elements of the ruling rich
will predominate in the exploitation of working people at any particular
moment.
Trump’s new budget proposes to extend his trillions in tax breaks to the
rich for another ten years. There will be zero opposition from the
Democrats. There was zero opposition to his generous gifts last year to
the same elite. There has never been opposition to the government’s
routine yearly $4 trillion corporate welfare and handouts to the one
percent, all built into the very fabric of U.S. tax codes and budgets.
The same with Trump’s proposed trillion dollar budget deficit, with the
national debt projected by the Congressional Budget Office to rise over
the next decade to $31 trillion by 2030, an amount that will exceed the
entire U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This follows virtually the
same multi-trillion dollar “quantitative easing” program of the Obama
administration which in 2008 distributed trillions in bailouts and
near-zero interest loans to the same superrich that Trump is beholden to
today.
Trump’s anti-abortion politics mirror Democrats
In contrast to Trump and Co., the Democratic Party platform purports to
support abortion rights, supposedly in accord with the 60 percent of all
U.S. women who favor abortion. But Democrats have played virtually no
role in thwarting the plethora of anti-abortion laws approved in recent
years across the country. To be sure, no Democratic Party president has
ever seriously moved abolish the infamous 1976 Hyde Amendment, named
after former Representative Henry Hyde, Republican of Illinois. This
amendment to a House appropriations bill bans the expenditure of federal
funds to pay for abortions, except in extremely limited circumstances.
The amendment, which effects millions of women, especially working class
and poor women, has remained in force today when eighty-seven percent of
all U.S. counties have no abortion provider whatsoever.
The Democrats’ election time rhetoric in June 2019 included statements
that all of its then 21 Democratic Party presidential candidates, except
Joe Biden, favored the repeal of the Hyde Amendment. Biden soon after
also whistled a pro-abortion tune. But after 44 years on the books and
regardless of which of the twin parties of capital are in power, the
Hyde prohibition remains in place!
It is in this context that an honest evaluation of Bernie Sanders and
his Democratic Party primary contenders must be made. “How will you fund
your Medicare for All proposal?” Sanders is repeatedly asked, as if the
costs were prohibitive in today’s economy. Sanders has been repeatedly
vague on this critical issue, but not because he seeks to back off on
advocating for a proposal that is the norm in most industrialized
nations. Sanders, whose “radical” proposals to tax the wealth of the
nations’ billionaire at a rate of 2 or 3 percent after their first $50
million and then increase the rate progressively until the wealth of
billionaires is subjected to tax rates of a few points higher, is
incapable of explaining that his Medicare for All plan is based on the
government paying the largely monopolized private hospital industry
outrageous prices rather than nationalizing the entire industry and
operating it for the public good rather than for the profits of the one
percent.
The same with Sanders’ Green New Deal, where he proposes a ten-year, $17
trillion program to end the nation’s dependence on fossil fuels without
a full and immediate government takeover of the entire multi- trillion
dollar fossil fuel industry and its rapid conversion to a safe and
sustainable energy system with all workers fully protected in the
transition. Sanders’ Green New Deal, in truth and in the context of its
co-existence with the capitalist system itself, amounts to rhetorical
election campaign bluster and bluff. The same with his utterances
regarding unspecified cuts in the military and any other proposals that
effectively challenges capitalist prerogatives. To do so would
necessarily challenge the legitimacy of the rapacious capitalist system
itself, a move that all of Sanders’ leading team insists would undermine
his “electability.”
Sanders today asks his youthful, multi-racial and multi-generational
supporters to storm the heavens to make him the Democrats’ presidential
candidate and future president. He has prevailed to date in Iowa, New
Hampshire and Nevada, plus his four Super Tuesday wins. Joe Biden’s
“miraculous” and overnight revival was without doubt orchestrated by a
near-panicked Democratic Party hierarchy whose ruling class elites
explained to Sander’s so-called centrist opponents that their staged
performances, aimed at undermining Sanders’ credibility, were over. In
an instant they rushed to Biden’s camp but not before joining the
corporate media’s full court red-baiting anti-Sanders tirades.
Building the socialist alternative begins with a clear break with
capitalist politics in all its manifestations. Join Socialist Action!
socialistaction@xxxxxxx.
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March 15, 2020 in Uncategorized.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
“God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
― Neil DeGrasse Tyson
