Vol. 81/No. 4 January 23, 2017
(front page)
Panic grows on ‘left’ as Trump nears White House
The Democrats, their liberal media mouthpieces like the New York Times, and the petty bourgeois left all blame Trump’s victory on a turn to the right by workers, especially workers who are Caucasian, smeared by Hillary Clinton as “deplorables.”
Liberal hue and cry became more shrill after the highly politicized “intelligence community” in Washington accused Moscow of supporting Trump’s candidacy by organizing the release of hacked emails embarrassing to Clinton.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” the Jan. 6 National Intelligence report said. No one claims Putin tampered with ballot boxes or attempted to fix computer tallies of the vote. Russian hackers are charged with harming Clinton by making her own words public.
The leaked messages revealed Democratic Party leadership efforts to rig the Democratic nomination race against Sanders, as well as Clinton’s use of her cabinet position to raise money for her family foundation.
“Donald Trump’s victory and his imminent presidency are already tainted beyond redemption,” thundered Times columnist Charles Blow Jan. 9, claiming Trump “is as much Russia’s appointment as our elected executive.” Portraying those who voted for Trump as brainwashed dupes, Blow said, “The American people cast their ballots in the fog of fake news and under influence of stolen property weaponized as a tool of propaganda.”
Actress Meryl Streep got big applause when she mocked workers who are sports fans in her teary anti-Trump speech at the Jan. 8 Golden Globes ceremony. “The most vilified segments in American society right now” are “Hollywood, foreigners and the press,” she said. “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts.”
When Trump points out that the record of the U.S. rulers’ intelligence agencies is unreliable, Democrats vigorously defend the government spies. “The quick support for the CIA may herald a new era in the agency’s relationship with Democrats,” Politico noted.
While crying “Russian interference!” liberals conveniently ignore Washington’s history of intervention in other countries’ affairs. President Barack Obama did everything he could to influence the Israeli election in 2015, hoping Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu would lose. Jeremy Bird, a leader of Obama’s 2012 election campaign, led a group called Victory15, which spent millions running anti-Netanyahu ads.
Democrats demonize Trump’s cabinet appointees, calling Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, a bigot. At his confirmation hearing this week, protesters against Sessions, some in mock Ku Klux Klan costumes, shouted, “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA!”
You’d have to look far and wide to find a U.S. attorney general who champions Black rights, but Sessions isn’t starkly different from the rest. “I abhor the Klan and what it represents, and its hateful ideology,” Sessions told the panel.
Democrats of all stripes are calling for efforts to block ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state. Some say he’s too chummy with Putin, because of the oil behemoth’s investments in Russia. Others say it’s unseemly for a corporate executive to serve as secretary of state. Few mention that former Secretary of State Clinton had been a Walmart board member, and notoriously silent on the company’s anti-worker labor policies.
And, after all, the rulers have always used their State Department to advance U.S. capital’s interests worldwide.
Obama, by repeatedly bypassing Congress and implementing policy by executive order, has handed Trump some easy early victories. “What can be done by the pen can be undone by the pen,” wrote William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal Jan. 3.
While Trump has promised to repeal and replace Obama’s Affordable Care Act — claiming he will increase competition and lower costs by lifting regulation on companies selling insurance across state lines — he has said he will maintain the popular provisions that prevent the insurance outfits from refusing coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions and allow young people to be covered by their parents’ insurance until age 26.
“Working people and our unions have a vital stake not only in defending what we’ve fought for and won from the employing class, but above all in building a mass social and political movement of the working class to extend these conquests as universal rights — not means-tested charity — for all,” Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes explains in Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning Under Capitalism. “Through our labor, the working class, in this country and worldwide, produces more than enough wealth to provide education, health care, housing, and retirement to every human being on earth, for a lifetime.”
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US rulers groomed Bill Clinton to lead Democrats to ‘center’
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