https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7tVM5x6Lcs&ab_channel=RT
Friday, October 2, 2020
Rational Live! | The Virus & All Of His Friends | October 2nd, 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb_v4Namu3U&ab_channel=TheRationalNational
Trump Gets Covid (Moment of Clarity)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlhffpoMaI4&ab_channel=MomentOfClaritywithLeeCamp
Left organizers map out a struggle for Election Day and beyond.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t53DUxD9jqQ&ab_channel=TheRealNewsNetwork
Bailed-out US airlines escalate attack on jobs
Jacob Crosse
1 October 2020
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/01/jobs-o01.html
After receiving billions in government aid through the bipartisan $2.2 trillion CARES Act, major US airlines and defense contractor Boeing are moving forward with mass layoffs, adding tens of thousands to the unemployment rolls as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread unchecked throughout the country.
Leading the charge in excising workers from their payrolls are American and Delta, which are set to eliminate upwards of 40,000 jobs beginning today, after Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin failed once again to reach an agreement on a fifth coronavirus stimulus bill, which would include more government grants to the airlines.
In addition to the airlines, Boeing, the world’s second largest defense contractor, which received $17 billion through the CARES Act, is also expected to announce more layoffs. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the company plans to move all 787 Dreamliner production from its Everett, Washington factory to its North Charleston facility in South Carolina.
This past April, Boeing announced it would be cutting 10 percent of its 160,000 employee workforce, of which 6,800 have already been laid off, while roughly 5,500 accepted early buyout packages.
Just two weeks ago, the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee released the results of its 18-month investigation into the two crashes of Boeing 737 Max airplanes that killed a combined total of 346 passengers and crew. The report laid out damning evidence that Boeing knowingly risked the lives of countless thousands of people by rushing into service an aircraft it knew to have potentially fatal design flaws. It systematically concealed the dangers from government regulators, airline customers, pilots and the general public.
Yet this criminal corporation and the commercial airlines, which received billions in taxpayer money, justified by Congress as an effort to “save jobs,” have been allowed to use the handouts to slash payrolls, restructure operations at the expense of workers’ wages and working conditions and boost their stock prices and executive bonuses. Meanwhile, the Democrats and Republicans allowed the $600-per-week federal unemployment supplement to expire two months ago, workers are facing the expiration of state jobless benefits and nothing is done to prevent millions from being evicted, going hungry and falling into destitution.
Neither of the big business parties, which pull out all stops to rescue Wall Street, are in any hurry to provide aid to workers. Democrats and Republicans are united in the drive to force workers back on the job in the midst of the pandemic, using unemployment and the specter of poverty as a club, in order to fully resume the extraction of profit from the workers’ labor. In this, they demonstrate their total subservience to the corporate-financial aristocracy that runs the country.
The Washington Post published an article Wednesday based on Labor Department data showing that since mid-March, the lowest 25 percent of income earners have seen their wages decrease by as much as 30 percent, while the top 25 percent have seen their earnings remain the same or slightly increase. Meanwhile, ultra-wealthy “pandemic profiteers” such as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have seen their wealth increase by 65 and 50 percent respectively.
The CARES Act, passed at the end of March by a near-unanimous vote of both parties, singled out American, Delta, United and Southwest airlines for multi-billion-dollar bailouts. Smaller regional carriers such as Alaska Air Group and Hawaiian Holdings received multi-million-dollar bailouts.
Doug Parker, the CEO of American Airlines, was joined by Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Wednesday morning. Both pleaded with Congress for a six-month extension of the so-called “Payroll Support Program,” the official name of the airline bailout scheme.
“Absent action, sometime today, we unfortunately are choosing to have a hundred thousand or more not employed,” Parker warned, essentially threatening the livelihood of every single American Airlines worker. Parker took in $12 million in compensation in 2018.
American Airlines, which has already detailed its plans to lay off upwards of 20,000 workers, received $5.81 billion through the CARES Act. As of January 2020, American employed over 140,000 workers. However, after months of buyout packages and early retirements, fewer than 100,000 workers are currently employed by the company.
Delta, which started the year with over 90,000 workers, now employs less than 75,000, roughly 15,000 having taken buyouts and early retirement. Despite Delta receiving $5.4 billion in grants and low-interest loans earlier this year, and more than 40,000 workers opting for temporary leaves of absence or reduced schedules since the pandemic began, the airline plans to furlough roughly 1,900 pilots starting today.
Delta has utilized the tax code to claim huge paper losses and receive large refunds from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In 2018, the carrier paid nothing in federal income taxes on over $5 billion in income, while claiming a $187 million refund. That same year, Delta CEO Ed Bastian received a total compensation package of nearly $15 million.
While no layoffs have been announced yet by Southwest Airlines, which received $3.2 billion in CARES Act money, this is only because large numbers of workers have volunteered to accept early retirement and buyouts. United Airlines, which received $2.75 billion, is planning to cut upwards of 13,000 workers, mostly flight attendants and maintenance crew, after negotiating separately with the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) to avoid furloughing some 2,850 pilots.
Alaska Air Group, which received nearly $1 billion in CARES Act grants, plans to go forward with the firing of 331 workers, today. However, the airline has warned that as many as 4,200 workers could be furloughed in the next month. Like Delta, Alaska paid nothing in federal income taxes in 2018 and received a $5 million refund from the IRS, despite a reported income of over $576 million.
Finally, Hawaiian Holdings, which received $664 million through the CARES Act, indicated in August that about 2,000 workers, including 600 flight attendants, will be laid off beginning today. The airline, which employed 7,447 workers at the beginning of the year, plans to have reduced the workforce to 4,946. Of the layoffs, 1,850 are supposedly “voluntary cuts,” while 466 are “involuntary.”
The WSWS spoke with an airline mechanic at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport in Texas, who
commented on the pending layoffs. “I have been in aviation for nearly 10 years,” he said. “I’m not a political person, nor do I get into the hype of it. But I gotta say, this is one time that the government has let us down.”
He continued: “I have family that worked for a major airline and gave all they had to them for over 20 years, but they got booted on the first round. But people who have been there less are still there.
“We have been still working every day and have been fortunate to be able to do so. We are on the front lines, putting ourselves as well as our families at risk. The one thing that has been asked is for someone to stand up for us and allow us to continue what we do so people can still feel safe in the air.”
Russia, France denounce Turkey as Armenian-Azeri war escalates
Alex Lantier
1 October 2020
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/01/cauc-o01.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Four days after fighting broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, tensions between the major powers are escalating. Amid reports that Turkey and Syrian Islamist militias are sending mercenaries to Azerbaijan to fight a war on Russia’s borders, the risk is growing of a clash between Russia and Turkey, launching a regional or global war.
While Azeri forces do not appear to have advanced far into Nagorno-Karabakh, casualties are mounting as precision weapons rain down on towns across the region. Armenian officials said yesterday they had lost 104 troops and that at least seven civilians had been killed since the fighting began. Azeri officials gave no statistics on military losses but confirmed that 15 Azeri civilians were killed.
An Armenian soldier fires an artillery piece during fighting with Azerbaijan’s forces in the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh
Online videos show air and drone strikes inflicting substantial losses to military units and equipment. Armenian officials claim to have destroyed 83 drones, seven helicopters, 166 armored vehicles, one warplane and one missile battery, and to have caused 920 casualties. Azerbaijan claims to have destroyed 130 armored vehicles, 200 artillery and missile launch systems, 25 air defense missile batteries and one S-300 air defense system, while inflicting 2,300 casualties.
Arayik Harutyunyan, the president of the unofficial Armenian authority in Nagorno-Karabakh, warned: “We must be prepared for a long war. … The war will end with the defeat of Azerbaijan, or at least not with a victory.”
Significantly, Harutyunyan added that Iran is one of the main targets of Turkish-backed Azeri operations. He said, “I want to say that one of the targets of this war (fighting on the contact line) is Iran because this war is directed, among other things, against Iran. We are aware of regional problems related, in particular, to the north of Iran,” where there is a substantial Azeri population. Iranian officials fear separatist sentiment could emerge among Iranian Azeris in favor of possibly seceding from Iran and joining Azerbaijan.
This is the bloodiest Armenian-Azeri fighting since the 1988–1994 war between the two ex-Soviet republics, which erupted shortly before the Stalinist regime dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991. It is now however deeply enmeshed in the innumerable geopolitical rivalries, imperialist wars and local ethnic conflicts that have spread across the Middle East and Central Asia in the three decades since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In particular, the war is unfolding amid a growing campaign by US imperialism to isolate and threaten both Iran and Russia.
Turkish officials are aggressively supporting the ethnically-Turkic Azeris against Armenia. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has called on Azeris to expel Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh and pledged that the “Turkish people stand with their Azeri brothers with all our means.” This intensifies tensions with Armenia’s main regional backer, Russia, under conditions where Russia and Turkey are already waging bloody proxy wars against each other in the civil wars triggered by NATO regime-change operations in Libya and Syria over the last decade.
Armenian officials said that they are discussing military aid with Russia and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which includes the post-Soviet republics of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss the war. On Russia’s Rossiya1 channel, he called the war “a threat to the Armenian people’s very existence.”
Last week, Russian-Turkish talks over Syria’s northwestern Idlib province broke down. There are expectations of a Russian-backed offensive by Syrian government troops against Islamist rebels supported by Turkey and the NATO powers. Turkish drone and air defense systems have, however, proven an obstacle to deploying Russian and Syrian aircraft and heavy artillery to support Syrian and Iranian infantry against the Al Qaeda-linked, CIA-backed Islamist militias.
There had already been reports that Islamist militias and Turkish private security firms are hiring fighters to deploy to Azerbaijan. On Tuesday, the Guardian interviewed Syrians from Idlib hired by Islamist militias for 7,000–10,000 Turkish liras (US$900–1,300) monthly, for “security” work in Azerbaijan. “There are no jobs available. I used to work as a tailor in Aleppo but since we were displaced to Azaz [after Aleppo fell to Assad in 2016], I’ve tried many times to practice my craft but my family and I can’t earn enough,” one explained to the Guardian.
The Center for Global Policy think-tank in Washington D.C. cold-bloodedly confirmed the story to the Guardian: “The international community regards the lives of Syrians as expendable, with Syria serving as an arena to settle geo-strategic scores and advance the interests of countries intervening in the country at Syrians’ expense. … [T]he economic ruin stemming from the war and the recent depreciation of the Syrian currency mean that most Syrians are now struggling to feed themselves. Faced with few choices, many are now willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder.”
The Turkish government responded with an ambiguous statement that “The Turkish ministry of defense does not deal with recruiting or transferring militiamen anywhere in the world,” without addressing the role of private firms or militias.
These reports drastically increase diplomatic and military tensions between the major powers. In the 1990s, as ethnic tensions mounted in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, civil wars broke out in nearby, Muslim-majority areas of Russia, like Chechnya and Daghestan. Moscow no doubt views the arrival of Syrian Islamist militias on its doorstep in Azerbaijan with alarm.
The Russian Foreign Ministry published yesterday a statement declaring: “Militants of illegal armed groups, in particular from Syria and Libya [have traveled to Azerbaijan] to directly participate in the hostilities.” It stressed that it was “deeply concerned” about deployments of Islamist militias, which create “long-term threats to the security of all countries in the region.” Without naming Turkey or Azerbaijan, it demanded the “leaderships of the states concerned” stop such transfers and “immediately” withdraw Islamist troops from Azerbaijan.
President Emmanuel Macron of France, which backs opposing sides to Turkey in the Libyan civil war and supports Greek maritime claims against Turkey in the Mediterranean, also attacked Turkish policy in the Caucasus yesterday. “France is very worried about Turkey’s warlike statements in recent hours, that basically give a green light to Azerbaijan to reconquer Nagorno-Karabakh. That we do not accept,” Macron said at a press conference in Riga, Latvia, where he was traveling to discuss the election crisis in Belarus.
A striking aspect of this Armenian-Azeri war has been the silence of Washington, which together with Moscow and Paris nominally chairs the Minsk Group tasked since 1992 with overseeing talks to manage the Armenian-Azeri conflict. However, Washington made no significant call for restraint. US President Donald Trump made only a brief statement, saying, “We’ll see if we can stop it.”
Thomas de Waal of the Carnegie Foundation-Europe called Washington “unusually disengaged,” and “the risk of further escalation and mass destruction alarmingly high.” He added, “Washington was the last major international actor to issue a statement, indicating a retreat from interest in this region. It is arguably also a sign that President Donald Trump—sponsor of the never-completed Trump Tower in Baku—views Armenia and Azerbaijan solely through a business perspective.”
In fact, Washington has for decades sought to dominate the Middle East and Central Asia as the key to its geopolitical strategy towards Europe, Russia and East Asia. As US forces threaten Russia with military exercises in neighboring Ukraine and bomb Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq, it appears that Washington is content to let this conflict escalate while it focuses on threatening Moscow and Tehran.
The war in the Caucasus is a stark warning of the bankruptcy of the nation-state system and the rising danger of large-scale war posed by national and ethnic conflicts across Eurasia. It is urgent to mobilize and unify the working class in an international movement against imperialism, nationalism and war.
Online videos show air and drone strikes inflicting substantial losses to military units and equipment. Armenian officials claim to have destroyed 83 drones, seven helicopters, 166 armored vehicles, one warplane and one missile battery, and to have caused 920 casualties. Azerbaijan claims to have destroyed 130 armored vehicles, 200 artillery and missile launch systems, 25 air defense missile batteries and one S-300 air defense system, while inflicting 2,300 casualties.
Arayik Harutyunyan, the president of the unofficial Armenian authority in Nagorno-Karabakh, warned: “We must be prepared for a long war. … The war will end with the defeat of Azerbaijan, or at least not with a victory.”
Significantly, Harutyunyan added that Iran is one of the main targets of Turkish-backed Azeri operations. He said, “I want to say that one of the targets of this war (fighting on the contact line) is Iran because this war is directed, among other things, against Iran. We are aware of regional problems related, in particular, to the north of Iran,” where there is a substantial Azeri population. Iranian officials fear separatist sentiment could emerge among Iranian Azeris in favor of possibly seceding from Iran and joining Azerbaijan.
This is the bloodiest Armenian-Azeri fighting since the 1988–1994 war between the two ex-Soviet republics, which erupted shortly before the Stalinist regime dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991. It is now however deeply enmeshed in the innumerable geopolitical rivalries, imperialist wars and local ethnic conflicts that have spread across the Middle East and Central Asia in the three decades since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In particular, the war is unfolding amid a growing campaign by US imperialism to isolate and threaten both Iran and Russia.
Turkish officials are aggressively supporting the ethnically-Turkic Azeris against Armenia. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has called on Azeris to expel Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh and pledged that the “Turkish people stand with their Azeri brothers with all our means.” This intensifies tensions with Armenia’s main regional backer, Russia, under conditions where Russia and Turkey are already waging bloody proxy wars against each other in the civil wars triggered by NATO regime-change operations in Libya and Syria over the last decade.
Armenian officials said that they are discussing military aid with Russia and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), which includes the post-Soviet republics of Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called Russian President Vladimir Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss the war. On Russia’s Rossiya1 channel, he called the war “a threat to the Armenian people’s very existence.”
Last week, Russian-Turkish talks over Syria’s northwestern Idlib province broke down. There are expectations of a Russian-backed offensive by Syrian government troops against Islamist rebels supported by Turkey and the NATO powers. Turkish drone and air defense systems have, however, proven an obstacle to deploying Russian and Syrian aircraft and heavy artillery to support Syrian and Iranian infantry against the Al Qaeda-linked, CIA-backed Islamist militias.
There had already been reports that Islamist militias and Turkish private security firms are hiring fighters to deploy to Azerbaijan. On Tuesday, the Guardian interviewed Syrians from Idlib hired by Islamist militias for 7,000–10,000 Turkish liras (US$900–1,300) monthly, for “security” work in Azerbaijan. “There are no jobs available. I used to work as a tailor in Aleppo but since we were displaced to Azaz [after Aleppo fell to Assad in 2016], I’ve tried many times to practice my craft but my family and I can’t earn enough,” one explained to the Guardian.
The Center for Global Policy think-tank in Washington D.C. cold-bloodedly confirmed the story to the Guardian: “The international community regards the lives of Syrians as expendable, with Syria serving as an arena to settle geo-strategic scores and advance the interests of countries intervening in the country at Syrians’ expense. … [T]he economic ruin stemming from the war and the recent depreciation of the Syrian currency mean that most Syrians are now struggling to feed themselves. Faced with few choices, many are now willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder.”
The Turkish government responded with an ambiguous statement that “The Turkish ministry of defense does not deal with recruiting or transferring militiamen anywhere in the world,” without addressing the role of private firms or militias.
These reports drastically increase diplomatic and military tensions between the major powers. In the 1990s, as ethnic tensions mounted in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, civil wars broke out in nearby, Muslim-majority areas of Russia, like Chechnya and Daghestan. Moscow no doubt views the arrival of Syrian Islamist militias on its doorstep in Azerbaijan with alarm.
The Russian Foreign Ministry published yesterday a statement declaring: “Militants of illegal armed groups, in particular from Syria and Libya [have traveled to Azerbaijan] to directly participate in the hostilities.” It stressed that it was “deeply concerned” about deployments of Islamist militias, which create “long-term threats to the security of all countries in the region.” Without naming Turkey or Azerbaijan, it demanded the “leaderships of the states concerned” stop such transfers and “immediately” withdraw Islamist troops from Azerbaijan.
President Emmanuel Macron of France, which backs opposing sides to Turkey in the Libyan civil war and supports Greek maritime claims against Turkey in the Mediterranean, also attacked Turkish policy in the Caucasus yesterday. “France is very worried about Turkey’s warlike statements in recent hours, that basically give a green light to Azerbaijan to reconquer Nagorno-Karabakh. That we do not accept,” Macron said at a press conference in Riga, Latvia, where he was traveling to discuss the election crisis in Belarus.
A striking aspect of this Armenian-Azeri war has been the silence of Washington, which together with Moscow and Paris nominally chairs the Minsk Group tasked since 1992 with overseeing talks to manage the Armenian-Azeri conflict. However, Washington made no significant call for restraint. US President Donald Trump made only a brief statement, saying, “We’ll see if we can stop it.”
Thomas de Waal of the Carnegie Foundation-Europe called Washington “unusually disengaged,” and “the risk of further escalation and mass destruction alarmingly high.” He added, “Washington was the last major international actor to issue a statement, indicating a retreat from interest in this region. It is arguably also a sign that President Donald Trump—sponsor of the never-completed Trump Tower in Baku—views Armenia and Azerbaijan solely through a business perspective.”
In fact, Washington has for decades sought to dominate the Middle East and Central Asia as the key to its geopolitical strategy towards Europe, Russia and East Asia. As US forces threaten Russia with military exercises in neighboring Ukraine and bomb Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq, it appears that Washington is content to let this conflict escalate while it focuses on threatening Moscow and Tehran.
The war in the Caucasus is a stark warning of the bankruptcy of the nation-state system and the rising danger of large-scale war posed by national and ethnic conflicts across Eurasia. It is urgent to mobilize and unify the working class in an international movement against imperialism, nationalism and war.
Trump’s Operation Dictatorship: What the debate exposed
Joseph Kishore, David North
1 October 2020
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/01/pers-o01.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
The degenerate spectacle of Tuesday night’s debate between Donald Trump and Joseph Biden will be remembered in history as the United States’ moment of truth. The myth of an invulnerable and eternal American democracy has been shattered. Political reality has burst through the countless layers of deceitful propaganda of the corporate-financial oligarchy and exposed the undeniable fact that the White House is the political nerve center of a far-advanced conspiracy to establish a presidential dictatorship and suppress constitutionally guaranteed democratic rights.
The grunts and barks emitted by Trump on Tuesday night leave no doubt about his intentions. Trump is as serious about the threats he made during the debate as Hitler was about those he wrote down in Mein Kampf. Trump views the November election as a continuation of the political coup d’état that began last June in Washington, D.C, when he unleashed military and police forces against peaceful protesters.
Trump’s political strategy is fairly obvious and can be summed up with the infamous phrase: “Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war.” The conspiracy will unfold as follows:
First, during the remaining month of the election campaign, Trump will do everything he can to discredit the voting process with the intention of delegitimizing the counting of the ballots, which, as he fully expects, will show that he lost the election by millions of votes. He will use fabricated allegations of ballot fraud to incite fascist thugs, assisted by police and unidentified federal agents, to intimidate voters and carry out violent acts at polling stations.
Second, on election night Trump will declare that he is the winner, claiming that all ballots cast through the mail are illegitimate. He repeated during the debate his claim that the only way that he can lose is if the election is “rigged,” through the destruction of ballots and other forms of fraud. Even though he trails heavily in the polls, Trump is counting on a delay in the tally of mail-in ballots to give him the opportunity to declare victory in key battleground states.
Third, Trump will use the 10 weeks between Election Day on November 3 and the Inauguration on January 20 to mobilize his followers in the streets, while turning to a stacked Supreme Court to decide the election in his favor. On Tuesday he again said that he was “counting” on the court to “look at the ballots.” He has the full support of the Republican Party, which is pressing forward with the rapid confirmation of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, so that she will be in a position to cast a deciding vote in any court decision on the election.
Trump is also counting on support within the police and sections of the military, as well as his control over the Department of Homeland Security. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that DHS acting Secretary Chad Wolf, a Trump crony, is preparing immigration raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in “sanctuary cities,” such as Denver and Philadelphia, this month. Federal paramilitary forces will be mobilized in many major metropolises in advance of the election.
Finally, and most critical of all for the success of his conspiracy, Trump has factored in the spinelessness of the Democratic Party. He fully expects that the Democrats, apart from mouthing a few empty threats, will do nothing to stop him.
The abject bankruptcy of the Democratic Party was on display on Tuesday night. While Trump personified the viciousness of a ruling class moving toward fascism, Biden—frail and frightened—epitomized bourgeois democracy on its death bed. Though endlessly intoning, “This is the deal,” Biden spent the 90 minutes of the debate evading the fact that his opponent is preparing for civil war and dictatorship. He mindlessly declared that once the votes are counted, the political crisis will be over, and everything will return to normal.
The role of the Democratic Party is to do everything it can to downplay and cover up reality, in order to prevent any popular mobilization against Trump. Biden went out of his way to declare that he is not opposed to Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett. He complimented her as “a very fine person,” even though Barrett, once on the Court, will be one of those who will drive a nail into Biden’s political coffin.
When Trump goaded Biden by declaring that the Democratic Party candidate supports the “far left manifesto” of Sanders, Biden responded by repudiating any association with left-wing politics: “I beat Bernie Sanders … by a whole hell of a lot.”
Biden did not even respond to Trump’s verbal salute to the fascist Proud Boys. He pledged to demand that his own supporters “stay calm” as the election is contested, while Trump urged that they mobilize and challenge the results.
To believe that dictatorship can be averted by supporting the Democratic Party is to close one’s eyes to reality. The Democrats’ actions are determined not by an abstract devotion to democracy but by the interests of the class that they represent.
Any strategy to counter the threat of dictatorship must base itself on a correct understanding of the underlying causes of the political crisis. Trump is the expression of a far deeper disease, whose origins and character must be properly understood.
There are several interrelated factors at work.
First is the far-reaching decay of American capitalism. In little more than a decade, the United States has been devastated by two major crises, first in 2008 and now in 2020. In both cases, the ruling class resorted to a massive and unsustainable inflow of funds—essentially, the printing of money—to keep the financial markets afloat. The historically unprecedented transfer of wealth to the rich must be paid for through an intensification of the assault on the working class.
Second, arising from the economic weakening of the United States, is the precipitous decline in the global position of American imperialism. Despite 30 years of unending war, the American ruling class has been unable to maintain its position as the global hegemon. Now, it sees in the rise of China an existential threat. All the resources must be diverted to prepare for global warfare with China, of which the conflict with Russia is one element. The American working class must be put on rations.
Third is the staggering concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny layer of society. The 400 richest individuals in the United States now control $3.2 trillion, and the richest one percent have more wealth than the bottom 40 percent. A recent RAND Corporation study calculated that the stagnation of income over the past four decades for the bottom 90 percent of the population created an aggregate net loss of income of $47 trillion. Democracy cannot survive under conditions of such enormous levels of inequality.
All of these underlying conditions have been intensified by the pandemic, which has revealed in the starkest way the dysfunctionality of American society. Trump speaks and acts on behalf of a criminal financial oligarchy that will stop at nothing to protect its wealth. Its response to the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated its contempt for the lives and welfare of the population. Its demand for the reopening of schools is an essential component of its program of “herd immunity,” which has already led to the deaths of more than 210,000 people in the United States. While the federal bailout has sent share values on Wall Street soaring, tens of millions are unemployed, and the major corporations are planning mass layoffs.
The ruling class knows that it confronts mass social anger that will take an explosive and potentially revolutionary form. This is what imparts to Trump’s actions their frenzied and reckless character. Terrified of the development of social opposition, he sees in every protest and manifestation of opposition the danger of the “radical left” and “socialism.” The growth of working class militancy, already apparent in the wave of strikes, has convinced a substantial section of the ruling class that they have no way out except through violence.
The lessons of the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s are of burning contemporary relevance. The examples of Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain demonstrate that the turn to fascism and dictatorship comes when the ruling class is no longer able, for reasons embedded in the character of capitalist society, to resolve its crisis through democratic means.
In the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Leon Trotsky warned that the Nazi regime was not a uniquely German phenomenon:
In all countries the same historic laws operate, the laws of capitalist decline. If the means of production remain in the hands of a small number of capitalists, there is no way out for society. It is condemned to go from crisis to crisis, from need to misery, from bad to worse. In the various countries the decrepitude and disintegration of capitalism are expressed in diverse forms and at unequal rhythms. But the basic features of the process are the same everywhere. The bourgeoisie is leading its society to complete bankruptcy. It is capable of assuring the people neither bread nor peace. This is precisely why it cannot any longer tolerate the democratic order. It is forced to smash the workers by the use of physical violence. [Whither France, November 9, 1934]
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