The Little Führer

[American Dream]

https://abolitionjournal.org/donald-j-t ... ent-elect/

Donald J. Trump: Racist, Alleged Child Rapist, and President-Elect

November 28, 2016
by Ahmad Greene-Hayes

“Look at what they did to my sister! Last century, last week,” laments Jamila Woods in her newest album HEAVN. The neurotic cry of racial-sexual violence blares the silences and the white noise of both pre- and post-election America crush the ear gates of black and brown, queer, trans, and womyn Americans. A white nationalist, xenophobic, homophobic, sexist, and ableist man named Donald J. Trump is now president-elect of the United States. Among his many crimes and sins, however, one is often ignored even as it disturbs the mental and spiritual fortitudes and psyches of so many in our world.

Trump is an alleged child rapist, a harasser of women’s bodies and autonomies, and the contemporary manifestation of the Thomas Jeffersons, Klansmen, and white vigilante rapists of our American past and present. When he speaks, he conjures the sadistic imaginaries of racial-sexual terrorists and he lambasts survivors and marginalized folks with both boldness and might.

Without doubt, I am troubled by the realities that permeate our current political moment, but I am also not surprised. The American presidency, which emerged out of the colonial imaginary of white male domination, the pillaging of indigenous land and people, and the brutalization and enslavement of African bodies, is rooted in racial-sexual terrorism. In fact, there is no United States lest there is the rape and dehumanization of black and brown people.

And even as the American people bear witness to Donald Trump’s truth (or falsehood) as racist, alleged rapist, America—and white America specifically—allowed him to rise, like white Jesus, to the highest political office in the United States of America. Propped up by the religious right, white Evangelicals, and white people of all classes, Trump’s racist, alleged rapist identity was fortified by manipulation of scripture (i.e. “God has called Trump for such a time as this”), a neoliberal Democratic failure, the Clinton campaign’s elevation of Trump with its “pied piper” strategy, and the consistent inability for Democrats and Progressive politicians, to stand on the side of the oppressed. Indeed, after Trump’s election to the presidency, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren among many others have recommended giving Trump “an open mind.” But alas, so many of us cannot give an open mind to a racist, alleged rapist, and far more stand between life and death, or are already dead, murdered by racism and rape.

And even as racist, alleged rapist Trump disturbs us, we need not situate Hillary Clinton as a white savior able to rectify and dismantle the structural and tangible realities of racial-sexual terrorism. As I have previously argued, along with so many others, white women also perform white male acts of violence. Clinton was soon to re-do this work as President, even as she performed these acts as Secretary of State (Just look at her track record with black and brown women in Haiti and Honduras, for example. Or with incarcerated women on Rikers Island).

We should also pay attention to how so much of our political moment disregards children. Children don’t vote, but they will be devastatingly impacted by Trump, especially if he not only allegedly rapes children but deports them, calls them “illegals,” threatens to beat them up for saying that their black lives matter, or dehumanizes them for being gay or disabled or differently abled.

Even still, I am unwilling to put all blame for our collective mistreatment of children entirely on Trump.

After her painful defeat, Clinton gave a speech at the Children’s Defense Fund’s “Beat the Odds” Gala, in which she stated, “We have work to do, and for the sake of our children and our families and our country, I ask you to stay engaged, stay engaged on every level. We need you. America needs you, your energy, your ambition, your talent. That is how we get through this.”

And yet, many fail to recall that it was the Clintons who ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a federal assistance program created by the Social Security Act (SSA) and administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that provided federal assistance to children whose families had low or no income.

The Clintons, then, gave an “open mind” to a Republican Congress, and again, our children suffered. Black and brown children suffered. So many poor folks suffered in ways comparable, but in no ways equivalent, to how Trump led a racist campaign against the Central Park Five (group of young black and brown boys) just seven years prior to the eradication of AFDC in 1996.

Indeed, our children have been handed a future that is not only dim, but its promise (or lack thereof) is stained by the blood of both America’s past and present, which blur as Democrats and Republicans teeter the same line of dishonesty, cowardice, and corruption.

The surprise, then, at Trump’s election by white liberals and the black and brown middle class functions as a reinscription of violence over and over again on the bodies of the most vulnerable: the poor; those who are queer and transgender; babies in Flint, Michigan; bedridden black grandmothers in the Lowcountry; and a host of others whose realities many of us never pay attention to, or we blatantly ignore, because of our class privileges and proximities to whiteness.

What remains clear, though, is that an openly racist, alleged rapist could be elected President of the United States of America, because America itself is a racist-rapist nation. We live in a country where former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw could rape 13 or more black women, and where women, especially black and brown women whose ancestors were raped by white male elites sanctioned by the U.S. nation-state, are disallowed from making their own reproductive health choices to this day. Racial-sexual terrorism is America, and Trump is its new leader.

Even as white liberals cry and lament Trump with more fervor than they would ever mourn Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Sandra Bland; or cry with and for our indigenous co-laborers in North Dakota; or even our Latinx kin who have been deported under Obama’s regime, what is undoubtedly apparent to those of us who have been living under white nationalism is that white tears will not save us, nor will white Jesus, nor will white liberals, nor will white Evangelicals. What will save us, though, is a doing away with whiteness writ-large.

The long road to freedom and justice ahead beckons us to divest from white saviorism, the falsity of American democracy, and the wickedness of neoliberalism. To do so we must instead invest in the conjured wisdoms of African foremothers and forefathers who said, “before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free.” Yes, we must tap into the well of life within each of ourselves and render fugitive blackness, or maroon blackness, our self-sustenance.

Trumpism is an Americanism, and because we saw Trumpism in Ferguson on August 9, 2014, I turn to the words of the freedom fighters of the Mike Brown rebellion who chanted, “the whole damn system is guilty as hell.” Those queer and trans black women taught us that before we can acknowledge our hell(s), we must “indict and convict” the racist, alleged rapists who stand before us upholding evil. We must also re-imagine the prophetic black radical tradition, such that we are no longer interested in working with the master’s tools, having a seat at the master’s table, or doing the emotional work of repackaging damaged “democratic” goods for faux liberation. We must “be like trees planted by the rivers of water,” or as Shirley Chisholm observed, “unbought, unbossed.”

[American Dream]

Does Trump Represent Fascism or White Supremacy?


How should we understand the impending presidency of Donald Trump? What should we be prepared for? While some have framed Trump’s victory as a sign of resurgent fascism, our guest contributor argues that we should see it as the latest development in a much older phenomenon, which is not an interruption of democracy but intimately interlinked with it.

There are many ways to conceptualize the relationship between democracy and fascism, and this is a dangerous time to take anything for granted; we will be publishing more on this subject shortly. In the meantime, this is a useful contribution towards analyzing the dangers ahead and how to ready ourselves for them.

Fascism is Obsolete, Whiteness is Here to Stay

Long before Donald Trump’s recent electoral victory, but in a chorus that has grown deafening in the last month, people have been talking about the possible return of fascism. As terrifying as Donald Trump is, it is nonetheless important not to level just any criticism against the president-elect. And though the misogynist mogul’s favorite epithet, “just disgusting,” fits him like a glove, the charge of fascist is inaccurate.

Since we’re interested in an analysis that enables more effective resistance, and not simply in spewing, Twitter-like, any insult with a chance of sticking, it behooves us to examine just which right-wing model Trump is following.

I would argue that fascism was made definitively irrelevant by the Second World War and its aftermath, during which it was conclusively absorbed by democratic capitalism. Since 1945, when the victorious allies dismantled the Nazi state and recruited the elements they found most useful, fascism has been nothing more than a second-string linebacker in a game that is democratic to its very core. The future, of course, is full of surprises, but it would take much more than a Trump victory for fascism to be tenable or necessary again in a central capitalist country like the United States.

One of the very few actual neo-fascist parties to appear on the political scene in the last decade is Golden Dawn in Greece. True to the original model, they combined a political party and a terroristic street movement, recruiting within the police and military to create party-specific loyalty, and forging connections with national capitalists and the mafia, in order to create a dual power capable of intimidating or overriding the checks and balances of democratic institutions and non-partisan media. Many people predicted Golden Dawn might seize power, and imagined a return to fascism. Golden Dawn imagined the same thing, and this utter naïveté, their ignorance about the historical moment and their role within democracy, proved to be their demise. As long as Golden Dawn acted to push public debates to the right, to create scapegoats for Greece’s social woes, to kill immigrants and attack anarchists or other social radicals, they were tolerated. But once they revealed that their designs on power were actually sincere and that they were willing to use violence against non-marginal elements in society, the democratic powers stepped in and cut them short, arresting the leadership and excluding the party, at least partially, from the public debates that shape acceptable opinion. Nowadays, fascism doesn’t stand a chance against democracy, and any gang of neo-fascists who fail to grasp that their role is simply to be a tool within the democratic toolbox is in for a rude shock.

In Spain, one of the other European countries hardest hit by the crisis, the neo-fascist or crypto-fascist parties have collapsed in recent years, and from Italy to the UK, the extreme right has followed a model that actually relies on and encourages democratic mechanisms. Structurally speaking, the progressive populist party SYRIZA in Greece actually has more in common with the fascist model than the Republicans under Trump (organic connections with extraparliamentary groups that have a powerful capacity for street mobilization, a unification of extreme left and extreme right discourses, a national vision of socialism, intense patriotism and militarism).

Fascism is not just any extreme right-wing position. It is a complex phenomenon that mobilizes a popular movement under the hierarchical direction of a political party and cultivates parallel loyalty structures in the police and military, to conquer power either through democratic or military means; subsequently abolishes electoral procedures to guarantee a single party continuity; creates a new social contract with the domestic working class, on the one hand ushering in a higher standard of living than what could be achieved under liberal capitalism and on the other hand protecting the capitalists with a new social peace; and eliminates the internal enemies whom it had blamed for the destabilization of the prior regime.

Trump showed contempt for democratic convention by threatening to intimidate voters and hinting that he might not concede a lost election, but his model of conservatism in no way abolishes the mechanisms that are fundamental to democracy. In another four years, we’ll be subjected to the electoral circus all over again. Trump did appeal especially to cops and border guards, but in no way began inducting the police into a para-state organization designed to cement his hold on power. He gave shout-outs to the militia movement and tickled the fancy of the Ku Klux Klan, but has done nothing to centralize those groups into a paramilitary force under his command. He promised a new deal for the working class, but will not even take the first steps towards instituting it, and whatever his intentions he will prove utterly unable to reward the owning class with social peace. He will make life harder for those he identifies as the enemies of society (Muslims and immigrants, especially), but he will not eliminate them.

Continues at: http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/r/trump/

[American Dream]

https://abolitionjournal.org/the-fools- ... socialism/

The Fools of National Socialism: Thoughts on Antisemitism and the Fight Against Trumpism

by Dan Berger

(11/21/16)

One of the (many) surprising things to come out of this election campaign has been the re-legitimization, on a mass scale, of old-school antisemitism. After years of high-profile, front-page news stories about whether the slightest expression of Palestine activism and solidarity comprised “antisemitism,” we now have a president-elect who has trafficked in the most cartoonish examples of anti-Jewish stereotypes. While his closing campaign ad depicted Jewish political figures as part of a global conspiracy, Trump’s primary campaign saw him tell the Republican Jewish Committee that he was the first candidate who didn’t want their money and that he was as good a negotiator as all of them. More troubling, he aims to appoint as chief strategist the alt-right spokesperson widely praised by neo-Nazis. While some mainstream commentators have flagged Bannon’s appointment as “controversial,” CNN and other media outlets have nonetheless given white nationalists space to pontificate as policy analysts. With white supremacists establishing an inside-the-beltway think tank, their influence will likely grow in the coming years: the neo-Redeemers go to Washington.

Obviously, Jews are hardly the most targeted group under Trumpism. Nor is this antisemitism new. As left-wing analysts of the so-called alt-right have noted, the far Right has always held on to an ideology of antisemitism. Meanwhile, the Republican Right’s commitment to Israel or opposition to antisemitism has always been equal parts cynicism and racism: they’ll do anything to discredit the Left, especially people of color, and they see themselves engaged in a civilizational conflict with Muslims. At best, they see Jews as shady and duplicitous conspirators rather than sworn enemies. Still, over the last year antisemitism has become quietly popularized but surprisingly unchallenged in a culture that has spent years dismissing protests against Israeli apartheid as antisemitic.

The emerging opposition to Trumpism has rightly focused on the groups facing the most dire, most violent threats–people facing deportation, exclusion, and mob assault. Within this logic, antisemitism remains a powerful ideological trope that the now-mainstreamed far Right has projected onto its authoritarian platform. From the announcement of Trump’s campaign in June 2015, it was clear that his worldview was shaped by far right conspiracy thinking, in which antisemitism is never far removed: the notion that “Mexico sends their people” is a foolish framing of why and how migration happens. Yet it reveals the antisemitic structure of Trumpian racial logic.

Put simply, Trump’s antisemitism is not primarily about Jews. Rather, the antisemitism functions as a structuring apparatus for his racist political outlook. By antisemitism, I mean a right-wing populist ideological framework that is 1) steeped in conspiracy thinking 2) premised on a misplaced anti-elitism against a secretive, racialized cabal that 3) can only be understood in crude, patriarchal nationalist terms. This kind of antisemitism is evident in Steve Bannon’s recent claim that he is not a “white nationalist” but rather an “economic nationalist.” Antisemitism here combines the neoconservative desire for U.S. militarism to fight a global “clash of civilizations” with late-19th century tribalist race thinking under the banner of capitalist accumulation. As the independent scholar Chip Berlet wrote in 2012, antisemitism is a racializing logic that, since 9/11, has applied as much to Muslims as to Jews. Whether it is Mexico “sending their people,” Hillary Clinton’s “secret [meetings] with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” (yes, he said that), or a host of other paranoid utterances by the now president-elect, Trump’s worldview is antisemitic. He understands geopolitics as a series of conspiracies that need to be met with violence. Race is his shorthand for describing whether someone is an agent of a global conspiracy or its victim.

Trumpian antisemitism has been the ideological framework for the most sustained white supremacist assault in generations. Its primary targets are Muslim, Black, and Latinx. The fact that Trumpian antisemitism is not exclusively directed at Jews—despite a host of transparently anti-Jewish statements, actions, and supporters—may speak to the shifting alliances and categories of analysis in this moment. Trump’s son-in-law turned close advisor, Jared Kushner, is an orthodox Jew—and now so is his daughter. Some Hasidic Jews supported Trump, pointing to his patriarchal stance and Islamophobic proposals. Similar sentiments can be found in Alan Dershowitz’s defense of Steve Bannon while attacking Black Lives Matter and BDS, or the speaking invitation extended to Bannon by the Zionist Organization of America. From the tragic to the farcical, right-wing celebrity conspiracist Wayne Allyn Root even suggested that Trump might be the “first Jewish president” since he is a successful businessman from New York who also lives part-time in Florida.

These kinds of endorsements echo those of Ben Carson and Omarosa, “Latinos/Hispanics for Donald Trump,” and others who see themselves above the victimization they co-sign with their endorsements. Simplistic projections of the linkage between identity and ideology fail to capture how race and politics intersect in the modern United States. White supremacy is increasingly untethered from phenotypic whiteness, yet more virulent than it has been in fifty years. Part of our fight in the years to come—and not just the four years of a Trump presidency—is to operationalize an analytic clarity about the nature and function of white supremacy. Trumpism demonstrates that antisemitism continues to play a vital role in misdirecting class rage and other forms of resentment away from confronting racial capitalism and toward social violence (while ignoring the accelerating climate catastrophe).

The proliferation of swastikas on walls, schools, sidewalks, Black churches—even the gravestone of former Beastie Boy Adam Yauch—makes vivid the scale of this threat. It should also alert us to the recrudescence of antisemitism in contemporary racial formation. The Trump family allegedly changed their name from Drumpf to downplay their German heritage and ease their assimilation into the world of New York City capitalists. Later, Trump learned both business and politics from ardent racists who govern with violence and manipulation: most especially McCarthyite henchman Roy Cohn, who prosecuted Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (an earlier generation of people Breitbart might label “renegade Jews”) as well as a series of mafia figures. He was trained by Cold War mercenaries, to which he adds 19th-century notions of racial contagion.

Yet the vast sweep of Trumpism’s many enemies suggests the potential for a renewed popular front against fascism and right-wing authoritarianism. The emerging coalition between some mainstream Jewish and Muslim groups is, in light of years of acrimony around questions of Palestine and Islamophobia, a breath of fresh air. Together with the grassroots initiatives led by undocumented activists, Black radicals, and so many others targeted by the incoming administration, they point toward the possibility of widespread alliances needed to upend what is already an expressly racist regime. Our fight is not only against the “socialism of fools,” as August Bebel famously called antisemitism on the left, but against the fools of national socialism—the pseudo, crypto, and explicit fascists of the Trump administration.

[American Dream]

December 2016 Bits and Bites

Out in British Columbia, some members of the Soldiers of Odin tried to crash an anti-racism rally in Richmond. Suffice it to say that it didn't go especially well for them:

However, it was marred slightly by the appearance of a small group from the Soldiers of Odin, a citizen-based “street patrol” organization, closely connected to anti-immigration movements in Finland.
....
On Sunday, although claiming not to be racist, pledging support for everyone, irrespective of race and carrying signs stating “Stand And Fight Against Hate,” — the three men representing the Soldiers of Odin were told their presence wasn’t welcome and, after a few words were exchanged, moved further down No. 3 Road.

Despite repeated attempts to contact the Soldiers of Odin’s B.C. chapter through its Facebook page, the News was not able to reach the group or its local leaders for comment.

At the event, Soldiers of Odin representative Kris Erickson told the News’ photographer that everyone had got their message wrong and claimed that they were there to express solidarity with the protestors.
....
SOO, which has chapters across Canada, denies, on its public Facebook page, any accusations of being racist or anti-immigrant and claims to exist to primarily protect women and children by keeping the streets safe.

However, it’s been alleged the group’s private Facebook page is filled with racist and xenophobic comments, mainly directed towards Muslims.

More at: http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2 ... bites.html

[American Dream]

Counterpoint: Yes, Trump Represents Fascism




Trump’s election signals a turn in a century-old cycle, one we ought to recognize by now. The U.S. has been experiencing growing populist discontent, a sentiment fostered by poor material conditions for the working class. The Left has had a few token victories (a black president, gay civil rights), but has, predictably, not demonstrated the revolutionary potential that could lead to real changes in most peoples’ lives. This failure is bitterly felt.

Most U.S. residents see the government as corrupt and untrustworthy. They feel alienated from the democratic process, and from their physical communities, retreating instead into online echo chambers of shared opinions and mythologies.

http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2016/12/ ... s-fascism/

[American Dream]

Notes on Trump (Bromma Dec. 2016)



1. The normality of white supremacy
Since Trump’s election, I keep hearing that we shouldn’t “normalize” him or his agenda. I believe that’s looking through the wrong end of the telescope. There’s nothing as “normal” in the U.S. as white supremacy. Sometimes it’s disguised by tokenism and obscured by “multiculturalism.” But in this country, white supremacy has always shown its true naked face at times of stress and transition.

Because white supremacy isn’t just a bunch of bad ideas inherited from ignorant elders. It’s a deeply-rooted institution through which the U.S. rules over many oppressed peoples. It’s the glue that keeps hundred of millions loyal to that very same program. It’s the central ideological, political and physical system set up by white capital to rule the land and dominate its internal and external colonies. And therefore white supremacy underpins all the wealth and power this country’s ruling class possesses. Without it, the U.S. falls.

2. Contradictions within white capitalism
White supremacy is constant, but it keeps changing form. For instance, African Americans have endured a variety of modes of white supremacy: slavery, Jim Crow, gentrification, and more. White capitalism welcomed Mexicans and Chinese as semi-slave laborers, then attacked and deported them when conditions changed. Native peoples faced extermination campaigns, phony treaties, forced assimilation and confinement on reservations at various times. White supremacy isn’t a singular strategy by white society towards people of color. The form can change, as long as whiteness is always valued; as long as white people are always on top.

U.S. white supremacy was modified in response to world anti-colonial struggles and, after the Cold War, to globalization. Together these developments generated significant contradictions for traditional forms of white supremacy. By the late 1970s, old-style white military colonialism had lost much of its power, beaten back by a phalanx of national liberation struggles. So imperialism rebooted, searching out colonial partners and new forms of financial blackmail to replace or supplement military occupation. And, in the 1990s, U.S. capitalism entered a period of intense cooperation with other capitalists around the world, aiming to make the global economy increasingly “borderless.” Open, blatant racism wasn’t helpful in this changed environment.

So the U.S. ruling class adapted white surpremacy to the new conditions and gave it a new look. In the revised, neocolonial order, some people of color were accepted into positions of wealth and authority. Racist violence and discrimination continued inside and outside the country. But at the same time, U.S. high culture increasingly professed to celebrate the diversity of people of all nationalities and races (and genders too). This helped present U.S. capitalism to the world with a friendlier face. White supremacy continued, masked by capitalist multiculturalism.

Some white people embraced the concept of multiculturalism, sincerely hoping it could be the basis for a genuine progressive culture. But most white amerikans felt that this new incarnation of capitalism was a demotion. They didn’t like having people of color as their bosses. They didn’t like seeing “good jobs” and social bribery spread around the world, instead of being reserved for them. And they hated the “political correctness” of having to hide their racism. U.S. capitalism’s perceived “disloyalty” to its white home base during the rise of globalization fueled the current upsurge of right wing populism, including eventually the campaign of Donald Trump.

But for quite a while the ruling class turned a deaf ear to its disgruntled white masses. The capitalists had global interests to tend to; global profits to bank. And frankly, a willing Asian dictator or Latina judge or African American president was worth more to them than a thousand whining white people. The militia movement was repressed when it became militant; the Tea Party was mocked by the global sophisticates. (Neither was destroyed, though; they remained as a possibility, a fallback.)

As globalization continued to advance in the last few decades, white amerika was gradually forced and cajoled to accept modest changes in the hierarchy of imperial privilege. It seemed possible that monopoly capital, pushing white people to fall in line with multiculturalism, might continue forever along that path, backed and cheered by cohorts of optimistic and idealistic artists and intellectuals.

To a large extent, this is where the plaintive cry not to “normalize” Trump comes from. Cosmopolitan liberals, now accustomed to living under globalized capitalism, can’t believe that U.S. society is going to be allowed to go backward; can’t believe that a rich country could ever be permitted to trash multiculturalism; to turn back the clock on women’s rights and environmentalism and so much more. They have a hard time accepting that their bright dream of a blended world culture, a dream that had previously been tolerated and even encouraged by monopoly capital, might be betrayed, and end in a surge of old-fashioned racist violence. Their disbelief echoes the disbelief among the liberal intelligentsia in England after Brexit, and in other countries where globalization is giving ground.

3. Timing is everything
It’s important to understand that populist opposition to globalization in the West is making breakthroughs not as globalization rises, but as it falters. In fact, the rise of these political movements is probably more a reflection of globalization’s decline than the cause of that decline. What’s coming into view, semi-hidden underneath the frenzied soap opera of reactionary populism, is that the tide of globalization has crested and started to recede. It wasn’t permanent after all.

It should be stipulated, right off the bat, that globalization has unleashed immense changes, many of which are irreversible. For example, the peasantry, once the largest class of all, isn’t coming back. Globalization broke it; sent it streaming out of the countryside by the hundreds of millions. Out of that broken peasantry, a giant new woman-centered proletariat and a sprawling lumpen-proletariat are still being formed around the world.

Yet globalization as a financially-integrated, transnational form of capitalism can’t advance without constant expansion, constant profit growth. Since no global state exists to mediate among the world’s capitalists, shared growth is the only thing that restrains them from cut-throat competition. Growth is also what allows capitalists to at least partly mollify the displaced masses back home with cheap commodities and whatever jobs a rising world economy has to offer. But now, instead of growing, the world economy is slowing. In fact globalized capitalism, having bulked up on steroidal injections of speculation and unsustainable, leveraged debt, is teetering on the edge of disaster.

From the U.S. to China, from the Eurozone to Brazil, danger signs are flashing; massive globalized industries are shifting into reverse. International trade and investment are flat or falling. Capital that was formerly used for investment in “emerging economies” is now flowing backward into safe haven investments in the metropolis. Automation, renewable energy and other new technologies are starting to shorten supply chains, reducing the demand for imports from far away. Intractable economic and political crises, like those in the Middle East and Greece and Ukraine, are eroding cooperation and sapping confidence in already-weak globalist institutions. The internet, a key factor in globalization, is gradually becoming segmented, as governments and corporations privatize, censor and manipulate parts of it. And underneath everything, the increased inequality caused by globalization itself is throttling the demand for commodities.

Multinational corporations aren’t abandoning world markets by any means. But leading monopoly capitalists are hedging against trade wars and reducing their reliance on complex, interdependent trade and finance. Facing what he calls a “protectionist global environment,” GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt is shifting his company’s production from a globalized to a “localized” model. “We used to have one site to make locomotives; now we have multiple global sites that give us market access. A localization strategy can’t be shut down by protectionist policies.” This is a defensive posture, harkening back to an earlier form of imperialism.

Once it seemed that transnational integration had an unstoppable momentum. But now a retreat into the once-familiar zones of old-fashioned nation-based imperialism seems to be on the capitalist menu.

4. A previous wave of globalization
If the ongoing shift away from from transnationalism and towards harsh national rivalry continues, it won’t be the first instance of “de-globalization” in modern history. It’s happened before.

From 1870 to 1913, fueled by the industrial revolution and the explosive rise of U.S. capitalism, there was a massive spike in international trade and market integration. It was centered in Western Europe and the U.S., but extended further into Latin America and other parts of the world. Borders were opened, tariffs were lowered, and there was a rapid increase in exports and financial interdependence. The world capitalist economy boomed. Just as during the current wave of globalization, this earlier period was marked by major innovations in transport and communications, as well as an unprecedented upsurge in transnational migration. (Including tens of millions of workers who migrated from Europe to the U.S.) Economists refer to this as the “first wave” of modern globalization.

But capitalism is at best an unstable and contradictory system, periodically riven by economic crisis. And a globalized form of capitalism appears to be particularly vulnerable to those crises.

The globalization of 1870-1913 collapsed like a house of cards. Growing economic imbalances and stalled growth led many imperialist countries to impose tariffs and take other protectionist measures, vainly striving to boost their own home economy at the expense of others. Inevitably, there was retaliation in kind. This cannibalistic inter-imperial competition only aggravated the already deteriorating economic conditions. Trade and global commodities became more and more expensive. There was a rapid downward spiral of economic depression and reactionary nationalism.

There was no pretense of multiculturalism in the U.S. back then, of course. Massive vio-lence against people of color was already common during the boom years of globalization. So it’s hard to say if racism became worse during the period of de-globalization. But in 1913, segregation was officially initiated in all federal offices, including lunchrooms and bathrooms. In the following decades there were dozens of vicious race riots against Black enclaves in cities North and South, causing many hundreds of deaths and thousands of people driven from their homes. Having been pushed down previously, the Klan was revived in 1915. Its peak was in the 1920’s, with some 4 million members.

Finally, the first wave of globalization imploded in a frenzy of national hatred and two brutal world wars, fought without quarter among the capitalist powers. Something we should keep in mind as we confront the current situation.

5. De-globalization
Today’s capitalist globalization isn’t failing because of political blows landed by Western anti-globalization movements, although those have had a real effect. Rather, the populist movements are reaching for real power just as chunks of the ruling class globalist consensus are themselves breaking away and seeking alternate, nationalistic strategies.

Former globalizers are floating back toward the anchors of their old home economies and shifting the blame for economic crisis onto “foreigners” and social minorities. They’re muting their former advocacy of free trade while backing away from trade agreements. They’re rediscovering protectionism. They’re experimenting with cyber-attacks on other countries, building up their militaries, increasing their involvement in proxy wars, and manipulating their currencies to gain temporary advantage over trading partners. And as a natural part of this shift, they’re unleashing their most rabid “patriotic” social bases to sell their new/old program, control the streets, and, potentially, to serve as cannon fodder down the road.

In every quarter of the globe, nationalistic xenophobia is on the rise, strangling the remaining globalists’ fading dreams about world government and a borderless economy. Right wing populism is being released, and it’s rising out of its reservoirs, flowing like water filling dry river beds. In country after country, old social prejudices are being revived and intensified; former globalist capitalists are reaching out and mending fences with their most trusted national social bases.

That’s how it is here in the U.S., too. A return to the old white amerika is becoming a more and more practical program for U.S. capitalists—not just for the white masses. It offers the only natural form of capitalist regroupment as globalization wanes. An option as amerikan as apple pie.

Continues at: http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/notes-on-trump/

[American Dream]

Soldiers of Odin: Strike Three

More at: http://anti-racistcanada.blogspot.com/2 ... three.html

[tapitsbo]

I wonder about the rumour I heard in passing that the "anti-racistcanada" blog is affiliated with the "CPC"

did they mean the Conservatives or the Communists?

either would be funny...

[American Dream]

Sketchy little rumours are easy to roll out but harder to prove...

[tapitsbo]

Good thing that one doesn't matter, much.

[American Dream]

How do you feel?

[tapitsbo]

How do you feel?

Better than when we first "met", thanks

[American Dream]

http://unityandstruggle.org/2016/12/19/ ... rd-spiral/

MORBID SYMPTOMS: THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL

The following post is the second part in our notes on Trump. Part one can be found here. We’ll look at the limits and potentials of the forces arrayed against Trump in part three.


In our last post, we located the Trump regime within a global right wing resurgence enabled by capitalist crisis and the failures of social democracy. Now we can examine how this resurgence developed in the U.S. context. In this piece, we will explore how conservative hegemony emerged from the crisis of the 1970s, developed through the Reagan years and exhausted itself in the Obama era. We will then trace how Trump builds on the history of conservative hegemony even as he rends it in two, and outline the degree to which the incoming Trump regime stands to deepen authoritarianism.

For decades, the U.S. neoliberal elite legitimated falling wages and living standards by keeping the economy afloat with successive credit-fueled bubbles and playing on white racialist resentments. But this strategy began to collapse with the onset of the Great Recession, after years of erosion. Now the the content of conservative hegemony is turning against itself, and Trumpism in the result. On one side are neoliberal efforts to contract social reproduction, and thereby struggle to renew the profitability of capitalism. On the other side are appeals to white populist nationalism, which increasingly undermine the norms of the bourgeois state and civil society. Both elements have been integral to neoliberal rule, but they can also become contradictory. As they contend in productive tension, they threaten a spiraling descent into authoritarianism and deepening capitalist retrogression.

Trump’s election signals that the turbulent waters of social contradiction have begun to spin faster. To grasp the dangers of this dynamic and how to overcome them, we have to trace their emergence from our own history, starting with the last capitalist crisis.

A New Hegemony from the Wreckage

In the late 1970s the U.S. capitalist class faced economic stagnation, rising inflation, and working class revolt in the streets and on the assembly line. In a bid to renew investment, they turned to attacking the costs of labor power, creating a new kind of working class in the process and detonating the Keynesian consensus that had stood for forty years. The 1970s crisis did not lead – as many had hoped – to a revolutionary challenge to capitalism, but to the emergence of a conservative hegemony that would expand and deepen for four decades.

Since the Great Depression, the trade unions, and later the civil rights leadership, had been steadily incorporated into capitalist production and the state. In exchange for labor peace and increased productivity, they had been promised expanded democratic rights, racial integration into civil society, and rising real wages. This period marked the definitive transition to the real domination of capital: the incorporation and reorganization of the whole of society according to the needs of capitalist value production. It resulted in a reduction of labor power, not only in terms of the gap between wage levels and the immense surpluses created at the time, but also through labor’s subjugation as an appendage of automation and the remaking of everyday life. The gap between the condition of workers and the enormous productive forces of capitalism continued to widen, sharpening a key contradiction of capitalism. Though living standards in the postwar period rose for many layers of the working class, thanks to the growing number of cheap consumer goods, this could only continue as long as the surpluses workers generated rose even faster. With economic stagnation in the 1970s – a combination of falling growth and soaring inflation – the material basis for the Keynesian regime dissolved. The capitalist class had to find a new way to rule.


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[American Dream]

Recharging the Batteries of Whiteness: Trump's New Racial Identity Politics

By Arun Kundnani




The US intellectual class has failed to understand the racism at the core of Trump's political project. The discussion is focused on two questions: Are Trump voters decent, salt-of-the-earth workers protesting their economic insecurity, or hate-filled Archie Bunkers? Are his transition appointments hateful bigots or mainstream conservatives?

What both questions obscure is that white supremacy is a social and political system, not simply a matter of individual attitudes. It is sustained not by barroom bigots but by millions of daily acts of complicity on the part of ordinary people — in New York City and San Francisco as much as in Alabama, and among wealthy elites as much as the rural poor. As Frantz Fanon wrote: "A given society is racist, or it is not." Questioning whether one region or class is more racist than another is the product of people "incapable of straight thinking."

Thinking of racism only in terms of hateful and ignorant individuals is convenient for well-off liberals as it enables the issue to be ascribed to people poorer or less sophisticated than themselves. It is also reassuring because it makes us feel like we know what racism is: after all, haven't we seen it on television newsreels of the Deep South in the 1950s?

But, in focusing on individual hatreds, we miss the bigger structural picture: the way the racist system grinds along, condemning millions of Black and Brown people to the indignities of hunger amidst plenty, and official violence narrated by proclamations of freedom. We miss how racism changes its shape over time as movements spring up to challenge it, and, in reaction, political projects emerge to give racism a new face, the better to preserve it.

Trump's election should be understood as the coming to power of such a political project. Its meaning cannot be understood by listing which members of his team hate Black people and which hate Mexicans, as if the racism of his project can be reduced to unchanging signatures of individual prejudice. Nor is the project altered if Trump appoints some persons of color. Rather, one ought to begin by looking at its racialized ideas and proposals, and how they relate to the wider social and political context.

It is too soon to trace with certainty the precise contours of this project. Whether it will be able to secure support from the Republican establishment and the corporate elite remains to be seen. But there is enough coherence to speak of an ideological center of gravity and direction of travel. At its core is a distinctive racial identity politics that views the US as undermining itself through politically correct multiculturalism and globalization, rendering it too weak to defend itself from the perceived civilizational threat of Islam and the rise of China. This political project builds on the history of Republican white supremacy politics but goes beyond and reworks it in significant ways.

Trump's European Antecedents

To fully understand it, we should turn less to Reagan and Nixon and more to the recent history of the far right in Europe, especially the reinvention of French fascism in the 1980s. At that time, members of the French far right began to downplay their Nazi pasts and instead emphasize the need to preserve cultural identity, defined as an ethnic "way of life." In this new identitarian narrative, whiteness became an ethnicity under threat from a ruling elite favoring excessive immigration, multiculturalism and globalization. Invoking the imagined threat of "Islamization" was a powerful way of weaponizing this formula of white victimhood. It powered the Front National (FN) party under Jean-Marie Le Pen to an electoral breakthrough in 1984, winning it 10 seats in the European parliament. The same formula will likely give his daughter Marine Le Pen a final round place in next year's presidential run-offs. After the events of 2016, it would be rash to write off her chances of an outright win.

Since the 1990s, and particularly in the shadow of the War on Terror, far-right movements across Western Europe have learned from the FN. They have understood how the seemingly nonracist language of culture and ethnicity can be used to engage the mythological power of white victimhood. And they understand that a different rhetorical relationship to Jewishness enables a plausible defense against accusations of neo-Nazism. Since the end of World War II, Europe has tended to equate racism with Nazism, and Nazism with anti-Semitism. Thus, mainstream acceptability for the far Right is aided by publicly substituting Islamophobic for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and describing Israel — traditionally hated by post-war fascist movements — as a frontline state in the West's war on Islam. The Vlaams Belang (VB) party in Belgium and the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands have both followed this path, giving rise to the seeming paradox of far-right Zionists with Nazi pasts — and a barely submerged anti-Semitism.

In the US, this kind of politics has been closely associated with the hugely popular Breitbart News. The Le Pens have been referred to on 17,500 pages of Breitbart's website according to Google's search engine; PVV leader Geert Wilders is on almost 4,000. To Breitbart, they are heroes defending Europe from excessive multiculturalism, globalization and an imminent Islamic takeover, the counterparts to Trump in the United States. One of Breitbart's most frequent contributors is David Horowitz, a leading figure in the networks of Islamophobic propaganda in the US; his organization, the Freedom Center, funds Wilders' political campaigns in the Netherlands. As its former chairman Stephen K. Bannon said in 2014, Breitbart News firmly believes it is leading a right-wing "global revolt" that includes the Front National in France, Wilders in the Netherlands, Narendra Modi's government in India and Nigel Farage's UK Independence Party (UKIP), which this year achieved its aim of a referendum vote to leave the European Union. All of these parties are united in ethnic separatism and anti-Muslim racism, which they present as the insurgent, antiestablishment common sense of ordinary folk.

The appointment of Bannon as chief strategist underlines the influence that this identitarian far-right politics will have in the Trump White House. Significantly, when Bannon was recently accused of anti-Semitism, it was easy for his supporters to dismiss the allegations by pointing to Breitbart News's support for Israel. Meanwhile, the neo-Nazi spectacle of Richard Spencer's pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., provided a helpful distraction, giving the reassuring impression that fascists are still recognizable by the same old signifiers. A week of outrage and the news media moved on, leaving Bannon's less obvious version of fascism unscathed.

Playing on Narratives of White Victimhood

The power of this racial identity politics lies in its implicitly racial narrative of white victimhood. With this narrative, Trump can tell a story that explains why things are so bad: the reason the corporate elite is not even embarrassed by its own failures is that, in embracing an empty globalism, it no longer has any racial attachment to the mass of "ordinary" Americans; and the reason policy-making in Washington is so arrogantly out of touch is because it is controlled by these same deracinated globalists.

Trump has been in the business of race construction as long as he has been in the business of building construction. His path to the White House began in 2011 with his mainstreaming of the racist conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya. The subtext was that the United States had a secretly Muslim president working for the "enemy." The point was: the multiculturalism Obama represents was really a kind of subversion. Two-thirds of Trump supporters told pollsters in mid-2015 that Obama was Muslim. With Newt Gingrich, Frank Gaffney, Stephen Bannon and Ben Carson, Trump has surrounded himself with advocates of the theory that the Muslim Brotherhood is secretly taking over the US government and attempting to implement sharia law — the 21st-century equivalent of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery.

More generally, the stereotype of the cosmopolitan Jewish banker of early 20th century anti-Semitism has been transformed into what Bannon calls "the party of Davos," which now threatens "the Judeo-Christian West" with an implicitly anti-white multicultural globalization. Trump's ideology thus provides a way to connect legitimate anger at the failures of capitalism to a defense of a victimized whiteness. One of Trump's campaign successes has been to get the intellectual class to talk more and more about the "white working class" as the main victim of corporations, rather than understand the working class as multiracial.

This new way of mobilizing racial identity is recruiting millions of people into continuing complicity with white supremacy without their having to invest in the full-blown bigotry of a Klan-style political movement. Moreover, it has outflanked the elite liberalism of Obama and the Clintons. The Democratic Party leadership has sought to reform America's racial capitalism to enable people of color to enter the elites of wealth and power, without touching the basic structures of oppression and exploitation. They look up at a glass ceiling to be broken for a few but not down to the concrete floors where the many remain. A corporate-friendly multiculturalism along these lines means the US can publicly disown an oppression it continues to depend upon. It can tell itself a story of its own exceptional virtue while maintaining devastating inequalities and upholding them with state violence. It can proclaim itself leader of the free world while defending everywhere elites who profit from the non-freedom of millions.

Trump Exploited the Hypocrisies of US Liberalism

Trump exploited precisely this gap between the polite, liberal values espoused by CEOs and Secretaries of State, and the exploitation and violence they actually preside over, domestically and globally. His fascism does not need to start from scratch. His call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States makes explicit what was already implicit in the policies of the War on Terror under Bush and Obama. Similarly, his demand for a wall to be built on the Mexican border dramatizes what has been the official policy of both parties since the 1990s. This is precisely how Trump's politics thrives amidst the hypocrisy of the US's 21st century multicultural platitudes. It is not that too much liberal elite identity politics helped Trump to victory; it is rather the failure of elite identity politics to go far enough. Its antiracism starts and ends in the boardroom, leaving intact the deep-seated social, economic and political constraints that the majority of Black and Brown people face.

Continues at: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3011-re ... y-politics

[American Dream]

Henry A. Giroux | White Nationalism in the Oval Office and the Suppression of Dissent

As Donald Trump's rule begins, it appears that Americans are entering a period in which civic formations and public spheres will be modeled after a state of racist warfare. During his presidential campaign, he provided a nativist language that targeted the most vulnerable in American society, including immigrants, Blacks and Muslims. He also provoked society's vilest impulses, energizing a range of extremist racist and anti-Semitic groups, including authoritarians, fascists, neo-Nazis and white nationalists, some of whom seek to normalize their bigotry under the umbrella of the "alt-right." According to The New York Times, members of various racist and ultranationalist groups have been energized by Trump's election.

One of the founders of the neo-Nazi website, The Daily Stormer, was quoted as saying that Trump's victory has resulted in a "reboot of the White Nationalist movement." The same article also quoted Richard B. Spencer, another prominent figure in the so-called "alt-right" movement, who without apology argues that his organization, the National Policy Institute, is dedicated to "the heritage, identity and future of people of European descent" and that "Race is real, race matters. Race is the foundation of identity." This is simply neo-Nazi dribble dressed up in the discourse of difference. There can be little doubt that these antidemocratic and racist tendencies will play a major role in shaping Trump's presidency.

The call for regime change, a term used by the White House to designate overthrowing a foreign government, seems certain to intensify under Trump's administration. This means a more militant foreign policy under Trump. But it also signals a domestic form of regime change as well, since this authoritarian neoliberal government will deregulate, militarize and privatize everything it can. With this regime change will come the suppression of civil liberties and dissent at home through the expansion of a punishing state that will criminalize a wider range of everyday behaviors, expand mass incarceration, and all the while enrich the coffers of the ultra-rich and corporate predators. The hate-filled discourses of intolerance, chauvinism and social abandonment are already creeping further into the ever-widening spheres of society bent on blending a militarized war culture with a totalizing embrace of corporate capitalism.

Under Trump, ignorance has been weaponized and will continue to be used to produce a profoundly disturbing anti-intellectualism. It is important to remember that in his various speeches, Trump emptied language of any meaning, giving credence to the charge that he was producing with his endless lies a kind of post-truth in which words did not count for anything anymore, especially when informed judgments and facts could no longer be distinguished from opinions and falsehoods.

Words for Trump are reduced to emotions, shock and effects that mimic tawdry reality-TV-style performances. He continues to speak from a discursive space in which everything can be said, the truth is irrelevant and informed judgment becomes a liability. Under such circumstances, it is extremely difficult to grasp what he knows about anything. He steals words and discards their meaning, refusing to own up to them ethically, politically and socially.

There is more at work here than the registers of incoherency, ignorance and civic illiteracy. There is also an inconsistency that errs on the side of a militant racism and a racist militarism. For instance, the only moments of clarity in Trump's discourse are when he uses the toxic vocabulary of hate, xenophobia, racism and misogyny to target those he believes refuse to "Make America Great Again."

The Suppression of Dissent Has Already Begun

Under Trump leadership, a war culture, a culture of aggression and state violence are set to intensify. There will almost certainly be a widespread suppression of dissent -- a suppression similar to the police violence used against those protesting the Dakota Access pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota, along with the arrests of journalists covering the protests.

It is reasonable to assume that under the Trump administration there will also be an intensification of the harassment of journalists similar to what happened to Ed Ou, a renowned Canadian photojournalist who has worked for a number of media sources, including The New York Times and Time magazine. Ou was recently detained by US border officers while traveling from Canada to the US to report on the protests against the Dakota Access pipeline. According to Hugh Handeyside, "Ou was detained for more than six hours and subjected ... to multiple rounds of intrusive interrogation. [The border officers] questioned him at length about his work as a journalist, his prior professional travel in the Middle East, and dissidents or 'extremists' he had encountered or interviewed as a journalist. They photocopied his personal papers, including pages from his handwritten personal diary." In the end, he was refused entry into the US.

Given Trump's recent insistence that protesters who burn the American flag should be jailed or suffer the loss of citizenship, his hostile criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement and his ongoing legacy of stoking white violence against protesters, it is reasonable to assume that his future domestic policies will further legitimate a wave of repression and violence waged against dissenters and the institutions that support them.

For instance, his tweeted threats regarding the burning of the American flag can be read as code for threatening dissent, or worse, unleashing the power of the state on them. How else to explain the motive behind Trump's consideration of Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke as a potential candidate for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security?

More at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3876 ... of-dissent