https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGlIiStdnic&ab_channel=ThomHartmannProgram
Saturday, October 17, 2020
MORALES WARNS ABOUT US MEDDLING IN UPCOMING ELECTIONS
By Orinoco Tribune.
October 15, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/morales-warns-about-us-meddling-in-upcoming-elections/
Bolivia’s Former President Evo Morales, Who Resigned Last Year Under Pressure From The Country’s Military And US-Backed Opposition, Warns That Attempts Are Underway To Meddle In The Latin American Nation’s Upcoming Elections With Washington’s Support.
The former head of state made the remarks in an exclusive interview with Iran’s Hispan TV Spanish-language television network on Tuesday.
Morales was seeking to nationalize the extraction of Bolivia’s lithium reserves when he was forced to resign last November under pressure from the military and following the opposition’s challenging the victory that he had secured in presidential elections a month earlier.
The former president, who both himself and his Movement for Socialism (MAS) still wield influence in Bolivia’s politics, sought exile in Mexico back then and is currently residing in Argentina, closely monitoring the domestic developments.
Citing indications of America’s ill-intention towards Bolivia’s presidential polls that are slated for October 18, he said the interim government of Senator Jeanine Anez sent one of its ministers to the United States in September to buy arms to help “establish democracy.”
He then asked, “How can one think of procuring weapons when they are considering establishing democracy?”
The ex-president also quoted remarks by Anez alleging that she would hand over the power to a “democratically-elected” government, not Morales’ MAS.
Morales cautioned that “this is a clear indication that they are preparing to either damage the upcoming elections or perpetrate electoral fraud,” reminding that Anez’ apparatus was an “interim” administration not a “transitional” one to be making such remarks.
The former statesman also warned about suspicious attempts on the part of some generals from the military command, who oppose MAS, but said they were “wrong” in thinking that they could interfere in the polls.
The polls are a battle between archrivals Luis Arce from MAS and centrist Carlos Mesa, also a former president. An opinion survey by the Bolivia-based CIESMORI research company has given the former a popularity rate of 30.6 and the latter merely 7.24.
Morales said the elections also manifest a competition between those seeking nationalization of the country’s hydrocarbon resources and those favoring privatization of the resources. The latter group, he said, prefers its own interests over the common good and is after selling off the country’s assets to foreign companies, especially American ones.
He, however, expressed certainty about Arce’s victory in the elections, calling him a trusted and long-term confidante of his.
“Currently, we need Luis Acre to revitalize the economy and we will realize this demand,” Morales noted.
Prof. Richard Wolff On How Pandemics Destroy Economic Systems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hyVDQumw3M&ab_channel=act.tv
LIBERALISM AND FASCISM: PARTNERS IN CRIME
By Gabriel Rockhill, Counterpunch.
October 15, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/liberalism-and-fascism-partners-in-crime/
“The intellectuals cast a veil over the dictatorial character of bourgeois democracy not least by presenting democracy as the absolute opposite of fascism, not as just another natural phase of it where the bourgeois dictatorship is revealed in a more open form.”
– Bertolt Brecht
Time and again we hear that liberalism is the last bulwark against fascism. It represents a defense of the rule of law and democracy in the face of aberrant, malevolent demagogues intent on destroying a perfectly good system for their own gain. This apparent opposition has been deeply engrained in contemporary so-called Western liberal democracies through their shared origin myth. As every school child in the U.S. learns, for instance, liberalism defeated fascism in World War II, beating back the Nazi beast in order to establish a new international order that—for all of its potential faults and misdeeds—was built upon key democratic principles that are antithetical to fascism.
This framing of the relationship between liberalism and fascism not only presents them as complete opposites, but it also defines the very essence of the fight against fascism as the struggle for liberalism. In so doing, it forges an ideological false antagonism. For what fascism and liberalism share is their undying devotion to the capitalist world order. Although one prefers the velvet glove of hegemonic and consensual rule, and the other relies more readily on the iron fist of repressive violence, they are both intent on maintaining and developing capitalist social relations, and they have worked together throughout modern history in order to do so. What this apparent conflict masks—and this is its true ideological power—is that the real, fundamental dividing line is not between two different modes of capitalist governance, but between capitalists and anti-capitalists. The long psychological warfare campaign waged under the deceptive banner of ‘totalitarianism’ has done much to further dissimulate this line of demarcation by disingenuously presenting communism as a form of fascism. As Domenico Losurdo and others have explained with great historical precision and detail, this is pure ideological pap.
Given the ways in which the current public debate on fascism tends to be framed in relationship to purported liberal resistance, there could scarcely be a timelier task than that of scrupulously re-examining the historical record of actually existing liberalism and fascism. As we shall see even in this brief overview, far from being enemies, they have been—sometimes subtle, sometimes forthright—partners in capitalist crime. For the sake of argument and concision, I will here focus primarily on a conjunctural account of the non-controversial cases of Italy and Germany. However, it is worth stating at the outset that the Nazi racial police state and colonial rampage—which far surpassed Italy’s capabilities—were modeled on the United States.
Liberal Collaboration In The Rise Of European Fascism
It is of the utmost importance that Western European fascism emerged within parliamentary democracies rather than conquering them from the outside. The fascists rose to power in Italy at a moment of severe political and economic crisis on the heels of WWI, and then later the Great Depression. This was also a time when the world had just witnessed the first successful anti-capitalist revolution in the U.S.S.R. Mussolini, who had cut his teeth working for MI5 to break up the Italian peace movement during WWI, was later backed by big industrial capitalists and bankers for his anti-worker, pro-capitalist political orientation. His tactic was to work within the parliamentary system, by mobilizing powerful financial supporters to bankroll his expansive propaganda campaign while his black shirts rode roughshod over picket lines and working-class organizations. In October of 1922, magnates in the Confederation of Industry and major bank leaders provided him with the millions necessary for the March on Rome as a spectacular show of force. However, he did not seize power. Instead, as Daniel Guérin explained in his masterful study Fascism and Big Business, Mussolini was summoned by the king on October 29th and was, according to parliamentary norms, entrusted with forming a cabinet. The capitalist state turned itself over without a fight, but Mussolini was intent on forming an absolute majority in parliament with the help of the liberals. They supported his new electoral law in July 1923 and then made a joint slate with the fascists for the election on April 6, 1924. The fascists, who had only had 35 seats in parliament, gained 286 seats with the help of the liberals.
The Nazis rose to power in much the same way, by working within the parliamentary system and courting the favor of big industrial magnates and bankers. The latter provided the financial support necessary to grow the Nazi party and eventually secure the electoral victory of September 1930. Hitler would later reminisce, in a speech on October 19, 1935, on what it meant to have the material resources necessary to support 1,000 Nazi orators with their own cars, who could hold some 100,000 public meetings in the course of a year. In the December 1932 election, the Social Democrat leaders, who were far to the left of contemporary liberals but shared their reformist agenda, refused to form an eleventh-hour coalition with the communists against Nazism. “As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany,” wrote Michael Parenti, “the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.” Prior to the election, the Communist Party candidate Ernst Thaelmann had argued that a vote for the conservative Field Marshal von Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and for war. Only weeks after Hindenburg’s election, he invited Hitler to become chancellor.
Fascism in both cases came to power through bourgeois parliamentary democracy, in which big capital bankrolled the candidates who would do its bidding while also creating a populist spectacle—a false revolution—that marshaled or suggested mass appeal. Its conquest of power took place within this legal and constitutional framework, which secured its apparent legitimacy on the home front, as well as within the international community of bourgeois democracies. Leon Trotsky understood this perfectly and diagnosed what was going on at the time with remarkable insight:
The results are at hand: bourgeois democracy transforms itself legally, pacifically, into a fascist dictatorship. The secret is simple enough: bourgeois democracy and fascist dictatorship are the instruments of one and the same class, the exploiters. It is absolutely impossible to prevent the replacement of one instrument by the other by appealing to the Constitution, the Supreme Court at Leipzig, new elections, etc. What is necessary is to mobilize the revolutionary forces of the proletariat. Constitutional fetishism brings the best aid to fascism.
Once its power was secure, however, fascism revealed its authoritarian face, transforming itself into what Trotsky referred to as a military-bureaucratic dictatorship of the Bonapartist type. It unflinchingly set about—at a rather different pace in Italy than in Germany—completing the task it had been hired to accomplish by crushing organized labor, eradicating opposition parties, destroying independent publications, putting a halt to elections, scapegoating and eliminating racialized underclasses, privatizing public assets, launching projects of colonial expansion and investing heavily in a war economy beneficial to its industrial supporters. In establishing the direct dictatorship of big capital, it even destroyed some of the more plebeian and populist elements in its own ranks, while crushing many confused liberals under the juggernaut of repressive class warfare.
It was not only within Italy and Germany that bourgeois democracy allowed for the rise of fascism. This was also true internationally. Capitalist states refused to form an antifascist coalition with the U.S.S.R., a country that fourteen of them had invaded and occupied from 1918 to 1920 in a failed attempt to destroy the world’s first workers’ republic. During the Spanish Civil War, which historians like Eric Hobsbawm have characterized as a miniature version of the great mid-century war between fascism and communism, Western liberal democracies did not officially support the left-leaning government that had been elected. Instead, they stood idly by while the Axis powers provided massive support to General Francisco Franco as he oversaw a military coup d’état. It is highly revealing that Franco, a self-declared fascist who is often sidelined in discussions of European fascism, understood with remarkable clarity why the epiphenomenal characteristics of fascism would differ considerably based on the precise conjuncture: “Fascism, since that is the word that is used, fascism presents, wherever it manifests itself, characteristics which are varied to the extent that countries and national temperaments vary.” It was the U.S.S.R. that came to the aid of the Republicans battling fascism in Spain, sending both soldiers and materials. Franco would later return the favor, so to speak, by deploying a volunteer military force to fight godless communism alongside the Nazis. Franco would also, of course, become one of the great postwar allies of the United States in its fight against the Red Menace.
In 1934, the United Kingdom, France and Italy signed the Munich Agreement, in which they agreed to allow Hitler to invade and colonize the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. “The sheer reluctance of Western governments to enter into effective negotiations with the Red state,” wrote Eric Hobsbawm, “even in 1938-39 when the urgency of an anti-Hitler alliance was no longer denied by anyone, is only too patent. Indeed, it was the fear of being left to confront Hitler alone which eventually drove Stalin, since 1934 the unswerving champion of an alliance with the West against him, into the Stalin-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, by which he hoped to keep the U.S.S.R. out of the war.” This non-aggression pact was then disingenuously presented in the Western media as an undeniable indication that the Nazis and communists were somehow allies.
International Capitalism And Fascism
It was not only large industrialists and bankers, as well as landowners, within Italy and Germany that supported and profited from the fascist rise to power. This was equally true of many of the major corporations and banks whose headquarters were in Western bourgeois democracies. Henry Ford was perhaps the most notorious example since in 1938 he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle, which was the highest honor that could be bestowed upon any non-German (Mussolini had received one earlier the same year). Ford had not only funneled ample funding into the Nazi Party, he had provided it with much of its anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik ideology. Ford’s conviction that “Communism was a completely Jewish creation,” to quote James and Suzanne Pool, was shared by Hitler, and some have suggested that the latter was so close ideologically to Ford that certain passages from Mein Kampf were directly copied from Ford’s anti-Semitic publication The International Jew.
Ford was only one of the American companies invested in Germany, and many other U.S. banks, firms and investors profited handsomely from Aryanizations (the expulsion of Jews from business life and the forced transfer of their property into ‘Aryan’ hands), as well as from the German rearmament program. According to Christopher Simpson’s masterful study, “a half-dozen key U.S. companies—International Harvester, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and du Pont—had become deeply involved in German weapons production.” In fact, American investment in Germany sharply increased after Hitler came to power. “Commerce Department reports show,” writes Simpson, “that U.S. investment in Germany increased some 48.5 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in continental Europe.” The German subsidiaries of U.S. companies like Ford and General Motors, as well as several oil companies, made wide use of forced labor in concentration camps. Buchenwald, for instance, provided concentration camp labor for GM’s enormous Russelsheim plant, as well as for the Ford truck plant located in Cologne, and Ford’s German managers made extensive use of Russian POW’s for war production work (a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions).
John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who would later respectively become the Secretary of State and the head of the CIA, ran Sullivan & Cromwell, which some consider to have been the largest Wall Street law firm at the time. They played a very important role in overseeing, advising and managing global investment in Germany, which had become one of the most important international markets—particularly for American investors—during the second half of the 1920s. Sullivan & Cromwell worked with nearly all of the major U.S. banks, and they oversaw investments in Germany in excess of a billion dollars. They also worked with dozens of companies and governments all over the world, but John Foster Dulles, according to Simpson, “clearly emphasized projects for Germany, for the military junta in Poland, and for Mussolini’s fascist state in Italy.” In the postwar era, Allen Dulles worked tirelessly to protect his business partners, and he was remarkably successful in securing their assets and helping them avoid prosecution.
Whereas most liberal accounts of fascism focus on its political theater and epiphenomenal eccentricities, thereby avoiding a systemic and radical analysis, it is essential to recognize that if liberalism allowed for the growth of European fascism, it is capitalism that drove this growth.
Who Defeated Fascism?
It is not surprising that the bourgeois democracies of the West were extremely slow to open the Western front, allowing their erstwhile enemy, the U.S.S.R., to be bled by the pro-capitalist Nazi war machine (which received ample funding from White Russians). In fact, the day after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Harry Truman flatly declared: “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious in any circumstances.” After the U.S. entered the war, powerful officials like Allen Dulles worked behind the scenes to try and broker a peace deal with Germany that would allow the Nazis to focus all of their attention on eradicating the U.S.S.R.
The widespread idea, at least within the U.S., that fascism was ultimately defeated by liberalism in WWII, due primarily to the U.S. intervention in the war, is a baseless canard. As Peter Kuznick, Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton reminded listeners in a recent discussion, 80% of the Nazis who died in the war were killed on the Eastern Front with the U.S.S.R., where Germany had deployed 200 divisions (versus only 10 in the West). 27 million Soviets gave their lives fighting fascism, whereas 400,000 American soldiers died in the war (which amounts to approximately 1.5% of the Soviet death toll). It was, above all, the Red Army that defeated fascism in WWII, and it is communism—not liberalism—that constitutes the last bulwark against fascism. The historical lesson should be clear: one cannot be truly antifascist without being anti-capitalist.
The Ideology Of False Antagonisms
The ideological construction of false antagonisms, in the case of liberalism and fascism, serves multiple purposes:
+ It establishes the primary front of struggle as one between rival positions within the capitalist camp.
+ It channels people’s energy into fighting over the best methods for managing capitalist rule rather than abolishing it.
+ It eradicates the true lines of demarcation of global class struggle.
+ It attempts to simply take the communist option off the table (by removing it entirely from the field of struggle, or disingenuously presenting it as a form of ‘totalitarianism’).
Not unlike sporting events, which are very important ideological rituals in the contemporary world, the logic of false antagonisms amps up and overinflates all of the idiosyncratic differences and personal rivalries between two opposing teams to such an extent that the frenzied fans come to forget that they are ultimately playing the same game.
In the reactionary political culture of the U.S., which has attempted to redefine the Left as liberal, it is of the utmost importance to recognize that the primary opposition that has structured, and continues to organize, the modern world is the one between capitalism—which is imposed and maintained through liberal ideology and institutions, as well as fascist repression, depending on the time, place and population in question—and socialism. By replacing this opposition by the one between liberalism and fascism, the ideology of false antagonisms aims at making the fight of the century into a capitalist spectacle rather than a communist revolution.
To Those Cheering on Censorship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDLx9zTbUSQ&ab_channel=RichardMedhurst
THE NIGHTMARE FACING THE POOR AND WORKING CLASS
By Jeff Schuhrke, In These Times.
October 15, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/the-nightmare-facing-the-poor-and-working-class/
If There’s Not Another Stimulus.
With time running out and Republicans balking at more Covid relief, U.S. workers are facing a future of financial misery.
As millions of U.S. workers face unemployment, food insecurity and eviction amid the coronavirus pandemic, the limited aid provided by the federal government’s flawed CARES Act from March has long since dried up.
Last week, following more than six months of stalled negotiations with congressional Democrats over a new economic relief package, President Trump abruptly announced he was halting talks until after the November election.
While the president quickly backtracked and is now reportedly continuing to negotiate, the federal government’s ongoing failure to pass a new relief package spells catastrophe for a U.S. working class already pushed to the brink by an economic crisis seemingly on par with the Great Depression.
Here’s a breakdown of what the continued lack of federal help means for workers:
Significantly Reduced Unemployment Checks
Perhaps the most beneficial part of the CARES Act was the extra $600 a week it provided to workers on unemployment — a temporary lifeline that the GOP-led Senate allowed to expire on July 31.
Weekly unemployment benefits vary widely by state, ranging from $44 in Oklahoma to $497 in Washington. The $600 weekly supplement was an across-the-board benefit that ensured unemployed workers in any state maintained a decent income despite losing their jobs due to the pandemic.
The Economic Policy Institute found that the consumer spending generated by that extra $600 per week supported over 5 million jobs, and that continuing the supplement through the middle of next year would have raised U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by a quarterly average of 3.7 percent.
After this benefit expired, rather than agree to Democrats’ demands to extend it, President Trump signed an executive order slashing it by 50 percent — allowing states to use federal funds to provide only a $300 weekly unemployment supplement. At least seven states have already exhausted these funds.
Meanwhile, by losing the weekly $600 boost, unemployed workers saw their incomes drop by two-thirds, making it more difficult to pay the bills and afford groceries. There are currently 25.5 million workers receiving unemployment benefits. With at least 14 million more jobless workers than job openings, millions will be forced to rely on unemployment insurance for the foreseeable future — but now with a greatly reduced check.
Mass Furloughs In The Airline Industry
Another one of the CARES Act’s most helpful provisions was the Payroll Support Program (PSP), which provided $32 billion in grants to the aviation industry for the sole purpose of keeping workers on payroll and providing benefits during the Covid-19 crisis. The aviation industry employs 750,000 workers, many of them unionized, and accounts for 5 percent of GDP.
The Senate allowed the PSP to expire on October 1, resulting in 40,000 airline workers immediately being furloughed without pay or health insurance. The industry’s unions are waging an aggressive campaign to extend the program. Without the federal government continuing the PSP, more furloughs are likely to come as passenger airlines suffer a loss in business due to the pandemic.
More Layoffs At Small Businesses
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), another component of the CARES Act, offered up to $659 billion in forgivable loans to small businesses to keep workers on payroll. The program has been criticized for allocating millions of dollars to large corporations and companies connected to politicians, but it has also offered much-needed financial support to small businesses across the country.
The application deadline for PPP loans was on August 8. While the Trump administration claims the program saved 51 million jobs, economists have put that number at anywhere from only 2.3 million to 13.6 million.
Whatever the precise number, the PPP’s impact is quickly running out of steam. Borrowers say they expect to lay off workers within six months, while a National Restaurant Association survey indicates that a whopping 40 percent of all U.S. restaurants could go out of business in the coming months, leading to millions of more layoffs.
No Second $1,200 Stimulus Check
While Sen. Bernie Sanders and progressive Democrats have been calling on the federal government to provide a $2,000 monthly check to every U.S. adult for the duration of the pandemic, the CARES Act instead provided a one-time check of $1,200 — which excluded many undocumented immigrants and college-age adults. Economists report that the checks did virtually nothing to stimulate the economy, though they did help poor and unemployed workers partially cover a few weeks’ worth of basic expenses.
President Trump and congressional leaders have been saying for months that a second $1,200 check is on the way. But without another relief bill, even this meager financial assistance will not materialize.
An Uncertain Future
On October 1, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a scaled-down version of the HEROES Act, an economic relief package they originally passed in May that extends the limited aid from the CARES Act.
Among other things, the $2.2‑trillion bill would continue the $600 weekly unemployment supplement to the end of January (making it retroactive to September 6), allocate another $25 billion for airline workers, allow small businesses to apply for a second PPP loan, send out a second $1,200 stimulus check, provide $50 billion in emergency rental assistance, and give an additional $10 billion to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Over the weekend, the Trump administration countered with a smaller, $1.8‑trillion proposal that would include a $400-per-week unemployment supplement, $20 billion for airlines, another $330 billion for PPP loans, and a second $1,200 check, among other measures — but neither House Speaker Nancy Pelosi nor Senate Republicans appear ready to push this bill in their caucus.
While millions of U.S. workers are left in the lurch and mass layoffs continue to mount, Trump and Senate Republicans are instead focusing their attention on ensuring right-wing, anti-union judge Amy Coney Barrett is hastily confirmed to the Supreme Court in time for the election.
“If this government doesn’t work for us, then we need to focus on the fact that it is our labor that gives all the value to this country,” Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson — who famously called for a general strike to end Trump’s federal shutdown in January 2019—said last week. “This country doesn’t run without us as workers. So we have to think about that option as well.”
The REAL Trump Coverup-Scandal That the Media’s Ignoring As You Read This With Aaron Maté
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUkonH-A9fA&ab_channel=KatieHalper
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