By Jeff Mackler
“GUILTY: JURY CONVICTS TRUMP ON ALL 34 COUNTS” was the May 31 banner headline of the nation’s leading corporate and Democratic Party mouthpiece, “newspaper of record,” The New York Times.
Trump’s sentencing hearing is set for July 11. The Times legal experts note that trial Judge Juan Merchan could sentence Trump to four years in prison, or simply grant him probation, speculating that the now convicted felon “Trump may never see the inside of a prison.”
Indeed, given that Trump’s three other felony trials are unlikely to be concluded before the November presidential election, few doubt that a Trump victory would see the world’s most notorious imperialist, warmongering racist, sexist bigot pardoning himself and proceeding with the daily business of defending the interests of the U.S. ruling class elite.
Genocide Joe
And if “Genocide Joe Biden” should win, a magnanimous pardon, in the name of restoring “bi-partisanship” and “good will” to world capitalism’s most predatory government should not be excluded. With 1100 U.S. military bases in 110 nations across the globe, U.S. imperialism’s voracious appetite for conquest and plunder is equally shared by Biden and Trump.
There can be no other outcome in the rigged capitalist electoral system, wherein multi-billionaire, if not trillionaire corporate power brokers hold all the cards, write and re-write the tax codes and otherwise game the system to advance their interests.
Whether it be endless imperialist wars for profit the world over, looting the US treasury to effectively defund public education and vital social services, – all at the expense of working people – or destroying the environment and persecuting, imprisoning, or expelling the poor and oppressed, there is not a dime’s difference between U.S. capitalism’s present and past presidents.
Biden’s, half century of service in the U.S. government – where he supported every U.S. war of conquest and served as the Democrat’s liaison between its Northern “liberal” wing and its Southern overt segregationist/former slavocracy proponents – long ago convinced the U.S. elite that he was their man for the job. This included when as Vice President under Obama Biden served in Ukraine in 2014 when the U.S. backed the fascist-led coup aimed at advancing U.S. oil corporations’ objective of replacing Russia as Europe’s chief fossil fuel supplier.
The “Moron” Trump
The “moron” Trump, as he was described by his former Secretary of State and Exxon Mobile chief Rex Tillerson, falsely believed that he really ran the country, including his “right” to lie cheat and steal in the manner that he judged was common to all politicians. Tillerson’s “moron” remark came after Trump suggested to a National Security Council meeting that the U.S. increase its tactical nuclear weapons supply one hundred fold! He had left the room at the time of Tillerson’s comment, but no doubt those who remained agreed. Today, in Trump’s footsteps, Biden has approved using long distance U.S.-supplied weapons to bomb deeply into Russia, bringing the world closer to nuclear holocaust.
Trump’s May 30 felony trial conviction focused on his petty maneuvers to falsify campaign documents to hide his personal sexual escapades. Upcoming felony indictments will litigate his demanding that top Georgia officials “find the votes” to make him president and another with his absconding with classified government documents that likely further exposed his petty corruption. A final trial will litigate his orchestrating an attempted Capital Hill coup to physically prevent the Congress from certifying that Biden had won the U.S. 2020 presidential election.
The latter maneuver was too much for the ruling rich to stomach; they quickly ensured that not a single court in the land or judge dared to stand in the way of their preferred choice, Joe Biden. The time was not right, the multi-billionaire elite few judged, for the likes of a would-be fascist tyrant to be their figurehead president.
Biden, whose political, economic and social policies, sufficiently mirrored Trump’s, minus the rhetoric, sufficed to meet their base needs. That all of Trump’s hundreds of instantly manufactured lawsuits challenging the election had zero success was proof positive that the ruling class had no interest this time out in litigating the presidency via his assemblage of now-imprisoned stooge lawyers, including Rudolph Giuliani, who he paid handsomely to manufacture the legal theses that he expected his Supreme Court appointees to certify.
Ruling class interests were secure enough with the predictable Biden in office. This included the continued outpouring of legislation granting $trillions in tax breaks and barely disguised infrastructure gifts to the corporate elite, as well the expansion of fossil fuel production, massive deportations, and an unprecedented $1.3 trillion in military spending. The latter guaranteed backing for all U.S. overt wars around the world, as well as imperialism’s drone wars, “Special Operation” wars, assassination wars, and covert wars. All this and more is backed by a U.S. “national security” surveillance system replete with five million security clearance operatives in some dozen agencies capable of spying on every person on earth. And, we must add, all this functions to qualitatively increase the profits of U.S. capitalism’s largely monopolized military-industrial complex.
U.S. ruling class has no present need for Trump and his delusions of grandeur
With this complex of monopoly political power and corporate economic interests secure, and in the present absence of a serious mass independent political and social force on the scene, the U.S. ruling class had no present need for Trump and his delusions of grandeur, including his demagogically posing himself as the nation’s MAGA “defender” against his ever-expanding perceived enemy list.
“Populist” Trump’s ever-expanding enemies now include, “fascists,“ communists, Marxists, foreigners, immigrants and whomever else his demonization antics aim to marginalize. He promises his election will bring on a “one-day dictatorship” during which he will purge from all government offices, all his declared enemies!
Source of current capitalist crises
Today’s real capitalist crises, in the U.S. and worldwide, stem from the system’s inherent contradictions. Ever-intensifying corporate competition in the world marketplace, marked by ever diminishing profit rates, drives the leading players to resort to endless measures to survive. Trump’s trade tariffs to keep competitive goods from China and elsewhere out of the U.S. were aped by Biden.
In the U.S., inter-imperialist rivalry includes closing and/or relocating once-unionized plants to low wage nations with near slave labor workforces. That many of these competitive “foreign” plants are U.S. owned is somewhat of an embarrassment to the corporate elite, so U.S. lawmakers are fully prepared to make exceptions to their tariff wars. Chinese electric vehicles, manufactured at a fraction of the cost of their U.S. equivalents, are banned from the U.S. marketplace, the environmental consequences notwithstanding.
Intensifying capitalist competition increasingly includes outright replacing domestic and foreign workers with ever more sophisticated automated processes. Along the way, compliant capitalist governments invariably intervene to approve legislation to reduce corporate expenses, undermine pension systems, grant endless tax benefits to the super rich and thwart unionization efforts. Substituting unprotected low wage immigrant and/or prison labor or part time, zero benefit “gig” economy jobs for decent-paying union jobs is the norm, with the U.S. unionized private sector workforce the lowest in the past century.
Racism, sexism and LGBTQI+ discrimination are essential to this process, pitting one sector of the working class against another to the boss class’s advantage
The system is the problem
But all is not well with today’s capitalist order. Vast numbers are becoming aware of the system’s base corruption. While some momentarily fall victim to racist-populist-scapegoating demagoguery, unprecedented numbers are coming to understand that “the system,” is the source of the horrors it imposes on society. Largely monopolized industries, including food and fuel, raise prices at will, blaming always undefined “supply chain” or other vaguely-defined “inflationary forces.” Meanwhile, the corporate elite endlessly conspire to keep wages and benefits down while raising prices, with zero restraint, at will.
Skyrocketing rent, housing costs, and unprecedented interest rates have driven increasing numbers of working people into near poverty, a pay-check–to–paycheck existence, if not homelessness. All of the above have convinced vast numbers that the two-party system itself is fundamentally corrupt and, along with it, its millionaire and billionaire candidates.
Majority opposition to US-backed Zionist genocide in Palestine and systemic racism
The Black Lives Matter movement, at its height a few years ago, mobilized five million into the streets to protest wanton police murder of unarmed Blacks. These mobilizations broke new grounds in educating and exposing the “systemic racism,” that permeates U.S. society, whose origins began in the extermination of the indigenous peoples and continued with institutionalization of the slave system whose racist discriminatory features continue the oppression of poor and oppressed people today.
And finally, today’s majority opposition to the U.S.-backed Zionist genocide of Palestinians has marked a new stage in the present U.S. radicalization, especially among youth, whose ongoing nationwide mobilizations have won the hearts and minds of the world’s people.
Today’s youth radicalization includes new a generation who shun the two-party duopoly and are more open than ever to revolutionary socialist ideas that challenge the capitalist status quo.
Today’s conflicted ruling class is fully aware of the fact that the vast majority has little or no confidence that either of today’s presidential candidates offer serious solutions to the basic insecurities that plague their everyday life.
The Trump wing increasingly poses overt repression to deal with society’s malcontents of every type, especially with its recent quasi-fascist allusions to a “new Reich,” the Hitlerite-era that began with the German Nazis rise to power in 1933. Yet today, there are no such overt fighting fascist forces on the scene – forces that are organized to physically challenge and defeat a mass workers’ movement that threatens capitalism’s basic stability. Indeed, today’s largely corrupt trade union mis-leadership, despite modest and limited moments of militancy, is overwhelming tied to the Democratic Party, as is the largely faith-based reformist civil rights movement.
Under these circumstances, Biden’s Democrats, world class mass murderers on the international scene, and now fully engaged in backing Zionist Israel’s Palestine genocide, see no need for mass repression at home. Indeed, the Democrat’s “left wing,” the AOC, Sanders, DSA and Co., serve them well, preserving the myth that a “progressive current” may emerge to fundamentally change the very nature of capitalism’s leading political party.
Even here, however, the Democrats’ prospects of engineering an image change are nil. Indeed, a broad March on the DNC coalition is planning a massive protest at the upcoming August 19-22 Democratic Party National Convention. Tens of thousands are expected to participate in defiance of Chicago city and police officials’ refusal to grant permits.
Revolutionary socialist alternative to capitalism
We live today is an especially contradictory period, one where capitalism’s mounting crises have driven increasingly militant forces to question its very validity. Massive forces, especially the youth, stand in direct opposition to the U.S. genocide in Palestine and to the systemic racism that permeates capitalist society. They have taken to the streets in cities and college campuses across the country. More than 3,000 have been arrested as they organized college and university tent encampments demanding divestment from Zionist Israel, university condemnation of U.S.-backed Zionist genocide and “No to university punishment of free speech protestors.”
They are increasingly open to the formation of mass action oriented, democratic, united front-type organizations to challenge the policies of the twin parties of the war criminals, Biden and Trump. They are increasingly interested in revolutionary socialist alternatives to capitalist war, racism, repression, and injustice.
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