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As Democrats
Press for War, the Left Must Demand Peace and Social
Transformation
By Glen Ford
January 17,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "BAR"
- As
is ordained by law, at the end of the week much of
President Obama’s legacy will become Donald Trump’s
powers, including the power to detain Americans
indefinitely (forever)
without trial or charge, an authority the First
Black President secured from Congress in 2011. Obama’s
wars become Trump’s wars, which, if Trump follows
Obama’s example -- and if he succumbs to the furious
pressures of leading Democrats, old line Republicans and
an openly aggressive and “politicized” national security
establishment -- will be expanded and multiplied. The
most imminent threats to human survival under a Trump
presidency flow, not from the billionaire’s own
belligerent instincts and unpredictability, but from the
momentum of Obama’s policies of ever-escalating
confrontation with Russia and China -- his deliberate
“pivots” towards brinksmanship on all the geopolitical
fronts of Empire.
“U.S. policy is to militarily intimidate the world into
submission -- a gangster’s game.”
It is the
Democrats that have whipped up war hysteria and a new
McCarthyism, attacking Trump from the Right to force him
to keep Obama’s imperial “surge” moving forward. With
western economic power fading fast, U.S. policy is to
militarily intimidate the world into submission -- a
gangster’s game. For the Lords of Capital and their
national security servants, Obama’s greatest achievement
was to put the U.S. back on the offensive after George
Bush’s defeat and humiliation in Iraq. From their
perspective, Obama has already “Made America Great
Again” with his “humanitarian” military intervention
doctrine, trampling every principle of international
law, including the sovereignty of nations, in Libya and
Syria. Trump’s talk of “deal-making” with Russia and
China threatens to slow the imperial offensive.
The ruling
class realignment that congealed in the Clinton
campaign’s Big Tent sees any relaxation of U.S. military
pressures against Beijing and Moscow as a prelude to
imperial collapse. For them, de-escalation is an
existential threat. They don’t give a damn about the
damage Donald Trump intends to inflict on what remains
of the U.S. social safety net -- and neither did Obama,
who came into office scheming to forge a
Grand Austerity Bargain with the Republicans. And,
if his preventive detention bill were not enough,
Obama’s support for creation of a “Ministry of Truth” --
officially, a joint governmental commission to police
the media for “foreign
disinformation and manipulation” -- screams out to
high heaven that protection of civil liberties is not
part of their agenda, either. Internet publications like
Black Agenda Report, cited by the Washington Post
as “fake news” and “minions” of Russia, will be punished
for deviance from imperial “exceptionalism” and
aggressive war policies.
“Trump’s talk of ‘deal-making’ with Russia and China
threatens to slow the imperial offensive.”
This is all
about war. The Democrats, massed corporate media and the
fully mobilized legions of spooks and disinformation
specialists are cynically seeking to harness people’s
well-founded fears of Trump’s domestic policies in order
to sabotage the possibility of a relaxation of
international tensions. Leftists that think they can
exploit the split between the Trump troglodytes
(fascists) and the Obama/Clinton/Old Line GOP War Party
(fascists) will ultimately wind up caught in a pincer
between the two.
The ruling
class is, indeed, in an acute political crisis, to match
its larger, systemic crisis. The duopoly system that has
served the rich so well for most of the history of the
Republic has come undone, split at the seams,
endangering the corporate-imposed national “consensus”
on empire and war. The War Party, deploying every
disinformation trick in the book, foments anti-Russian
hysteria to create a mass base for its imperial agenda.
They point fingers at phantom “minions” of Moscow in
order to make leftists into political foot soldiers of
the Pentagon, Langley and the military industrial
complex. MoveOn.org moves to their beat, as does the
entire Congressional Black Caucus, including
Barbara Lee (D-CA), the nation’s most left-leaning
congressperson. Fine; they are duty-bound to go down
with the Bad Ship Hillary. But the social movement
activists that allow themselves to be swept up in the
Democrats’ offensive-from-the-Right against Trump are
the biggest dupes of all.
“They point fingers at phantom ‘minions’ of Moscow in
order to make leftists into political foot soldiers of
the Pentagon, Langley and the military industrial
complex.”
The Democrats
are incapable of agitating for anything more than
defense of Barack Obama’s “legacy” -- chiefly, his
doomed Affordable Care Act, which was already
disintegrating from its own contradictions and whose
final demise will create an acute crisis that cries out
for single payer health insurance, the outcome Obamacare
was designed to forestall. The Left should be making
that demand right now, rather than helping Democrats
join with Republicans to patch together an even worse
private-based system, down the road.
The precariat
economy that is emerging from Obama’s post-Meltdown
restructuring, in which
94 percent of the new “jobs” are so contingent,
inadequate and insecure they can hardly be called jobs
at all, demands a National Minimum Income – a
potentially transformative leap that the Left should be
loudly championing, right now.
Five years
after Occupy Wall Street, the Left should finally call
for the nationalization -- not fragmentation -- of the
big banks, and creation of a public development bank to
rebuild the national infrastructure without going
into debt to private capital. Anybody that doubts
masses of people will join in this demand doesn’t know
their fellow Americans and their deep hatred for Wall
Street banks.
“The social movement activists that allow themselves to
be swept up in the Democrats’ offensive-from-the-Right
against Trump are the biggest dupes of all.”
Ferguson set
the new Black movement on a course of confrontation with
the Mass Black Incarceration State, in all its
manifestations. Obama’s legacy -- and that of the Black
misleadership class that has collaborated with mass
Black incarceration for two generations – is to
intensify intelligence gathering in Black communities,
while dispersing Black population concentrations through
gentrification. Trump or no Trump, there is no avoiding
the logic of the movement’s central grassroots demand:
Black community control of the police. Non-Blacks on the
Left must support that demand.
There is no
such thing as a genuine Left that supports imperialism,
but there are plenty of fakers that do, including phony
socialists. How sad -- and maddening, at the same time
-- that a Donald Trump can speak of “cutting down” on
“regime change,” while purported leftists rally to
Obama’s “humanitarian” military interventionism, the
lip-stick on the imperial pig. The Democrats want war so
badly, they are fouling their bourgeois institutional
nest and bearing down hard from the Right to prevent any
let-up in tensions with Russia and China. The Left’s job
is to oppose the warmongers, not to band with them.
There is no
mystery to what the moment demands. What’s needed is
Left movements for social transformation, not a
farcical, Democrat-led anti-Trump pseudo-movement, whose
real agenda is war.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
