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By Andre Vltchek

Only citizens can vote in the US Presidential elections, yet the impact is global.

The world is suddenly in disarray, in panic. A man notorious for his bigoted rhetoric, a man who believes in American exceptionalism, who wants to build the walls and to ‘restore order’, has been elected the 45th President of the mightiest nation on Earth. Hiscountryis doubtlessly in decline;it is indebted and some would even argue, hopelessly bankrupt, but it is still the Empire,the sole one to this day.

Below the surface, Mr. Trump may not be any viler than the Democratic candidate Mrs. Clinton and her clan has been for years. The establishment with which she has been inseparably intertwined for years and decades has been murdering millions all over the world, looting entire continents, and brutally guaranteeing that the Western world would always stay firmly in control of the entire Planet.

Throughout the years, Mrs. Clinton has been using ‘politically correct’ rhetoric, mainly (and often in a twisted way) in order to silence those who dared to criticize her deeds. Still, no matter what her words were stating, millions of people have been vanishing, worldwide, as a result of the policies introduced by her and by her former boss, President Barack Obama.

Donald Trump is brusque, aggressive, narcissistic and most likely, brutally honest. What he says is often pure trash, but whatever it is, he is not embarrassed to parade it in public. He has been giving many advanced warnings to both his supporters (including his voters) and to his adversaries. Objectively speaking, he is not any more or any less dangerous than Mrs. Clinton.

Both candidates come from the moneyed, pro-establishment milieu. Yet Mr. Trump evokes much greater fearall over the worldthan his rival, from Asia and Africa to Latin America.

It is at least partially because the mainstream Western propaganda rallied determinedly behind the well-tested and ‘reliable’ Mrs. Clinton (she has proven to be subservient to the Western imperialist regime and to market fundamentalist dogmas), and the Western mainstream media is exactly what is giving ‘marching orders’ to the local press, particularly in ‘client’ states in all parts of the world.

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Nonetheless, Mr. Trump is definitely frightening on his own account, and just because he ran against (and defeated) the establishment candidate, does not make him less so.

Rowan Wolf, Managing Editor atThe Greanville Post and publisher ofUncommon Thought,recently summarized what I felt about the recent elections, when she wrote to me (it was right after the results were announced):

“I am frightened over the election of Trump. Things were going to be bad here even without that because his position as the candidate for president legitimated the ugliest bigotry and violence. His election, legitimates and institutionalizes it at the highest levels possible. It is not as if this ugliness was not present in the US as it certainly was, but it was not celebrated. His racism extends outside the US and he has already stated numerous times that he would use nukes in the Middle East and just take the oil. He also hates the Earth. He plans to reverse or remove all environmental protections and regulations, and he doesn’t “believe” in global warming. His presidency could not happen at a worse time for our planet.”

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I had the extremely bad fortune of spending ‘the day after’ in the den of the Western pro-establishment mainstream media based in Asia Pacific – the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand (FCCT).

Or perhaps it was not only ‘bad fortune’ but also some type of perverse desire to witnessthe great and genuine desperation of those who have, for years and decades, been serving the Empire and its ‘liberal’ dogmas, twisting the truth and manufacturing hyper-reality.

Even before my arrival at the FCCT, the results of elections were finalized. I expected a great mess, and mess it was. I witnessed depressed glances, nervous laughter, small talk, and an excessive consumption of booze.

Speeches soon followed: made by the members of Western human rights organizations, of several NGO’s, and press corps.

Some Iranian exile began trashing Iran, somehow loosely connecting it to the US elections. Someone else had a go at the Philippine’s anti-imperialist President Duterte. And of course, China was hit on several occasions, and so was Russia, particularly that ‘evil’ Putin. One after another, speakers mimicked Ms. Clinton’s derogatory pronunciation of Russian President’s name.

No one mentioned Thailand or Indonesia even once.

It was all grotesque and endlessly sad.

Then the chest beating and insulting the voters slowly began… a slow masochistic public orgy.

In the end, several well-behaved members of the public began queuing in front of the microphone, asking polite questions. Not sending the panelists to hell, not insulting them directly to their faces… Nothing like that! People were just asking non-confrontational questions, and then, patiently and politely waiting for replies.The ‘client’ states of the West were still very far from the rebellion.

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Then my phone became extremely active, as I began receiving messages from all corners of the globe.

From Sudan: “I never thought Donald would win! The Sudanese are making fun of Trump saying that he looks like our President Al-Basheer.”

From Italy: “Better than Killary, but still disgusting”.

From Uganda: “Our government is acting as if it didn’t back Hillary before the elections.”

From Argentina: “Now in the US they will have to eat their own crap… as they made others eat it for decades.”

From Indonesia: “Trump said that he would increase tariffs on imported products. In that case he’ll have to pay more for his suits, as he apparently wears some that are made in Indonesia”.

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“Where were you on the 9-11?” Or now: “Where were you on 11-8?”

Some people compare these two events.

On both occasions (or before), no one bothered to listen, to face reality, and as a result, some terrible events took place.

On 11-8 I was in Bangkok.

On 9-11 in Hanoi, Vietnam, sipping coffee, and looking out of my window. The apartment was on a higher floor of the “Hanoi Tower”. The building was literally growing out from the old French prison, where Vietnamese patriots used to be tortured, raped and executed by the French colonialists. If I were to walkall the way towards the very glass panel, I would be ableto see, far below, two shiny guillotines, preserved for people to rememberthe ‘great enlightened rule of the West over Asia’.

Suddenly on the horizon, the sky lit up in a tremendous explosion of colors. The villages surrounding Hanoi were shooting firecrackers and makeshift rockets up to the sky. It was a great fireworks display, something I had never seen before.

I turned my television set on. On the BBC coverage, two airplanes were flying, in slow motion, towards the towers of the World Trade Center.

A few minutes later I received a phone call from my best friend in Santiago de Chile.

“You would not believe what is happening here,” he reported to me, breathless. “People, total strangers, are stopping here, in the middle of the street. They are crying, falling into each other’s arms, and whispering: “Justice takes time, but it always comes!”

They were referring to 9-11-1973, when the United States overthrew one of the oldest and greatest democracies on Earth. Chile was raped, its people murdered, its form of government and its economic model were shattered.

A few hours after the “event”, both the Vietnamese and Chilean governments expressed their shock and support for the American people. In Vietnam, the celebrations were not reported. But they took place. Everyone knew it.

The great anger against the Empire could be felt, and is still felt, not only in those two great nations, but also all over the world.

People are outraged. Those in the United States are… and also those in the rest of the world are…although they are outraged for totally different reasons… but outraged they all are nevertheless!

“Democracy” is the rule of people. It does not mean the ‘Western multi-party system’. It only means the ‘rule of the people’, in Greek. It can be based on the ancient ‘heavenly mandate’ on which the Chinese system is based even now. It can be the modern Latin American form of participatory democracy… as long as people are ruling.

However, they are not ruling. Not in the West, nor in most of the countries of the rest of the world, where the governments are forced upon them by Western imperialism to defend their states and to often adopt very tough measures to do so.

People in the United States had spoken, expressing their frustration and anger.

People in the rest of the world were not asked who should be leading the world.

The next, the most logical step for the world shouldnow be, immediately to reject the leadership of both the United States and Europe.

Brexit and 11-8 should be followed by the WORLD-EXIT. What does it mean? Simple: ‘Let the West eat its own shit, alone, finally’! And let the world be free from those governments and economic and colonialist concepts, which no one here (in Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Middle East) really elected and wants!

Once we are at exiting, rejecting and defending, let’s also build huge protective walls around all non-Western countries. To defend them from theCrusaders and hordes that have been looting and plundering the entire Planet for centuries.

The citizens of the United States have spoken. Oh yes! So let the rest of the world do the same!

Let them vote on WORLD EXIT! It is clear what the result will be!

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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

23 November 2016

By Chris Hedges

My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense. They live in towns and villages that have been ravaged by deindustrialization. The bank in Mechanic Falls, where my grandparents lived, is boarded up, along with nearly every downtown store. The paper mill closed decades ago. There is a strip club in the center of the town. The jobs, at least the good ones, are gone. Many of my relatives and their neighbors work up to 70 hours a week at three minimum-wage jobs, without benefits, to make perhaps $35,000 a year. Or they have no jobs. They cannot afford adequate health coverage under the scam of Obamacare. Alcoholism is rampant in the region. Heroin addiction is an epidemic. Labs producing the street drug methamphetamine make up a cottage industry. Suicide is common. Domestic abuse and sexual assault destroy families. Despair and rage among the population have fueled an inchoate racism, homophobia and Islamophobia and feed the latent and ever present poison of white supremacy. They also nourish the magical thinking peddled by the con artists in the Christian right, the state lotteries that fleece the poor, and an entertainment industry that night after night shows visions of an America and a lifestyle on television screens—“The Apprentice” typified this—that foster unattainable dreams of wealth and celebrity.

Those who are cast aside as human refuse often have a psychological need for illusions and scapegoats. They desperately seek the promise of divine intervention. They unplug from a reality that is too hard to bear. They see in others, especially those who are different, the obstacles to their advancement and success. We must recognize and understand the profound despair that leads to these reactions. To understand these reactions is not to condone them.

The suffering of the white underclass is real. Its members struggle with humiliation and a crippling loss of self-worth and dignity. The last thing they need, or deserve, is politically correct thought police telling them what to say and think and condemning them as mutations of human beings.

Those cast aside by the neoliberal order have an economic identity that both the liberal class and the right wing are unwilling to acknowledge. This economic identity is one the white underclass shares with other discarded people, including the undocumented workers and the people of color demonized by the carnival barkers on cable news shows. This is an economic reality the power elites invest great energy in masking.

The self-righteousness of the liberal class, which revels in imagined tolerance and enlightenment while condemning the white underclass as irredeemable, widens the divide between white low-wage workers and urban elites. Liberals have no right to pass judgment on these so-called deplorables without acknowledging their pain. They must listen to their stories, which the corporate media shut out. They must offer solutions that provide the possibility of economic stability and self-respect.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood the downward spiral of hating those who hate you. “In a real sense all life is inter-related,” he wrote in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. …”

We cannot battle the racism, bigotry and hate crimes that will be stoked by the Donald Trump presidency without first battling for economic justice. This is not a gap between the tolerant and the intolerant. It is a gap between most of the American population and our oligarchic and corporate elites, which Trump epitomizes. It is a gap that is understood only in the light of the demand for economic justice. And when we start to speak in the language of justice first, and the language of inclusiveness second, we will begin to blunt the protofascism being embraced by many Trump supporters.

I spent two years writing a book on the Christian right called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I spent many months with dispossessed white workers in states such as Missouri, Kansas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and California. I carried into the book project all the prejudices that come with being raised in the liberal church—a disdain for a magic Jesus who answers your prayers and makes you rich, a repugnance at the rejection of rationality and science and at the literal interpretation of the Bible, a horror of the sacralization of the American empire, and a revulsion against the racism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and blind intolerance that often afflict those who retreat into a binary world of good and evil.

Those enthralled by such thinking are Christian heretics—Jesus did not come to make us rich and powerful and bless America’s empire—and potential fascists. They have fused the iconography and symbols of the American state with the iconography and symbols of the Christian religion. They believe they can create a “Christian” America. The American flag is given the same sacred value as the Christian cross. The Pledge of Allegiance has the religious power of the Lord’s Prayer. That a sleazy developer and con artist was chosen as their vehicle—81 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump—for achieving this goal is startling, to say the least. But this is not a reality-based movement. Most of those who profit from this culture of despair, many wrapped in the halo of the ministry, are, like Trump, slick, amoral trolls.

My view of the tens of millions of Americans who have fallen into the embrace of the Christian right’s magical thinking underwent a profound change as I conducted interviews for the book. During that time I did what good reporters do: I listened. And the stories I heard were heartbreaking. I grew to like many of these people. The communities they lived in, many of which I visited, looked like the towns where my family lived in Maine. They were terrified of the future, especially for their children. They struggled with feelings of worthlessness and abandonment. I fear the Christianized fascism in which they enshroud themselves, but I also see them as its pawns.

They hate a secular world they see as destroying them. They long for the apocalyptic visions of Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” series. They want the cruelty and rot of “secular humanism” to be obliterated before they and their families are lifted into heaven by the rapture (an event never mentioned in the Bible).

I finished my book with a deep dislike for megachurch pastors who, like Trump, manipulate despair to achieve power and wealth. I see the Christian right as a serious threat to an open society. But I do not hate those who desperately cling to this emotional life raft, even as they spew racist venom. Their conclusion that minorities, undocumented workers or Muslims are responsible for their impoverishment is part of the retreat into fantasy. The only way we will blunt this racism and hatred and allow them to free themselves from the grip of magical thinking is by providing jobs that offer adequate incomes and economic stability and by restoring their communities and the primacy of the common good. Any other approach will fail. We will not argue or scold them out of their beliefs. These people are emotionally incapable of coping with the world as it is. If we demonize them we demonize ourselves.

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” in story after story makes clear that members of the white underclass are also victims and deserve our empathy.

The liberal class has no hope of defeating the rise of American fascism until it unites with the dispossessed white working class. It has no hope of being an effective force in politics until it articulates a viable socialism. Corporate capitalism cannot be regulated, reformed or corrected. A socialist movement dedicated to demolishing the cruelty of the corporate state will do more to curb the racism of the white underclass than lessons by liberals in moral purity. Preaching multiculturalism and gender and identity politics will not save us from the rising sadism in American society. It will only fuel the anti-politics that has replaced politics.

Liberals have sprinkled academic, corporate, media and political institutions with men and women of different races and religions. This has done nothing to protect the majority of marginalized people who live in conditions that are worse than those that existed when King marched on Selma. It is boutique activism. It is about branding, not justice.

Murray Bookchin excoriated the irrelevancy of a liberal class that busied itself with “the numbing quietude of the polling booth, the deadening platitudes of petition campaigns, car[-]bumper sloganeering, the contradictory rhetoric of manipulative politicians, the spectator sports of public rallies and finally, the knee-bent humble pleas for small reforms—in short the mere shadows of the direct action, embattled commitment, insurgent conflicts, and social idealism that marked every revolutionary project in history.”

Human history, as Bookchin and Karl Marx understood, is defined by class struggle. America’s corporate elites successfully fused the two major political parties into a single corporate party, one that seized control of electoral politics, internal security, the judiciary, universities, the arts, finance and nearly all forms of popular communication, including Hollywood, public relations and the press. There is no way within the system to defy the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry or war profiteers. And Trump is about to remove whatever tepid restraints are left.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The only route left is revolt. If this revolt is to succeed it must be expressed in the language of economic justice. A continuation of the language of multiculturalism and identity politics as our primary means of communication is self-defeating. It stokes the culture wars. It feeds the anti-politics that define the corporate state.

“The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left,” Richard Rorty wrote. “Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the ‘politics of difference’ or ‘of identity’ or ‘of recognition.’ This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.”

Our enemy is not the white working poor any more than it is African-Americans, undocumented workers, Muslims, Latinos or members of the GBLT community. The oligarchs and corporations, many of them proponents of political correctness, are our enemy. If we shed our self-righteousness and hubris, if we speak to the pain and suffering of the working poor, we will unmask the toxins of bigotry and racism. We will turn the rage of an abandoned working class, no matter what its members’ color, race or religious creed, against those who deserve it.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

First published in Truthdig

22 November 2016

By Ralph Nader

Optimists are hoping for a Trump makeover. They cling to his brief victory remarks suggesting that he wants to be the “president of all the people.” In his 60 Minutes interview following the election Trump said that the protestors were out in the streets because “they do not know me.” They recall his statement some months ago that he had to say outlandish things in order to get greater media attention and reach more people than his Republican primary competitors.

Character and personality are not prone to change in most people. Especially in the case of Trump, who sees these campaign tactics as reasons for his “successes.” However, the assumption to exalted, higher offices of public trust and power sometimes brings out the better angels.

So far, though, the signs are foreboding. Trump values loyalty, and people like Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich stuck with him at his lowest points earlier this year. Trump knows very little about the awesome job given him by that dead hand from the past – the Electoral College – which has once again caused a plurality of voters to see their chosen candidate lose (Even Trump acknowledged its unfairness on CBS’s 60 Minutes after the election).

Lack of knowhow coupled with blind loyalty brings Trump to rely heavily on these old hands behind the worsening corporate state and military belligerence.

His transition appointments are delighting the corporatists. The man chosen to oversee the changes in the Environmental Protection Agency denies that climate change is man-made and scowls at regulation of harmful pollutants. Trump has opened the door to the big oil and gas lobbyists to control the Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior. Wall Streeters are smacking their lips over Trump cavorting with opponents of regulating that giant gambling casino.

His military advisers do not come from the ranks of prudent retired officials who see perpetual war for what it is – a mechanism for national insecurity, authoritarianism and profits for the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about in his 1961 farewell address. To the contrary, many of Trump’s military advisors have been quick to embrace an Empire mentality and its warfare state.

One can imagine how a major stateless terrorist attack on the U.S. during his administration could provoke Trump into a heavy-handed retaliation with dangerous and unforeseen consequences. This is exactly what these adversaries want him to do in order to further spread their propaganda campaign against the U.S. Meanwhile, our civil liberties, and the domestic necessities of the people are shoved aside.

His first two major assistants – Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon – have called for corporate tax reductions and elimination of the estate tax on the rich (the only ones who pay it). Despite the “small government” façade, they are not likely to challenge the deficit-swelling combination of a larger military budget, decreased revenue and continuation of the bailouts, subsidies and giveaways known as crony capitalism that have enriched Trump and his plutocratic allies over the years.

Intrigue and internal fighting inside the White House and top Cabinet levels are likely if Trump insists on giving powerful roles to his three children and son-in-law (albeit without pay). Nepotism and conflicts of interest are acidic cocktails and undermine the integrity and transparency of public office.

Then there is the explosive crackdown on immigrants – many of whom benefit millions of Americans by working in low-wage jobs – that can produce daily turmoil, not to mention the exorbitant human cost of breaking up families in communities across the country.

In past Republican Party electoral victories, there was always a modicum of checks and balances to slow their plutocratic greed and power grabs. As of January 21, 2017 the Republican Party controls the Executive Branch, the Congress, the Supreme Court and most likely 33 governorships and 32 state legislatures. The anti-democratic Electoral College is the cause this November of giving the GOP control over the White House and, by extension, the Supreme Court (see nationalpopularvote.com).

Other than an unlikely vigorous and fearless free press, not just in Washington but also back in the localities, or a self-destructive Trump implosion, the redeeming power of the people can only come from the grass roots.

Our country is in an extraordinarily high-risk condition, given who possesses the reins of power. Self-described conservatives and liberals can curb that power if they form alliances back in the Congressional districts around the major initiatives on which they agree (See my book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left/Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State). Such alliances have occurred with success in the past.

With the power brokers employing their divide-and-rule tactics, such potent political alliances will require citizen action and adequate funding in all Congressional districts with focused and sustained intensity on their Senators and Representatives. Congress, with only 535 lawmakers, is the most accessible of the checks and balances reachable by the people back home.

How many enlightened billionaires, serious citizen-patriots and advocates for transforming elections and governance step up?

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest book is The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Other recent books include, The Seventeen Traditions: Lessons from an American Childhood, Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win, and “Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us” (a novel).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

First published in CommonDreams

18 November 2016

Modi accuses Islamabad of spreading terrorism

NEW DELHI: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday accused Pakistan of being the “origin and spread” of terrorism and said India and Israel had agreed on the need for the international community to act with a resolve against terror networks and the states that harboured them.

The remarks came as India and Israel on Tuesday decided to further broaden their already close defence partnership and intensify cooperation in combating radicalisation and extremism.

“We recognise that terrorism is a global challenge, knows no boundaries and has extensive links with other forms of organised crimes.“Regrettably, one of the countries of its origin and spread is in India’s neighbourhood,” said Modi in his media statement after holding talks with visiting Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

“We agreed that the international community must act with resolve and determination against terror networks and states that harbour them,” added Modi.He sought Israel’s help in containing terrorism and extremism from Pakistan. “President Rivlin and I deeply value our strong and growing partnership to secure our societies. Our people are constantly threatened by forces of terrorism and extremism,” he said.

“We noted the strength of our growing defence partnership. And agreed on the need to make it more broad-based through production and manufacturing partnerships,” he said.Modi added that the Israeli president had also assured support for India’s UN Security Council permanent membership.

He also asked Israel to invest in India for high-technology manufacturing and in the services sectors.“We have identified water management and conservation, and collaboration in scientific research and development as two areas of priority engagement. We both agreed that the current trajectory of the Indian economy opens up many promising opportunities for Israeli companies,” he said.

Referring to growing collaboration between the two countries, particularly in defence sector, Rivlin said his country was ready to “Make in India and Make with India”.“We stand together in defending our people and our values,” Rivlin said.The two sides inked two pacts to strengthen cooperation in agriculture and water resources management sectors.

16 November 2016

By Ahmed Jazbhay

Against all odds, Donald Trump’s bigotry against Hispanics, Latinos, Muslims and Sikhs have catapulted him to the White House.

His extremist vitriol made him quite popular amongst evangelical Zionist Christians, ultra-right wing White extremists and even the White middle class.

Dissatisfied with the Obama administration, with the Republican Party and with their personal economic circumstances, which saw a firm deterioration in the 1970s. This accelerated in the twenty-first century and many were attracted to Trump’s bigotry.

Political commentators expected Trump’s campaign to fizzle out sooner rather than later, but his ever-growing support base caught some hard-line Republicans by surprise. He never stopped making controversial statements at any point in his campaign. Even claims of sexual assault could not damage him.

In effect, Trump’s popularity represents the success of bigotry and much that is wrong with mainstream politics in the United States. It has also helped re-ignite a long-discredited xenophobic feature in the country.

No one seemed able to conjure up a meaningful plan to halt Trump’s bigotry-laden steam train in its tracks. Strategists in the US are now scampering around to figure out how to contain the situation.

However, should Trump really be contained? Perhaps a Trump presidency is what the world requires, to re-ignite the drive for true and meaningful liberation.

The United States presents itself as a bastion of democracy and capitalism, protector of the free world and the guardian of the international human rights dispensation.

The American Public Relations machinery (the mainstream media, Hollywood etc.) have punted this facade for decades and it has taken the bigotry of a billionaire businessman to bring it into question.

A Trump presidency is beginning to expose the true nature of the modern/colonial Islamophobic world under the stewardship of the American empire.

At the commencement of the War on Terror following the 9/11 attacks, George Bush and the American establishment were at pains to argue that this was not a War on Islam.

Trump does not pretend to do so even stating that under his presidency, Muslims would be banned from entering the United States and that all Syrian refugees would be sent home as they could be ISIL operatives.

The fact that his views hold so much currency after having been accepted by American voters, speaks volumes about the real nature of the American empire.

His Islamophobic rhetoric has woken up many liberals and even conservatives from their slumber. It has conscientised oppressed populations that the world has descended into disorder of the highest proportion where the paradigm of war is increasingly going to be used as a tool of resolving political conflicts with far reaching consequences for human life.

The non-Western world has begun to realise that the empire only wants complete control, domination and subordination of non-white peoples.

The grand opera of non-racialism, multi-racialism, inclusivity and mutual respect purported by the American empire was just meant to pacify the oppressed.

It will soon begin to crumble, since a Trump presidency will expose the illusion of the international human rights regime and will reveal the myth of the American venture of spreading democracy.

A Trump presidency will help unmask, attack and obliterate these myths because it  clearly demonstrates that the American empire, as the global leader of the modern/colonial world, can only be sustained through a combination of violence, deception, insincerity and lies.

It will demonstrate that we live in a world governed by the idea of coloniality – the continuation of power arrangements that emerged from colonialism and continues to manifest itself long after the end of formal colonialism.

A Trump presidency will assist in making it clear that we are not free. Oppression has merely managed to change forms. It may just be the spark to conscientise the world to this fact. It is the missing ingredient to wake up the marginalised to the reality of its hellish condition.

We may begin to realise that everything we know about ourselves and the world has been constructed for us by Eurocentric thinkers to further a neo-colonial agenda of dominance and subservience.

Thank you America for voting trump into power.

Dr Ahmed Jazbhay

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13 November 2016

By Kevin Zeese

The Obama administration faced reality on Friday when they recognized the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would not be ratified by this Congress. The TPP is dead.

How did people power win?

We have worked to stop the TPP and other Obama trade agreements for more than five years. We were part of the ‘movement of movements’, the largest coalition ever opposing a corporate trade agreement, which stopped it. It included all sorts of activists who work on human rights, worker rights, the environment, climate change, Internet freedom, health care, food safety and more.

People told us stopping the TPP was impossible. Even after the election of Trump, people still told us we could not win, the corporations wanted this and they would get it. But, after years of work, the impossible became the inevitable and the TPP is dead.

Even before the election the TPP was near death. Years of people working to stop it made TPP stand for Toxic Political Poison. First, the movement exposed the TPP which the Obama administration had sought to keep secret while it negotiated a global corporate coup with the aid of hundreds of corporate lawyers, executives and lobbyists.

The movement organized spectacle protests that drew attention to an agreement being secretly negotiated. People across the country organized leafletting, teach-ins and visibility actions. There were national and global days of action, and there were Twitter storms and memes on Facebook. It became impossible to hide the TPP. The secret was exposed. Once exposed, the movement educated people about what it contained. Wikileaks and others leaked portions of the document. As more was exposed, it became less popular.

The movement conducted national call-in days that garnered hundreds of thousands of calls to Congress. When we went to Congressional offices, phone calls coming in on the TPP were constant. When fast track was being considered in 2015, we built an encampment on Capitol Hill for three weeks. We worked across the political divide with Tea Party and conservative Republicans who shared our concerns about the trade deficit, lost jobs and loss of sovereignty.

The battle over fast track trade promotion authority slowed the progress of the TPP. It took years longer to get fast track than the administration had hoped. One compromise that the administration made to get fast track was to publish the TPP text after it was completed so the public and members of Congress could read it. Again, the more people read about it, the less popular it became.

These political battles also showed the risk associated with the TPP. John Boehner, the former Speaker of the House, lost his job because of how he twisted arms to get votes for fast track and how he punished Republicans who exposed fast track. Members fought back against these tactics and Boehner’s career was quickly ended. He may have won fast track for Obama, but lost his place in Washington, DC. A message was sent to all elected officials – be careful with the TPP, it is politically toxic.

By delaying fast track the TPP was pushed into an election year and that was a key to our victory. In the campaign, those running for office were forced to answer to the people. Do you support the TPP? Do you support giving up US sovereignty? Allowing unsafe foods into the country? Forcing GMO’s into global agriculture? Increasing the prices of pharmaceuticals? Making corporations more powerful than governments? The questions kept coming because the TPP affects everything.

Every candidate for president had to come out against the TPP. The only one who didn’t was Gary Johnson who did not seem to understand the agreement. He believed the slogan “free” trade when in fact it was corporate trade, crony capitalism on an international scale. Senators who supported TPP changed their positions in order to keep their jobs. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan continually warned the President that the votes were not there to ratify the agreement, even in a lame duck session.

Popular Resistance has been planning all year for an action camp and series of protests next week to kick off the lame duck and stop ratification. This will now turn into a celebration — the people stopped a global corporate coup. The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) also died as a result of people powered pressure on both sides of the Atlantic. We will ensure that the final agreement, the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), perhaps the most dangerous of Obama’s three agreements, is also dead. TiSA is also in trouble as member nations experience difficulty completing its negotiations.

All these Obama agreements failed because the corporations demanded too much. They wanted to force the US big finance capital system on countries all over the world. They wanted to institutionalize pushing public services into private profit centers. They wanted the power to sue corporations if their profits were impacted by laws written to protect the public interest. Leaks showed the US was the most aggressive on behalf of corporate interests out of all the countries involved in these negotiations. This almost made it impossible to reach agreement on the TPP and has stopped agreement on TTIP and TiSA. If Trump attempts to negotiate a “better deal” for US corporations it will be almost impossible to get other countries to agree. The TPP and Obama trade agenda may end up like the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has made little progress since the Seattle protests of 1999. They are likely to flounder and go nowhere.

Now, we need to put forward a new approach to trade, an approach that protects the people and planet and that is negotiated in a transparent and participatory way. Trade must make the Paris climate agreement goals a reality, lift up international labor standards and protect the environment as well as the food supply, Internet, access to healthcare and more. We need agreements that allow communities to protect themselves from corporate abuses. The death of the TPP is a step toward ending neo-liberalism that has privatized public goods, enriched corporations and created a global wealth divide. Future trade agreements should work toward making the International Declaration of Human Rights and related agreements reality. Trade can uplift the world but it must be clear that is one of the goals of trade.

The defeat of the TPP is a tremendous victory that should propel us forward. It shows organized people have power even in the US oligarchy. We need to build on this power, continue our unity as a movement of movements and demand that the people’s agenda becomes the political agenda, not the agenda of big business and the wealthy oligarchs. It is time for people power to rule. We still have a lot of work to do, but we should celebrate this great victory and move to set a people’s agenda for the United States.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance.

12 November 2016

By Stephen Kinzer

DONALD TRUMP’S VICTORY in our presidential election set off many convulsions, but few were as shattering as the one that dynamited the Washington foreign policy elite. Almost every member of this incestuous band of Beltway bombers supported Hillary Clinton’s campaign. They had reason to do so, since she has spent her career promoting their aggressive, we-know-best approach to the world. Now they face four years in the wilderness. Voters have driven a stake not only into the heart of the Clinton machine, but also into the heart of the American foreign policy establishment. Now we will see something new — or will we?

Several months ago, an evidently frustrated President Obama lamented that American foreign policy comes from a playbook that says Americans have a duty to shape the rest of the world. Today it is tempting to believe the playbook has been thrown into the Potomac. That is too optimistic. The ability of presidents and Congress to shape foreign policy is overstated. Deeply vested interests control the sprawling national security bureaucracy and make real change all but impossible. No one knows this better than Obama. He began his presidency by winning the Nobel Peace Prize, but his foreign policy legacy is dominated by war in Afghanistan, chaos in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, targeted killings, Guantanamo, and a trillion-dollar program to build a new nuclear arsenal.

To say that Trump’s foreign policy ideas are unformed would be an understatement, but he has a few. Three sound highly promising. First, he wants to de-escalate our spiraling conflict with Russia. For whatever reason, he has rejected the playbook view that President Vladimir Putin is a mad thug whose policies threaten our national security. If he remains firm and pulls us out of the spiral of US-Russia confrontation, he will be stepping back from the conflict that has seemed more likely than any other to explode into nuclear war.

Trump’s unorthodox view of Russia leads to his second wise foreign policy instinct, about the horrific war in Syria. Here his ignorance is an asset. Instead of reading the piles of reports that have gushed from the think-tank world in recent months, all of which demand military escalation, he is using common sense. It tells him that Syria poses no threat to the United States, and that our priority there should be crushing ISIS, not overthrowing the government.

The third way Trump’s foreign policy may break with the playbook has to do with his view of NATO and the other alliances through which we project military power. During his campaign, he said he would ask our European and Asian partners to pay for their own defense. He doesn’t seem to like the idea that the United States could be dragged into great-power war over a local dispute in the Baltic or the South China Sea. His election could allow NATO to escape from American control and pursue the less aggressive policies that France, Germany, and Italy would prefer.

That’s the good news. Alongside it are depressing indications that in important ways, Trump will be just as eager to double down on failed policies as Hillary Clinton would have been. The common sense with which he sees Russia and Syria fails him when he views Iran. He also looks suspiciously on Cuba, even though it is poor, weak, and no threat to us. His anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim tirades have alienated huge numbers of people. He has dismissed climate change as a hoax invented by the Chinese to weaken our economy. His approach to deal-making — squeezing everything you can out of an adversary — may work in business, but it is the opposite of diplomatic negotiation, which succeeds only when all parties walk away with some success.

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump’s approach to foreign policy was shaped by an odd contradiction. He declared his willingness to break from orthodoxy in shocking ways, but the few major political figures who supported him are charter members of the bomb-’em-all club. Newt Gingrich, said to be a likely candidate for secretary of state, is unreservedly pro-Israel and anti-Iran. Nonetheless, he is not a classic militarist. He has called himself a “cheap hawk,” and might look dubiously at the corporate welfare program known as the defense budget. Foreign aid also leaves him cold: “You ought to start off with zero and say, ‘Explain to me why I should give you a penny.’ ” His views on climate change are as dismissive as Trump’s, but he is less anti-trade and anti-China. Some of his musings even suggest that he might be willing to pull our troops out of the Afghanistan quagmire.

The end of the Cold War obliged the United States to adopt a new foreign policy to deal with new realities. We never did. Instead we lashed out in ways that have weakened our security while wreaking havoc on unfortunate countries. Large numbers of Americans reject this aggressive approach to the world. They want us to concentrate on rebuilding our own declining country. It would be a delicious irony if Trump gives us the post-Cold War foreign policy that we should have adopted a generation ago.

Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and author of the forthcoming book “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire.” Follow him on Twitter @stephenkinzer.

10 November 2016

By Jon Kofas

Right wing political groups throughout the world are celebrating Trump’s victory but rather prematurely. The traditional conservatives and liberals are sufficiently delusional to believe that they are somehow far removed from Trump-style authoritarian politics when in fact they laid the groundwork for Trump to succeed. Meanwhile, some traditional conservative political leaders around the world are wondering if right wing populism flirting with Fascism is the way to political victory, never questioning if their policies drove people to the far right. Others are questioning if BREXIT and the Trump victory really mean popular discontent with globalization under the neoliberal development model. Many analysts are already decrying the rightwing course of the American electorate, as though Clinton was a New Deal Democrat rather than a Rockefeller Republican with a more pro-Wall Street and more hawkish foreign policy than Trump.

Political correctness aside, the US was already a quasi-police state before Trump under both Bush and Obama. Therefore, the socio-cultural-political landscape was fertile for the new populist Republican leader, especially considering the corruption scandals that plagued Clinton. It is not at all the case as many have argued that US democracy suddenly became bankrupt because of Trump’s victory, because this was the case throughout history, with some exceptions when reformism became necessary to strengthen capitalism under the pluralistic society as during the Progressive Era and New Deal.

Behind the new authoritarian figure that will become America’s president, and behind the Republican victory of both houses of congress, the real power is corporate America as it always has been. Wall Street, not Washington, will determine policy under Trump who promised economic nationalism vs. globalization, isolationism vs. interventionism, job-growth oriented economy vs. jobs export oriented economy. Mainstream politicians, the media, and the entire institutional establishment have always projected the image that elections are equated with democracy.

The establishment wants people to believe that the electoral process affords legitimacy to the social contract. No matter how manipulated by the political class, financial elites and the media, elections put a stamp of legitimacy on what people believe constitutes popular sovereignty. As shocking as it was for many across the US and around the world, a Trump victory represents the illusion of democracy at work in a country where voter apathy is very high in comparison with most developed countries – the US ranks 27th in the world below Mexico and Slovakia in voter participation.

Besides the illusion of popular sovereignty, elections inject a sense of hope for a new start in society – the eternal spring of politics intended to maintain the status quo. An even clearer picture emerges regarding the distasteful “steak or fish” choices, as President Obama alluded during the correspondents’ dinner a few weeks before the election to indicate with pride that there is no third political choice. The larger problem is the lack of differences between ‘steak and fish’ (Democrats and Republicans) in every policy domain, except social, cultural/lifestyle issues.

Of course, the very high percentage of ‘negatives’ for both presidential candidates and the absence of alternatives other than those that the political and financial establishment chose for people to give their final approval reveals that people were voting for what each side deemed the ‘lesser of two evils’ – the ‘steak or fish’ choice that the establishment places on the menu and then the media ‘guides’ voters to choose one over the other as though it really makes much difference. This is hardly a manifestation of democracy and a testament of a system far removed from popular sovereignty.

Unlike elections in many developed countries, American elections have an aura of finality about them. It is as though everything has been decided at the ballot box until the next election cycle and people must conform. Elections invalidate expression of dissident voices, but not for corporate lobbyists influencing legislation. Despite the aura of finality and the historic election of populist Republican supporting economic nationalism, after the presidential election the US remains more bitterly divided than it was during the last years of the Vietnam War under President Nixon; certainly more undemocratic because of the ubiquitous surveillance state and Homeland Security regime that is here to stay. Although these divisions are not expressed as part of a class struggle, given the absence of working class solidarity, they find expression in varieties of smaller social, religious and cultural groups at odds with each other.

This is not to suggest that the US is as authoritarian as other countries claiming to be democratic. Nevertheless, there is considerable underlying sociopolitical polarization in a country hardly democratic as its apologists insist. Because of factionalism (socio-cultural-religious conservatives, isolationists/anti-globalist libertarians, traditional fiscal conservatives), Republican infighting will invariably manifest itself when the executive branch tries to push measures that congress will reject because corporate lobbyists oppose them. Animosity within the Republican Party and between the two major parties in congress will result in more gridlock despite a sweeping Republican victory of all branches of government. This is what Wall Street wants. Gridlock projects the image that both sides are fighting for the interests of the people when they are really fighting on behalf of corporate interests. Nevertheless, they present the process as the essence of democracy and the media reinforces that view.

Trump’s quasi-Fascist America will be unacceptable to many Democrats who believed that pluralism and multiculturalism in a country with changing demographics must become a reality with a first female president symbolizing these changes. On the other hand, Trump voters will be very disappointed once reality sinks in that the flamboyant charlatan billionaires cannot deliver in the promise to make America great again in terms of raising living standards. Trump had raised expectations so high that the first to be disappointed will be his own voters. However, he will deliver on the implied promise to take America back a few decades when white male supremacy was rarely questioned at home or abroad.

Just days before the election, a FOX NEWS poll of its own audience indicated far greater pessimism about the country’s future than the general population. These people also fear deepening division in the country because the liberal establishment is an anathema to their cultural identity. With a Trump victory, the Republican popular base watching FOX NEWS will be hoping that their right wing messiah will lead them to the promised land of the early Cold War of the 1950s and to the elusive American Dream of yesteryear. Disillusionment has already set it on the part of many on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party who see their dream of greater social justice far removed.

Regardless of Trump’s promises to improve the lives of the poor and the middle class by bringing jobs back home, the only certainty is the hegemony of markets over the state resulting in continued political polarization in society that has turned sharply to the right even more than it was under Reagan AND Bush-Cheney. Globalization and neoliberal policies (the model based on state empowering the private sector in every domain and incentivizing it through fiscal policy and subsidies) will continue no matter what Trump promised/threatened, and that will result in further capital concentration and downward pressure on middle class living standards and sociopolitical polarization will become more evident.

Parading the confederate flag and a hunting rifle, the Trump voter will continue to feel one with the apartheid culture of the past. Trump’s supporters will feel marginalized and will become more fanatical. By contrast, the Clinton voter supporting trans-gender rights and the woman’s right to choose will be optimistic that the time has come for pluralism to expand the all-inclusive socio-cultural net. By the end of Trump’s first hundred days, neither the Trump nor Clinton voter will see much evidence to celebrate a future rise in living standards.

Many academic economists, private investment firms, the IMF, the World Bank, and OECD estimate that low growth will be accompanied by market concentration and jobs exported to cheap labor markets, keeping American wages low in the coming years. The average median net worth of Americans ranks lower than 18 other nations and dropping as personal debt is rising. Misplaced optimism on the part of Republicans will soon be replaced with pessimism almost as intense as that of the Democrat voter.

Campaign promises to raise living standards have been made by every presidential candidate in the last four decades. Living standards have been declining and they will continue on that trajectory according to all studies on future economic prospects. Considering the low-growth global economic environment, the high US debt under a system that encourages more capital concentration and export of high paying jobs, no one expects inflation adjusted improvement in living standards during the next four years. Moreover, the low interest rates, which stimulated some very modest growth since the recession of 2008, are ending. The absence of monetary stimulus will further impact middle class credit and the consumer-driven economy.

Contrary to appearances, Trump will be limited in what measures he can pass through congress that relies heavily on wealthy donors and lobbyists for campaign finance. The executive branch will be weaker than it was when Obama succeeded an unpopular president in 2008 amid a deep recession and US military intervention. The legislative branch will be more aggressive toward the executive branch than it was under Obama. The result will be greater political division that only helps corporate America. The share of the economic pie for the middle class and workers will continue to shrink This in no small measure because the sharp rise in the public debt will require higher indirect taxes, cuts in entitlement programs, and higher interest rates to attract buyers for US treasury bonds – presumably a risk free asset threatened by rising rapidly rising debt levels undermining the dollar’s value.

Besides the structurally weak economy under neoliberal policies and corporate welfare, several factors will lead to sharper political division in the next four years. First, Republicans will be predictably hostile to any Democrat policy proposal from background checks on guns to relief for college debt aimed to further the Democratic Party’s popular base. Second, many conservatives will use the Trump victory to rally popular support for an extreme right wing agenda to keep the populist wing of the Republican Party strong. Third, Trump already set the divisive tone by alienating every social group in the country, but was well rewarded for it, thus reflecting the ideological, political and cultural milieu of the American mainstream now entrenched on the far right of the spectrum.

People who voted Trump will feel vindicated about their attitudes toward women, minorities and foreigner from Latin America and the Middle East. As their living standards decline, they will become more fanatic. Their church leaders and local civic leaders along with right wing talk radio and FOX NEWS will encourage right wing fanaticism because they all have an ally in the White House. To appease the Republican voters, along with local law enforcement, many in the military generally accepting of a police state, President Trump will likely focus on an infrastructural development program to create some new jobs. At the same time, he will strengthen defense while fighting out with mainstream Republicans about rapprochement with Russia and withdrawal from regime change foreign policies.

Co-optation of the Popular Base

For both political parties, the biggest challenge will be to co-opt the masses while serving Wall Street and the defense/intelligence industry establishment. The Democratic Party is indeed an umbrella that includes elements ranging from Rockefeller Republicans especially suburban women opposed right wing populism, to progressive social democrats and even some espousing a form of socialism. As middle class living standards continue to decline, in accordance with IMF predictions among others, the ability of the Democrat party to remain a large umbrella will be diminished, especially after Clinton’s crushing defeat.

Unless the Democrats revert back to FDR’s New Deal politics of the 1930s, something that neoliberals and their wealthy donors adamantly oppose as do Republicans, the party will have to choose between remaining in the camp of Rockefeller Republicanism like Clinton, or abandon its neoliberal commitments and move closer to the Bernie Sanders camp.

The election of 2016 proved that Republicans have moved farther to the right than anyone could have predicted. Nevertheless, divisions remain between traditional economic/fiscal conservatives, some Libertarians, and populist socio-cultural-religious conservatives, including the Ku Klux Klan that endorsed Trump. For now, Republicans have the luxury to ignore the changing demographics – Hispanics and African-American voters along with younger voters.

No matter how charismatic the Republican or Democrat political leader, it will not be easy to compensate for the growing chasm between rich and poor. As much as ideology matters, in the end the Democrat voter cannot pay her bills with LBGTQ bumper stickers any more than the Republican voter can do so with the confederate flag. No matter the obfuscating political and media rhetoric about disparate social groups transcending social class, socioeconomic factors determine class as they always have. Both parties will try to indoctrinate their voters to live by ideology alone, as churches convinced the faithful masses that salvation of their soul was the only thing that matters.

Suppressing class struggle evident in all aspects of society, the media will continue to propagate for class collaboration using nationalism as the catalyst. Subservience to capital identified with the national interests is a historically rooted belief that has remained in the social consciousness as secular dogma and taught in schools as gospel truth. The media perpetually delivers the message that if there is a problem in the political economy the culprit is the political class, the elected official and not the financial elites; certainly not capitalism as a system engendering structural inequality.

Trump will be no different than politicians of both parties that try to distract public opinion by directing attention away from domestic issues to foreign enemies new and old alike; pursuing the dream of Pax Americana despite its costs and limitations in a multi-polar world order where East Asia plays a dominant global role. The only leverage of the US is to keep Asia divided by demonizing China, as Trump has done repeatedly. Demonizing a foreign enemy to distract from focusing on domestic problems worked during the Cold War to engender sociopolitical conformity amid the triumph of Pax Americana. In the absence of a Communist bloc, the counter-terrorism ideology that replaced anti-Communism will be intensified under a Trump administration because it is in the interest of the defense industries.

As we have seen since 9/11, there are limits and monetary and political costs to the counter-terrorism, considering that US policy and practices actually contribute to the growth of terrorism not its elimination. Even the most gullible right wing Trump fanatics realize that polluted water in Flint Michigan has nothing to do with ISIS, and everything to do with the massive tax breaks of the state’s Republican governor to corporations and the rich of that state. Similarly, people are aware that after several trillion dollars spent in Middle East wars and counter-terrorism, the US public debt has risen sharply and the economy weakened.

Sociopolitical Polarization under Corporatocracy

Even for the apathetic masses that do not bother with elections, the magic of the ballot box affords the illusion that people have a voice in the political arena. Politicians, pundits and the media remind the public that they have only themselves to blame for their elected officials. They rarely mention rich donors behind the political class that decides who runs for elected office. The realization that people’s prospects are not improving, that their children are not experiencing upward socioeconomic mobility, and policy works to benefit a small segment of society drives some to the extreme right and others to the left.

The weakened center that Democrats claimed to represent in fact causes more people to rebel from the right because it is socially and ideologically acceptable as it has deep historical roots going back to the Civil War. Trump’s victory offers ample proof of this reality. By contrast, the US, unlike many countries around the world, has no historical tradition of sustained strong left wing politics, and see right through the hollow liberal rhetoric behind which is Wall Street financial interests.

Just beneath the thin veil of conformity that the media, politicians and mainstream institutions promote, there is lingering sociopolitical polarization that will become more pronounced now that Trump is elected and legitimized neo-Fascism in America. The mainstream media actually reinforces sociopolitical polarization mainly caused by structural conditions in the economy and a political system representing corporatocracy (rule by the corporations). FOX News, right wing talk radio, among others advocates a more authoritarian/militarist/police state course for society. The rest of the media presents itself as ‘objective’ propagates for the façade of a pluralistic society that permits cultural diversity, but it is as committed to corporatocracy as the right wing. In short, corporatocracy led to the election of a populist Republican who is as close to an authoritarian leader and open to Fascism as any in the past.

Regardless of whether it supported Republican or Democrat candidates, the mainstream media in search of the culprit for the public debt is critical of social security, subsidized housing and health care for the lower strata of society, school lunches, and social programs. At the same time, the media echoes Wall Street in blaming government for the conditions of poverty that the political economy creates. Trump’s ‘drain the swamp’ slogan referring to Washington never mentioned the source of the swamp which is Wall Street and its lobbyists. Therefore, the media never blames corporatocracy but the elected officials serving it in order to preserve the system. By embracing the authoritarian Republican leader, the majority voters are revealing that they see greater hope for their future under such a regime that promises to fight corporatocracy than they do under a Democrat leader linked to Wall Street.

Political Co-optation Strategy

In their struggle to broaden their popular base, aspects of Bonapartism, the political strategy of projecting the impression of rising above classes, have been embraced by both political parties, especially the Republicans. Unless the political parties representing capital co-opt the disillusioned middle class and working class elements; unless they give them an outlet to express their disapproval with a political economy favoring the rich; unless they give them hope that the system works for them, then bourgeois democracy collapses and a form of authoritarianism ensues. This is already a reality in Trump’s America.

A precursor to Fascism in Europe, Bonapartism would not be possible unless all mainstream institutions and not just the political parties and media contributed to the promotion of institutional conformity. Although a segment of the population sees past such efforts at conformity and supports the reformist candidates – Bernie Sanders in 2016 – invariably those candidates are co-opted by the mainstream and bring along the masses. This was the case with Senator Sanders who managed to lead a grass roots movement only to deliver it in the hands of the Wall Street candidate, as Sanders described Clinton.

Partly because of the Sanders candidacy, Clinton succeeded to some degree in co-opting the progressive elements of the left into the Democrat Party. A continuation of the defunct Tea Party behind which was energy corporations and right wing billionaires, Trump’s populist ‘revenge anti-establishment politics’ was even more successful in co-opting the masses that the Democrats. While the Democrats efforts focused on de-radicalizing the progressive elements by securing loyalty of their leaders into the mainstream, Republican efforts focused on driving them even farther toward fanaticism as an expression of dissatisfaction with the Democrat status quo that implicitly castigated the corporate elites.

Co-optation of the masses by Republicans necessarily entailed a populist appeal to social/cultural conservatives, mostly angry whites who feel besieged by demographic and structural economic changes in society. Instead of analyzing the root causes of structural inequality built into the system, Trump backers blame other social groups, but refused to criticize the political economy because it is unpatriotic to question capitalism. They believe that if all minorities somehow disappeared and no immigrants ever entered the land, then their social and economic problems would disappear as well and their status would magically flourish.

Because of demographic changes and downward income pressures, the traditional Republican appeal confined only to fiscal/economic, and defense-security conservatives is no longer sufficient to elect a president. Revenge politics of extreme right wing populism was more the message of the Trump team promising to clean up Washington, to distance itself from the UN, dilute NATO, exit from international trade agreements or re-negotiate them, and discipline corporations while first incentivizing them so they do not take jobs into cheap labor markets overseas.

Disgruntled social/cultural conservatives liked Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric against the political and economic establishment, against minorities, Muslims, and women. His emotional appeal similar to that of the Nazi Party (‘give people someone to hate’) worked because Republican right wing populism has deep roots and offers hope for reverting to a racist/sexist/xenophobic America of the past instead of the one that exists now under current demographic and economic conditions.

The irony is that Obama’s America operated under a regime many would justifiably label quasi-police state and institutionalized racism was evident despite an African-American president. Police officers were shooting unarmed black males and a criminal justice system reflecting institutional racism not so far off what Trump and many of followers openly or covertly advocate as a reaction to political correctness and equal opportunity institutional access (affirmative action).

Weak Executive Branch, Strong Wall Street

Wall Street pharmaceuticals and defense-related stocks celebrated with a sharp rise to welcome a Trump victory. However, a weak executive branch is inevitable under the new president, but it should not be confused with a weak governmental structure typically characteristic of developing nations. In much of Africa, and parts of Latin America and Asia, states are unable to raise taxes and deliver basic services to their citizens. Although the state structure in the US is hardly like that of developing nations, there are signs that it is weakening at the expense of the masses under the neoliberal regime Trump will follow no matter his hyperbolic rhetoric against globalization. The only certainty about the US election outcome is policy continuity, which is what the markets want, regardless of a president-elected who mobilized popular support by appealing to racism, xenophobia, sexism and authoritarian style politics.

To maintain corporate hegemony over the state, Wall Street and the media it owns can only prevail if the legislative branch is compliant and checks the powers of the executive that may dilute corporate welfare policies in order to maintain the social order by providing certain basic social programs from affordable health care and social security to affordable education. One glaring contradiction of the political economy is that people must be convinced that their interest is inevitably linked to the fortunes of big capital and not contrary to it; that big capital is not responsible for declining living standards for America’s middle class and workers in the last forty years; and that the enemy is the politician.

The media helps to keep the focus on the politician (establishment political class of both parties) as the evil force behind the calamities that befall society; never on the capitalists on whose behalf the politician conducts policy. The media will always examine tantalizing stories of all sorts about the personal lives of politicians, stories that deserve attention because they reflect integrity of character. However, the media never examines the politician as a servant of big capital and the massive influence of corporate lobbies in determining legislation. The media will never cover social justice issues, because they lead back to the structural inequality built into the political economy. In other words, the business of perpetual mass indoctrination and distraction is essential to keep the majority under the illusion that they live in a democracy – rule by the people – when in fact it is Corporatocracy. In winning the presidential election, Trump gave the illusion to his followers that they have hope for structural change.

Culture wars and personality conflicts as distraction from social justice issues will remain front and center to distract people from focusing on the root causes of downward social mobility. While market hegemony is a reality of the nexus between state and capital, the media and politicians have convinced people into believing in the illusion of choice – ‘the future is in your hands’ and ‘the people have spoken’, as media headline read. The question for capitalists who were divided between Clinton and Trump is how to manage the economy and what role the state must play against the background of intense global competition and shifting balance of power from the West to the Far East. This is not to minimize the intense political rivalry, the partisanship of law enforcement and other institutions at all levels of government, or the ongoing struggle for policy influence.

CONCLUSIONS: Revolt of the Extreme Right

Trump’s victory temporarily sets into hibernation the majority popular base of the Republican Party while emboldening its more extreme right wing elements. There is nothing like the illusion of identifying with a political victory to appease those feeling marginalized among the lower layers of the social pyramid. Once it becomes evident that domestic conditions will continue as they have in the recent past, contrary to Trump’s lofty promises to the middle class and working families, disillusioned voters will have to be content with the Republican cultural agenda, strong law and order position, and strong defense policy. Republicans are more likely to support leaders advocating greater reliance on militarism and police state methods and less tolerance for dissent. The elements for an authoritarian society are already deeply rooted in the culture and will eventually come into the forefront more pronounced than ever.

Ironically, both Republican and Democrats are responsible for the underlying causes of a revolt by the masses rallying around a right wing demagogue appearing to be in a struggle against the establishment. Judging by the performance of the US stick market, the establishment knows he represents Wall Street and not the unemployed worker in Cleveland. The media has convinced the average American that it is anathema, un-American to rebel from the left against the unjust system but patriotic to do so from the right. With the exception of the Klan label, there is no stigma attached to rebelling from the right against the establishment which includes not just Washington but corporate America. The job of the right wing politician will be to co-opt the popular base and keep it loyal to corporatocracy.

While the corporate media sings the praises of globalization and subtly criticizes Trump’s economic nationalism, it can only carry that message up to a point without appearing unpatriotic. The dilemma for the corporate elites is not to be caught in contradictory messages when trying to rally support of the masses, something that has become exceedingly difficult because of the downward socioeconomic mobilization. This is where it becomes convenient to blame politicians, and to keep the executive branch weak and government divided so that people blame everything on politicians who are actually in gridlock in the first place because they differ about which segment of the economy and which corporations benefit more than others as a result of policy.

Political campaign promises are like happy endings in children’s novels. People enjoy reading and dreaming about such things but they do not really expect that everyone lives happily ever after. The lives of the vast majority of Americans will not improve no matter who had won the White House in 2016. Symbolically and not just because she is a woman, but also in terms of engendering greater social harmony among the disparate demographic groups, Clinton was better suited for the sake of continuity from the Obama administration. However, Trump will serve Wall Street and neoliberal policies and globalization just as faithfully because corporate America will give him no choice.

Because of objective domestic and international conditions in the early 21st century, the middle class is on a continuing downward slope that radicalizes people either on the right or the left will realize cannot be fixed by populist right wingers or mainstream Democrats. Hence polarization in society will continue and it will become much worse after the next deep recession in the US because the political economy is increasingly serving a much narrower social base than it has since the 1920s. Trump has broken all political and ideological taboos about crossing the line from traditional conservatism to flirting with Fascism. This is America’s political future and it has been here for some time only to manifest itself more candidly in Trump.

Jon V. Kofas, Ph.D. is a retired professor of History/international political economy, author of 11 books and two dozen articles on international development

10 November 2016

By Ali Abunimah

On a day that most people expected not to see, we can say few things with certainty.

One of them is that Hillary Clinton would have been a disastrous president for those supporting the Palestinian struggle for their rights.

Her failed campaign pitched her as the natural successor to President Barack Obama, the Democrat who just unconditionally handed Israel the biggest military aid package in history.

During the Democratic primary campaign, Clinton marketed herself as a belligerent and violently hawkish allyof Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against the Palestinian people.

She vowed to make blocking the nonviolent Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement a priority of her would-be administration.

She went out of her way to campaign against the mildest efforts to hold Israel accountable, including appealing directly to members of her United Methodist Church last spring to vote against divestment from companies that assist and profit from Israel’s occupation.

Clinton positioned herself as an anti-Palestinian extremist at a time when the Democratic Party base showed itself more open than ever to embracing Palestinian rights.

Her extreme support for Israel is just one of the many ways she and her party operatives pandered to donorsand revealed themselves to be out of touch with large segments of the country they had taken for granted.

But Hillary Clinton will not be president.
President Trump

The only thing that can be said about President-elect Donald Trump with any confidence is that no one knows exactly what he will do.

Earlier in the campaign he insisted that he would be even-handed in dealings with Israelis and Palestinians, driving many of Israel’s most fanatical and neoconservative supporters into Clinton’s arms.

But facing a backlash, he quickly pivoted, promising Netanyahu he would recognize Jerusalem as the “undivided capital of the State of Israel,” and actively encouraging Israel to continue building colonial settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Trump still showed flashes of unwillingness to appease. After winning his party’s nomination in July, he brushed off a reporter’s question about whether he would follow the “tradition” of other Republican candidates and visit Israel.

“It’s a tradition, but I’m not traditional,” Trump shot back.

Even if these changes reveal an erratic man with no fixed views, Trump’s most pro-Israel positions don’t differ much in substance from the policies of Obama, on whose watch settlement construction more than matched the pace during the term of President George W. Bush.
Visceral fears

In his victory speech last night, Trump returned to a regular theme: “We will get along with all other nations willing to get along with us … We’ll have great relationships. We expect to have great, great relationships.”

That will be little comfort to people in the US and around the world whose visceral fears are stoked by the forces that helped propel Trump’s rise: his racist baiting and incitement against Muslims and Mexicans, his boasts about sexually assaulting women, his denial of global warming and his indulgence of anti-Semitic white supremacists, including the Ku Klux Klan, which gave him its endorsement.

The Israeli counterparts of these vile American racists are celebrating Trump’s victory today.

Netanyahu congratulated Trump, calling him a “true friend of Israel.”

“I am confident President-elect Trump and I will continue to strengthen the alliance between our two countries and bring it to greater heights,” the Israeli prime minister added.

Naftali Bennett, the Israeli education minister who has boasted about his killings of Arabs, hailed the coming Trump era.

“Trump’s victory is an opportunity for Israel to immediately retract the notion of a Palestinian state in the center of the country, which would hurt our security and just cause,” Bennett said.

But the so-called two-state solution was already dead and Clinton would not have changed that.
Fighting back

The Palestinian cause has already shifted to a struggle for equality against an entrenched system of Israeli occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid anchored and rooted in support from the US bipartisan establishment.

Palestinians were not waiting for the result of the US election to decide which way their struggle would go.

Trump has won, but some things have not changed. Over the last decade, support for Palestinian rights has been rising in the United States, particularly among the young – and in the increasingly diverse Democratic Party base that has been utterly failed by its establishment leadership.

More than ever, people understand that US support for Israel comes not only from the same places where support for white supremacy, mass incarceration, unchecked police violence and US militarism and imperialism are strongest.

It also stems from the liberal, pro-human rights circles that championed Clinton, who more often than not equate colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed, occupation and resistance.

This base has no choice now but to rally from its despair, which at any rate the election of either candidate would have precipitated, to keep organizing and fighting for its rights and the rights of people around the world.

The truth is, we had no choice but to wage that fight anyway.

Ali Abunimah is Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books. Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.

First published in Electronic Intifada

10 November 2016

By Poppy McPherson

One year after a historic election put a civilian government in
charge, the country’s army is using brutal methods to regain its
popularity.

On a cool night last November, a euphoric crowd surged around the
headquarters of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD)
in Yangon. Supporters danced and waved flags as result after result
was announced from a digital billboard. It was a landslide. Amid the
cheers, a man named Than Htay told me he how he had waited decades to
vote freely.

For the first time in more than half a century of a brutal junta,
civilians would be in charge of the country. But a year after the
vote, it’s not clear just who is in charge in Myanmar — and Myanmar’s
military, once despised, is riding a new wave of support.

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The reason? An enemy propped up for decades by the army has made a
resurgence in the public imagination, if not in reality. The military
is restoring its political power by returning to its war footing
against Rohingya Muslims, a persecuted minority who for years have
been loathed as “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh, despite their
presence in Myanmar dating back centuries.

The Rohingya have been discriminated against for generations, but the
persecution has grown particularly intense in recent years.

It was dictatorial Gen. Ne Win who, after seizing power in a coup in
1962, pushed through the 1974 Emergency Immigration Act and 1982
Citizenship Law that stripped Rohingya of their citizenship. In Burma:
A Nation at the Crossroads, Benedict Rogers quotes a former government
minister as saying the junta chief “had an ‘unwritten policy’ to get
rid of Muslims, Christians, Karens and other ethnic peoples, in that
order.’”

Government prejudice has been mixed with demagogic hatred, with the
Rohingya portrayed as foreigners and, more recently, vehicles for the
spread of jihad. In the era of the Islamic State, existing suspicions
have become bound up with a global narrative of Islamist extremism.
Nationalist Buddhist monks like Ashin Wirathu have framed Islam as an
existential threat to Myanmar, stoking fears that Muslims are both
outbreeding the Buddhist majority and connecting to international
terrorist groups.

The Myanmar military now claims to be facing an organized rebel
insurgency among the Rohingya, chiefly in the western province of
Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh. It’s true that the far-flung state
has been home to various insurgencies, both Buddhist and Muslim. In
the past year, the Arakan Army rebels, comprised of Rakhine Buddhists,
has fought several skirmishes with the military.

In the early hours of Oct. 9, scores of assailants armed with swords
and pistols attacked three border posts in Maungdaw Township, northern
Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh. Nine police officers were killed
and five soldiers then died pursuing the attackers. Both the
authorities and the public blamed the Rohingya, with the government
accusing the attackers of being Rohingya Muslim terrorists trained by
the Taliban, citing evidence obtained — possibly by force — after
soldiers captured some of the alleged culprits. In a later interview,
Suu Kyi backpedaled, saying the claims came from only one person and
may not be reliable.

The subsequent crackdown was swift and, according to multiple
accounts, brutal. There have been accusations of arbitrary arrests,
burned villages, extrajudicial killings, and rape.

All have been met with blanket denials, not only by the government but
by a public already defensive about international criticism of
Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya. Jingoistic articles have
dominated state media and Myanmar-language Facebook. “Insurgents
arrested!” (Bedraggled-looking men in a police lineup.) “Guns seized!”
(Decades-old hunting rifles).

For the military, the attack came at a convenient moment, as other
long-standing conflicts — with the Kachin rebels along the Chinese
border, and with the Ta’ang Liberation Army in Shan State — are
flaring up again. When 30 soldiers were killed this May in fighting
with the Arakan Army, another minority — but not Muslim — militia in
Rakhine, the military didn’t comment. But following the Maungdaw
attack, the authorities have been warning of a “Muslim invasion” and
promising to arm Buddhist civilian militias. The plan has fueled fears
of a repeat of 2012 violence when Rakhine Buddhist mobs — allegedly
facilitated by local authorities — set upon Rohingya Muslim
communities, burning down homes and killing scores. “For the first
time since the Kokang crisis of early 2015, the military is getting
strong public support for its actions,” commented Richard Horsey, a
Yangon-based political analyst, referring to a spasm of fighting in
the north last year which killed more than 100 soldiers and rallied
support for the armed forces.

In the wake of the Maungdaw attacks, Rakhine Buddhists marched around
villages chanting their support for the army, while leading Myanmar
journalists questioned why Rohingya were “uncooperative” with the
military. A reporter who gave an interview to the New York Times
saying he had witnessed soldiers shooting unarmed Rohingya later
retracted his comments in a Facebook post that was shared thousands of
times. What pressures he was under to do so remain unknown.

Sittwe, the Rakhine State capital, is an hour’s flight from Yangon and
five hours away from the operation zone in Maungdaw, which is off
limits to foreign journalists. In the dusty coastal town, it’s easy to
forget how much Myanmar has changed since 2011, when the military
launched reforms. The junta apparatus is everywhere, from the hotel
whiteboards that listing the names of every guest and their room
numbers, to the secret police and informers. Checkpoints stand outside
derelict mosques, guards watching for long-gone congregants. They’re
no longer needed, as most of the Muslim population were driven out of
their homes following clashes with the Rakhine Buddhist majority in
2012, pelted with fruit by local Rakhines they trudged to the
internment camps on the outskirts of the city where they have been
confined ever since.

Inside the camps, the mood is bleak. In Maw Thi Nyar camp, Noor Islam,
a middle-aged Rohingya community leader, told me he hadn’t heard from
his sister from Maungdaw in more than a week. “She told me that her
neighbor had already been killed,” he said. During their last
conversation, she said, “Just pray for us and just pray for Maungdaw.”

He and others were convinced the rebel movement had been fabricated by
the military. “Currently, the Myanmar military is implementing their
policy,” he said as a small crowd gathered to listen in. “I’m just a
simple man, so I don’t understand, but I’m hearing from my grandmother
and grandfather and my father — because this is my ancestral land —
that the Myanmar government is trying to ethnically cleanse these
people, torturing people, eliminating people, doing such bad things to
these people.”

The next morning, two Muslim men said that they had been fishing in a
local river a few days earlier when they were detained and beaten by
the navy. One of them, Abdul Amin, lifted his longyi, the long cloth
worn by Myanmar men, to reveal purplish red marks on the backs of his
legs. “We were just taking a rest after we pulled in the net and ate
our dinner at 8 p.m.,” he said. “At that time the navy came to us and
just bound our hands and beat us with a stick, made us lie down and
beat us with a wooden stick.”

As we spoke, other Muslims gathered around, nodding in agreement as
Abdul Amin said, “It’s like it’s government policy to kill people.”

There is no evidence that the Myanmar military faked the murder of
their own border police. But few doubt that their actions over recent
years may have nourished an appetite for retaliation.

Matthew Smith, CEO and founder of Fortify Rights, a nongovernmental
organization, described the military’s “divide and conquer” strategy
in the region to rally the support of the region’s majority Buddhist
population. “It has an uncanny ability to instigate conflict between
ethnic groups, and it’s done that to great and deadly effect in
Rakhine,” he said. “We haven’t seen evidence that the attacks on
police were a false flag event but it’s clear the military is using
the situation to shore up favorable sentiment.”

“The allegations [about military atrocities] emerging from northern
Rakhine State are still difficult to verify given very limited
international and media access to date. But they are broadly
consistent with allegations that are heard from other military
operations zones, including in northern Shan and Kachin,” Horsey, the
political analyst, commented, referring to two other long-standing
conflicts between the military and minority groups.

But many local Buddhists don’t want to see a return to violence of any
kind. Rakhine Buddhists who had fled the fighting against the
suspected Rohingya insurgents in the north and were staying in a
makeshift refugee camp inside a stadium in late October said that they
had been friends with Muslims back in their home villages and met up
for religious ceremonies.

Ronan Lee, a doctoral candidate at Singapore’s Deakin University who
has done research in northern Rakhine, said that “despite the events
of 2012, many Muslim and Buddhist communities in northern Rakhine
State were keen to work together and they understood that both their
communities were better off when there was peace and trade between
them. Despite the state’s natural resources, keeping Muslim and
Buddhist communities separate and restricting Muslims’ ability to
travel has damaged the state’s economy.”

As the military’s popularity has surged following the attacks, the
civilian government’s muted response has left it looking ineffectual.
Shortly after the attacks, State Counsellor and de facto government
leader Suu Kyi flew to India. Last week, she was in Japan. She has not
visited Rakhine and neither has her president, Htin Kyaw. According to
Reuters, the Ministry of Information submitted a list of questions
about the army’s response that went unanswered. “There are really two
governments in Myanmar: the civil government and the military
government,” said Widney Brown, director of programs at Physicians for
Human Rights, which recently released a report on northern Rakhine.

The military retains control of vital institutions including the
ministries of defense, home affairs, the police, and immigration.
“Thus, there is a very strong military presence along the land
borders, including with Bangladesh,” Brown said. “This control coupled
with concerns about insurgencies means that the military government,
not the civilian government, is really in control in northern Rakhine
State.”

The months leading up to the Maungdaw attacks had brought rare,
civilian-led progress in the search for peace in the state. In the
face of staunch opposition from the military, the government paved the
way for an independent Rakhine commission, headed by former United
Nations chief Kofi Annan, to conduct investigations and file an
advisory report. The recommendations are due in late 2017.

Now that enterprise looks distinctly shaky. “The naming of Annan to
head up a state advisory commission is an attempt to shed light on
abuses and set the stage for some reconciliation,” said Brown.
“However, the ability of the commission to have an impact was already
limited, as it is merely advisory and the recent violence in northern
Rakhine State may have cost the commission any opportunity to have an
impact.”

More disturbing than the suggestion that the civilian government is
powerless against the military is the idea that they tacitly approve.
Nobody really knows what Suu Kyi thinks of the Rohingya, although she
has often been criticized for her failure to act. There is also
evidence that other senior NLD officials are deeply hostile.

After the October attacks, state media, which is run by the
civilian-led Ministry of Information, has carried opinion pieces
condemning “fabricated” allegations of human rights abuses by the
military and accused journalists of being “hand in glove” with
terrorists. They have referred to Rohingya as “thorns.”

On Facebook, Zaw Htay, a spokesman for the government, singled out a
journalist at the national English-language newspaper, the Myanmar
Times, for her reporting on alleged military rapes. “We support and
advise government to take legal action against [the Times] and those
who are responsible for fabricating false news,” read one of the many
comments. The reporter was fired, reportedly following calls to the
paper by Zaw Htay, a former soldier who served in the former
military-backed administration but was kept on by Suu Kyi.

A few days ago, Zaw Htay confidently said the government and army were
“collaborating” on the crisis. “And [they have] also the same policy
on it.”

Additional reporting by Aung Naing Soe.

10 November 2016