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by American Dream » Tue Oct 25, 2016 5:13 pm
by American Dream » Wed Oct 26, 2016 11:07 am
A Trump Loss Is Still a Win for the Alt-Right
No matter what happens Nov. 8, the alt-right has already won Washington’s gridlocked future.
BY: LAWRENCE ROSS
Posted: October 19, 2016
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is cheered on by supporters during a campaign stop inside a hangar at Lakeland Linder Regional Airport in Lakeland, Fla., on Oct. 12, 2016.
The Donald J. Trump Traveling Crazy Circus will finally crash and burn on Election Day, when millions of sane Americans head to the polls and pull the lever for Hillary Clinton. (This will happen regardless of what happens at the debate Wednesday night.) And once the election is called for the first woman to be elected president, millions of Americans will point and laugh at the empty suit reality-show millionaire and his delusional presidential folly.
Most will make the mistake of thinking that Donald J. Trump will act like most losing presidential candidates and disappear. Mitt Romney headed back to Utah, which is like going into a “whiteness” protection program; while Al Gore went so deep undercover that he grew a James Harden-like beard. But if you think the Donald is gonna spend the rest of his days playing Jenga with Melania, you’ve got another think coming.
The forces of racism, xenophobia, misogyny and religious intolerance that Trump unleashed over the past two years may not be enough to send him to the Oval Office, but a con man—excuse me, “businessman”—like Trump recognizes how much money can be had by playing to America’s worst instincts. So, folks, get ready for Donald J. Trump: The Ugliest American. And I have a feeling that the Ugliest American is gonna haunt Hillary Clinton from the day she takes office.
To be fair, it’s not as if Trump invented racism, xenophobia, misogyny and religious intolerance within the Republican Party.
The modern GOP has always had two different faces: One face stoked the white-hot flames on talk radio, where the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity types would tell uneducated, unwashed white masses that their problems were the result of all those other people: you know, n–gers, w–backs, f–gots, feminazis and anyone with an SAT score. But these “First-time caller, longtime listener” conversations were supposed to stay outside the mainstream public eye.
The other face was the seemingly respectable, sensible-sounding GOP elites, politicians like Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, John Kasich and Marco Rubio, who nonetheless presented racist, xenophobic, misogynistic and religiously intolerant public policies, but did it in Brooks Brothers suits while wielding perfect Colgate smiles.
These elites talked about how they were guided by God to take away women’s rights to their own bodies, and every so often they would throw red meat to the talk-radio masses when they needed votes at the polls. In the polite GOP politician elites, voter-ID laws had nothing to do with restricting blacks and minorities from voting; it was about dealing with a nonexistent problem that just so happened to restrict blacks and minorities from voting.
However, here’s the thing: The dirty, unwashed masses didn’t like the polite policy conversations of the elites; they wanted their elites to give them their racism, xenophobia, misogyny and religious intolerance rough, rugged and raw, and they wanted it all the time.
To them, the elites were playing a phony three-card Monte con game, because everywhere they looked, those others were getting things like rights, and who said they could have those? So when a real con man got hold of the cards and he started saying things like, “Make America great again,” it felt like … freedom. And these folks ain’t about to give up that freedom, especially when Trump has proved to be such a great figurehead.
And now, to the consternation of the elites, the unwashed masses have taken over the Republican Party.
So there’s a danger that the Hillary Clinton presidency, which should focus on the problems of income inequality and police violence against the black community, will instead be consumed with fighting the GOP, now controlled by the extreme right.
This newfangled extreme right, now called the alt-right, is a racist movement. One of its better-known representatives is Steve Bannon, the Trump campaign’s CEO. Bannon, the former fiery editor of the oft racist and anti-Semitic Breitbart website, helps foster the alt-right, which is a younger, more social-media-aggressive, extreme-right demographic than your dad’s Ku Klux Klan.
Racist and misogynist performance artist Milo Yiannopoulos is one of its generals, while regular soldiers use 21st-century social media anonymity to intimidate people like Saturday Night Live comedian Leslie Jones. Typically, even in the worst political circumstance, the alt-right would be relegated to the political backwaters, but by attaching itself to Trump, like a virus attaching itself to a weakened host, the alt-right now has power, and it will use that power to turn our democratic politics on their head.
If past is prologue, then just as President Barack Obama was greeted not with “hope and change” but with “Show me your birth certificate, n–ger!” by an America not ready for a black president, I’m sure that we’re going to enter a world where the United States will temporarily feel the psychological euphoria of having a woman smash the glass ceiling. But the shards of that glass will be used by the alt-right, and those who feel they can gain political power by associating themselves with these extremists, to cut minorities, women and the LGBTQ community to the core.
After being rejected at the ballot box, these uneducated white masses will fall prey to every conspiracy theory, every grievance that can be turned into a sound bite. And my fear is that some will think that waiting for the ballot box is old-fashioned, and that perhaps the talk of needing a Second Amendment “remedy” is more effective.
And where will Donald Trump be? His narcissism and ego would require him to find the heat of the spotlight even without the alt-right; but now that he’s co-opted by it, he’ll do what he always does: He’ll monetize it. There will be a Trump Network of some sort, and it will feature Donald J. Trump spewing the same bile that he did during the campaign, except now he’ll get money for every eyeball. And the anger he stokes will need to be directed somewhere. Hopefully, that somewhere won’t be toward us others.
by American Dream » Wed Oct 26, 2016 1:19 pm
Casino Owned by Presidential Candidate Donald Trump Violated US Anti-Money Laundering Laws Repeatedly
Trump Taj Mahal opened in 1990 under the ownership and control of current presidential candidate Trump and since then has been part of four bankruptcy reorganizations, which took place in 1991, 2004, 2009 and 2014.
The casino emerged from its final bankruptcy earlier this year under new ownership, and Trump relinquished his remaining 10 percent interest in the business. The casino closed its doors earlier this month after negotiations between its new owner, billionaire Carl Icahn, and union employees broke down, leaving some 3,000 casino workers unemployed.
With each bankruptcy, Trump’s ownership and control of Trump Taj Mahal was reduced. Trump, however, from 1995 to 2009 served as chairman of the casino’s parent company, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, which was renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2004. He also served as the parent company’s chief executive officer from 2000 to 2005 — a period that includes years when FinCEN said multiple BSA violations occurred at the casino. Trump also was the owner and operator of Trump Taj Mahal in 1990 and 1991, which is when the BSA violations cited in the 1998 FinCEN penalty took place.
In fact, one of the more glaring money-laundering threats that played out at the casino under now-presidential candidate Trump’s leadership was the employment of a high-level executive allegedly linked to organized crime. Danny Leung, Trump Taj Mahal’s vice president for marketing from 1990 until early 1993, was identified in 1992 by a Senate subcommittee as “an associate of the 14K Triad,” a Hong Kong-based criminal organization involved in murder, money laundering, extortion and narco-trafficking.
The New York Daily News reported in 1995 that, according to New Jersey regulators, Leung allegedly “flew in 16 Italian organized crime figures from Canada who stole more than $1 million from the [Trump Taj Mahal] casino in a credit scam.” The newspaper also indicated that the incident was “never reported” because Trump didn’t file charges.
In announcing the $477,700 fine against Trump Taj Mahal in 1998 (again, a penalty stemming from BSA violations that took place in 1990 and 1991) then-FinCEN Director Stanley E. Morris said:
“Casinos are cash-intensive businesses, and many offer a wide variety of financial services, similar to banks. Without effective safeguards, they may be vulnerable to money laundering."
Anti-money laundering industry expert and former U.S. prosecutor Charles Intriago, principal of Intriago Advisors, says “laundering dirty money is easy to do in a casino” that doesn’t have proper safeguards in place, as was the case for years at Trump Taj Mahal, including under Trump’s ownership and executive leadership.
Intriago told Narco News in a recent interview that if the violations of U.S. anti-money laundering laws are serious enough, the US Treasury Department, which oversees FinCEN, can go beyond civil penalties and make a criminal referral to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) — although he says such referrals are very rare. It is not clear if a criminal referral was ever made to DOJ in the case of Trump Taj Mahal as a consequence of its numerous violations of US anti-money laundering laws over the years. Such referrals are not public record, Intriago says.
FinCEN spokesman Stephen Hudak told Narco News that he could not comment on the Trump Taj Mahal case beyond what is in the documents already made public by his agency. Trump’s press secretary, Hope Hicks, did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump Taj Mahal does not represent the first time current presidential candidate Trump has been associated with business operations accused of failing to adhere to US anti-money laundering laws.
In 2005, Trump cut a business deal with a company called Bayrock Group LLC to build a hotel in Moscow. Although that project didn’t pan out, Trump did later team with Bayrock on the Trump SoHo hotel-condominium development in New York City.
That Trump project in 2007 received a shot in the arm, along with several other Bayrock projects, in the form of a $50 million dollar investment from an Icelandic investment firm. That company, the FL Group, was backed by Russians “who were in favor with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” pleadings in a lawsuit against Bayrock allege.Bayrock is the target of a pending civil-racketeering lawsuit filed by the company’s former finance director and another employee. The plaintiffs allege in the pleadings that Bayrock is “covertly mob-owned and operated” and accuse the company’s principals of engaging in “money laundering, conspiracy, bribery, extortion and embezzlement.”
The failure of U.S. law enforcers to bring criminal charges against large financial institutions, including casinos, and their executives in cases of flagrant violations of anti-money laundering laws represents a longstanding double-standard in the US justice system. It is a double-standard that may well have worked to the advantage of Trump Taj Mahal’s executive leadership, which over the course of years failed to assure that the casino complied with those laws.
Mega-financial institutions Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase & Co., Wachovia (acquired by Wells Fargo in 2009), HSBC Holdings, ING Bank, Standard Chartered, American Express Bank International, and not a few others, for example, all have been accused over the past decade of failing to comply with US anti-money laundering laws — thereby enabling, collectively, hundreds of billions of dollars of suspicious transactions to move through the banking system absent adequate monitoring or oversight.
Yet not one these banks, nor any of their top executives, has been hit with criminal sanctions.
“All financial crime has a money laundering component,” Intirago said in a previous interview with Narco News. “… If you’re an individual, and get caught, you get hammered.
“But if you’re a big bank [or casino], and you’re caught moving money for a terrorist or drug dealer, you don’t have to worry. You just fork over a monetary penalty, and then raise your fees to make up for it.”
by American Dream » Thu Oct 27, 2016 8:26 am
Trump Supporter Arrested for Planning a Mass Shooting at an Islamic Center
Zach Cartwright | October 26, 2016
A supporter of Donald Trump has been arrested and charged with a hate crime for allegedly plotting a “Columbine-type” mass shooting at a mosque.
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) announced Tuesday evening that 40-year-old Mark Lucian Feigin was arrested in relation to threats made over the phone to the Islamic Center of Southern California (ICSC). After tracing the calls back to Feigin’s apartment and arresting him for the threats, police found nine guns and 250 pounds of ammunition in his home. LAPD public information officer Sal Ramirez told US Uncut Feigin was released Tuesday on $77,500 bail. Feigin has been charged with making criminal threats.
NBC Los Angeles reported that Feigin made two separate threats on September 19 and September 20, and that Feigin’s stockpile of weapons included rifles, shotguns, handguns, expanded high-capacity magazines, and “thousands of rounds” of ammunition in his trailer home. ICSC spokesman Omar Ricci told reporters that upon seeing photos of Feigin’s weapons stash, he was reminded of the Columbine High School shooting.
“He could have easily barged in and hurt some of our members,” Ricci said during a press conference. “The worst came to mind and that’s why we have added additional security to the Islamic Center.”
Feigin’s Twitter is filled with messages supporting Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, along with Islamophobic threats, anti-immigrant tirades, violent fantasies, and racism.
by American Dream » Thu Oct 27, 2016 12:32 pm
Trump booster Alex Jones: I’m not anti-Semitic, but Jews run an evil conspiracy
Radio host Alex Jones is a big Trump fan — and Trump, for his part, has returned the favor. In December, he went on Jones’s show, telling the host, “your reputation is amazing” and promising him that “I will not let you down.”
Given that Jones is one of America’s foremost conspiracy theorists, who has been accused of sowing racial and anti-Semitic fears before, that was almost certainly a mistake. Jones proved it on the latest edition of The Alex Jones Show, aired on Tuesday, when he blamed America’s ills on “the Jewish mafia.”
“They run Uber, they run the health care, they’re going to scam you, they’re going to hurt you,” he said, per Media Matters. Jones listed a series of prominent people with Jewish backgrounds he believed to be working with this mafia — Rahm Emanuel, Madeleine Albright, George Soros — and accused them of being part of a “global, corporate combine” in alliance with the Japanese, Communists, and other evil factions.
“I guess I better do some exposés on the Jewish mafia,” Jones said. He described Emanuel as “a guy foaming at the mouth with knives at Cabinet meetings, basically threatening the president, totally crazed. Who’s got his fingers in everything, screwing us over.”
But, Jones insisted, “I’m not against Jews.” Just the Jewish Mafia, whatever that is.
by American Dream » Fri Oct 28, 2016 8:07 am
by American Dream » Sat Oct 29, 2016 2:35 pm
by American Dream » Sat Oct 29, 2016 6:31 pm
The 11/9 Days and the Weiner Surprise
Here in these United States, many Americans are looking forward to November 9, 2016 and for good reason: This will be first day after the 2016 US Presidential Election. This election has easily been the ugliest and most divisive in modern American political history. Some have tried to find parallels to the '64 and '68 contests, but there is really no comparison in recent years.
While nearly three quarters of US voters see the country as being on the wrong track, there is nothing resembling a general census as to what exactly is wrong with country. One individual's answer can vary radically from another depending upon one's age, race, religion, economic status, education and a host of other factors. There was far more unity in the turbulent 1960s. Nowadays practically the only thing uniting these United States are Star Wars and NFL football, and even NFL ratings have been tanking of late.
This makes the emerging hope of the US populace for things to get back to "normal" after the elections conclude an utter pipe dream, even if one doesn't factor in all the geopolitical shenanigans being played out right now. Putin has recently issued a warning to the West concerning the dangers of nuclear war. Further bolstering this point is the deployment of Russia's largest naval force since the Cold War to Syria. During the third and final presidential debate, front runner Hillary Clinton was directly asked if she would shoot down a Russian jet if violated the no-fly zone US policy makers have been obsessed with initiating in Syria of late, and she opted not to answer the question. This should send a cold chill down the spine of all Americans, even taken out of the context of the power struggling unfolding between the State Department and the Pentagon over the no fly zone question.
These developments alone ensure that the American public will continue to be confronted with tough decisions even after the 2016 election ends. And this of course assumes that the election itself will not drag on after the votes have been cast. To hear the mainstream media tell it, a landslide victory for Hillary is all but assured. But if the election ends up being close, things could get very interesting indeed.
Both Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump have invested a considerable amount of time in parading voter fraud memes in front of the American public for the past few weeks. Clinton and the Democrats have sounded the alarm over Russian intervention in US elections while Trump and his allies have accused the Clintons of rigging the elections in multiple states. Not to be outdone, Clinton backers are now speculating that Russia could plant evidence of voter fraud to steal the election from Hillary. Adding fuel to the fire were Russian calls to place "monitors" in the US to observer the election for evidence of voter fraud.
In other words, the stage is set for one candidate or the other to refuse to accept the results of the vote on November 8. If such a scenario plays out, it is difficult to see where things will go from there.
by American Dream » Mon Oct 31, 2016 9:25 am
by American Dream » Mon Oct 31, 2016 1:55 pm
Phillip Galea : Y U No Like The Left?
The Age article contains a Channel 7 News report which states that Galea attended the May 31, 2015 United Patriots Front (UPF) anti-leftist rally in Richmond armed with a 25cm kitchen knife; ‘according to Federal police that was just the beginning of his violent plan’. (Incidentally, the protest was a bizarre attempt to remove Yarra councillor and socialist Stephen Jolly from office. Happily enough, Jolly was re-elected to his position on the weekend.)
In addition to being linked to Reclaim Australia (Galea attended their protests and claimed to have been an admin on one of their Facebook pages; he also appears to have helped establish the RA Media website and ‘RA media newsgroupe’ Facebook page), the True Blue Crew (TBC) and UPF (Galea attended various of their functions, both public rallies and more private meetings), it’s alleged that he had an association with neo-Nazi grouplet ‘Combat 18’, which has maintained a shadowy presence in STRAYA for some years. A few years ago (2010), several C18 members were convicted of having shot at a mosque in Perth, while in Melbourne it’s more closely associated with Creatard bonehead Patrick O’Sullivan, though others have also claimed an association and have attended various public protests organised by the TBC and UPF, including in Coburg in May and the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ demonstration in the CBD in July. Note that Galea also attended a farcical anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rally in Melbourne organised by the ‘Australian Defence League’ back in April 2010.
The True Blue Crew will be hopping on a bus from Bendigo and Melton to Eltham on November 5 in order to attend a protest organised by the Sydney-based Party for Freedom (PFF). The PFF maintain that the decision by St Vincent’s Care Services to temporarily house 100 or so refugees from Iraq and Syria at its site is tantamount to rape and murder. Then again, the PFF has also floated the idea that peoples in the Third World require sterilisation, so we’re not really talking about rational political actors. The boys from Sydney, Bendigo and Melton will be joined by the Soldiers of Odin, who were the subject of a recent column by Jason Wilson: Fear and loathing on the streets: the Soldiers of Odin and the rise of anti-refugee vigilantes (The Guardian, October 28, 2016): ‘Far right groups are gaining a global foothold because they echo mainstream discourse which has shrunk the political horizon to issues of border paranoia, terror, and security.’
by American Dream » Mon Oct 31, 2016 9:11 pm
Fear and loathing on the streets: the Soldiers of Odin and the rise of anti-refugee vigilantes
The central idea the Soldiers push is an association between Muslims – both refugees and immigrants – and crime. Alexander Reid Ross, a US-based anti-fascist researcher and author of the upcoming book, Against the Fascist Creep, says they are part of a “radicalisation of the right that is grounded in the reaction to the spectre of ‘refugees’ and ‘immigrants’.”
Their offer of protection is explicitly pitched at white fears about Arabs and other migrant groups. Their name and iconography refer directly to Norse mythology, which they interpret in racial terms. As Reid Ross puts it, “they explicitly present themselves as preservers and defenders of the white race in spiritual terms”.
In this context, one thing that sets them apart from other groups is their street patrols – an idea they’ve brought to Melbourne. Alan Dutton works for the Canadian Anti-racism Education and Research Society (CAERS). He says that in that country, patrols are one way that the Soldiers are “trying to appear to support civil responsibility. But that seems to be a strategy to gain social license to raise money and recruit members”.
He added that while the Soldiers discourage open, public racism in their online communities, and try to disavow the unapologetic white supremacism of European chapters, they “have been unable to explain why, if they disavow racist violence, they assume the name of a racist and violent group”.
The same question could be asked of the Melbourne chapter, which similarly plays down the racist associations of their name and group. Indeed, the Age’s reporting on the group has been criticised in some quarters for similarly backgrounding the group’s far right associations.
Kieran Bennett, an Australian political blogger and antifascist researcher, faulted the Age for not seeing that the Soldiers “are implementing a tried and tested racist strategy”. Like many far right groups, they offer security that they say the state has failed to provide.
“Fascist rhetoric centres around the idea that the state has failed the ‘nation’ in some way … they are purporting to react to this failure.”
In the US context, Reid Ross says that “they thrive off the anti-government movement, and its attempts at replacing the federal government with localised systems of right-wing, sovereign power”, and there is a lot of crossover with so-called patriot groups and other right wing militia.
In Melbourne, some of the members of the Soldiers of Odin have been drifting around the far right for a while. Long standing blogger and researcher on the far right in Australia, Andy Fleming, says the Soldiers’ leader, Jay B Moore (who featured in the Age’s report), was previously a member of the Patriots Defence League of Australia.
“They’re drawn from an already-existing milieu,” he says, “and you could argue for some of them it’s a rebadging – they’ve taken off they’re PDLA gear and put on Soldiers of Odin gear instead.”
Given that the PDLA was itself a splinter group from the Australian Defence League, and that he estimates that the Soldiers in Melbourne number no more than 20, they need to be understood in the context of the fractious history of the far right.
So far they have attended far right rallies and intermittently clashed with other far right groups like the True Blue Crew. According to their Facebook page, they are planning to attend the “Battle of Eltham” rally this weekend, where a number of far right groups will be protesting the decision to re-settle Syrian and Iraqi refugees in St Vincent’s care facility in Eltham, in the Northern Suburbs of Melbourne.
Their numbers may be small in Australia so far and that may, in part, indicate a fragmentation of the local far right. The uptake of Odinist branding may be a matter of convenience – window dressing for personality conflicts in a movement stacked with big egos.
But what’s undeniable is that the common currency of international far right groups is Islamophobia, and that social media allows far right activists to make common cause across national boundaries.
by American Dream » Wed Nov 16, 2016 8:02 pm
MORBID SYMPTOMS: THE RISE OF TRUMP
NOVEMBER 15, 2016
The following series attempts to understand the rise of Donald Trump, particularly in the context of capitalist crisis and the emerging power of the populist and far right. Part one is below. Part two and three will follow over the next couple of weeks.
*****
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
– Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
The election of Donald Trump––despite his losing the popular vote––has come as a shock to many Americans. While most recognized that the campaign had tightened after the intervention of the FBI, it was assumed that Clinton would edge out Trump on election day. But even if the Democratic Party had narrowly won the presidential election, it would have told us nothing about the development of mass rightwing populism and white nationalism in the U.S. This force represents both an immediate threat and a long-term strategic challenge to those of us seeking liberation. How can we understand what has happened? And what can be done?
Capitalist Crisis and the Rise of Trump
Trump’s rise is a consequence of the ongoing and deepening crisis of global capitalism. Since the 1970s capital has faced the problem of falling profits, and the resulting crises have made it difficult for the political and economic order to reproduce itself in a reliable way. For decades capitalists confronted this problem by cutting costs, especially the cost of labor power: slashing wages, benefits, health care, education, and housing. In the former Third World this entailed gutting the developmentalist regimes that took power after decolonization. In the capitalist core (like the U.S. and Europe) it required dismantling social democracy.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, capital sought to remove any roadblocks to profitability, starting with institutions such as unions and labor parties, and the rights won through a century of worker, civil rights, women, and queer struggles. The great concentrations of industry and proletarian power were broken apart through globalization. Labor parties and nationalist governments were incorporated into the management of capital, and made partners in exploitation. In many countries, new technocratic politicians and managers came to control national governments, state bureaucracies, and major institutions like schools. This was the “neoliberal” elite.
The neoliberals operated on a consensus that cut across the political spectrum: the economy would only be sustained through capitalist globalization abroad and austerity at home. In the capitalist core, this meant abandoning sections of the working class that had previously enjoyed some political representation and economic benefits, largely through the inclusion of unions and social democratic voting blocs. The elites carrying out this program united former “progressives” alongside conservatives. Bill Clinton––who signed NAFTA in 1993, expanded mass incarceration in 1994, and gutted welfare in 1996––is a great example.
Continue reading→
by American Dream » Thu Nov 17, 2016 11:41 am
The power of the movements facing Trump
Michael Hardt,
Sandro Mezzadra
THE MANY FACES OF THE GLOBAL RIGHT
Although Trump is certainly an idiosyncratic figure, he is really one of many “populist” right-wing leaders that have emerged on the global stage against the backdrop of the economic crisis, including Vladimir Putin in Russia, Narendra Modi in India, General Al Sisi in Egypt, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Michel Temer in Brazil, Mauricio Macri in Argentina, and perhaps soon Norbert Hofer in Austria and Marine Le Pen in France.
This is a heterogeneous group, obviously — and even the label “populism” we use as shorthand here deserves greater critical scrutiny. But these right-wing figures do share several characteristics. All of them promise a combination of neoliberalism and nationalism as the solution to economic and social malaise. Most of them also manage to mobilize for the right a widespread hatred for the entire political class and contempt for the political establishment — a sentiment that at other times has been mobilized effectively by the left, for instance in 2001 in Argentina and 2011 in Spain.
Many of these right-wing leaders and political forces also add some traditional characteristics of fascism, such as the threat of the mass expulsion of migrants, racial purity as a condition of legitimate belonging to the nation, the suspension of normal legal procedures to imprison and repress political opponents, attacks on the independent press, and creating an atmosphere of terror for LGBTQ populations, people of color, women and others.
Note too that the rise of these right-wing “populisms” has exacerbated in all of these countries a profound institutional crisis, often blocking, for instance, the basic traditional functions of government (passing budgets, approving nominations) as well as undermining the standard political rationalities of administration. And the economic crisis that began in 2007 has functioned as a hothouse to facilitate and accelerate all of these phenomena.
Studies will emerge in the coming months (and years) that explain in detail the success of Trump’s campaign strategies and the motives of his supporters — how much was driven by racial resentment, how much by the economic fears of “the losers of globalization” and an industrial working class in decline, how much by a fabricated social panic, and so forth. These are undeniably important questions, but we simply want to signal that Trump’s election, seen from a global perspective, is not the exception but squarely in line with a significant (and terrifying) trend.
by American Dream » Thu Nov 17, 2016 2:43 pm
Rising European Fascists Welcome Trump Victory
Saturday, 12 November 2016
By Ryan Harvey, Truthout
Many of us have been sounding the alarm for some time about the interconnected nature of this right-wing wave stemming from shifts in the global economy, rising racism and xenophobia, the crisis facing the EU, eroding legitimacy of mainstream media and "insider" government, and resurgent nationalism in the face of a "globalist" agenda. For many (from both sides of the political divide), conspiracy has taken the place of researched analysis, and assumption and rumor weigh heavier than fact. These are signs of the times, and they are pushing far-right politics in places few expected they could thrive.
With this understanding, the next four years will not happen in a vacuum but in a highly volatile and rapidly changing global economic and political order. Trump's association with the Russian oligarchy and Russian state, increasingly tied to Europe's far-right, will start to matter. While Russian banks have helped finance Le Pen's National Front, the current Dutch government is trying hard in the space before March to reverse the results of an April referendum rejecting the EU's agreement to bring Ukraine further into the European sphere.
Though Trump spoke against Russia's annexing of Crimea, his strongest European supporters stand opposite of him on the issue, and his former strategist Paul Manafort has set his feet firmly in the pro-Russian Ukrainian political scene. Manafort is now under an FBI inquiry for his ties to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs with links to both the political and organized-crime worlds.
On the topic of Putin, Trump's respect for strongmen leaders and his embracing of conspiratorial ideas about who runs the world will likely trickle down to the grassroots. We can expect an alliance with the Le Pens and Hofers of Europe, one that places xenophobic nationalist rhetoric at the center of its policies, as well as a tighter embrace of the Putinsphere across Eastern and now Western Europe.
The connection between Russia's defense of the Assad regime, Turkey's tension with the EU, and the return to nationalist borders in Europe are significant. Writing in The Guardian, Natalie Nougayrède suggests that "if Europe sees a new exodus of refugees, Russia will stand to benefit. The refugee crisis has sowed deep divisions on the continent and it has helped populist rightwing parties flourish -- many of which are Moscow's political allies against the EU as a project."
Trump's approach to the Middle East is a bit of a mystery, though he has made no secret of his desire to ban the entry of refugees from the region into the US. The situation in Syria, an impasse between the old Western powers and their allies and a newer alliance of self-declared "anti-imperialist" states oriented around right-wing ideologies and authoritarianism (Russia, Syria and Iran), has been a big development as far as American policies in the region go. Trump's affinity with some of these powers, and especially with their male leaders, suggests strange possibilities. We can probably expect an increased alliance with Putin and Assad against both the Islamic State and the Syrian opposition -- if it survives the current bombardment in Aleppo -- but such an alliance may stop short at Iran, a Russian and Syrian ally Trump has long positioned himself against.
by MacCruiskeen » Thu Nov 17, 2016 3:00 pm
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