Message From the DESMOG Editor

On August 30, during a tour of the damage from Hurricane Laura, a reporter asked President Trump about the risks that stronger hurricanes, intensified by climate change, pose to the fossil fuel industry along the Gulf Coast. His answer — “That’s the way it is” — echoes his dismissal of the rising death toll from COVID-19 just a month earlier.

Sharon Kelly reports on Trump’s comments and Hurricane Laura’s impacts on the Gulf, with powerful photos by Julie Dermansky. Check out the story.

With memories of Hurricane Sandy still fresh, Hoboken, New Jersey this week filed a climate lawsuit trying to hold accountable major oil companies and the industry’s largest trade group, the American Petroleum Institute, for their “deceptive actions” around climate change. Dana Drugmand has the story.

Also joining the wave of climate lawsuits this week is a group of young people in Portugal, who launched a case against almost all of Europe (33 countries) for failing to properly address the climate crisis that they say threatens their fundamental human rights

Have a story tip or feedback? Get in touch: editor@desmogblog.com.

Thanks,
Brendan DeMelle
Executive Director

P.S. Thank you to all the readers who’ve already donated to support our public interest journalism during these difficult times. Donating even $10 or $20 right now will help keep us going.






‘That’s the Way It Is’: Trump’s Dismissal of Hurricane Laura and Climate Crisis Echoes Remarks on COVID-19 Deaths
— By Sharon Kelly (11 min. read) —

At an August 30 briefing in Orange, Texas, during a visit to tour damage from Hurricane Laura, President Trump answered a question about climate change and hurricanes. Texas has had big storms for a long time, he said, and “that’s the way it is.”

The phrase carried echoes of his remarks on COVID-19 — made at a time when the coronavirus had killed over 156,000 and infected over 4.7 million in the U.S. — that the virus’s death toll “is what it is.”

READ MORE





Hoboken, New Jersey Sues Oil Industry for Climate Impacts From its 'Deceptive Actions'
— By Dana Drugmand (5 min. read) —

New Jersey has now joined the wave of lawsuits seeking to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for climate impacts. The city of Hoboken today filed a case against major oil and gas companies and the American Petroleum Institute (API), a powerful industry trade group which has played a major role in promoting “uncertainty” about climate science.

The lawsuit seeks to recover costs associated with climate impacts like extreme flooding and sea level rise. Like other climate liability lawsuits targeting fossil fuel companies, Hoboken's suit alleges that the oil and gas companies and their lobbying group not only knew early on about the climate harms resulting from their products, but actively engaged in campaigns of deception to undermine climate science and avoid policy responses.

READ MORE





Latest Youth Climate Lawsuit Filed Against 33 European Countries Over Human Rights
— By Dana Drugmand (7 min. read) —

Six young people from Portugal have filed an unprecedented climate change lawsuit against almost all of Europe, targeting 33 European nations for failing to take adequate action on the climate crisis that they say threatens their human rights.

It is the latest in a series of legal actions brought by young people around the world demanding urgent climate action to protect their fundamental rights and safeguard their futures.

READ MORE





As Climate-Fueled Wildfires Worsen, Communities Wrestle With Paying the Costs
— By Karen Savage, Climate Docket (9 min. read) —

Pennie Opal Plant spent much of last weekend anxiously scanning the horizon for smoke from California’s growing wildfires, packing and repacking treasured items into her car, and trying to decide which to bring if she needed to evacuate.

Plant, the co-founder of Idle No More SF Bay, a group led by Indigenous women dedicated to climate activism, is no stranger to climate-fueled disasters, including California’s growing wildfire crisis. But for the first time ever, Plant was preparing to flee from the flames at a moment’s notice. She has lived in her home in Richmond for more than 20 years.

READ MORE




From the Climate Disinformation Database: Principia Scientific International




Principia Scientific International (PSI) is an organization based in the United Kingdom which promotes fringe views and material to claim that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas. The PSI website says the organization is “for everyone who supports the traditions [sic] scientific method against the rise of sinister and secretive government funded 'post normal science'.” In 2020, the organization has been promoting conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic.







Read the full profile and browse other individuals and organizations in our Climate Disinformation Database or our new Koch Network Database.

THE US EXPEDITIONARY KLEPTOCRACY

By Danny Sjursen, AntiWar.com.

September 3, 2020

https://popularresistance.org/the-us-expeditionary-kleptocracy/
A Banana Republic And Its Banana Wars.

According to Transparency International’s 2019 Corruption Perception’s Index, the US is the world’s 23rd least swindling state. A bit better than Bhutan, but not quite as honest as Uruguay or the United Arab Emirates. So much for “We’re number one! We’re number one!” Still, I think the index was rather generous to Uncle Sam. Maybe that’s because it “ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption, according to experts and business people.”

In other words, Transparency International mainly looks inward, paying limited attention to states’ foreign policies and the domestic profits produced. Yet two short-lived stories last month – a US company’s Syrian oil contract and the State Department Watchdog report on Saudi arms sales – should seal the deal: America’s true top export is corruption.
A Syria “Mission” Fit For A Smedley Butler

Back in the bad old days of “gunboat diplomacy,” Washington shipped its sons off to overt corporate protection-racket missions in Latin America and East Asia. Sometimes the guns on those boats weren’t sufficient, so the navy was obliged to “send in the marines.” These were dubbed America’s “Banana Wars.”

So it was that the proudest of the Corps’ “few and proud” – Major General Smedley Butler – earned his two Congressional Medals of Honor during ten or so deployments bolstering business interests. Or, as he’d later explain in his post-retirement “Road to Damascus” tract, War is a Racket:


I helped make Mexico…safe for American oil interests…Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys…raping half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street…I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers…the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests…made Honduras right for American fruit companies…In China…helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

All in all, he diagnosed himself mostly “a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street.”

Yet what’s unfolding in the Syrian sphere of the US military’s Operation Inherent Resolve would be all too familiar to Smedley. For about the only thing current administration has inherently resolved to do there is protect the oil wells of Delta Crescent Energy. Five will get ya 500 – about as many troops still in country – that America’s mothers imagined a more romantic mission for their cherished sons. But such is life at the tip of Trump’s transactional strategic-spear.

It was, predictably, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who announced the deal between the US energy corporation and northeastern Syria’s Kurds to develop the fields under their militia’s control. Delta Crescent is a classic kleptocratic choice – basically a “revolving door” with shareholders – what with its co-foundingtrio of a former US Army Delta Force officer, a Bush-era diplomat, and a veteran oil executive.

Official Syria screamed, naturally – and not without cause. A foreign ministry statement said Damascus “condemns [the agreement] in the strongest terms” as a scheme for “an American oil company to steal Syria’s oil under the sponsorship and support of the American administration.” Unsavory Assad’s regime may be; but wrong, according to international law? Not exactly.

The deal’s broad strokes are more than a bit shady. The insider trio formed Delta Crescent for the sole purpose of securing this secretive contract, which it lobbied State hard for this past year. The deal is expected to produce billions of dollars for Kurdish authorities and the US company, none of which they plan to share with the Syrian government. Adding insult to injury, this Spring the Treasury Department granted Delta Crescent a license exempting it from Washington’s expansive sanctions regime against the Assad regime.

Only let’s not vilify The Donald and absolve the Democrats. However muddled motives and paltry his principles, do remember that Trump has thrice declared his intent to pull US troops from Syria; and all three times hawkish foreign policy advisers and advocates dissuaded him. The second time, in late 2018, National Security Advisor John Bolton pushed back and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis literally resigned in protest.

The last time, in October 2019 – with Bolton and Mattis both banished – a bipartisan House super-majority condemned Trump’s withdrawal in the face of a Turkish invasion of northern Syria. Some of the loudest rebukes came from Democrats, who, you know, control the chamber. Not a single one of them voted against the measure (though nine didn’t vote at all).

None other than Mr. Israel himself, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee Representative Eliot L. Engel, introduced the bill. His virtue-signal of a statement was sufficiently vacuous: “At President Trump’s hands, American leadership has been laid low.” Nobody paid much mind to the ceaseless canary in the militarism coal mine, Senator Rand Paul, when he sensibly Tweeted “If we can save one American soldier from losing their life or limbs in another senseless middle eastern war, it is worthwhile.”

Enter a far savvier senatorial operator, Lindsey Graham, and his go-to Fox News contributor-general Jack Keane – an architect of that Iraq surge which went so swimmingly. They reportedly convinced America’s casino-commander-in-chief to keep a contingency force in Syria to defend oil fields from the Iranian boogeyman. Brilliant, as my brother British officers used to say! The dastardly duo at the forever war law firm of Graham&Keane knew their man – his incredible ignorance, profound principles-paucity, and just what buttons to press. It was almost too easy, and the third time sure was the charm in this case: “I like oil. We’re keeping the oil” in Syria, the president parroted.

All of which set the staggeringly stupid stage for the current centenary reprise of American boys (and now girls!) wagering their lives for distant oil interests. And it isn’t even all that much oil we’re talking about here. In 2018, Syria produced an anemic 24,000 barrels per day – in other words, something like 1/500th the daily output of Saudi Arabia.

Thing is, the dirty secret that everyone not-so-secretly knows is this: a meager 500 US troops can neither defeat the remaining insurgents in post-civil-strife Syria nor (clearly) deter invasions by even ostensible NATO-allies like Turkey. What they can do is babysit Delta Crescent’s concessions – protecting its infrastructure and civilian workers from an array of hostile forces roaming the Wild West of Syria’s East.

Cue poor Smedley rolling in his proverbial grave.
Saudi Arms Sales And Starving Yemeni Children

It’s a rather old banana republic story: an outside audit or internal investigation exposes government misbehavior; and then, for his trouble, the diligent inspector is canned. I know what you’re thinking: it can’t happen here – not in a nation so full of freedom it can’t help but share some with the rest of the world. Until it does, and just did…again.

Early last month, the State Department inspector general issued a report criticizing the agency’s failure to take proper measures to reduce Yemeni civilian deaths from the American-made bombs Washington’s Saudi and the U.A.E. buddies have been dropping on them since 2015. Pretty scathing, if secretive stuff – seeing as its detailed civilian casualties data was heavily redacted and the report’s single “recommendation” was in the classified annex. Are you catching my drift here, good people of Transparency International?

But wait: didn’t Congress put a bipartisan two-year hold on transfers of arms for the Saudi-Emirati terror war on Yemen? Well, sure – but Machiavelli Mike is made of sterner stuff than that. Besides, he had a handy mechanism for an end run around those pesky legislators on the Hill: the “emergency” clause. So a persistent Pompeo went ahead and just declared one in May 2019, citing some compulsory and vague “threat” from Iran’s malign – if largely unchanged – activities in the region. And, in case you were wondering, no: investigators didn’t much examine whether an actual Iran “emergency” existed or if the weapons-sale approval was based on that at all. Rather, the report addressed more narrow procedural issues.

Anyway, with “emergency” waiver in hand, Pompeo opened the floodgates for $8.1 billion in Saudi-bound sales of the munitions mandatory for killing Yemeni kids. That sure is a lot of dough: wonder who made most of it? You guessed it: Raytheon: longtime lobbying home of Mighty Mike’s West Point classmate and cabinet-compadre, Defense Secretary Mark Esper. You’ve got to stand in awe of corruption that overt and old school. These M&M boys could teach some Arab and African authoritarians a thing or two!

Only it gets worse. In May, under some Pompeo-prodding, Trump fired Mr. Steve Linick – State’s then inspector general – amidst this and four other investigations into alleged wrongdoing at the department. Ice cold, Mike; Ice cold. Not a month later, Linick fingered the two main administration heavies who’d pressured him to drop the arms sale investigation. One was State’s top lawyer, Mark String. The other? Yep, Brian Bulatao: the under secretary of state for management, longtime friend and West Point ’86 classmate of Pompeo and Esper. “He tried to bully me,” Mr. Linick said of Butalao – whose nickname at the academy just happened to be “Rambo.” Well, sure: Brian learned his moves at hazing central: from those oft-cruel cadets at West Point! Sound shady enough yet? There’s also this: Mike, Mark, Brian, and a core of other ’86ers in the administration call themselves the “West Point Mafia.” So, yea…

But have no fear, folks – that no-retreat-from-Syria stalwart, Eliot Engel, has our back and was presumably breathing down Pompeo’s. And boy did he ever fire back at the IG’s insufficient report. Wait for it: “We will review the entire product with an eye toward ensuring that the classified annex hasn’t been used to bury important or possibly incriminating information.” Hardly scathing, that.

Nor has lame duck Eliot shut down business on the Hill until he gets to the bottom of this banality of evil executed in our name. Which begs the pathetic question: this guy is the best overseer on offer? Guess that leaves average Americans sh*t out of luck. To hell with this loser – which he was in the recent primary – and his home in the Israeli far-right’s pocket. Good riddance to bad (and ever-complicit) rubbish!

As for the output, it’s a classic case of qui bono – the American defense secretary’s old bosses at Raytheon – and qui gets f*cked: Yemeni babies.
America’s “Lebanonization” Of Iraq…And Itself

If there’s a silver lining to more classic mafia states like Lebanon and Liberia (tied for 137th on the Transparency list), or textbook tin-pot dictatorships like Djibouti (126th), it’s that they’re too small to export corruption. Not so America the exceptional, and expeditionary. Take Dr. Freedom’s post-9/11 patient zero: the Iraqi Kleptocracy. As Robert Worth wrote in a New York Times investigatory report, “As recently as the 1980s, corruption was rare, and ministries in Saddam Hussein’s autocratic government were mostly clean and well run.”

The key pivots were the U.S. sanctions regime imposed after Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait – which, beyond killing half a million Iraqi kids, dropped per-capita income from to $3,500 to $450 – and Bush’s 2003 Baghdad regime-change fiasco. See, when government officials’ salaries halve – or “eighth” – it can be difficult to make ends meet without taking bribes. Worse still, when the regime one works for is “changed,” plus government and society collapse into chaos then civil war, corruption becomes king.

Of course, a desperate US military – and its Washington masters – had an expedient solution for the ethno-sectarian strife they’d catalyzed: consider it the Lebanon formula. So America’s orientalist ambassadors – most, staggeringly young Republican stalwarts with no knowledge of the Mideast – imported France’s imperial Levantine blueprint. Essentially, this meant sectarian quotas and preferences for political office: a Kurdish president, Sunni parliamentary speaker, and Shia prime minister. The French have actually added the term for this disastrous recipe – libanisation – to their dictionaries: “A process of state fragmentation, resulting from the clash between various communities of faiths.”

The end state, in today’s Iraq – as in modern Lebanon – is government ministries meted out to various militias (many linked to Iran) by unwritten “street” agreements. The Sadrists have Health, Badr Brigades have long-held Interior, and Oil belongs to the Hikma honchos. Now that’s for some “Iraqi Freedom” befitting Baby Bush’s operational codename for the ’03 invasion.

Still, seen another way, this Iraqi endgame wasn’t just predictable, but perfectly appropriate – reflective of a US increasingly Lebanonizing at home. In Sectarian America, a people divided, distracted, and armed, battle for control of the nation’s streets, whilst their nominal leaders corruptly carve up contracts with the defense industry and in overseas fiefdoms. Washington’s duopoly elites ship their bombs to Saudi Arabia and their sons (well, not their sons) to Syria to secure arms deals and oil fields. And if, as a result, about a 100,000 Yemeni children, and a handful of American soldiers have to die, well – so be it.
“All Of Them Means All Of Them”

Hardly anyone here in the “land of the free” notices, of course. Yet, for those paying attention, it’s enough to wonder if today’s post- (corruption-induced) blast, livid Lebanese protesters are on to something. They’ve recently taken to constructing makeshift gallows, hanging effigies of their political elites, and even – in a macabre nod to their French colonial forebears – retweeting calls to “bring back the guillotine.”

Should that sound solely Lebanon-level crazy, recall that last week a demonstration of Amazon employees led by Staten Island’s own, Christian Smalls, set up a guillotine outside Jeff Bezos’ house. He whose wealth has grown by $85 billion since January, amidst Amazon’s soaring mid-COVID revenue, and owns a Washington Post that recently ran the headline (unironically): “Lebanon patronage system immune to reform.” Pot, meet kettle.

Both sides have blood and bribery on their hands. Pompeo and Esper are Republican kleptocrat classmates; but the Pelosis and Engels (himself a Raytheon recipient) doing the over-sighting attended their Democratic sister school. Could it be the rotten two-party system fueling America’s expeditionary extortion is to blame? Couldn’t be more obvious; or less meaningfully challenged.

Perhaps We the People should take another page out of the Lebanese protest playbook and collectively chant down our own oligarchs: “All of them means all of them!” Or, since US foreign policy doesn’t serve the national interest, but as a kleptocrat piggy-bank, Americans ought offer their Iraqi cousins’ trademark slogan:

“Nureed watan“…”We want a country.”

California Enters New 'Era of Megafires'

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Nie4v4ems

LET’S TELL LIES…

By Jorge Arreaza Montserrat, Venezuelan Ministry of Popular Power for Foreign Relations.

September 3, 2020



https://popularresistance.org/lets-tell-lies/

In the Spanish-speaking world, there is a very peculiar children’s song: “Let’s Tell Lies”. Through the hilarious repetition of verses and a catchy melody, there is a succession of absurd situations that delight children. Comedy is an exercise where reality is alienated so that laughter is achieved. The song made us remember what took place in recent days in the United States Senate, during a hearing with the ineffable Elliott Abrams -who despite greatly resembling a known villain of a children’s program who unsuccessfully chases blue pixies, continues to be Donald Trump’s macabre political operator. That country’s Senate asked Abrams for explanations and answers for the inefficiency of this erratic strategy to achieve a change of government in Venezuela. The performance they carried out in the Senate goes beyond the limits of comedy in order to play the role of a tragedy of enormous dimensions.

It is a two-fold tragedy: on one side, because of the sad role of Mr. Abrams, with his eagle-like features, carrying the accumulated defeats against Nicolas Maduro and the resistance of the Venezuelan people, stammering unintelligible excuses, making up magic words in an attempt to divert attention so as to guarantee the endeavor’s success. However, what is most worrisome is the tragedy that we see as all of the actors in this congressional performance are disconnected from reality. In order to make coherent and assertive decisions, one of the fundamental values in politics is to start from truthful premises of the situations that make up the political game, the actors, the ideological reality, concrete reality. Hollywood has made the world believe that the dominant elite in Washington have all the means to rely on truthful information on whatever issue you can imagine. Reality is quite different. Each of the Senators’ interventions questioning Elliott, with his disjointed smile, resounded like that children’s song, absurdity after absurdity, lie after lie, as they tried to draw the complex reality of the Latin American continent.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, surrendering any contempt for ridicule, displayed his ideological ignorance by questioning poor Elliott – who gazed in disbelief, always in defeat, not knowing quite how to reply – on the concern about substituting President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government with another by Guaido who, in his view, “is also a socialist and his party is recognized by the Socialist International.” Unbelievable! He is convinced that the puppet created by the Trump Administration to plunder Venezuelan wealth whose only personal accomplishment will be obtaining a few crumbs and the scorn of the Venezuelan people; he who attempted to carry out a coup d’état and only managed to stain his shirt with green plantains; a firm enthusiast of empires, specially the North American one; that character, for Senator Paul, is a socialist. He would need to start by reading a bit about the real ideals of a philosophy that places the human being at its center, rescues people’s dignity, doesn’t sell out to the highest bidder, recognizes people’s work and distributes resources equitably to achieve a dignified and gratifying life. It would be to his advantage to study a bit of history about Latin American popular struggles, the bloodshed by the Bolivian coca farmers in Cochabamba, the suffering of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who still recall the ghosts of military indignity, the sacrifice of Chilean miners against the capitalist maelstrom of copper. Socialism, paraphrasing Che Guevara, is carried in one’s heart to die for it, not in one’s mouth to profit from it. This Senator is ideologically lost in space.

But the nonsense doesn’t end there. New Hampshire Senator, Jeanne Shaheen, invoking the spirits of McCarthyism, complained to a beaten Elliott so that he would promote sanctions on Turkish companies carrying food to Venezuela. It is not enough with the suffering already felt by Venezuelans while confronting the blockade and the huge difficulties to acquire that which people need, Senator Shaheen also pretends that businessmen from other countries also should be relentlessly persecuted for supplying food to Venezuela. The Senator attempts are against the most fundamental principle of humanity, but also against a value that her own capitalist spirit defends without looking back: free trade. In this case, she finally requested that Abrams deliver to her a list of Turkish businesses that would be subject to sanctions by Trump and his thieves; for her, people don’t have the right to procure the possibility of food provisions, and the so-called free trade should always be limited to the approval of the United States and its capricious way of conceiving the world.

Finally, Senator Tim Kaine – who according to his Twitter profile – plays the harmonica in his spare time, ends the string of nonsense contained in this concatenation of errors from the U.S. elite. In a tragicomic sentence of the world turned upside down, this brainy representative from the state of Virginia, indicates that Colombia must be contrasted with Venezuela as an example of a good democratic government. Nothing more and nothing less than the country which exports drugs and violence to all the latitudes of the continent – especially to the United Sates which is the main consumer of Colombian drugs -, where the State is involved in, to say the least, in the dubious annihilation actions against its own population in the hands of irregular groups promoted by the government party itself. The country where the disappearance and murder of journalists and activists is so common that it has been normalized as a constant by public and published opinion. Colombia, where paramilitary groups are created and trained to invade the sovereignty of neighbors. Colombia, the country whose reality pains all the peoples of Our America. To pretend to present Colombia as a role model can be labeled as the most insane ogre summoned by these Senators without thinking about what they are saying.

We acknowledge there was a notable exception among the Senators. The intervention of Democratic Senator Chris Murphy rendered a questioned Abrams speechless. This Senator shamelessly exposed how his government has been behind every destabilization operation and action in Venezuela in recent years, all of them, by the way, in violation of Public International Law and of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Using the first-person plural, Senator Murphy was the discordant note of the evening. He didn’t concentrate in lying or repeating ideologized narratives. He tried to prove how his government has unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow the Venezuelan government and labeled the strategy employed until now as failed. From his arrogant mouth, only truths came out about a policy built on false premises, disconnected from Venezuelan reality and destined to fail from the first day.

From Venezuela we could laugh in front of such an out of key song of lies and nonsense surrounding this new aggression from the U.S. Senate against our sovereignty. No matter how much it resembles a humorous script, it comes short of it the moment in which they express it with proud seriousness, inside the greatest halls of a State that acts as the clearest political expression of world imperialism. The utter failure of the maximum pressure campaign against Venezuela is totally incomprehensible. They know nothing about Venezuela, and even less about Chavismo and its historic, political and social role. Their sources are fictitious, the information upon which decisions are made is not even inaccurate, it is false, absurd, and ideologized to the fullest. The Trump Administration has extended its Miami-oriented and Manichean script, its intemperate spiel and its reflexive aggression, to large part of the extremities of his country’s body politic. But our conviction, with the truth and dignity, remains unwavering. President Nicolas Maduro obtains new victories everyday against the offensive of the Trump Administration and the cataclysmic vocation of that caricature called Elliott Abrams. They haven’t succeeded against Venezuela and they won’t be able to. The Venezuelan people not only resist but advance as well. It is unstoppable. It knows not about surrender. It knows how to struggle and win.

Debenhams Strike 150 Days

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKIoBV064Vw

TRUMP INCITES VIGILANTE VIOLENCE AGAINST PEACEFUL PROTESTS

By Joseph Kishore, WSWS.

September 3, 2020



https://popularresistance.org/trump-incites-vigilante-violence-against-peaceful-protests/

In the week since a fascistic gunman killed two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin and seriously wounded a third, the Trump administration and its allies within the media and political establishment have defended the killings and the murderer.

The actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old Trump supporter who had previously attended Trump rallies, are the direct outcome of the incitement by this administration itself. It occurred during the week of the Republican National Convention, as speaker after speaker railed against the “radical left” and demanded the restoration of “law and order” in response to the protests over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha last Sunday.

Over the weekend, when asked to respond to the murders, Trump refused to condemn them. He repeated an earlier statement that they were “under investigation” and that the administration was “looking at it very carefully.” Trump added, however, that it was protesters who were to blame, saying that Wisconsin “should not have to put up with what they have been through,” referring to the protests.

Others in and around the administration have been even more explicit in praising Rittenhouse. Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s eldest son, retweeted a post by right-wing commenter Tim Pool declaring that Rittenhouse “is a good example of why I decided to vote for Trump” and lauding him for deciding “to go up and protect businesses and offer medical support [to] people.”

Last week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson praised Rittenhouse for attempting to “maintain order when no one else would.” Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin repeatedly refused to condemn Rittenhouse, instead denouncing the “violence” and “economic destruction” in the week since Blake’s shooting.

Developments in Wisconsin have been followed by an escalating campaign by the Trump administration for a military-police crackdown in Portland, Oregon. Right-wing groups—including Patriot Prayer, which has ties with the Portland police—have been patrolling the streets of that city over the past week, firing mace and paintball guns against protesters and journalists.

After a member of Patriot Prayer was shot and killed on Saturday, Trump demanded the deployment of the National Guard in the city and tweeted, “LAW AND ORDER!!!” Referring to the fascistic gangs, Trump wrote that the “big backlash… cannot be unexpected after 95 days of watching and [sic] incompetent Mayor admit that he has no idea what he is doing.”

There is nothing spontaneous about the parade of armed vigilante groups in Kenosha, Portland and other cities. They are no less coordinated with the White House than the armed protests of fascistic groups at state capitol buildings in Michigan, Virginia, Minnesota and other states in April and May to demand an end to restraints aimed at stopping the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

The strategy of the Trump administration is to wage the next two months of the election campaign under conditions of violence, military-police deployments and the threat of civil war. Its “law-and-order” campaign is being developed even as it is provoking violence and repression.

What is now taking place is an escalation of Trump’s efforts to develop a far-right, fascistic movement based on the police, sections of the military, and paramilitary-type organizations. The latest tirades follow his threat on June 1 to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military against protests, effectively attempting a military coup, and the deployment of federal paramilitary shock troops to seize and beat protesters opposed to police violence in July.

Trump’s actions come not from a position of strength, but from a position of fear and desperation. The ruling class is immensely sensitive to the growth of social anger in the working class.

Last week, the Republican National Convention was centered on hysterical denunciations of “socialism,” “Marxism,” “communism” and the “radical left.” In his own fascistic tirade on Thursday night, Trump declared the election a referendum that “will decide whether we save the American dream or whether we allow a socialist agenda to demolish our cherished destiny.”

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed the horrific consequences of the subordination of all social needs to the capitalist oligarchy’s drive for profits. The official death toll is more than 187,000, with projections that it could rise to 300,000 by December.

Tens of millions of people are unemployed and have been cut off from federal unemployment benefits. The trillions of dollars turned over to Wall Street—with the bipartisan support of both Republicans and Democrats—are to be paid for by forcing workers back to work, increasing exploitation and implementing massive cuts to social programs and infrastructure. Even as the death toll rises, the Trump administration is spearheading the drive to force children back to school so their parents can go back to work in unsafe conditions.

The growing movement of the working class must be unified on the basis of a clear socialist and revolutionary program.

The central danger is the subordination of opposition to the Democratic Party. A division of labor exists within the ruling class. The Trump faction is openly trying to create an environment to legitimize vigilante violence. The Democrats, however, speak for another faction of the ruling elite that is no less hostile to the interests of the working class.

For the past four years, the Democrats have worked to channel mass opposition to Trump—which erupted immediately after his inauguration—behind their anti-Russia campaign and the opposition of dominant sections of the military and intelligence apparatus to elements of Trump’s foreign policy. Terrified of and opposed to any movement of the working class against Trump, the Democrats have pursued their conflict with the White House using the methods of palace coup, culminating in the impeachment debacle that ended in February.

In response to the eruption in May of mass protests against police violence following the murder of George Floyd, the Democrats and their political allies have worked to hijack the demonstrations and direct them along racialist lines. The United States, they insist, is not divided between the working class and the oligarchy, but between “white America” and “black America”—a claim that feeds into Trump’s own efforts to develop a fascistic movement based on racism and backwardness.

This has culminated in the nomination by the Democrats of Biden and Harris, the shill for Wall Street and the ex-prosecutor. The Democrats’ election campaign advances no program to address the pandemic or massive social crisis. They are seeking ever more explicitly to divert popular opposition to Trump into a campaign for military operations against Russia and also China. Their orientation is toward the military-intelligence agencies, Wall Street and a section of the Republican Party.

The working class is an enormous objective social force. But the power of the working class has to be directed and guided by a conscious political perspective. The answer to the attacks by Trump is not to subordinate opposition to Biden, but to develop an independent movement of the working class that breaks free of the political straitjacket of the Democratic Party.

While Trump screams about the specter of socialism, a real socialist movement must be built. The Socialist Equality Party advances a program that meets the needs of the working class, not the corporate and financial elite.

The wealth of the billionaires must be expropriated. The trillions of dollars handed out to Wall Street must be reclaimed and redirected to meeting urgent social needs, including relief for the unemployed, universal health care and an emergency program to stop the coronavirus pandemic. There must be a halt to all evictions. The back-to-work and back-to-school campaigns must be halted, with all workers and parents affected receiving full income until the pandemic is brought under control.

There is not a single social problem that can be resolved without a frontal assault on the capitalist system itself. The coronavirus pandemic, mass unemployment and poverty, the devastating impact of wildfires and hurricanes, the growing danger of world war, and the drive to dictatorship—all make clear the urgent necessity for the development of a conscious political movement for socialism.

Iran schools reopen: Government seeks to reassure concerned parents

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awDWGEeiT8Q