Fight Fascism and Corruption: Take Action this Week
Charlie Cooper
A Brilliant Political Message
Corbin Trent is a progressive activist who helped elect AOC, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman and others to Congress. I highly recommend his Substack publication “America’s Undoing,” which hits two main themes: deindustrialization and the entanglement of mainstream Democratic leadership with big money donors who exploit the rest of us. In his latest post, he analyzes why people voted for Trump and what can be done about it.
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We must do more to defeat Trump fascism
So far, the anti-fascist movement has been characterized by pressure on Congress from voters, hundreds of lawsuits filed in federal courts, the Tesla takedown and other efforts aimed at specific corporations, anti-ICE street actions, and large monthly rallies across the nation. The public and the Democrats in Congress put up a fight against the horrendous budget bill, but we lost. Trump and his cronies want to dismantle the U.S. government – to weaken science, public health, and even weather forecasting – because it makes it easier for them to plunder and extract value from the working class. To paraphrase Robert Reich, the government can now no longer protect us from real hazards such as hurricanes because it is building its anti-immigrant armed police force to further divide the working class.
Cracks in the Trump coalition are beginning to form. He is famously quarreling with Elon Musk while corporate and Wall Street types are apprehensive about his scatter-shot trade moves. And Trump recently had a tantrum in which he called Leonard Leo, the author and paymaster of the far-right takeover of the Supreme Court, a “sleazebag” and “unpatriotic.”
Each of us must find ways to participate in this struggle (see immediate options below), and we must avoid cooperating with the unconstitutional, illegal, and evil initiatives Trump is perpetrating. Watch Hector Rivera’s rallying cry to Angelenos organizing resistance to ICE. (It starts at 6:35 of the video and lasts about 1:45.)
Lawsuits are essential, but there is a particular danger that the Supreme Court will drastically and catastrophically weaken the Constitution by capitulating. They issued another “temporary” order on mass firings yesterday that will cause long-term damage. I have proposed that one essential action by our resistance forces would be a massive rally at the Supreme Court. Please read the proposal, and, if you agree, discuss it with your associates.
Because fascism is, in essence, an alliance between right-wing, racist political forces and major corporations, we must find ways to pressure the corporate world. It will take a lot more organizing to have an impact in this realm.
Musk’s New political party
Musk wants to form a political party to win 2 or 3 Senate seats and 8-10 House seats to control key votes on budget, energy, and education issues. He espouses a fictional mainstream austerity view on the budget. “The U.S. government is broke.” While Trump is destroying many aspects of government as Musk desires, it’s not enough from Musk’s point of view. Musk has absolutely no empathy with working people. A party in his image would be even crueler.
The main problem in the U.S. is not the public debt. The main problem is that so much of the federal budget is unproductive:
Gargantuan military waste: The post 9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq plus other “anti-terror” campaigns cost $8 trillion! The U.S. also maintains 700+ foreign military bases while no other nation has more than 13. Military weapons, including nuclear arms, are a major source of waste, fraud, and corruption.
About $2 trillion in federal health care spending is dumped into a counterproductive mess of a health system that wastes in excess of $1.7 Trillion per year. While cuts to Medicare and Medicaid are grossly unfair, we should not ignore that our overall health system is extremely wasteful.
Recent history has proven that orthodox economics explanations of government debt (like what many of us were taught in Econ 101) is just plain wrong. Their predictions of inflation have not been borne out. Modern Monetary Theory proponents Stephanie Kelton and L. Randall Wray have published primers.
Here is a sharp analysis of the obstacles Musk would face if he tries to establish a new political party.
Our Dilemma
Suppose we successfully defeat Fascism and Corruption as I call for in this newsletter. Our species would still face dire global threats:
Rampant inequality and exploitation of working classes in much of the world and the attendant despair.
Climate change.
War.
Ever-growing migration of people whose lives are upended by the above.
And, on top of all this, an incipient AI industry that could do great harm in the hands of greedy monopolists like Elon Musk and other tech bros. (Watch Karen Hao of MIT, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic explain AI threats.)
Biden was a president who made genuine and somewhat successful efforts to find solutions to the top two bullets by combating monopoly, promoting unionism, and moving toward a sustainable energy future. But other aspects of his presidency were comically and tragically deficient - built on a web of lies about U.S. moral leadership in the world and about Biden’s mental faculties. Biden continued to try to govern when he was mentally disabled, and he could not explain his pro-labor actions to voters. Most other Democratic Party leaders were and are so focused on the needs and demands of their big campaign funders that they have little sense of the public mood.
Our political system in the U.S. has become mainly a mechanism to maintain and heighten inequality. Despite a popular consensus to regulate money in politics, make it easier to vote, raise wages, regulate monopoly, build labor unions, transition away from fossil fuels, make health services and child care more affordable, and promote peace – despite the broad public support for these pillars of a sane society – the various mass propaganda organs enable/force politicians to please their donors and thus try to maintain certain aspects of the status quo. Monopoly and bad labor laws continue to make life difficult for a majority of the working class. Big money power spreads lies. Trump’s lies take the form of a never-ending tsunami. His agenda is to destroy government services – everything from health care, to weather forecasting, to FEMA – so that it will be easier to exploit the working class. Other Republican leaders are scared to cross him.
It will not be enough to defeat Trump; we must rebuild our political system so that it can confront the serious crises of inequality, avoiding nuclear devastation, climate change, mass immigration, and monopoly-driven AI.
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