China or Russia? Vote for the New Enemy!

[elfismiles]

I thought we were fighting the new "War on Fake News" ...

[JackRiddler]

[DrEvil]

Liberalism.

Oh yeah. If you put it in quotes. "Liberalism" meaning all designated domestic enemies wrapped into a feverish projection that includes everyone from BLM to obscure Marxist professors at public universities to Chomsky to "liberal media" and the Clintonists. Maybe just short of including Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie.

Maybe "anti-authoritarian people" would be a better term. Liberalism is too vague in these post-truth times. Four of the permanent seats of the security council are chaired by more or less authoritarian governments (if you count the Hair That Should Not Be), and number five is up for election soon. The Fascist Internationale is in full bloom.

[Elvis]

Vietnam. Finish the Job.

[seemslikeadream]

Shots have already been fired

January 21 2017 war will be officially declared on the citizens of the United States of America by the federal government with Donald J Trump leading the way. Once he is impeached Mike Pence will continue that war with the full force of ALL three branches of government.... Legislative Judicial and Executive

When they came for women where were you?

Because you are next in line

The War On Women
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=34154

Mike Pence is seriously dangerous
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40077&p=621591&hilit=PENCE#p621591

TRUMP is seriously dangerous
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39115

Drain The Swamp
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=40206&p=623432&hilit=drain+swamp#p623432

[minime]

Look for an increasing number of UFO sightings.

[seemslikeadream]

WAR

This is war

Our land being sold off to the privates/pirates

Republicans Planning Historic Sell-Off of Federal Lands
http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/videos/v ... eral-lands

New Resource Exposes 'Corporate Chieftains' Filling Trump Cabinet
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/0 ... mp-cabinet

In total there are 92 users online :: 1 registered, 4 hidden and 87 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)

[American Dream]

From Mouvement Communiste/Kolektivně proti Kapitălu

WHO PROFITS FROM TRUMP’S PROGRAMME?
The fantastic and contradictory declarations of candidate Trump don’t help to clarify the orientation of the government of President Trump. However, if we put to one side the crazier pronouncements, a general economic line emerges, around which the future government will manoeuvre: protectionism on the world market, deregulation and big public works on the national level. The global objective is to loosen the grip of competition for American companies which are in difficulty or faced with unfavourable duels on the world market.

Trump’s vision for American capitalist development is opposed to that which has brought success for big capital over the last thirty years, whether it’s Apple or Walmart, Google, Boeing or Amazon: growing internationalisation of production and supply chains. Some of these big companies could well suffer from the taxation of Chinese and Mexican imports. But individual capitals adapt quickly. In this regard, Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, has already asked Foxconn, its Taiwanese subcontractor, to study the possibility of constructing a new factory in the US.

PROTECTIONISM AND TRADE WAR ON THE MENU
While the figures thrown about during the campaign seem ludicrous, a tax on imports from China and Mexico still seems possible. This would imply the unleashing of a severe trade war with China and the calling into question of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which concerns Mexico and Canada. Together, Mexico, Canada and China represent 39.2% of US imports and 48% of exports3.

Trump also wants to disengage from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which notably includes Japan, Australia, Mexico and Canada. These multilateral accords, which cover very varied areas and categories of commodities, will be replaced, according to Trump doctrine, by a multitude of bilateral agreements made more advantageous because of the dominant position of the US.

The way of bilateral economic and trade diplomacy is already followed by China, and now by the UK as it separates from the EU. It’s a way which, far from marking the end of so-called globalisation, makes world trade war more acute. Trump’s diplomacy is completely based on protectionism and trade war. Not a single extra dollar will be spent on the geopolitical domination of the United States if it is not rapidly translated into earnings.

RECOGNITION OF A MULTI-POLAR WORLD, THE RETURN TO “COLD PEACE” AND THE STATUS QUO
Neither Trump nor Putin have made any mystery of their intentions during the campaign. For Trump, it’s a matter of disengaging American military forces and so leaving Russia to reinforce its influence in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. For Putin, the accent is on non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. Trump is the partisan of an agreement with Assad to end the war in Syria and of reconciliation with Erdoğan’s Turkey. The days of an alliance with Kurdish militias in Syria are over. The only priority for Trump in the region is Islamic State, which is closer to defeat every day.

Elsewhere, tensions in the South China Sea are going to increase. If the anti-Chinese rhetoric is an indicator, the risks of trade war are strong and those of a real war are growing.

Trump wants the historic allies of the US to pay more for their protection. He proposes to make the protection mechanisms of NATO conditional on an increased contribution to military expenses by some of its members, and the same goes for Saudi Arabia. On the other hand there have been numerous signals to reassure the Israeli state in the last few weeks with the promise of moving the US embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem.

More generally, the foreign policy of Trump aims at the status quo and the balance of power on a world scale. It’s a modern and multi-polar reissue of the good old days of “cold peace” punctuated by wars of localised influence which followed the Second World Butchery.

INTERNAL DEREGULATION AND PUBLIC WORKS
In agreement with most Republicans, Trump wants to reduce the importance of the Federal State and give more power to the states which are federated (of which the most advanced, from the point of view of capital, are run by the Democrats). In this way Trump intends to squeeze the federal budgets for education, health, defence and regulatory agencies (financial, environmental, etc.).

If for now he denies wanting to simply abolish the reforms to the system of social protection put in place by Obama, all the same the President Elect wants to modify the mode of financing and to make the beneficiaries of “universal” social protection instituted by the outgoing President pay more.

Trump also promises to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which regulates some financial activities. The Trump camp holds it responsible for the weakness of the economic recovery: it held back lending. The big banks complain reasonably about the lack of quality (i.e. solvent) borrowers. On the other side, the small local banks could profit greatly from the significant reduction in their reserve fund requirements and from the possibility of making use of their deposits for riskier, but potentially more lucrative, financial products, as promised by Trump.

As for big public works, Trump is only pursuing the counter-cyclical policy of his predecessors Obama and Bush junior. His plan for a trillion dollars of expenditure to modernise, in particular, transport infrastructure is not much more generous than that announced and carried out during the first term of the outgoing President and markedly less ambitious than that of Bush junior, which involved mostly military and security expenditure after the attacks on the Twin Towers. The only real difference lies in his willingness to make the private sector finance big works by means of fiscal gifts for companies joining the plan.

THE PRAGMATISM OF US CAPITALISM. INTERNATIONALISED CAPITAL HUNKERS DOWN AND WAITS FOR THE WINNER
“As a fiduciary to our clients, it is our job to maintain strong, deep, relationships with governments around the world irrespective of party affiliations.”

The pragmatism of US capitalists is summed up in this statement by the boss of BlackRock, the most important fund management company in the world (5,000 billion dollars in assets), Laurence D. Fink, close to Hillary Clinton. Yet Fink did not hesitate to join the management of JP Morgan Chase, General Motors, Walmart and Disney, in the “President’s Strategic and Policy Forum”, which exists to guide Trump in his plans. What’s more, the financial markets reacted well to Trump’s election surprise. At the end of 2016, the Dow Jones reached a previously unattained high, pushing 20,000 points. The energy and pharmaceutical sectors will be able to directly benefit from deregulation linked to environmental risks and the price of medicines.

PROTECTIONISM OR FREE TRADE? NEITHER. CLASS STRUGGLE!
We wrote on the occasion of Brexit 4:

“Anti-globalisation is the modern “fool’s socialism” […] It’s an ideology which really grew to prominence amongst the liberal left in the 1990s, but now it’s increasingly the right – Trump, Putin, UKIP, FN… – who are its standard-bearers”.

If we take a look at the American elections and the UK referendum, we can see that the common point between Sanders, Corbyn, Farage and Trump, along with Clinton and May, is the defence of “national sovereignty” towards and against other capitalist states. It’s a scenario we’re often going to see in the years to come with Grillo, Salvini and Meloni in Italy, Valls, Mélenchon and Fillon in France and in plenty of other places.

In 1848, in the opposite situation, when free trade was gaining ground in Europe, Marx wrote5:

“To sum up, what is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action. So long as you let the relation of wage labour to capital exist, it does not matter how favourable the conditions under which the exchange of commodities takes place, there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited. It is really difficult to understand the claim of the free-traders who imagine that the more advantageous application of capital will abolish the antagonism between industrial capitalists and wage workers. On the contrary, the only result will be that the antagonism of these two classes will stand out still more clearly.”

And in conclusion:

“Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free trade competition within a country.[…] But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, Gentlemen, that I vote in favour of free trade.”

Do we therefore have to take the side of the free traders against the protectionists? That would be to misunderstand the masterly lesson of Karl Marx. It’s a lesson which simply says that everything which accelerates the destruction of the system founded on exploitation is good and that the proletariat has everything to gain from an antagonism with capital which is the most obvious and least disguised. The proletariat is a global class, as is its field of battle.

THE WORKING CLASS, THE STATE, THE REACTIONARY SOCIAL BLOC AND THE “NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY” MOVEMENTS
It’s clear that right now the working class is not present for itself in the US or in the other developed countries. The only notable exception is China where economic struggles for wages, which often win, and struggles against industrial pollution, have been going on for a long time yet without creating any visible embryos of independent organisation of the exploited class.

With Brexit and the election of Trump, the reactionary and protectionist tendencies of capital launch their offensive against free trade and globalisation. Today, the protectionist line of capital feeds the identity-based and national response, the fear of the foreigner, and encourages internal and external scapegoating. Whether they put up with or whether they identify with the ranting, the electors of Trump have also voted for the incarceration and massive expulsion of foreigners with an illegal status, for “law and order”, in the context of police violence against “African American” proletarians, and against the right to abortion. The traditional racist extreme right supported Trump from start to finish, and its various groups were energised by the victory of “their” candidate.

The political coagulation of this social reactionary bloc around charismatic authoritarian figure, well inserted into the framework of bourgeois democracies, is a global phenomenon. We can see striking similarities between Trump (US), Erdoğan (Turkey), Orbán (Hungary), Kaczynski (Poland), Abe (Japan), Xi (China), Putin (Russia), Modi (India) and Duterte (Philippines) to mention only the best known. And others of the same stripe are already crawling out of the woodwork in Italy, France and various Latin American countries.

The basis of this reactionary social bloc lies in the modifications of the social structure brought about by the financial and fiscal crises of states. The democracies have lost their sparkle, and with it some of their intermediate bodies (parties, unions, professional associations etc.). The principal sociological components of this reactionary bloc are well known: the small shopkeepers, small bosses, small farmers and the employees of the public sector and the private sector in productive territories most affected by the crises. On the other hand the owners of this social bloc are the sectors of capital which have suffered the most from the loss of competitiveness on the internal and world markets.

This reactionary social bloc for the moment only exists politically through elections. It inserts itself perfectly into the democratic game and reinforces it with insistent demands for a state of order and defence against “aggressors”, presumed to be both external and internal. These sovereigntist movements have variable ideologies, going from a certain extreme left of capital, anti-imperialist and third-worldist, right up to the nationalist and fascist extreme right. The difference between the national left and the national right is blurred, as both are convinced defenders of the nation state, an aspect of reality which is weakened more and more in the era of mature capitalism and the fully developed world market.

For the time being these movements don’t have anything subversive about them. Therefore they don’t appear to be movements which will engender fascism and Nazism. They put themselves forward as active factors of democratic order, reviewing and correcting in a reactionary sauce. Yes, the most internationalised fraction of capital in the US has suffered a defeat with the election of Trump but bourgeois democracy has still chalked up a win.

The so-called protest vote is still a vote, an instrument for the conflictual integration of sectors of the population who are not convinced by the construction of a consensus around the state and capital in a period of great fragility of the society of capital and a crisis of its traditional intermediaries. Here, as elsewhere, democracy has won against the most advanced capital but the state ends up stronger, reinforced by the conflictual attachment to the democratic game of those sectors of the population that the crises have weakened the most.

Only an independent political opposition of broad sectors of the proletariat who are capable of attacking the state which promotes and feeds the new sovereigntist movements can really beat them back. Restricting itself to fighting them without understanding that they function as a means to reinforce the state and the democracies which give rise to them would be a fatal error.

This fight must be carried in the first place within the exploited class itself where sovereigntist movements are rooted. And it has to begin by explaining that the reactionary fantasies dwelling in proletarians who adopt this vision of the world can only make conditions worse for the whole of their class. In this context, the “growing union of proletarians” seems a long way off. As the only viable policy for the working class, it must come about through autonomous struggle, toe to toe for wages, the improvement of conditions of work and life in general, without taking account of the needs of capital.

[semper occultus]

Sick shit, Novem5er. And your scenario of occupying the border region is probably cheaper than the Wall.

Novem5er should be open to the possibility of a call from the Trump appointments team in the near future and maybe an invitation to step into the golden lift...

[Novem5er]

Sick shit, Novem5er. And your scenario of occupying the border region is probably cheaper than the Wall.

Novem5er should be open to the possibility of a call from the Trump appointments team in the near future and maybe an invitation to step into the golden lift...

Wow, thanks! . . . I think?

Has anyone ever thought that, with as much time as Trump seems to actually spend on the internet, passing along alt-media stories, and tweeting about every banal thought that comes into his head, that he might actually encounter RI?

I mean, think about that. We could have a sitting president who actually has a chance of reading this forum.

I just got chills, and not in a good way.

[JackRiddler]

Sick shit, Novem5er. And your scenario of occupying the border region is probably cheaper than the Wall.

Novem5er should be open to the possibility of a call from the Trump appointments team in the near future and maybe an invitation to step into the golden lift...

Wow, thanks! . . . I think?

Has anyone ever thought that, with as much time as Trump seems to actually spend on the internet, passing along alt-media stories, and tweeting about every banal thought that comes into his head, that he might actually encounter RI?

I mean, think about that. We could have a sitting president who actually has a chance of reading this forum.

I just got chills, and not in a good way.

Yeah, zero chance of that.

He tweets off a phone app. That's it.

.