Workers look for road forward amid liberal hysteria, Trump presidency

BY SETH GALINSKY

As the administration of Donald Trump enters its third month, the “American carnage” being visited on working people he described in his inaugural address, including “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape,” continues with no end in sight.

And many in the fractured Democratic Party, liberal bourgeois press and the middle-class left are stepping up attempts to obstruct Trump in hopes of forcing him out of office before the end of his term.

“Donald Trump is a despicable man and an awful president who deserves whatever he gets,” columnist Charles Blow wrote in the New York Times April 3. “He is crude, a liar, a bully and a cheat.

“It is not clear to me that America — and indeed the world — can survive a full-term Trump presidency.” The remedy Blow likes? Impeachment.

As part of their stop-Trump-from-being-able-to-govern effort, Democrats are preparing to filibuster the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. This is extremely rare in U.S. bourgeois rule, not used even when the Democrats bitterly opposed Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork in 1987.

Democrats’ opposition to Gorsuch has nothing to do with his views or his qualifications. As Politico noted in January before Gorsuch was nominated, “Senate Democrats are going to try to bring down President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick no matter whom the president chooses.”

In fact, many Democratic Party officials acknowledge that as possible nominees for the Supreme Court go, Gorsuch would be far from the worst.

If the Democrats filibuster, the Republicans, who hold 52 seats, are expected to take what is known as the “nuclear option” — suspend the rules and move to confirm Gorsuch with a simple majority.

Sanders seeks to take over Democrats
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had the Democratic Party presidential nomination stolen from him by the party machine, has been stumping for his “Our Revolution” campaign. At a Boston rally March 31 he said the party should be based on the working class, not the “liberal elite.” His goal is to keep workers bottled up in the Democrats, one of the bosses’ two parties.

Although he called the president a “fraud,” Sanders admitted that Trump won because Americans are struggling economically, frustrated, angry and “living in despair.”

“If you sit home and think Donald Trump won because all of the people who voted for him are racists or sexists or homophobes, I think you got it wrong,” Sanders said. He won because he “developed proposals” that addressed the carnage workers face.

But it’s not the class that votes for the party, but the class the party votes for that determines its character. And the Democrats do the bidding of the ruling rich.

Bipartisan anti-immigrant policy
For all his demagogic rhetoric, Trump has mostly continued the same anti-worker policies that were carried out by the Obama and previous administrations.

But deporting undocumented workers is increasingly unpopular among U.S.-born workers.

The shift in views among working people and broader sections of the population comes through in a March 28 article in the Times, “In Steve King’s District, Iowans Begin to Question His Anti-Immigrant Views.”

Congressman King is notorious for his racist attitude toward immigrants. But many people the Times interviewed in Sioux County, which went overwhelmingly for King and Trump in the last election, say they disagree with King on deportations.

Evan Wielenga, manager of a farm co-op in Orange City, told the Times he used to believe all the undocumented should be deported, but had a change of heart.

“Some of these kids were born in the U.S. These families had lived here 10 years, and all of a sudden, Dad’s gone. Mom’s gone,” Wielenga said, referring to the impact of Immigration and Custom Enforcement raids. “When you think of it from that perspective, what’s the lesser of two evils?”

“When our kids are such good friends at school, people are getting to know each other better,” said Libbie Schillerberg, from Denison. “They’re trusting each other, wanting to be around each other.”

Despite the fact the Trump administration’s effort to bar visitors from six majority Muslim nations is bottled up in court challenges, they are moving forward with planning steps for “extreme vetting” of refugees, immigrants and tourists, the Wall Street Journal reported April 4. That would include government access to their email, Facebook and other social media accounts.

“We want to say for instance, ‘What sites do you visit? And give us your passwords,’ so that we can see what they do on the internet,” Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told Congress in February.

The new rules would apply even to visitors from the 38 countries that participate in the Visa Waiver Program, which includes some of Washington’s closest allies, such as the U.K., Japan and Australia.

The White House is planning to put in place an “ideological test,” interrogating people about their political views. This wouldn’t be the first time, the Journal said, noting that communists and other foreign-born working-class militants have been excluded from the U.S. in the past.

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