Blog

Crisis in the Democratic and Republican Parties

2-13-22

Economic and political crises are set to collide and explode like black holes before the ’24 elections.

The boycott of Biden’s Atlanta speech by black voter rights activists, and white suburbanites swinging Republican in the Virginia gubernatorial election, are responses to the Democrats’ passive, incoherent policies. The Party has no activists, and its base is abandoning it.

The criticism of Trump around Jan. 6th by the Wall Street Journal and McConnell, and of Trump’s pro-vaccine stance by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones, are class struggles between the neoliberal Republican politicians and fascist activists within its MAGA base. Trump is failing to hold them together.

The Republican Party will attempt to steal elections from Abrams, Warnock and O’Rourke this November, possibly intimidating minority voters and decertifying their ballots. If the Supreme Court ratifies the Republican steal, everyone will expect a Republican Presidency in ’24, turning to dictatorship.

Inflation is an indicator of unresolvable economic imbalances leading to recession and extreme distress, pushing workers toward strikes, reactionary Canadian trucker-type demos, or both. The class struggle within the parties will intensify. All sectors of the working class, including whites, will open to new ideas and organizations.

Biden and Trump symbolize the end-stage decay of the ruling class. America faces an unprecedented existential crisis in capitalism and Constitutional rule with no Lincoln or FDR, no political and moral leadership at all. Only socialists with no ties to the system can lead a struggle for good jobs, health care, green energy, public schools. A powerful, independent workers movement can stop fascism, compel reform, and empower itself for the future. Only socialist democracy can resolve America’s class, race, gender, and climate crises.

What Whoopi Goldberg got right

2-9-22

German modernization and Jewish assimilation had reduced anti-Semitism to a background cultural presence, when Hitler revived and politicized it. In contrast, American racism toward blacks is economically, politically, and culturally systemic, and a driving force throughout American history. The current rise in anti-Semitism is a by-product of white supremacy directed at blacks and other racial minorities. Underlying conflicts became genocidal in Germany, Ruanda, America against Indians, when the ruling class adopted it.

Hitler scapegoated Jews, among others, for Germany’s humiliating war defeat, hyperinflation, and divided governance, as a component of his hyper-nationalist message. The ruling class installed him in power for his anti-communism and promise of law and order. As dictator, Hitler elevated anti-Semitism to state policy, borrowing American concepts of racial purity and Jim Crow laws. He personally decided on the Final Solution and death camps, implementing it in secret. Today, German fascists direct their hate against immigrants, especially Muslims.

American white supremacy, from slavery, through Jim Crow, to today, involves both the super-exploitation of blacks and scapegoating them to divide workers racially. It’s the principle ruling class strategy for holding power. The neofascist Republican core promise is to make white conservative Christians dominant again.

The American political ruling class weaponizes accusations of anti-Semitism as cover for their racist attacks—against Ilhan Omar, Women’s March activists Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, and the BDS movement. AIPAC, allied with Christian fascists, cynically propagandizes the Holocaust to justify Israel’s apartheid settler colonialism.

While American Jews are politically diverse, and in the working, professional, and ruling classes, the fascists make no distinctions, shooting synagogues, banning books, and repurposing the racist chant “You will not replace us” as anti-Semitic. Only the multi-racial working class, youth, and oppressed peoples can stop the Republican neofascists from seizing power.

China. Is China a threat to world peace?

2-3-22

China’s Belt and Road is a global infrastructure project with China as its hub. Its large loans and construction aid, while often high-debt and environmentally burdensome, benefit partner countries’ development. With stable trade routes, access to resources, and shared global growth, China aims to outcompete and surpass the U.S. peacefully.

China is turning to nationalism, building an economic and military “fortress China.” China could defend its internationally recognized claim to Taiwan with conventional missiles capable of destroying U.S. Asia-Pacific military bases. It is forcefully absorbing nominally autonomous Tibet and Xinjiang. It’s 1979 military incursion into Vietnam, border skirmishes with the India, and illegal seizure of the South China Sea, were to secure its border region. Its military base in Djibouti is to protect the oil trade route from pirates.

It’s shifting from manufacturing/export to a self-sufficient, high-tech, internal-market driven economy. It has its own social media, cloud computing, and security system. It’s investing in AI, 6G, and hypersonic nuclear missiles.

China does not invest in high profit corporations extracting resources overseas, nor impose austerity plans on debtor nations. Nor does it wage wars, occupy countries, establish a network of foreign military bases, overthrow governments, or meddle in the internal affairs of other countries. While it promotes the superiority of China’s system over the West, it does not impose it.

 China has growing unresolved problems: top-down rule by a self-serving bureaucracy, high wealth inequality, declining growth rate, unbalanced capitalist/government investment, worker and peasant protests. While not now imperialist, China has the capability to extract value overseas in the future.

The U.S. is a fading, increasingly desperate and volatile imperialist power. China’s policies are transparent and consistent because it’s winning. Only the U.S. will provoke global warfare.

Inflation Consumers don’t cause inflation; capitalists do

1-30-22

The Federal Reserve is increasing interest rates to slow the economy and raise unemployment, so capitalists can drive down wages to reduce consumption and supposedly inflation. This could tip the economy into recession while inflation continues.

Money must be backed by production of goods and services—real value. Inflation is caused by capitalist under-production of real value while expanding the money supply. Money sits in the stock and bond markets making huge profits while producing nothing—Apple Computer’s $200 billion; Blackstone investment’s $9 trillion; the Federal Reserve’s recently printed $4 trillion; bank expansion of debt over assets—all fantasy value. Predatory lending by private equity firms and the war in Yemen destroy materiel and production. Cryptocurrencies and nfts are speculation in fantasy value for the masses.

While consumers drive 2/3rds of the economy, over the past 40 years, trillions of dollars have been transferred from us, through lost jobs, wages, and government benefits, to the capitalists as profit. Investment in affordable housing, health care, green energy, day care even with higher pay would decrease prices by adding real value to the economy. Instead, the capitalists and administrations of both parties created an economy with unresolvable problems: inflation; high government, corporate, and consumer debt; oligopolies keeping prices high rather than innovating; export and automation of jobs; record underemployment of workers in their prime; half the population living hand to mouth, only the professional and ruling classes with purchasing power. Americans of both political sides understand the economy is unfair and run for the elite.

Recession is inevitable, probably accompanied by continuing inflation, that could cause financial collapse and a great depression. Fight for a socialist economy, where workers own and manage production for the benefit of the people.

The split in the Republican Party

1-27-22
Republicans share common principles but are divided along class lines between fascists and neoliberal opportunists.

The MAGA activists disrupting school boards and threatening violence, white supremacist militias, Steve Bannon, new figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and state legislators, capitalists like the DeVos/Prince family, Clarence Thomas, think tanks like the Claremont Institute, are fascists willing to use violence to seize power and establish an authoritarian, Christian nationalist state. They set the direction of the Republican Party.

Republican leadership—Senators and governors, think tanks like the Hoover Institute, are loyal to neoliberal corporate interests. They’re conservatives or libertarians who jumped on the Trump bandwagon. They maintain economic and social ties with the corporate ruling class, and whether politically sincere or not, their instincts are to preserve their careers and their class.

Once a mainstream party, the Republican leadership from Nixon to Trump turned to white supremacy, authoritarianism and violence, patriarchy, and jingoism to hold its base and gain power. Unlike the unified and disciplined Nazi and Italian fascist parties and their paramilitaries, the Republican Party is American born: individualistic; built around an attitude, not an ideology; yearning not for a glorious future but a mythical past; opportunist and pragmatist; consumed by fantasies and lies; promising no economic benefits.
Trump bridged the gap between the capitalist leaders and middle class base. The MAGA activists push toward dictatorship, leaders struggle for control, and most Republican voters are passive, desperate followers. An economic downturn or leadership power struggle could spur the internal class conflict to erupt.

An independent movement fighting for economic demands and working class empowerment can build a multiracial antifascist alliance of workers and youth, the only force capable of stopping the Republican drive to dictatorship.

The Republican all or nothing drive for dictatorship

1-26-22

If the Republican Party wins or rigs the ’24 Presidential election, it will alter election law to hold power permanently—a Constitutional coup ending the U.S. as an electoral democracy. Multiple sectors of the American people will either refuse to cooperate or rebel—factions in the military; a few corporate leaders; the media; a sector of the professional managerial class; activists from minority communities, women, gays, and environmentalists.

Any disruption of commerce would threaten the support from the military high command and corporate leaders the Republican Party depends upon. They’ll seize control of the metropolitan areas that drive the economy—New York City, California, Austin, Atlanta. They’ll use their supporters in the corporate world, military, Federal law enforcement, Congress, Supreme Court, state governments, and militant MAGA base to take over: mainstream and social media; education and youth; television, movies, sports; neighborhoods and civic organizations. It may take years, utilize both legal and violent means, but the Republican Party will either form a dictatorship or fail and be broken.

The strategy to defeat Republican neofascism is to organize the independent power of the working class through fighting for immediate economic interests—a living wage, unionization, housing, health care, day care, and education. Expose Republican neofascism and Democratic corporate complicity. Organize to strike and demonstrate through the ’24 elections to cripple Republican authority, turn the ruling elites against them, and divide them.

AOC and the end of progressive politics

1-20-22
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remains loyal to her black, Latino, and immigrant constituents and wants to better conditions for the American working class. She hasn’t realized that the neoliberal capitalists who finance the careers of Republican and Democratic politicians, partly in response to the progressive demand to raise corporate taxes, have killed all electoral and legislative reform. Their zero-sum end-game buries progressivism with Biden’s program in a common grave, leaving Republican neofascism as last man standing.
When AOC stepped into the spotlight with her win in 2018, she connected with minority working class youth and white professional liberals. Standing beside young environmental activists against Pelosi, and her exposé of corporate legal bribery of legislators, went viral. In interviews she was refreshingly unrehearsed, self-reflective and transparent, attractive, articulating complex ideas to regular folk. She was a Tribune of the People with potential to cross over to the white working class.
The progressive movement’s attempt to transform the system from within, that began with Bernie Sanders 2016 run for President, stalled out with: union organizing and voting rights legislation killed; Sotomayor’s lonely dissents on the Supreme Court; Nina Turner’s and India Walton’s defeats; progressive urban prosecutors in San Francisco and Philadelphia struggling with rising crime. While the Democrats and media promote the illusion of hope, the death of reform now drives America toward fascism or socialism.
Movements build in waves—Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter lost their demands; Red State teachers strikes won pay raises and school reforms, since eroded by inflation and covid shut downs. Fight, fail, fight again. Organize and empower the working class. Replace capitalism with economic and political democracy—socialism.

Ukraine: Has-been powers tear a nation apart

1-17-22
Putin is not interested in occupying a hostile western Ukraine, and the U.S. couldn’t defend it. Both the U.S. and Russia are declining great powers, their military forces over-reliant on nuclear weapons, slap-fighting for dominance over Ukraine. The U.S. is the primary aggressor. NATO expansion by Clinton and Bush was designed to corner Russia into either accepting a subordinate position within the U.S. dominated bloc or face a hostile force alone. While acting in self-defense against NATO, Russia is an aggressor against Ukraine. As his temporary occupation of Georgia, seizure of Russian speaking majority Crimea, and meddling in the Donbass indicate, Putin’s goal is limited—gain geo-strategic advantage and create disorder in Ukraine.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian people could have formed a democratic government supported by both Ukrainian and Russian speakers. Asserting neutrality, signing non-aggression treaties, loans, investments, and military purchases from both the West and Russia would have turned its central location into a source of national strength. Instead, the so-called Orange Revolution of 2004 and overthrow of the legally elected President in 2013 were in fact NATO, EU, U.S., and IMF installations of corrupt, unpopular oligarchs, completely dependent on the West.
Biden’s sanctions on Russia aim to extend control over the Ukrainian regime, put a wedge between Europe and Russia on trade, and saber rattle for domestic consumption. As the West can’t stabilize Ukraine sufficient to absorb it, Putin will likely win this contest. Following on the heels of its Afghanistan War fiasco, Ukraine is another sign of the decay of U.S. imperialism.
Self-determination and democracy for Ukraine, Russia, the Donbass, and Crimea.

The coming crisis: fascism, reform, or revolution

1-10-22

The American crisis develops in ebbs and flows, inexorably toward financial collapse and deep recession, illegitimacy of the Federal government, environmental catastrophe, and civil unrest. Though this existential moment could come within the decade, it is not immediate. The economic ruling class has trillions of dollars in excess capital, and the economy is uneven recovery. The political ruling class is divided between the two parties, but firmly in power. Military and police power are secure.

The capitalists and politicians could allow higher wages, universal health care, green energy—they chose no reform at all. The Republican Party chose fascism as its sole path to power with its permanent minority base. The Democratic Party opted to be a non-factor. The banks and corporations, military, and Federal law enforcement watch to see whether fascism or the Constitutional republic is most stable. A Republican rigged election win could split the entire ruling class into camps.

Only a working class-minority-youth mass movement capable of disrupting business and government can stop fascism. It could force democratic and economic reforms out of the ruling class, or it could transform ideologically and organizationally to overthrow the capitalist system.

A crisis develops into a revolutionary situation when both: the ruling class can no longer rule by law, tradition, and its old strategies—such as when it’s deeply divided; and the masses refuse to accept being ruled in the old ways. Whether the working class succumbs to fascism, reforms the system, or overthrows it, depends on which ideology and organization earn the leadership role.

What Hitler taught us.

1-8-22

Hitler took power legally because German liberals, union leaders, Jews, intellectuals and artists, and Marxists, out of denial, intimidation, or conciliation, failed to demonstrate, strike, and unite to stop him.

Germany’s defeat in World War I humiliated its people and crippled its economy. Hitler, a charismatic orator, blamed Marxists and Jews, imagining a glorious, proud, united Germany fulfilling its destiny as the greatest country in the world. His promise of dictatorship, scapegoating, strict law and order, and mix of elections and paramilitary violence, won the increasingly desperate rural areas, middle class, and a sector of the working class.

Rise to power: After failing in an armed coup attempt in 1923, he turned the Nazi Party to elections. As fear and desperation radicalized Germany, the Nazis rose to 41% of the vote, communists challenged capitalism, and centrist parties shriveled. The Nationalist Party, hoping to control Hitler and steal his base, appointed him Chancellor, with the acquiescence of the political, corporate, and military ruling elite.

In power: Hitler consolidated one-man rule and crushed his enemies one-by-one. He seized legislative power; banned, then incarcerated, communists and trade unionists; formed the elite SS to infiltrate the military and government; purged the Nazi Party; attacked Jewish communities, then put them in concentration camps; won the military and corporate leaders with military spending to rebuild Germany; constructed a monolithic hyper-nationalist, racist, warrior culture through censorship, brain-washing youth, and terror.

It took him 12 years to rise to power, 6 months to establish a dictatorship, and 11 years to destroy Germany and Europe.

Organize the independent power of the working class, resist, and unite.

American white supremacy could end civilization

1-7-22

If the Republican Party takes power in ’24 and establishes permanent one-party rule, it will mark the victory of white supremacy in America. It will in turn cause a global wave of fascist power grabs and coups—India, Brazil, Poland, Ukraine, unstable countries throughout the Global South. If and when revolutions create popular rule, global warming will likely have reached the point of no return.

We are at a turning point in world history unlike any before it. Organize the independent power of the working class, youth, and minorities to resist Republican neofascism.

Democracy. What does democracy look like?

1-4-22

Democracy, rule by the people, is a form of government, of social relationships, and an ideology.

Participatory democracy—the people govern themselves through day-to-day decision-making on production, energy needs, the environment, law enforcement. What is now only for PTAs could be used in workplaces and communities.

Direct democracy—the people decide by voting on issues. A national referendum could decide issues like abortion rights and declaring war.

Representative democracy—the people elect representatives who make legislative and executive decisions. Representatives should be and remain working class.

Democratic organizations—committees, clubs, families, peer groups, respect each individual while working and resolving conflicts for the collective good. The loyalty and solidarity in embryonic form in working class black communities and Indian reservations, platoons of soldiers at war, in unions, could be extended throughout society.

Democratic world view, ideology, and culture—egalitarianism and human rights, justice for all, balance individuality with collective values and responsibilities.

The more actively engaged the people are in determining their own lives, the more democratic a society is. Today, Americans on both sides of the political divide feel helpless and disempowered by both government and business. Democracy exists only when we control the economy. Socialism, where the working class, the vast majority, own and manage production and governance, local and national, is true democracy.

Will we get dragged down the Democratic Party’s suicide mission?

1-3-22

The Republican Party could win Congress and the Presidency in free and fair elections, but just to be sure, it’s seizing control of dozens of red and swing state elections, transforming the ’24 Presidential election into a farcical Putinesque landslide. They inspire their MAGA base with their narrative of white supremacy, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and ultra-nationalism. Their grassroots movement takes over county election and school boards, spreading their stop-the-steal and racist anti-crt message. They block Democratic reforms, and run a propaganda machine with tentacles deep into America. The Republican Party is radical, dynamic, in synch top to bottom, lawless, violent, and heading toward power.

The Democratic Party is for “normalcy”—they stand for nothing, no hope of self-reform. Their politicians, with zero charisma and credibility, collaborate with Republicans on the neoliberal budget, then fail at economic reform. They exist in a bubble of corporate executives, media, celebrities, and the urban professional class. Their performance politics and internal bickering push their base to apathy, disillusionment, and disgust. When the Republicans take power, the Democratic politicians’ careers will end, their leaders possibly imprisoned, yet they’re paralyzed.

Continued focus on the Democrats and elections will only deepen apathy among youth, minorities, and progressives. Pressure the ruling class, corporate leaders and the military high command, to stop the Republican neofascist election seizure. Mobilize anger and fear into mass action, empowered through grassroots community and workplace organizations. A mass upsurge capable of shutting down business as usual could replace the Democratic Party with a multiracial working class party, stop fascism, and turn America toward radical change.

Fascism: end-stage of neoliberal capitalism

12-29-21

Neoliberal capitalism is free market absolutism, with government limited to police and military functions. Each corporation is geared solely to its short-term profits through increased productivity and decreased wages regardless of consequences. Neither corporations nor government place economic value on working peoples’ standard of living, health and education, the environment, or the future of civilization. As people are stripped of their livelihoods and self-respect, they rebel—government responds with lies and force.Neoliberalism was invented by U.S. economist Milton Friedman and first implemented in Chile in the 1970s—under the fascist Pinochet regime. The U.S. economic and political ruling classes during the Reagan/Clinton era, adapted neoliberalism for our Constitutional republic, took it global, and have been rationalizing and extending it to every corner of society.
U.S. banks and corporations hold trillions of dollars in excess wealth that could be spent on reforms. While Goldman Sachs expressed mild support for Build Back Better—a half-step reform that didn’t even restore the 2016 level business tax—the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable, the neoliberal central committees, argued it would disadvantage the U.S. in its existential competition with China. With zero tolerance for reform, neoliberal capitalism slouches toward its ideal state and dystopian reality—fascism.
America’s path is now splitting into fascism or socialist democracy. Hopefully, this will not occur with the ’24 election, because the fascist movement is far ahead of the socialist movement. But it could.

Has Trump become unChosen?

12-27-21

Trump’s pro-vaccine position contradicts what MAGA activists have been in the trenches fighting for, infecting their families, and dying for. Trump frequently reverses himself, but siding with Fauci against the devoted could be the betrayal that ends his reign as Chosen One.

Trump seized leadership of the Republican Party early in 2016 through tuning into what rural white conservative Christians wanted to hear and tossing back memes—“Build the wall,” “Lock her up.” Trump fed off his audience and mesmerized them, shaping them into the MAGA movement. “I am your voice,” “Only I can fix it.” A guy from Queens, he learned about guns, homophobia, the Bible. His charisma and powers of manipulation and domination made him infallible, spinning his personal fantasies—like anti-vaxxing—into political Scripture he destroyed careers and shaped new ones in His own image.

Trump’s loss of the popular vote to a joke like Sleepy Joe shook him to the core. He lost his mojo, contradicting his self-proclaimed victory by leaving office—he betrayed the MAGAs. No longer dominating the media, he’s the subject of talk. Once his echo chambers, Carlson and Cawthorne now lead “Stop the Steal.” Covid isolation was a hothouse for Trump’s zany narcissism, overwhelming his political instincts.

With the Democrats disengaged and paralyzed, the Republicans have the momentum and organization to take both Houses of Congress in ’22. Through rigging 32 State elections, they were on course to a certain ’24 Presidential landslide with 300+ Electoral College votes.

Now they must resuscitate Trump or find a new Leader. Because they bet the house on Him, the young, promising MAGAs rose through devotionals as acolytes, not leaders. To lose the Presidency in ’24, betraying the MAGAs once again, could be a fatal blow to the Republican Party.

Republican regime, 2025

12-26-21

If the Republican Party takes the Presidency in ’24, its goal is to hold power permanently with MAGA support by disassembling and transforming liberal, secular, multicultural, independent-thinking government and culture. Based on Red State laws and court cases, Republican think tank and politician proposals, the Republican Party will:

  • Manage national and state elections so they always win.
  • Purge and replace Federal judges, military officers, and officials with loyalists.
  • End food, housing, all programs for the poor.
  • Ban abortions nationwide, decriminalize sexual assault.
  • End civil rights protections. Institute a “meritocracy” with white male dominance.
  • End restrictions on gun carry and sales nationwide.
  • Replace school textbooks and noncompliant teachers.
  • National “right to work” law; end collective bargaining.
  • Legitimize discrimination against gays.
  • Intimidate news, entertainment, and social media companies into compliance with lawsuits, arrests, and violence.

The classic playbook for turning a republic to a dictatorship is: 1. grab power step by step from ruling class opponents in the military, government, and blue states—deconstruct Constitutional law, put loyalists in power. 2. Make shock-and-awe white supremacist, patriarchal, hyper-nationalist changes to society and culture to rally the base and crush resistance.

Once the Republican Party controls the military, Federal law enforcement, and blue cities and states that drive the U.S. economy, it can establish a terroristic dictatorship if it chooses. The time to stop dictatorship is before it takes power.

Organize a mass movement capable of shutting business down to force the economic, political, and military ruling classes to stand for rule of law, one person-one vote, and thwart dictatorship. Build the independent power of the working class to fight for socialist democracy.

Housing: Why It’s not a Wonderful Life

12-25-21

Both Jimmy Stewart’s realtor George Bailey who builds affordable homes for the working class and his nemesis local capitalist Mr. Potter were squeezed out by a Wall Street hedge fund that’s levelling Bedford Falls to build mansions and a world-class golf course. In my Berkeley neighborhood, apartment buildings with micro-unit starter homes for Gen Z techies are going up a few blocks from a tent city by the freeway. Winner-take-all neoliberal capitalism invests in homes for the professional-managerial class, top ten percenters, as middle- and working-class housing declines in number and quality and rises in price.  

George W. Bush urged Americans to fight Al Qaeda by buying a house, and the Wonderful Life fantasy made homeowners prey for exploitation, going into debt as home values rose. Mortgages that were commodified, financialized, packaged, and bought and sold on Wall Street skyrocketed into a speculative bubble. When the market collapsed, Obama saved Wall Street as 8 million main streeters lost their homes and life savings. As anger at Wall Street from right and left mounted, the Tea Party turned blame on minority homeowners, earning funding by the Koch brothers to become the Patriot Caucus in Congress. Wall Street is now buying up foreclosed homes to squeeze renters as low-risk income.

After World War II, Federal housing policies, banks, and real estate developers prevented blacks from buying homes while aiding whites for two generations. Now, homeowners and renters of any race, middle and working class, are being priced out and squeezed. The politicians even killed Build Back Better with its inadequate proposal for government-business cooperation on housing. No angel, no hero.

Under socialism, the working class owns the government, banks, and development companies, to build integrated, environmentally friendly, productive, workplace-housing communities.

Will the army support a Republican President from a rigged election?

12-23-21

Three retired generals warned in the Washington Post that another contested election could break down the military chain of command and initiate civil war. After the 2020 election, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the Constitution by undermining Trump’s illegal actions. Retired General John F. Kelly is an authoritarian Christian nationalist, and many active-duty officers and rank and file troops range from committed MAGAs to extremist militia members.

If the Republican Party wins the ’24 Presidential election by rigging it, it must get approval from the military high command. It will need a semblance of Constitutionality, at least passive acceptance by most Americans, stability and law and order. Once in power, the Republican Party can step-by-step take control of Federal elections and establish a dictatorship; then it will be too late for military Constitutionalists to stop it.

The Democrats’ and mainstream medias’ failure to stop the current Republican takeover of 29-32 State elections lulls voters into a false sense of security—they are complicit in the fix. An armed civil war requires two sides—far more likely is the uncontested Republican seizure of power.

When not only elections fail, but the Constitution and republic as a whole, turn to the democracy of the streets. We lack the capacity for civil war, but we can organize against the Republican election fix and push through Democratic Party and media mis-leadership. In crises throughout history, the people have proven to be the final arbiters of power. Build a movement at work, in communities, and online as an independent force. By 2024, demonstrate and strike to force the political and military ruling class to hold free and fair elections.

Neoliberalism: Biden or Trump, why business always wins

12-19-21

Neoliberalism is the contemporary form of capitalism where corporations value short-term profits exclusively. Ruthless, asymmetric competition concentrates wealth and power in the developed nations and mega-corporations, driving down wages and deconstructing social services in the developed world, and stripping the economies of developing nations and rural areas. Governments fund the capitalist’s projects and protect them from systemic failure.

Governments minimalize rules that reduce profits. Gig and online individualized labor, drug and human trafficking, environmental devastation, mass migration are endemic to neoliberalism. Finance capital shifts investment from productive enterprises and research and development to the more profitable unproductive, high-risk speculation with others’ money, anti-productive predatory capitalism, and rampant corruption.

Following World War II, the dominant U.S. capitalist class confronted an expanding socialist bloc headed by the Soviet Union. It formed the “free world,” rebuilding Western European capitalism, waging the Cold War. Ruthless exploitation, political domination, and wars of intervention extracted super-profits from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, funding a middle-class lifestyle for white American industrial workers.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the U.S. capitalists experienced falling profits from its aging technology and rising competition from Europe, Japan, and the Third World, such as OPEC. China and Russia turning to capitalism created a single world market. Under Reagan and Clinton, capitalism evolved neoliberalism, and the world fell into step. Now neoliberals refuse to accept higher taxes or curb fossil fuels because it weakens them in relation to the rising power, China.

Three global existential crises—climate change, the growing danger of global warfare, the extreme concentration of economic and political power, threaten human civilization. They are systemic to neoliberal capitalism—it’s incapable of reform.

To stop the Republican drive for dictatorial power, organize to fight neoliberalism, while moving to end exploitation and colonialism, create egalitarian, democratic governance, and produce for human needs in harmony with the natural world.

Republican neofascism

The Republican Party was a corporate dominated, conservate mainstream party that Trump reoriented to neofascism.

The Party has coalesced around 4 basic principles: white supremacy, authoritarianism, patriarchy, and ultranationalism. As extreme variants of historical American exceptionalism—America as the unique and greatest country—they speak to the MAGA’s worst instincts.

They evolved a three-pronged strategy: seize control of the election process in 32 states quasi-legally to rig them; promote white-male-national supremacist culture in Congress, the media and social media, and public schools; use MAGA activist and white militia violence to intimidate and demoralize opponents.

Trump’s low profile now made Republicanism a flexible conglomeration of ideas from Tucker Carlson, Madison Cawthorn, think tanks like the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, and Trump. Billionaires Charles Koch, Rebecca Mercer, the Devos/Prince family, Peter Thiel, and corporations like AT&T provide funding.

Their neofascist transformation is incomplete and contradictory. The Republican Party is not centralized to handle major civil conflict. Trump lacks vision, strategy, and organizing skills. Neoliberal politicians like McConnell oppose populist programs to help the MAGAs. Trump is an instinctive isolationist, while Republican politicians are interventionist.

The Republican Party is on course to roll over the self-destructing Democrats and win or steal the ’24 Presidential election and make itself the permanent ruling party. Only a grassroots movement in workplaces and communities can stop the Republican neofascist drive for power.

It’s bigger than Roe

12-9-21

Republican Party authoritarianism is ideologically Christian patriarchy. Once in power, it could ban abortion nationwide; at minimum it will legitimize male dominance in families, workplaces, and government. Expand the struggle for women’s rights:

  • Equal pay for equal work. Equal pay for comparable work—same pay for predominantly female jobs, such as domestic and preschool work, as comparably skilled predominantly male jobs, like construction laborer and computer tech. Equality for predominantly minority work, such as health aide and hotel maid.
  • Paid maternity and family leave; sick pay.
  • Unionize all work, including contract and online work.
  • Public schools with breakfast and lunch, afterschool care, nurses and counselors.
  • Empower women’s organizations on domestic abuse, rape, sex work, and child abuse.
  • Universal women’s health care, including abortion rights.
  • Publicly funded housing for the middle, working class, and poor
  • Living wage–$25 per hour minimum.

Abortion has dropped from a right to a privilege, unavailable to many working class and minority women in rural areas. The second wave feminist movement failed to organize rural white and urban minority working class women, instead allying with the Democratic Party and relying on the courts. The white professional class 4th wave feminists, who took over #Metoo and the Women’s March from minority working class organizers, have no strategy for Republican authoritarian patriarchy.

With the nuclear family as the basic unit of capitalist consumption and child-raising and women held responsible, family issues are working women’s issues. Under socialism, women have the option of making child-raising and housework community responsibilities.

Build a multicultural working-class women’s movement against patriarchy, economic exploitation, white supremacy, and authoritarianism.

Climate change

12-8-21

To stop global warming, reorganize society, empowering people to construct an economy in balance with the natural world:

  • Communities of mixed high-density housing and clean industrial and service production, autonomous in food, construction, transportation, renewable energy, and culture, as the basic unit of global society.
  • Integration of communities into forests, shorelines, rivers to create dynamic and stable resource exchange.
  • Global free movement of goods, services, ideas, culture, and people through a network of communities, in accord with human rights, local needs, and environmental habitats.
  • Community participatory democracies to resolve conflicts and liberate human creativity and labor power to utilize technology to benefit people and nature.
  • Small and medium size family and cooperative farms, mixed cropping with grains, fruits and vegetables, livestock, woodlands, ponds. Localized industrial production. Recycling of organic material, detoxification and reuse of chemicals and minerals.
  • Use creativity and labor power collectively to solve environmental problems
  • Liberate women and provide basic income to reduce population and economic growth.

Capitalism prioritizes short-term profit over human needs and the environment, enriching the l1 percenters. People are valued only for labor and consumption, and nature for resource extraction. Capitalism won’t reform itself by using existing technology to build and retrofit energy efficient homes, recycle waste, clean factories, green cities, and restore habitats. By the time technocratic solutions are more profitable than fossil fuels, it will be too late.

Make what’s necessary possible. Civilization depends on it.

Rittenhouse and Republican vigilantism.

12-6-21

The Republican hero worship of Rittenhouse is purposed to inspire vigilantism, and legitimize intimidation and threats against protesters and citizens.

  • Oklahoma decriminalized vehicular assault on protesters.
  • The Governor of Missouri pardoned the McCloskeys for waving guns at peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrators.
  • Politicians and commentators call Trump inspired Jan. 6th violence patriotic.
  • A Federal Judge declared Wyoming’s campaign-free buffer zone around polling stations unconstitutional. Next election, Republican politicians and election boards could empower armed right-wing militias to intimidate voters at minority polling stations.
  • Texas put out a $10k contract for lawsuits against abortion providers. Legal vigilantism through crippling lawsuits is a potential weapon against grassroots organizations, journalists, and opposition politicians.
  • The Supreme Court is expected to overturn New York’s concealed weapons carry law, legitimizing unrestricted gun carry in Blue states. It could end gun control restrictions nationwide, empowering Rittenhouse type killings.

The Republican Party strategy is to inspire rightwing vigilantism, while avoiding legal responsibility. A Klan tactic in the Jim Crow South, repeated acts of terror can normalize the breakdown of rule of law, prepping people for authoritarian rule. The Democratic Party’s inability to stop or even put up a fight against legalized vigilantism makes them an obstacle. 

Organize in workplaces and communities to defend our rights and stop the Republican drive for one-party rule.

No Republican One-Party Rule

October 23, 2021

With the 2024 election, the Republican Party plans to control the Presidency, Congress, the Supreme Court, and 26-29 State governments, giving it the power to implement permanent one-party rule. Republican operatives have taken control of the entire voting process in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. Voter roll purges, obstacles to registering, white supremacist militia intimidation of minority voters, and invalidating ballots will slash Democratic voters by millions, ensuring Republican wins in ‘22 and ‘24. The Michigan Republican State Legislature is prepared to overturn a Democratic popular vote win and choose Republican Electors, pushing their Presidential candidate over 270 to victory.

While no Republican has publicly discussed either stealing the election or one-party rule, Republican politicians, think tanks, state election officials, armed militias, and MAGA voters coalesce around the belief that white, Christian rural voters are the true America, while minorities, youth, urban liberals, and Democrats threaten America and can’t be allowed to vote or rule.

The Democratic Party leadership failed to act on Kemp’s theft of the 2018 gubernatorial Georgia election from Stacy Abrams. Facing escalating Republican unconstitutional laws, law-breaking, and incitements to violence, the Democrats have no strategy to use their legislative power, Federal Law enforcement and the Courts, or mobilize their base. Their moral cowardice that will lead inexorably to their permanent irrelevance.

The fix in the 2022 Congressional elections, especially against the well-funded and popular Dem. Sen. Warnock of Georgia, will be blatant. That’s when we must react.

#NoRepublican1PartyRule

What’s wrong with the Democrats?

October 24, 2021

Joe Manchin upholds the Bill Clinton/Obama/Pelosi pay-go, no corporate taxation Democratic Party program, while Biden attempts a left turn. A career political hack, Biden fails to arouse the base to transform his Party the way Trump did. If he fails to pass reconciliation, voting rights, and the workers’ rights bills, the Democrats will likely lose Congress in 2022 even in a fair election, and Republican control of all 3 branches of the Federal government in ‘24.

The Democratic Party uses performance politics in both defeats and victories—the two impeachments, Juneteenth holiday, and impotent rhetoric supporting abortion rights. It’s continued reliance on law suits, corporate money, the shrinking local Party machines, celebrity endorsements, mainstream media support, and voter registration drives in campaigns and legislating brings knives to an AR15 fight.

Politicians from both Parties are politically, economically, and socially entwined with the neoliberal corporate and Wall Street elite, but the Republican Party unites and energizes its base around right-wing cultural issues, while Democrats seek an impossible economic balance between the capitalists and the people.

The Party’s division and paralysis reflects the absence of a mass movement for radical reform in America today. The labor movement for industrial unions during the Great Depression, with Communist Party members as key organizers, gave Roosevelt a mandate for the New Deal. The Civil Rights movement pushed Lyndon Johnson and the Supreme Court to end legal segregation and enact anti-poverty programs. Today, the undercurrent of frustration, fear, and anger at the steady destruction of the standard of living of the masses must be transformed into a radical movement, bypassing the Democrats, to defend the Republic and redistribute wealth through economic transformation, before the Republican Party seizes absolute power in 2024.

#NoConstitutionalCoup

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Indict Trump for election fraud

10-25-21

Why doesn’t Attorney General Garland do his job, defend rule of law, and mitigate future violations of the Constitution by indicting Trump for—paraphrasing Federal election law—knowingly defrauding the residents of Georgia of a fair and impartial election process, in the 2020 Presidential election? The overwhelming evidence from documents and Trump’s own and witness statements between Election Night and January 6th prove Trump’s intent to reverse not only the Georgia results but the entire 2020 election. The most effective action the Department of Justice can take to stop the Republican rigging of the 2024 Presidential election is to charge, convict, and imprison Trump for election fraud.

Even if Trump’s almost certain conviction in District Court was overturned by the Supreme Court, the process would mobilize the Democratic base, expose Republican lawlessness, and scare Republican operatives about interfering with future elections.

Rep. Schiff wants an indictment, but the rest of the Democratic leadership, mainstream media, and Constitutional scholars refuse to even discuss imprisoning Trump. They‘re terrified of the multipronged counterattack Republican politicians, right-wing media, the MAGAs, and white supremacist militias are lusting for. Isolated from their base, losing every fight with the Republicans, mired in bickering and performance politics, the Democratic Party is paralyzed and self-destructing.

Only the people can pressure the Feds to defend the Republic and take to the streets to fight white supremacist, authoritarian rule.

#NoRepublican1PartyRule

#NoConstitutionalCoup

#DemocracyoftheStreets!

Why didn’t Trump seize the ’20 election?

10-31-21

Trump was cocksure he’d win in ’20, so losing to a doddering hack like Biden rendered him limp. For over a week after Election Day, the Greatest President of All Time, feeling rejected and mojoless, succumbed to Barr, advisers, and lawyers whispering he lost. Though he screamed rigged election, he failed to demand Republican State Legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin reverse the popular vote and choose Trump Electors for the 270+ victory. Without their Leader to deliver them from Babylon, the Republicans dicked around, allowing Biden to win the Electoral college, the Capitol seizure fell flat, and Pence, the Republican Senate, and Supreme Court certified the win.

Trump and the Republicans learned from those mistakes and are preparing years in advance to seize the ’24 election and make Trump President for Life.

Why do the MAGAs believe Trump’s lies?

11-1-21

The Make America Great Agains, small town, white Christians in the main, see their way of life, traditionalist beliefs, their families, communities, and futures threatened by rapid economic and cultural change. Neoliberal capitalism outsourced their manufacturing jobs, consolidated their farms and turned them into agribusiness, replaced their stores with Walmart and Amazon, shipped their profits to Wall Street, foreclosed on their homes, vacuumed their most ambitious kids to cities and addicted many of the remaining. Their stories were no longer told by Hollywood and mainstream media. Transformed from princes to frogs, they were searching desperately for a way out when Trump rode down his escalator.

Trump said aloud what they already sensed—they were being displaced by dark-skin immigrants and minorities on the government teat, feminists and gays, the liberal elite and media, Federal bureaucrats and scientists—the whole Democratic Party coalition. Trump is a fantasist who builds an alternative reality where he alone protects the MAGAs from violent Black Lives Matter protesters, cancer-causing wind turbines, Fauci’s emasculating masks. He believes his own lies, making him an effective story-teller. His narcissistic refusal to apologize and insecure diatribes against his enemies mirror the MAGAs own racial, class, and gender anxieties. They see him as King Cyrus delivering the Chosen People from the Democratic Babylon.

The Red State teacher wildcat strikes in 2018 and current John Deere and Nabisco strikes are progressive actions that will hopefully inspire others. The best thing the white working class can do for minorities, women, gays, and for themselves, is to fight for their real economic interests instead of their perceived racial and gender fears.

Virginia election: dying gasp of the Democratic Party

11-5-21

The Democratic candidate for governor in Virginia couldn’t win a free and fair election against a racist Republican pretending to support education. Now the Republicans can rig Virginia elections to go with Arizona and Georgia, giving the ’24 Republican candidate for President 272 Electoral College votes and the win. The Democratic Party stands for nothing, is entangled with and dependent on corporate interests, pushing incrementalism since Bill Clinton, Hillary’s I’m-not-Trump strategy, disconnected from its core base of youth and minorities and hated by white workers, nothing left but hack politicians backed by mainstream media. With no alternative, some still cling to the Democratic Party like DiCaprio’s Jack to the floating door as the Titanic sinks, but not enough to win.

Pressure from below generates reform—the labor movement made the New Deal, the civil rights movement and urban riots made Medicare. Only the people acting through the democracy of protests and strikes can force the economic and political ruling classes to pass laws for the people and stop the Republicans from seizing the Federal government in ’24.

Police violence is official policy.

11-9-21

George Floyd passed a counterfeit $20 bill, making him a suspect in a minor case of fraud. As they couldn’t determine intent—Floyd may have been the victim of fraud, not the perpetrator—the police at the scene could have questioned and released him—treating him like a white man; then sent the matter to the Minneapolis police department’s white collar crimes unit for investigation and, if they identify a major counterfeiting ring, referral to the U.S. Secret Service. Instead, Derek Chauvin first arrested, then violently subdued the panicking, Floyd. As with Philando Castile and Elijah McClain, Floyd’s death was taped, exposing the criminalization and murder of a regular guy, necessitating the system revoke Chauvin’s blue immunity and scapegoat him for the greater good. Standard police procedure leaves handling minor infractions or “suspicious activity,” like traffic violations and talking with friends in public, to the discretion of the officer, who is trained to use force at the slightest sign of resistance. Not only racist sociopaths like Chauvin are empowered, the typical cop, trained to be hyper-alert and confrontational, will violate rights to protect himself and the system.Police violence is not caused by bad cops, and can’t be cured by police procedural changes like banning chokeholds, mandating body cams, or ending no-knock warrants. The police function to protect property and power over people. Historically, American authorities responded to violent crime, riots, and “vagrancy” in the black community by one means—brutal suppression. This evolved, modernized, and “reformed” into using the criminal justice system, from police to prisons and courts, to isolate and control the black community. Protected and incentivized by moral hazard, the President, Congress, and Supreme Court write laws that police, as frontline troops, enforce with impunity. This violent, racist criminal justice system ignores 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure, denies human rights, and threatens black lives.

How the Democrats lost the vaccine war

11-12-21

From the beginning of the pandemic, both political parties put the full burden of the economic, health, and schooling crisis on workers and their families. No one, not even Congressional and media progressives, proposed and fought to: 1. mandate that companies pay workers’ wages during the recession; 2. provide for the poor and small businesses; and 3. nationalize health care to provide free treatment throughout the pandemic; 4. assist schools in upgrading. As a result, the capitalist class increased their wealth by $1.8 trillion, as the people suffered lost wages, threats of eviction, closed schools, sickness, and death.

Initially flip-flopping on the covid danger, as Trump saw the recession and health crisis threaten his authority, he ripped off his mask, derided shut-downs, and once out of office, denounced vaccines. Trump played MAGA fear and confusion into rage against scientists, liberals, and the Federal government. Instigated by Republican Party think tanks and funding, the MAGAs merged their mask phobia, anger at school shutdowns, and fear of critical race theory into attacks on school boards and educators.

As the Democrats were right about vaccines and masks, you’d think they’d win this fight. But their neoliberal incrementalism locked them into a doom-and-gloom, no-solutions box. They feebly attempted to consolidate their base by misdirecting liberals against anti-vaxxers. America will never reach vaccine herd immunity. As with climate change and election integrity, the Democrats betrayed and lost the war for truth.

If we have to vote for a third limp-noodle Democrat in ’24 to slow the Republican power grab, remember—the Democratic Party utterly failed to defend minorities, youth, liberals, the working class, and the truth against the rising Republican neo-fascist tide.

WHAT WILL REPUBLICAN ONE-PARTY RULE LOOK LIKE?

11-17-21

Republican commentators, MAGAs, militias, think tanks, and Trump are united on a foundational belief—the Democratic Party and its minority, liberal, media, women, and LGBTQ support, are unamerican and pose an existential threat to traditional white Christian values and all that’s good about America. They’ve resolved to take power by any means and never again voluntarily yield it. Whether the Republican Party wins in fair elections or steals the Presidency and Congress, it must end paralyzing conflict and stabilize America to win acceptance from America’s powerbrokers—the military high command, FBI, Wall Street, corporations. Half the country, including factions in state and federal government, oppose it. To avoid civil break-down and losing control, the Party will form an authoritarian, repressive regime.ONE-PARTY RULE—replace rule of law with Presidential power. Manage elections so Republicans can’t lose.Declare a threat to national security and a state of emergency.Replace the Federal loyalty oath to the Constitution with one to the President, the Secret Service with a loyal armed security unit. Purge disloyal factions from the Republican Party and government.Launch media propaganda, rallies, military displays, armed white supremacist actions.Use shock and awe quasi-legal action, threats, MAGA militance, targeted arrests, surgical violence, to silence opposing politicians, media, activists. DICTATORSHIP—An economic recession, foreign war, failed mass resistance, or arbitrary Presidential decision leads to: mass arrests and violence; a paper-constitution dictatorship. Dispatch the army, Federalized National Guards, and white supremacist militias to occupy Democratic states and cities, seize media and social media, incarcerate opponents, establish armed peace.To continue what we’re doing—no mass protests or prominent anti-fascist organizing—will absolutely lead to one-party, long-term Republican rule. A broad, multiracial grassroots alliance leading protests and strikes in advance of the ’24 election can force the American ruling elite to abort the Republican power grab before it’s too late.


Comments and criticisms welcome.

Inflation is a rip-off of American workers and consumers.

11-23-21

During the pandemic, the Federal Reserve Bank bought $3 trillion of corporate bonds in exchange for cash, pumping cash into stock and bond markets, the parasitic rentier—unproductive, financial industry. The Fed didn’t offer to buy your credit card debt, student loan, or mortgage for cash, nor did the capitalists or government invest in building working-class housing, growing vegetables and chickens, daycare and transportation—our economy, the production and consumption of goods and services.

The increase in the money supply based on little increase in production causes prices to rise and the dollar to deflate. Why should investors put their money into meeting our basic needs when they could get 17% return on stocks and bonds during the covid recession? The concentration of wealth and political power in the capitalist class leads to investment in production being replaced by speculative investment, money chasing money.

Under socialism, working people own the factories, services, transportation, communication, and land, recycling profit back into producing the goods and services we need. Unionize and fight the capitalists not only for wages and working conditions, but to empower workers for a life with dignity.

Reform is dead in America

11-28-21

Biden’s proposed Build Back Better, voting rights, and union rights legislation passed intact were the minimum requirement to strengthen the people enough to defend the Constitution. Long term stability for the republic requires Constitutional amendments to democratize the Supreme Court, Electoral College, and Senate, and end corporate financing of elections and legislation. Instead, the Republican Party is on course to roll over the Democrats, block all legislation, then, fairly or unfairly, take Congress in ‘22, the Presidency in ’24. It can then manage elections for long-term, right-wing extremist, one-party rule.

The Republican Party has powerful politicians, billionaires and thinktanks, a mobilized MAGA base, and goals and strategy. The Democratic Party leadership is politically and morally compromised, while the true reformists, from Bernie Sanders and AOC to grassroots union, African-American, socialist, and environmentalist organizations, are marginalized and in separate streams.

The only remaining possibility for reform is for us to build a working class/minority/youth movement powerful enough to prevent the Republicans from seizing power in ’24, and force major reforms to the political and economic system. The labor movement of the early ‘30s, and black liberation and student-antiwar movements of the late ‘60s, went 0 to 60 in a few years to advance American society and government. If we do nothing or depend on the Democrats, America as a republic is coming to an ugly end.

The looming debt criss.

11-29-21

Global debt is over 350% of global gross domestic product. In the U.S., bank, corporate, government, and consumer—credit card, mortgage, and student debt, are higher than ever. Much of this debt is imaginary money, never fully paid off, with debtors expected to pay interest and principal in perpetuity. The narrow base of actual production supporting towering debt can tip if a large bank or medium size government fails to pay creditors, causing a falling dominos system collapse.

When investments lose their value to pennies on the dollar, creditors demand payment of their loss of imaginary money by extracting real money from worker-debtor-taxpayers. Following the ’08 financial collapse, more than 8 million homes were foreclosed; Puerto Rico closed schools, hospitals, and sold off public utilities. Creditors who make bad loans, many of them predatory, should go bankrupt to clear bad debt and renew the financial system. Instead, Obama and Congress used taxpayer and Federal Reserve money to bail out the banks, keeping bad debt alive. The capitalists have the economic, political, and military power to make us pay for their systemic failures.

Financial crises, dating back to the 1600s, are inherent to capitalism. While workers produce goods and services, the capitalists extract profit they use to make even more money, often through speculation or war, rather than reinvesting in production or wages.

The next financial collapse will send production and trade tumbling, currency devaluation and inflation—global economic stagnation with no reserve of wealth to jump-start production. The resulting food security and refugee crisis, environmental stresses, international and civil conflicts, could endanger human civilization.   

In a socialist system, workers own all production facilities and make decisions from workplace to government level. There are no contradictions between production, consumption, and investment, so no crises. With no exploitation, conflicts are resolvable. Economic and political reform are dead; socialism is the only solution.

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