Government's of nations especially US, are giving scant respect to democratic norms, let alone constitution. The USA rulers have been wary of their own people who mostly do not approve of any dissenting voice. The white supremacists in the administration including trump have suppressed black and colored voices demanding equality and end to racism. They have found support from technology and Facebook has assisted in mobilising opinion. Now, the trump administration wants to use the same ' technology' in getting the dissenters to book. The justice department seeking the accounts and information in this context is to eradicate growing opposition to Trump by hook or by crook
It is difficult to add anything useful to this excellent and hard-hitting article. The federal response to Hurricane Harvey that hit one of the key reactionary regions,Texas, and that to Hurricane Irma that hit the somewhat less reliably reactionary state of Florida, stand in stark contrast to the response to Hurricane Maria. Puerto Rico, as the reactionaries are keenly aware, does not have any electoral votes in Presidential elections nor does it have any representation in Congress. Of course the statehood issue was voted on 4 times in the recent history of Puerto Rico and generally failed by a small margin.
Trump's Criminal Capitalist Regime that, like those before it, would quickly assemble aircraft carriers, amphibious assault carriers, and huge flocks of helicopters, and transport aircraft, for attacks on foreign lands, was not concerned enough about Puerto Rico to do any advanced logistical planning or mobilization to respond to the hurricane. Trump himself, was much more interested in whipping up fascists and reactionaries, with tweets and speeches about the NFL player's actions during the playing of the national anthem than he was in making any executive decisions about events in Puerto Rico. It is also ironic that the outrageous excesses of some of his Cabinet official's travel habits came to a head at the same time. Tom Price should be jailed and should cough up the entire million dollars he expended; and the criminal "Foreclosure King' Steven Mnuchin (who profited by buying up a California bank during the financial crisis, and speeded up the pace, and increased the number of people forced from their homes) had the bad taste to use a government plane to fly to Fort Knox to view the eclipse. All the while standing above all the gold and "feeling the gold's vibrations" while his sickening wife-to-be posted pictures of herself posing with various types of expensive designer clothes and accessories. These people are the worst advertisement Capitalism could find, they are true to the greedy and deadly spirit of that sick socioeconomic system of exploitation and death.
A businessman Trump, will always look at ' profitable' side of the problem. Thus, while Puerto Rico is reeling under the impact of hurricane, and people are suffering due to lack of basic necessities, his ranting of wall street and debt is not very surprising. The people should be aware of the perils of capitalism with trump and his policies as prime example. As looking for help from the government is a sheet waste of time, activists of the working class and ordinary people who value humanity above all petty things must rush supplies of medicines and food to the needy ones in the devasted land and help people rebuild their lives
This could be the modern equivalent of the 1905 "Bloody Sunday" event that happened in Russia, if Puerto Ricans start dying en-mass from disease, and injury, and exposure to elements, starvation, and criminal indifference by their betters.....excuse me.....leaders there and in Washington. This can be the cathartic process that brings socialism and even full blown communism to that island.
I do wonder if a stock market collapse will occur by the end of this year to put a wrench in all of this? Or if this tax reform does make it to the President's desk before Christmas there is reason to believe it will help to sustain the rally and push the bubble further down the road.
Trump and Bannon represent a two-pronged attack to handle the inevitable collapse of capitalism. By pushing and pushing to accelerate a destabilization of society and push economic disparity as fast as they can, they are trying to force a crisis as fast as they can. Understanding that the US public has a long way to go to gain any sort of Marxist perspective with which to base a truly progressive movement on, Bannon is trying to realize his vision of "The Fourth Turning" by forcing a collapse earlier than it might have happened without this two-pronged attack.
US oligarchs suffer from an extreme form of social/cultural psychosis. On the one hand the US is confronting a systemic, indeed seismic shift of geostrategic & economic power to China & the Brics. The petroyaun is on the rise, as nations slowly dedollarise generally. The US is riddled with infrastructure decay, debt, poverty & social alienation. So naturally it's response must be to double down on all these negatives with a plethora of tax cuts for the 1%. Overweening greed & lust for power amounting to insanity are simply "baked into" the nature of capitalism & imperialism.
I hail Mr. Grey for tackling this vital question head on. His article should not be the end of an effort by the Left in general and WSWS in particular to address this issue, but merely the beginning. I do think it is true that horrible and depressing periods, like the one we are mired in at this time, always precede periods of leftist renewal and struggle. Unfortunately, for those of us in the U.S., I would expect the next stage of a mass struggle to wrest a decent life from the capitalists would take place in Asia, primarily in China.
In the immediate moment the Capitalists, and their right-wing political organs, always have the upper hand during times of economic distress and decline. That is until the suffering and crisis becomes actually unbearable. Would the Russian Revolution have taken place if the dim witted Czar had not led Russia into WW 1? I don't think so, certainly not in the acute manner that it did. In the developed countries working classes fought for gradual improvements and achieved the best living standards seen in human history; these are now under dire threat in much of the West.
The entire West, particularly Europe and North America are enmeshed in endless crises and wars. Living standards have been falling for 40 years in the U.S. and maybe half that in Europe. The middle classes of the developed Western countries largely did the responsible thing and quit having large families. The response on the part of capital was to bring in some sort of immigrants and push wages down. The actual history of the circumstances surrounding the introduction of these people, and other factors that play into the unfavorable changes that befell working people, in the U.S. and Europe, are generally not known to many working people. What they see are some clannish swarthy newcomers who often receive some sort of public help; while the traditional communities and social order of the native white populations are savaged. The identity politics of multiculturalism proffered by the left/liberals certainly does not come up to explaining what is happening, and any sort of public assistance for native working people to address their valid complaints is nearly nonexistent. It is easy to say that working people should have an international outlook with solidarity and fraternal relations with working people from other parts of the world. The reality of that is much uglier.
Hopefully we will see another upwelling of popular resistance and struggle, like those from the 1930s and 1940s, or even from the Civil Rights Struggles and the Anti-War Movement. It will be fed by the demands of young people; and it is notable that Socialism is more popular among Americans under 30 than is Capitalism.
It seems to me that by and large the actually multicolored so called "white" working class in America as well as perhaps elsewhere in the Western world have become cheap and easy targets for the US ruling class and its associated partners in class crime to off-load all their social guilt onto for the inability of this anti-social system to provide jobs and a reasonable level of prosperity for all.
Hitler and his buddy Henry Ford had the so-called "International Jew" (the actual title of Henry Ford's infamous book) to carry the blame for the outrages of the system that made them both millionaires ( Ford, an automobile manufacturer, Hitler, the publisher of what became the largest daily circulation news rag of the far right in Germany during the inter-war period much analogous to the Fox News Syndicate of our own era in the US and UK).
I'ts these social and political forces on the far right today that are well positioned to benefit from the discontent of the so-called "white" working class at being forced to bear the burden of guilt (i.e. the much ballyhooed so called "white skin privilege") that has been heaped upon them by what they have been socially conditioned to believe is the left. As the SEP/wsws.org has consistently pointed out since its inception in 1998, this so called "left" that exists today in America and the geo-strategically important parts of Europe and the Far East, is a phony left that serve a critical role on behalf of US & global capitalism in terms of misdirecting and deflecting the public's attention from class based issues onto an increasingly racialist perspective along with new forms of gender chauvinism never seen before at any other time in previous world history.
The result is thus highly predictable: a internationally based working class that is hard pressed to makes sense out of the daily facts of life that it has been presented with and thus ever in search of increasingly sensationalist explanations for everything from A to Z as a way to anesthetize themselves from the inevitable psychological pain and horror they incur as a completely new sort of beast of burden, i.e. the social and political scapegoats of the capitalist mafias who seek total control over the planet, its people, its resources, and its nonexistent future who care not a whit or the proverbial rat's behind for the niceties of life that many just foolishly accepted as something bequeathed by an imaginary "Almighty" who supposedly looks after us all as opposed to devours us all in the never-ending infernal bloodbaths called wars and all the other milder forms of horror associated with that class of blood-suckers that we correctly label the capitalist class
