A May Day Greeting from Revolutionary Organization of Labor, USA (ROLUSA) May Day 2022

 

 

Revolutionary Organization of Labor-USA
Boxholder, 607 Boylston St., Lower Level Box 464, Boston, MA 02116

MAY DAY GREETINGS — 2022!

Dear Comrades and Friends,

As we honor our most important holiday of the year--- the day of International Working Class Solidarity --- I am pleased to share the positive May Day message from International Coordination of Revolutionary Parties & Organizations (ICOR). 

Despite our own significant organizational weaknesses including lack of substantial contact with other ICOR-affiliated as well as most other international anti-imperialist organizations, we remain affiliated with ICOR. And, after some consultation, I have endorsed ICOR’s May Day Greeting on our behalf. 

Please share this ICOR statement, where appropriate, with any and all working class fighters, including strikers and union organizers, and anti-imperialists including Black Lives Matter activists, Latino immigrant fighters and others fighting for social justice in
the Belly of the Beast.”

Also, in the spirit of proletarian internationalism, we are including in this mailing the Resolution from Revolutionary Organization of Labor-USA (ROL-USA) we proposed last October to ICOR on the need to “prioritize the building of a new Communist International for our time, guided by the exemplary, outstanding and victorious historical
experience of the Third Communist International.”
 

The ongoing war in the Ukraine that broke out in late February makes the task of establishing a New Communist International all the more urgent. For, as the enclosed ICOR Resolution correctly states: “Imperialist countries or blocs of Russia or the USA, main warmonger in the world in alliance with NATO, directly confront each other … in abarbarous inter-imperialist war.”

With Communist Greetings,
Ray Light, General Secretary
Revolutionary Organization of Labor-USA

 

****************************************************

ICOR call

May Day 2022 and May 8. and 9. – International Days of Struggle  for Workers’ Rights, Peace, Freedom, and Socialism!
Active resistance against any imperialist war and the danger of World War!

May Day 2022, as international day of struggle of the working class, is overshadowed by a barbaric invasion of Ukraine by Russian imperialism and a massively intensified general interimperialist danger of war and world war. Imperialist countries or blocs of Russia or the USA, as the main warmonger in the world and in alliance with NATO, directly confront each other in different ways on Ukrainian territory – creating the potential for a Third World War.

May 8/9 stand for the victory of the Allies, above all the Red Army of the socialist Soviet Union over Hitler's fascism in 1945. The masses in Russia and Eastern Europe celebrate this day until today and the ICOR has elevated it to an anti-war day of struggle. 

The international working class, especially the international industrial proletariat is challenged to form the decisive backbone in the struggle of the masses, the workers, women, youth, environmentalists, and antifascists against imperialism and today especially against the imminent danger of a nuclear-led III World War.

The interaction between the persisting world economic and financial crisis, the corona pandemic, the arms race now being stepped up worldwide, and the accelerated transition to a global environmental catastrophe has affected the lives of the world’s masses to the point of questioning their foundations of life. Inflation is rising rapidly, making life unaffordable for increasingly growing masses of people. An estimated 17 million people have died from COVID-19. Many of them could still be alive if they had received a vaccination. However, the imperialist countries and monopolies continue to greedily guard their profitable patents at the cost of the lives of millions of people. 160 million persons have additionally been thrust into poverty. In more than 100 countries, hard-won social benefits and health services have been reduced or even entirely revoked during the crisis. Millions of jobs have been destroyed or earmarked for elimination. 

The masses are fighting back in demonstrations, resistance actions, strikes, and movements similar to uprisings. In hunger revolts and struggles against inflation and the energy companies’ policy of monopoly prices they defend their existential interests.

ICOR has clearly positioned itself. Now it is necessary to follow words with deeds: May Day is above all the day on which we take stock of the strengthening of ICOR and all our member organizations in order to make the call unmistakable worldwide: forward to socialism and communism! Only with the seizure of power of the proletariat the way is opened that imperialist wars, exploitation and oppression of the workers and the broad masses, environmental destruction, and lack of prospects for the youth belong to the past.
 

Active resistance:
No to Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine!

No to every imperialist policy – Step up the anti-imperialist struggle against the threat of World War – Strengthen the anti-imperialist and antifascist united front!

Fight the shifting of the burdens of war and crises on the backs of the workers and the toiling masses!

For the right of self-determination of nations!

Long live the friendship between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples!
Worldwide struggle for democracy, peace, freedom, and socialism!

Signatories (as of 27 April 2022, further signatories possible):
 PCPCI   Parti Communiste Proletarien de Côte d'Ivoire (Proletarian Communist Party of Ivory Coast)
 UPC-Manidem   Union des Populations du Cameroun - Manifeste National pour l’Instauration de la Démocratie (Union of Populations of Cameroon - National Manifesto for the Establishment of Democracy)
 MMLPL   Moroccan Marxist-Leninist Proletarian Line
 CPSA (ML)   Communist Party of South Africa (Marxist-Leninist)
 PCT   Parti Comuniste du Togo (Communist Party of Togo)
 PPDS   Parti Patriotique Démocratique Socialiste (Patriotic Democratic Socialist Party), Tunisia
 CPB   Communist Party of Bangladesh
 CPI (ML) Red Star   Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Red Star
 NCP (Mashal)   Nepal Communist Party (Mashal)
 PPRF   Patriotic Peoples Republican Front of Nepal
 CPA/ML   Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)
 БКП   Българска Комунистическа Партия (Bulgarian Communist Party)
 PR-ByH   Partija Rada - ByH (Party of Labor - Bosnia and Herzegovina)
 MLPD   Marxistisch-Leninistische Partei Deutschlands (Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany)
 UC   Unité Communiste (Communist United ), France
 UPML   Union Prolétarienne Marxiste-Léniniste (Marxist-Leninist Proletarian Union), France
 KOL   Kommunistische Organisation Luxemburg (Communist Organization of Luxemburg)
 RM   Rode Morgen (Red Dawn), Netherlands
 UMLP   União Marxista-Leninista Portuguesa (Portuguese Marxist-Leninist Union)
 RMP   Российская маоистская партия (Rossijskaya maoistskaya partiya) (Russian Maoist Party)
 MLGS   Marxistisch-Leninistische Gruppe Schweiz (Marxist-Leninist Group of Switzerland)
 MLKP   Marksist Leninist Komünist Parti Türkiye / Kürdistan (Marxist Leninist Communist Party Turkey / Kurdistan)
 KSRD   Koordinazionnyj Sowjet Rabotschewo Dvizhenija (Coordination Council of the Workers Class Movement), Ukraine
 UoC   Union of Cypriots, Cyprus
 PCC-M   Partido Comunista de Colombia – Maoista (Communist Party of Colombia – Maoist)
 OAPCM   Organización Apoyante del Partido Comunista de México (Supporting Organization of the Communist Party of Mexico)
 PCP (independiente)   Partido Comunista Paraguayo (independiente) (Paraguayan  Communist Party (independent))
 PPP   Partido Proletario del Perú (Proletarian Party of Peru)
 PC (ML)   Partido Comunista (Marxista Leninista) (Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist)), Dominican Republic
 PCR-U   Partido Comunista Revolucionario del Uruguay (Revolutionary Communist Party of Uruguay)
 ROL   Revolutionary Organization of Labor, USA

 

 

Revolutionary Organization of Labor-USA
Boxholder, 607 Boylston St., Lower Level Box 464, Boston, MA 02116

ROL-USA Proposed Resolution:

Prioritize Building A New Communist International

Whereas, the International Working Class and the Oppressed Peoples today confront a number of grave global crises simultaneously — all spawned by the moribund system of monopoly capitalism and
imperialism; and this general collapse of the global capitalist system is generating an increasingly powerful fascist motion throughout the world as well as the increasing likelihood of major regional and
ultimately global war; and

 
Whereas, the U.N.'s Special Reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stemming from the 2015 Paris Agreement have continued to document that, under monopoly capitalist and
imperialist domination, virtually all the world's nations have failed to live up to their mutual commitments to a set of environmentally conscious goals; and the unprecedented extreme weather events ever since that have occurred throughout the world have already brought about great mass suffering, with far more calamitous events for humanity on the horizon; and

 
Whereas, the Corona-virus (COVID19) Pandemic under global imperialist domination has produced both a devastating global health crisis and a prolonged economic crisis: Even with the introduction of
“successful” vaccines their private profit-driven production and distribution has featured the hoarding of vaccine supplies by the rich nations while the peoples in the poorest nations are almost universally
excluded from access to these life-saving medicines, increasing the danger for all humanity of the emergence of more and more virulent variants. All this has dramatically underscored the truth of comrade
Lenin's teaching that the “essence of imperialism” lies in the “fundamental distinction between the oppressing and the oppressed nations;” and

 
Whereas, global capitalism has spawned rapacious finance capitalists, a ruling class for whom there is no compunction to pay taxes, to support national infrastructure, mass public education, public health services or other national uplift; they are shameless privatizers of all public resources; and
 

Whereas, this same global capitalist system drives desperate populations of many countries to migrate from one continent to another (Africa to Europe, South America to North America) creating sharp dislocation for vulnerable populations in both the losing countries and the receiving countries and making them ripe for global chauvinist violence largely directed against migrant families and communities, and

Whereas, imperialist wars of plunder and occupation are a continuing prominent feature of imperialist economic policy, devastating vast areas of the globe such as the Obama-led, U.S., Italian and French
imperialist destruction of Libya and much of Northern Africa and the U.S.-led twenty year imperialist war and occupation of Afghanistan; and

 
Whereas, global individualism promoted by capitalist market forces, now intensified by social media global monopolies like Facebook and Instagram and their algorithms, supplant national cultures with
chauvinist hatred and crass consumerism, while huge populations no longer have collective self-worth based on the work they do, or on their contribution to society or their society's global contributions;
instead, what they own, drive, wear, etc. now determines their identity and makes them more susceptible to fascist appeals and unjust imperialist war, and

Whereas, the moribund system of monopoly capitalism and imperialism now is in perpetual crisis, is alienating billions of people and increasingly resorts to fascist leaders, right-wing “populist” movements of white supremacy, anti-semitism and immigrant-bashing and various anti-democratic attempts to violently seize political power as the ongoing Trump-led motion in the USA, one of the most powerful
imperialist countries, demonstrates so clearly; and whereas, the growing competition between U.S. and

Whereas, under the economic devastation wrought by the ravages of the COVID 19 global pandemic, workers all over the world are increasingly rising in strike struggles for higher wages and organizing
themselves to bring social justice to the workplace and beyond. Examples include: several general strikes in Argentina launched against capitalist austerity, a recent South Korean general strike demanding the nationalization of some basic industry and an end to casualization of labor, powerful rural worker and peasant uprisings in India, South African steelworkers opposing a wage freeze, an upsurge in U.S. industrial strikes and a series of massive protests by the French workers in defense of their pensions; and

Whereas, it is the working class, who has for several years shown signs of waging protests on a global scale and on broad political questions including international working class solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement following the brutal police murder of George Floyd, U.S. airline workers refusal to cooperate with their corporate employers and the U.S. state apparatus in the kidnapping from their families of immigrant Latino children at the U.S.-Mexico border; Google tech workers' global walkout in 2018 from Japan to the USA to Europe in defense of women workers; and worker unrest that helped scuttle Google's project to help U.S. military drone warfare, and, similar worker protests at Amazon against facial recognition projects to assist police agencies resulted in a moratorium on such sales; and

 
Whereas, today the international working class remains the one socio-economic class whose very strength is realized through its struggle against international capitalism and it is under the leadership of
the global proletariat that other class and national forces can play a positive role in the struggle to overcome the current existential crises brought on by the moribund system of monopoly capitalism and
imperialism; and finally,

 
Whereas, in the 1930's and 1940's, when the fascist movement was in power — from Italy, Portugal and Spain to Germany and Japan — it was the Soviet Union and the Soviet-led Communist International, the
revolutionary organization of the international working class, that led the working class and oppressed masses in the successful victory over global fascism, including through the skillful use of the United Front
Against Fascism;

Therefore, be it resolved that ICOR and its affiliated organizations as well as associated mass organizations including at the national democratic revolutionary and anti-fascist level be
encouraged to carry out “unity of action” on the grave global crises in the fight for workers power leading to socialism and communism.
Be it further resolved that ICOR and its affiliates prioritize the building of a new Communist International for our time, guided by the exemplary, outstanding and victorious historical experience of the Third Communist International.

SUBMITTED On Behalf of
The Revolutionary Organization of Labor (USA)
by
Ray O. Light
General Secretary

October 2021

There's STILL Time and Urgent Need to Trounce Trumpist Tyranny! Statement of Ray O. Light, General Secretary of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor (USA)

 There’s STILL Time And Urgent Need to Trounce Trumpist Tyranny!
Statement of Ray O. Light, General Secretary of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor(USA)
JULY 4, 2021

On July 4, 2021, we are celebrating one more year of this country’s independence from the tyranny of King George and the British Monarchy — without fascism having achieved power here...YET. Before, during and after the November 3, 2020 U.S. presidential election there was a bitter struggle to defend whatever has remained of bourgeois democratic rights in the USA. For Trump, the tyrant, had staked out his position early on that the only way he could lose was if the election was “rigged.”  From his powerful position as Commander in Chief, as President, he would fight to stay in power, apparently by any means necessary! Trump’s aim was absolute power; he intended to establish a Trump dictatorship in the United States in the tradition of King George of England!

In my previous statement dated October 1, 2020, issued in the midst of the 2020 presidential election, I warned:

“The next three months or so, approximately from Election Day, November 3, 2020 until the presidential inauguration scheduled for January 2021, will be a time of reckoning that will likely determine whether or not fascism will come to power in the USA in this period. What has become dramatically pronounced in the past week or so is the extra-legal character of this specific moment that sharply contrasts with what has historically been a period of peaceful transition from one U.S. ruling class party of  ‘Republicrats’ to the other (when the same party did not retain the presidency).

“First, President Trump refused outright to acknowledge the possibility that he could legitimately lose the election. (And this is despite the fact that all polls have him substantially behind Biden.) Thus, Trump has communicated loudly and clearly to his militia group supporters, the police associations and special police and armed forces that they should not idly stand by and accept a defeat at the hands of the so-called ‘deep state’ federal government.” (p. 2)

In this light, I reported that, “QAnon along with Proud Boys and

Boogaloo and other secretive on-line organizations are mobilizing in preparation to be poll-watcher “voter intimidators” and/or to take to the streets to proclaim and enforce (with police help) a Trump ‘victory.’”(p. 3, Bold added)

I observed: “Each time Trump has ‘escaped’ punishment for his crimes against the people, he has been emboldened to become even more autocratic and dictatorial. Even after being impeached by the House of Representatives, only the third President in U.S. history so convicted, Trump became more aggressive against his personal foes,* wildly reckless and destructive in his handling of the COVID public health crisis and dismissive of the public health experts, openly hostile toward the U.S. population in the ‘blue states,’ erratic and irrational in his approach to ‘opening up’ the U.S. economy, the schools etc., demonstrated no respect for the self-sacrifice of the troops under his command, nor for the health care workers, meat packers and other industrial workers and all the other ‘essential workers’ and was openly white supremacist in his support for murderous police power against working people, especially Afro-Americans and Latino immigrants and other people of color.” (ibid., pp. 4,5)

*Among the most desperate of the many horrific assaults of the Trump Campaign’s thuggish MAGA supporters in the lead-up to the election was the attempted kidnapping by white terrorists in Michigan of one of Trump’s most hated political opponents, Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Wittmer. The plan included kidnapping her, along with her family, with the intention of putting her “on trial” and executing her! If this well-planned, wide-ranging and well-rehearsed plot had succeeded, it would have put tremendous pressure on the Governor of every state in the USA (since each state conducts its own election) to lean heavily toward favoring Trump and his thugs in the 2020 election.

Finally, I warned: “If Trump is allowed to remain at the head of the U.S. imperialist state apparatus and the U.S. Empire on the basis of his trampling of the most rudimentary democratic rights of the U.S. citizenry, including our voting rights, we will have no remaining rights. The growing dictatorial power of a fascistic leader over the past four years will be supplanted by fascism in power.” (p. 5, Italics as in original; bold removed from this entire quote.)

On the basis of trying to help block the emergence of fascism in power in the USA, as the leader of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor (USA), the main purpose of my October 1 Statement was to call on our supporters to help elect the corporate Democratic Party Biden-Harris slate against Trump-Pence and then to “Wage Battle for Democracy” during the period between the November 3 election and the presidential inauguration on January 20, 2021.*

*I  believe this position is not at all at odds with our long standing view that the Democratic Party is the main political gatekeeper of U.S. monopoly capitalism and imperialism, the main political defender of the U.S. Empire. Moreover, this new position is in conformity with the teachings of the international communist movement in the period of the Communist International that helped the Soviet Union lead humanity in the global defeat of fascism in the World War II period and led to unprecedented advances for the cause of national liberation, socialism and communism in the period that immediately followed. It was crowned by the victory of liberated China in 1949 and the rapid establishment of a huge Socialist Camp with a global population comparable to that of the Capitalist Camp.

*****

-Trunp's Clear Defeat in the 2020 Presidential Election

With Trump’s thuggish and brutish campaign, with its increasingly sophisticated and effective use of algorithms and access to the internet generally during his term in office, with improper use of the White House and other venues and props as President, and with years-long coordinated Republican voter suppression efforts across many states, Trump may well have won the election with his own rigging, had the Coronavirus Pandemic not arisen worldwide and attacked the USA in early 2020. However, because of the Trump Administration’s scandalous behavior, motivated by deep ignorance, white supremacist hatred and corporate greed, the U.S. response to the global COVID pandemic was criminal, even genocidal.

The Trump Regime caused the USA, a monopoly capitalist state with state-of-the-art hospitals, medical technology and resources, to be chronically short of basic necessities throughout Trump’s remaining tenure and to become, early on, the number #1 country in the world in both infectious rates and deaths from COVID. Thus Trump’s monstrous leadership was also responsible for the ensuing U.S. economic collapse.

Largely for this reason, the country’s voters cast seven million more ballots for the corporate Democratic Party Biden-Harris slate than for Trump-Pence. And, even the anti-democratic electoral college vote favored Biden in 2020 as “overwhelmingly” as it had Trump in 2016.

But, spearheaded by the Afro-American people of Georgia under the

leadership of Stacey Abrams, a rainbow coalition of youth and working people were absolutely vital to the successful outcome as well.

-The Contribution of  “Sandernistas,” Black Lives Matter Activists and Other Anti-Fascists to Trump’s Clear Defeat-

As the Coronavirus Pandemic was surging through the country, on May 25, 2020, a revitalized Black Lives Matter movement exploded in street demonstrations across the USA and were soon accompanied by solidarity street protests in cities and towns across the world in response to the brutal Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd. And, shortly thereafter, under massive BLM pressure, police murders that had already been swept under the rug, were belatedly uncovered and revealed. Beginning with the public release of  the murderers’ own videotape of their February 2020 stalking and murder of jogger Ahmaud Arberey by a police-connected father-son duo in Glynn County Georgia and public exposure of the March 2020 midnight police break-in and cold-blooded murder of Breonna Taylor in her own Louisville, KY home, BLM street protests, rose up in new locales responding to outrageous police conduct seemingly every day.

This massive outpouring particularly of youth affirming the value of

Black lives has included newly conscious Afro-Americans as well as newly conscious allies among Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and poor and working class and middle class whites. Impressively, the BLM has focused on the key role of police departments around the country in enforcement of continuing “systemic racism.” This was a notion which most of the BLM protesters had not even previously contemplated, having been filled with the U.S. Empire’s bourgeois democratic propaganda and illusions during the “Obama years.”

The increasingly fascistic Trump Regime, with its unequivocal backing of and by the police as well as its vast corruption, was all the more exposed by Trump’s criminal responses to the Coronavirus Pandemic in the USA. These ranged from ignorance and impotence and concealment of its lethal character to profiteering off the manipulation of scarce medicines, medical supplies, clothing and equipment (which drastically affected health care workers, meat packers and other “essential workers”) to outright genocidal attacks against the Afro-American people and Latino immigrant families,  The Trump Regime’s criminal response to COVID fueled the popular resistance among the youth.

In the face of the rising BLM, aided by the spontaneous emergence of anti-fascist allies in many places, Trump called on the police to be especially brutal in cracking down on the BLM street protests. This served the two-fold purpose of: A. Intimidating some protesters into abandoning direct street action and B. Creating the conditions for increasingly militant self-defense on the part of the protesters and increasingly hostile encounters with the police.

Perhaps two events were most notorious in this regard: 1. Trump’s order for the various special D.C. police forces outside the White House to make an unprovoked attack on the peaceful demonstrators at Lafayette Park to clear a path for Trump’s unscheduled walk across to the nearby church where he held a Christian bible (upside down) in his infamous photo op. (This incident led Trump’s Secretary of Defense, General Jim Mattis, to resign on the principle that the U.S. military should not be used against U.S. citizens exercising their right to free speech in the USA. Significantly, within days, many active and retired top military brass supported Mattis’ position.) 2. Trump’s insistence on sending federal forces to Portland, OR against the wishes of both Portland’s Mayor and Oregon’s Governor. Provocations by Trump’s federal forces, including kidnapping demonstrators off the street, helped keep Portland in a constant state of occupation and resistance for months.

With such deliberate provocations, Trump was able to arouse his “law and order” base and his domestic terrorist base against the BLM and its anti-fascist allies. All the violence perpetrated by these Trump MAGA thugs, Proud Boys, Boogaloo, Oathkeepers, etc. had some success in pushing the BLM activists back, as the Trump forces gathered momentum around the 2020 presidential election.

Nevertheless, BLM activists and anti-fascist forces did not collapse. Many of them played active roles in the substantial electoral defeat of Trump for a second term. Moreover, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the most prominent social-democratic politician in the USA*, whose powerful 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns for the Democratic Party presidential nomination were both sabotaged by the Wall Street-dominated Democratic Party itself, nevertheless, in 2020, wholeheartedly backed the Biden-Harris corporate candidates against the fascist Trump. And Sanders’ large loyal base stayed involved and committed, too. 

*who unfortunately has always been and remains a social-imperialist in U.S. foreign policy.

This election victory over Trump’s campaign army set the stage for its desperate January 6 assault on the U.S. Congress in session at the Capitol; it was rendered an ultimately unsuccessful attempted coup by the Trump-led thugs to prevent the inauguration of Biden/Harris and install Trump as a rogue dictator.

Meanwhile the Biden/Harris victory, highlighted by Stacey Abrams and the Afro-American-led mobilization in Georgia, has required Biden’s Wall Street-dominated corporate Democratic Regime to make some positive government appointments and monetary and other concessions to the people, bringing some relief from the widespread hardship currently experienced by working people and oppressed nationalities across the USA. But the short term federal emergency money finally reaching the masses is no substitute for the workers and oppressed nationalities gaining greater power through and over the government itself.

-Trump’s BIG LIE About “the Rigged 2020 Election”-

While bourgeois elections in the USA have always been rigged against the poor and working people, (for example, Afro-Americans and women have only had the vote for a relatively few years historically), Trump still received the second largest presidential vote in U.S. history bested only by Biden’s vote in the same race. And the Republicans on the same ballots with Trump around the country gained more seats in Congress.

Christopher Krebs, Trump’s Republican appointee overseeing the 2020 election countrywide as Director of  the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, declared that the 2020 election was the most secure election in modern U.S. history. Trump responded by firing Krebs! Even Attorney General William Barr who had consistently abused his office and the entire Justice Department in order to function as Donald Trump’s personal shield instead of as the U.S. peoples attorney, already on his way out the door, affirmed the 2020 presidential election results, stating that no widespread fraud or other significant election violations had been found at all!

Furthermore, sixty different election court cases, filed by attorneys for the Trump campaign, were all thrown out after being adjudged frivolous claims, including by a host of Trump-appointed judges. And, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected all Trump campaign appeals sent its way, despite the fact that Trump (with McConnell) had packed that court, too.

Recounts of the 2020 vote in several swing states were conducted with no significant fraud discovered and no significant changes. Three were conducted in Georgia alone, including one count by hand. As I had underscored in the October 1st Statement, Georgia was a key battleground in the 2020 election. [SEE “Georgia on my Mind” p. 7, October 1, 2020 Statement] And Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who had voted for Trump, taped Trump’s telephone call to him openly pressuring Raffensperger to “find” “exactly one more vote than Biden had received.” The substance of this blatantly illegal election tampering may yet be among many serious criminal charges brought against Trump now that he is no longer shielded from prosecution by presidential immunity.

Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s chief operating officer under Secretary of State Raffensperger, also a Republican who had voted for Trump, was the voting system implementation manager basically in charge of the Georgia election. Sterling finally made a public and emotional appeal directly to Trump to stop his attacks on Georgia’s (Republican) election officials “before someone got killed,” as they and their families were facing increasing harassment and death threats, egged on by Trump and his campaign thugs.

Despite all of the above, Trump maintained and intensified his insistence with no proof that the election had been “rigged” against him. And the BIG LIE that Trump had asserted long before the election took place that he could only lose if the election was rigged became the foundation for the continuous and still ongoing attempt of the rogue President to overthrow the legally elected Biden-Harris Administration.

 

Finally, on January 6, 2021, both houses of the U.S. Congress met in session at the Capitol building in Washington, DC to officially ratify the electoral college vote, paving the way to the inauguration of Biden-Harris two weeks later. To block this constitutionally mandated legal process chaired by Mike Pence, his own (defeated) Vice President who was still functioning as President Pro Tem of the U.S. Senate, Trump countered with a well-publicized street rally of thousands of white supremacist MAGA supporters and with some level of strategic planning by domestic terrorist organizations from the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, QAnon conspiracy theorists and other right wing groups supporting Trump’s blatantly illegal attempt to resist and disrupt and block “the peaceful transfer of power.”

At Trump’s January 6 street rally, the sitting U.S. President called on the crowd to march to the Capitol, though he promised to go there with them and did not. And his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, urged the crowd to let this be “TRIAL BY COMBAT.” With both Houses of Congress in formal session, the MAGA mob attack on the Capitol featured domestic white terrorists trying to hunt down House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat,  and Republican Vice President Pence, who, until the day before, had been one of this mob’s heroes, perhaps second only to Trump himself. Pence was now demonized for carrying out his constitutionally-mandated duty to preside over the formal electoral college vote count. And mob sentiment seemed to be to murder both Pelosi and Pence as well as many other Congresspeople, if they got their hands on them.

As many have observed, had Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters or union workers or anti-fascists stormed the Capitol they would have suffered massive casualties and deaths at the hands of police and military forces armed to the teeth! By contrast, upon arrival at the Capitol, Trump’s MAGA monsters found understaffed and outgunned Capitol police and other DC area police and military forces with no specific battle plan to defend the Capitol and its employees and the Congress itself!! Clearly, higher-ups in the various DC police forces, the National Guard and the U.S. military were conspiring with and/or cooperating with Trump’s insurrectionary mob. In this circumstance, the supposedly “pro-police and law and order” base of Trump supporters beat up and seriously injured and even took a few lives of those overwhelmed guardians of the Capitol who had taken their responsibility to protect the Congressmen and women under attack.

To their credit, the Congresspeople and VP Pence returned to the formerly occupied and besieged and now ransacked Capitol just hours after escaping it. And, in the middle of that night, they finished their work of formally counting the electoral college vote and declaring Biden-Harris the victors and designated them for the January 20 presidential inauguration ceremony. Ominously, though, even after the violent white supremacist, domestic terrorist assault on the Capitol, 139 House members and eight Senators, all Republicans, still voted that night against the clearly legitimate electoral college vote.*

*However, even this bad thing can be turned into a good thing if decisive action is taken against this large group of pro-insurrectionist members of Congress.  Evidently, it will take working class and oppressed nationality-led BLM and anti-fascist forces to compel Biden and the Democrats in Congress as well as Attorney General Merrick Garland to move. If Justice is served by Garland’s Justice Department, these traitors even to their own successful legitimate elections can be cleaned out; and a more productive, pro-democratic and pro-people Congress can result.

I had concluded the October 1, 2020 Statement with the following warning: “Donald Trump has shown no indication that he will give up power without a fight. He has maintained some independent strength in spite of the fact that he has not yet had his Reichstag Fire moment. Let us be alert and aware.”

I was especially concerned that Trump, while still the head of the U.S. state apparatus, while still President, might well launch a serious incident, like the Nazi-created Reichstag Fire in 1933 (where the Nazis themselves destroyed the German parliament building and blamed the communists to justify “a state of emergency”) that would carry Trump safely through to victory in the election or to the postponement or cancellation of the election. One important accomplishment of the U.S. people’s 2020 election defeat of Trump by a clear margin is that he was able to actually be ousted from office on schedule. From this weakened position his subsequent activities till now have all been transparently ineffectual and largely illegal. And his presidential immunity is gone, too.

-The Present Situation-

However, the main purpose of this current July 4, 2021 Statement is to underscore the fact that now, some eight months after his substantial electoral defeat and then his ultimate failure to block the inauguration of the Biden-Harris Regime with his January 6 bloody assault on the Capitol, Donald Trump still has shown no indication that he will give up power without a fight. He has never conceded the election! He’s still fighting for power! Meanwhile, the Biden Regime, a faithful tool of Wall Street finance capital, has shown little inclination to prosecute Trump and his domestic white terrorist supporters and/or otherwise compel them to concede and comply with the U.S. Constitution. Hence, despite the fact that Biden is President and Trump is not, fascism in the USA remains “a clear and present danger.”

This can be seen in the following: 1.   The ongoing openly insurrectionary appeals from Trump-pardoned felons such as Trump political guru Roger Stone and General Michael Flynn and similar political adventurism of former President Trump and his reactionary white supremacist and domestic terrorist MAGA crowd based entirely upon the BIG LIE that the 2020 election had been rigged against him. Yet, none of Biden’s vast Executive Branch power has been used thus far to punish these bold insurrectionists. 2. Contrast Trumpite provocation with Biden’s refusal to campaign for the elimination of the Senate filibuster rule that now protects the January 6 insurrectionists, including those within Congress itself, from Congressional investigation and from being exposed and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Instead, Corporate Democratic President Biden now travels to Europe to “fight against autocracy over there”! 3.  With Wall Street’s renewed financial backing of pro-insurrection Republican Congresspeople, Voter Suppression (Voter Theft) laws aimed against working people and especially people of color being proposed in forty-eight states, based upon the same BIG LIE will likely be successful as Biden’s tolerance of the Senate filibuster may spell doom for the For The People Act.  4.  Similarly, by refusing to lead a powerful campaign to smash the Senate filibuster rule, Biden has put passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in jeopardy.  5. Likewise, despite Biden’s frequent positive comments about organized labor, the Protective Right to Organize (PRO) Act (already weaker than the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) proposed and never passed under Obama) is in jeopardy.

Also consider the following: 1. Now, eight months after the election, while his brother remains a three star general, former three-star General Michael Flynn, a convicted felon pardoned by Trump and an unabashed promoter of QAnon conspiracy theories is openly calling for Trump to lead a Myanmar-type military insurrection to overthrow the Biden-Harris Regime. We the people, including BLM and anti-fascist forces, need to organize and demand that U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and the Joint Chiefs of Staff move promptly and decisively to have Flynn courtmartialed, deprived of his military pension and imprisoned for sedition. Roger Stone, also a convicted felon pardoned by Trump and Trump’s political guru, has been just as outspoken as General Flynn in his constant public urging of Trump campaign insurrectionist action. And Stone should be likewise arrested and charged with sedition. 2.  Attorney Sidney Powell who had joined with Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuiliani in approximately sixty unsuccessful court cases to have the official 2020 presidential election results thrown out is now calling for Trump to  “simply be re-instated,” after “a   new inauguration is set.” We must demand that swift judicial action, including disbarment, be taken against Powell for her unconstitutional frontal attack on the Executive Branch of the U.S. government. 3.  In Arizona, a bizarre recount of that state’s 2020 election ballots is being carried out by “Cyber Ninjas,” a private firm hired to do the recount with no prior experience and no apparent qualifications other than its purely speculative and prejudiced assertion, before having access to Arizona ballots, that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Trump in that state. While this unorthodox and unprecedented recount has spoiled Arizona’s original ballots, anti-fascist and pro-democratic forces there need to be prepared to fight any attempt to throw out or dismiss the official Arizona electoral college vote. A similar fight may be required in other swing states in the days ahead as well. 4.  Many large corporations, such as Boeing, had previously announced their cutoff of all financial support for Congresspeople that(in coordination with the insurrectionist mob) had still voted against the electoral college victory for Biden-Harris just hours after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Now these corporations have quietly begun to back those white supremacist Republican thugs again in keeping with their normal practice of supporting the “Republicrats” (i.e. both the Democrats and the Republicans at the same time.) We need to mobilize boycotts and other actions exposing and punishing these pro-insurrection corporations. 5.  In this context, the large Republican minority in the House was unable to stop the creation of a Congressional Commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection. However, the Senate, using the anti-democratic filibuster rule that Biden and the corporate Democratic leadership have refused to eliminate, just voted to block the establishment of the January 6 Commission. Attorney General Merrick Garland has the authority to establish a Justice Department special counsel to investigate the January 6 bloody assault on the Capitol and we should demand that he do so without delay on the way to cleaning thuggish scum like Florida Congressman Gaetz and Georgian Congresswoman Greene out of the House. Such developments can only produce a more progressive Congress and more pro-working class laws.

One Conclusion: It’s clear that Trump’s fascist campaign to overthrow the elected bourgeois government of Biden-Harris, backed to one extent or another by millions of Trump voters in 2020, will not disappear even if and when Trump himself is put away and the key thrown away. And even this prospect for Trump, the individual, currently seems unlikely, given the Biden Regime’s cowardly and corrupting Wall Street ties. Indeed, the movement to bring fascism to power in the USA will likely need to be struggled against by the workers and oppressed peoples within the USA and beyond for years to come, as the historical example of the rise of Nazi Germany reveals.

-The Rise of Nazi Germany and the BIG LIE-

In November 1918, the German military under the Hohenzollern Monarch and the German monopoly capitalists had just experienced a crushing defeat at the hands of Germany’s imperialist rivals in the First World War. This defeat was leading to the rapid ruination of the German people. On this basis the German Communists (the Spartacists) under the talented leadership of Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were building an increasingly powerful armed struggle in Berlin, the capital, on the road toward establishment of a soviet republic in Germany. They were following a similar path as that traversed by the victorious Soviet Bolsheviks a year earlier in Tsarist Russia.

To block the establishment of a soviet republic led by the German working class, Germany’s top military leadership forced out the Kaiser and the Hohenzollern monarchy and handed power over to the surprised and reluctant social-democratic leadership of the trade union workers. Thus it was that the dutiful social-democratic government united with the German military, the conservatives and the monarchists to crush the communists and workers in Berlin and to murder Liebnecht and Luxemburg, acknowledged even by bourgeois authorities as the most talented organizers in Germany. And thus it was that the new social-democratic government that had no previous governmental responsibility for Germany’s defeat ended up officially signing the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty and agreed to the harsh war reparations exacted by French and British imperialism. The German monarchy and the military thus used this “shoddy trick”* to avoid the wrath of the German people, that is, to avoid taking their responsibility for the actual conduct of the imperialist war and the ruination of the German people…And millions of Germans believed this BIG LIE!!  

*bourgeois historian William L. Shirer’s phrase

The early 1920’s saw several putsches carried out by embittered military and ex-military men, pro-monarchist officers and other fascist forces. Adolph Hitler cleverly and persistently promoted the BIG LIE with passionate intensity that “the November criminals” who sold out the German people in the Versailles Treaty were the “socialists and communists, the Marxists and the Jews.” In this way, by late 1923 he was in a position to lead the so-called Beer Hall Putsch in Bavaria.

In his massive, authoritative “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” (1960), bourgeois historian William L. Shirer observed that the Beer Hall Putsch was quickly dispatched and Hitler and eight of the other nine insurrectionist leaders (all except famed General Ludendorff who was acquitted) were convicted of high treason at their trial. Shirer reports that the Bavarian Minister of Justice, a friend of Hitler’s, made sure that at trial “the judiciary would be complacent and lenient.” “Hitler was allowed to interrupt as often as he pleased, cross-examine witnesses at will and speak on his own behalf at any time and at any length ...”(p. 75)

Moreover, Article 81 of the German Penal Code declared that, “Whosoever attempts to alter by force the Constitution of the German Reich or of any German state shall be punished by lifelong imprisonment ...”  According to Shirer, Hitler, while in prison, “was treated as an honored guest, with a room of his own and a splendid view.” Incredibly, he was able to verbally dictate to his devoted secretary and fellow convicted conspirator, Rudolph Hess, the first volume of his two-volume best-selling book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle) which became his chief source of large personal income and wealth over the ensuing years until coming to political power; the book also became his playbook for fascist rule. Furthermore, rather than receiving lifelong imprisonment, Hitler was sentenced to five years. And “a little less than nine months later, on December 20, 1924, Hitler was released from prison, free to resume his fight to overthrow the democratic state.” (p. 78, My emphasis)

Shirer added, “The consequences of committing high treason, if you were a man of the extreme Right, were not unduly heavy, despite the law, and a good many anti-republicans took notice of it.” (p. 78)*

*The dangerous phenomenon described here has frequently occurred over the past few years in the USA. Indeed, among the most vocal and vitriolic pro-Trump insurrectionists who actively mobilized for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Congress at the Capitol and are continuing their non-stop treasonous roles unimpeded until today are Trump’s original National Security Adviser, former Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone, Trump’s political guru. Both these men are convicted felons who were pardoned by Trump. And neither has been charged since January 6. Moreover, Trump, the main leader of the January 6 coup attempt at the Capitol and no longer shielded from legal prosecution by his former Presidential status, has yet to be charged for any of his crimes. Many violent domestic white supremacist terrorists in the USA have taken note of this, too.

Little more than eight years later, in early 1933, after continual Nazi

Party mobilization, mob actions and murders around the BIG LIE that the “Jews and the Marxists” and not the Monarchy and the Military had been responsible for the crushing German defeat in the First World War, Adolph Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg. And one month later, the Nazis themselves burned down the Reichstag, the parliamentary building, and blamed it on the Communists. The next day Hindenburg gave the Nazi leader and his Party emergency powers, effectively making Hitler the absolute ruler of Germany for the next dozen years, during which the Nazi Regime was responsible for the extermination of perhaps one hundred million souls. Yet “the thousand year Reich” lasted just twelve years until the victorious and heroic Soviet Red Army marched into Berlin in May 1945.


*****

-TRUMP and the BIG LIE-

Today, the BIG LIE that the 2020 Election was somehow rigged against Trump is still believed by the majority of the millions of last year’s Trump voters despite the consistent testimony to the contrary of Republican figures all the way from state and local election officials to former Attorney General William Barr himself. The belief in this BIG LIE remains the cornerstone of a still prevailing mass sentiment in support of the Trump-led drive to install fascism in power by bloody insurrection.

Many of these MAGA movement activists also believe the BIG LIE that the Trump-inspired assault on the Capitol was somehow carried out by BLM and so-called “Antifa” forces disguised as pro-Trump MAGA thugs. This is despite the fact that the location and timing of the January 6 Rally promoted by and starring President Trump in Washington, DC and the subsequent attack on the Capitol precisely at the time of the constitutionally-mandated electoral college vote officially anointing Biden-Harris to be inaugurated two weeks thereafter all point to the MAGA thugs and the domestic white supremacist terrorists as having the primary motive to be there themselves. And this fact is documented by the identities of the 400 or so arrested and indicted participants in the violent insurrection on January 6.

The BIG LIE that all the military and police forces from the DC   Capitol police to the Pentagon and the acting Secretary of Defense as well as other top Trump officials in Washington, DC had failed to communicate with each other about a largely internet mobilization that had been publicly undertaken months earlier and were “caught unprepared” would be laughable if were not so dangerous! Indeed, in my October 1, 2020 Statement I had written the following: “The very day of that [first presidential] debate, [September 29, 2020] the FBI Dallas Field Office issued a document marked ‘FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY and LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE’ entitled, ‘Boogaloo Adherents Likely Increasing Anti-Government Violent Rhetoric and Activities.’ This intelligence report warned of an ‘imminent extremist violent threat’ posed by the far-right militia group known as the ‘Boogaloos’ and identifying the current election period up to the 2021 inauguration as a ‘potential flashpoint.’” (p. 2, October 1, 2020 Statement by ROL, Emphasis in new citation here, 7-4-21) The official Electoral College vote count by both Houses of   Congress at the Capitol on January 6 provided the prime target date in this entire period!

-THE BI-PARTISAN “REPUBLICRAT” BIG LIE ABOUT WORLD WAR II AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR TODAY’S STRUGGLE AGAINST FASCISM-

Finally, there is the BIG LIE promoted virtually unanimously by all the “Republicrats” of both the Democratic and Republican Parties. This is the BIG LIE that it was the USA and Britain that led the victory over German and global fascism in World War II. The truth is that the Stalin-led Soviet Union and the Georgi Dimitrov-led Communist International, guided by Lenin’s teachings, were the main force in the titanic military-political victory of the twentieth century by the widely admired “greatest generation.” This truth helps guide us to long term and short term aims and objectives in relation to the struggle against fascism today.

Lenin taught that, “... in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, poor, false; a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to Communism, will, for the first time, produce democracy for the people, for the majority, side by side with the necessary suppression of the minority– the exploiters. Communism alone is capable of giving a really complete democracy ...” (V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, 1917) This was and is the long-term strategic perspective for the international working class and the oppressed peoples in the successful smashing of global fascism.

As I noted in the October 1, 2020 Statement, Georgi Dimitrov, the great Bulgarian communist leader, was the heroic comrade who exposed in the German Nazi court itself the Hitlerites’ own draconian role in setting the Reichstag Fire themselves! His defense was so strong that, rather than execute him and his two Bulgarian comrades, the Nazis whisked them out of Germany. Dimitrov went to the Soviet Union where he became the head of the Communist International and led the implementation of the United Front against Fascism strategy, spearheaded by the heroic Soviet peoples of the USSR, the Soviet Red Army and the Soviet Communist Party. They were the decisive forces at the core of the global anti-fascist coalition that included the U.S. military and the U.S. people, which smashed the thousand year Reich in a dozen years.

Comrade Dimitrov taught: “Before the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, bourgeois governments usually pass through a number of preliminary stages and adopt a number of reactionary measures which directly facilitate the accession to power of fascism. Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory.” (Georgi Dimitrov, Political Report of General Secretary to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, August, 1935)

In line with comrade Dimitrov’s guidance, the following are current short-run political tasks in the Battle For Democracy against the Trump-led campaign to place fascism into power in the USA.

Highlights of The Current Battle For Democracy in the USA

**Defend and Expand Voting Rights Against New Wave of White Supremacist and Anti- Worker Voter Suppression: (including)
    -Street Heat on Congress to pass the For The People Act!    
    -Defense of the Public Postal Service for Voter Access to Ballot Box!
    -Election Day as a Paid Holiday for All Workers!

**Abolish the Electoral College!

**End Anti-democratic Senate Filibuster!

**Demilitarize Police:
    -Shift Resources from oppressive police apparatus to Community needs!
         -Promote Black Lives Matter (BLM)!
    -Street Heat on Congress - pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act

**Take Corporate Money Out of Politics!

**Defend immigrant people and families
    -Eliminate U.S. federal kidnapping immigrant children away from families!
    -Prosecute federal officials complicit in these crimes!

**Expand Workers’ Right to Organize!
    -Put Street Heat on Congress - Pass the Protect the Right to Organize Act

**Enforce and Defend Freedom of Assembly:
    -From Police and Vigilante Attacks on Peaceful Demonstrators!
    -From state laws encouraging vehicular killing of demonstrators!

**Join anti-fascist resistance—to the streets!

**Help Build and Defend:
    THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT,
    THE IMMIGRANT RIGHTS MOVEMENT AND
    OTHER HEALTHY ANTI-FASCIST FORCES
    in the USA and Around the World!

*****

Let’s Counter the Trump Mob’s White Supremacist and Great Nation Chauvinist Poison By Upholding Our Banner —

WORKERS OF THE WORLD AND OPPRESSED PEOPLES UNITE!



Contact us at:  Boxholder, 607 Boylston St., Lower Level Box 464, Boston, MA  02116   USA

Time to Toss Out Tyrant Trump! Statement of Ray O. Light, General Secretary of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor(USA) October 1, 2020

 Time to Toss Out Tyrant Trump! Statement of Ray O. Light, General Secretary of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor(USA) 

October 1, 2020

 

“The accession to power of fascism is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie—bourgeois democracy—by another form—open terrorist dictatorship.” – Georgi Dimitrov(Main Report, Seventh World Congress of the Communist International (Comintern), August 2, 1935)

 

I.  A Time of Reckoning

What has been a nominally two-party system of joint rule by the Republicans and Democrats on behalf of the Wall Street ruling class at least since the advent of U.S. monopoly capitalism and imperialism in the 1890’s is being replaced! The 2016 Presidential race featured the voters’ rejection of all the Republican and Democratic mainstream party candidates. Donald Trump was opposed by almost the entire Republican establishment. Still, he handily won the Republican nomination! However, in the Democratic Party, the main gatekeeper of the U.S. Empire for decades, Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ sole establishment candidate, used huge corporate financing and anti-democratic party rules to control that party and defeat the very popular anti-establishment, “independent” social-democrat Bernie Sanders in the primary season. Yet, despite the  corporate establishment’s overwhelming support for Clinton, with the aid of the anti-democratic 200 year-old U.S. electoral college rules, Trump overcame a three million vote plurality for Clinton and was installed as the U.S. President.

On the advice of insatiably greedy Roger Stone, Trump had run in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries with the plan to advance as far as he could and then allow himself to be bribed with money or lucrative quid pro quos to withdraw in favor of candidate x, y or z. But, because of massive voter disaffection with the two mainstream bourgeois parties, to his surprise, Trump’s angry and abusive treatment of his Republican establishment “rivals” kept him winning. At his inauguration, with no transition team and no deep connections to either “Republicrat” party, he had only a skeleton crew, including family members, to operate the huge state apparatus of the U.S. Empire’s Executive branch administration. His key appointments, except for the “Goldman Sachs alumni” manning all the major financial positions, were more loyal to the Trump Family dynasty than to Wall Street. (Fortunately for Trump he managed to get through Congress the gruesome Tax Cut for the super-rich which no doubt encouraged Wall Street to leave him in office for this first full presidential term.)

Already fascist-minded, over the past four years as President, Trump steamrollered the Republican politicians and bent them to his will. The Republican party is basically gone. It has been replaced by the Trump Party, a one-man dictatorship. What remains is the two-faced Democratic Party, the U.S. Empire’s main gatekeeper, which timidly and half-heartedly fought Trump’s increasing lawlessness up to and including the successful House impeachment. It’s noteworthy that the Democrats, “unwilling to really rock Wall Street’s boat,” have failed to refer to the impeached president in this campaign. And, once again in 2020, the Democrats sabotaged Sanders’ presidential campaign, leaving Biden-Harris as this season’s “corporate Democrat” version of 2016’s Clinton-Kaine.

*****

Four years ago, we encouraged a vote for progressive or anti-imperialist third party candidates to help strike a blow against the U.S. Empire and its “two-party”system.*  


*We pointed out, “U.S. Fascism has significantly advanced on the shoulders of every U.S. president at least from Reagan to Bush I to Clinton to Bush II to Obama.” In that light we called for unity of action “to oppose the drive toward fascism in the USA—including defense of the Afro-American people against police brutality and Latino immigrants against ICE raids and against militarization of the domestic police and U.S. society ... To stay in the streets to fight for the Sanders Campaign platform demands. And unlike Sanders, to protest the Obama-led U.S. imperialist wars. We raised continuing the fight for single payer universal health care and defense of the environment [et al.]” (ibid.) Finally, we called for exposure and isolation of the Democratic Party and for work to build an anti-fascist labor/oppressed nationalities Third Party, encouraging Senator Sanders to run for President independent of the Democratic Party to help lay the basis for such a mass-based party right then.

Yet, for revolutionary Marxist-Leninists and U.S. anti-imperialists and anti-fascists much has changed since then.

The next three months or so, approximately from Election Day, November 3, 2020 until the presidential inauguration scheduled for January 2021, will be a time of reckoning that will likely determine whether or not fascism will come to power in the USA in this period. What has become dramatically pronounced in the past week or so is the extra-legal character of this specific moment that sharply contrasts with what has historically been a period of peaceful transition from one U.S. ruling class party of  “Republicrats” to the other (when the same party did not retain the presidency).

First, President Trump outright refused to acknowledge the possibility that he could legitimately lose the election. (And this is despite the fact that all polls have him substantially behind Biden.) Thus, Trump has communicated loudly and clearly to his militia group supporters, the police associations and special police and armed forces that they should not idly stand by and accept a defeat at the hands of the so-called “deep state” federal government.

Then, in the first presidential debate, when asked by Fox News moderator Chris Wallace, if he would condemn “white supremacist violence”, Trump defiantly replied, “Almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not the right-wing.”* Pressed specifically about denouncing violence perpetrated by “the Proud Boys,” Trump, instead, appeared to give them an order to “Stand Back and Stand By!” And the Proud Boys, heeding Trump’s words, within minutes dutifully adopted “Stand Back and Stand By” as their new slogan and began placing it on posters, shirts and other items for sale.

*The same day in June when Trump announced his designation of “Antifa” as a terrorist group, the FBI’s Washington Field Office had announced it was unable to find evidence of Antifa involvement in violence in the Black Live Matter protests against police brutality. In fact, in a recent study, the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that anti-fascist groups have not been involved in a single murder in the USA in the past 25 years! See “As  Trump equivocates on White Supremacy, the FBI Warns of Right-wing Terror,” by the Nation’s Ken Klippenstein.

The very day of that debate, the FBI Dallas Field Office issued a document marked “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY and LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE” entitled, “Boogaloo Adherents Likely Increasing  Anti-Government Violent Rhetoric and Activities.” This intelligence report warned of an “imminent extremist violent threat” posed by the far-right militia group known as the “Boogaloos” and identifying the current election period up to the 2021 inauguration as a “potential flashpoint.”
                              
Meanwhile, the gangster regime of fascistic President Trump has been unceasingly attacking the U.S. bourgeois election process itself. He has been aided and abetted every step of the way by Attorney General Barr.

Trump had harassed his original Attorney General, former Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, into resigning. The first Republican Senator to endorse Trump for President and an unreconstructed white supremacist who aggressively implemented Trump’s vicious chauvinistic plans in the Justice Department, Sessions’ only “crime” was recusing himself from supervising Mueller’s Russia investigation rather than protecting Trump and his coterie. His replacement, Attorney General Barr, has functioned as Trump’s personal attorney rather than even pretending to act as the top justice official of the people of the USA.

Barr’s first big move was to “receive” the long-awaited Mueller investigation report and to “condense” its hundreds of pages into a few pages of “highlights”, i.e., a whitewash. While Mueller found many instances of contact between the Russian government and the 2016 Trump campaign, on this first of the two charges, he determined that no conclusive evidence showed collusion between the two. Even though his investigation found multiple violations which made it impossible for Mueller to dismiss the second charge, one huge “weakness” was Mueller’s decision not to recommend that Trump be charged with obstruction of justice. Letting Trump off the hook, Mueller used a shaky legal opinion that a sitting president couldn’t be charged with a crime. AG Barr turned all this into: “Trump was found innocent!”

Since then, Barr has worked in concert with Trump to get key Trump lieutenants (“unprotected” by previous AG Sessions as well) out of prison, including Roger Stone, longtime political adviser to Donald Trump, and General Michael Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor.

In September, Stone gave public advice to the President via a conspiracy theorist’s online show in Nevada. Stone’s forty month prison sentence for lying to Congress and witness-tampering in the Russia investigation had been commuted by Trump “on the recommendation of Attorney General Barr.” Stone, still a convicted felon, shamelessly advised that, if Trump  loses the election, he should consider invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 and arrest the Clintons, former Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Mark Zuckerberg and others. Calling the Nevada governor “a punk,” Stone further advised Trump to have federal marshals seize and dispose of the ballots in Nevada on election night!

Former Trump National Security Advisor, General Flynn, had admitted to twice lying to the FBI regarding his meetings with the Russian ambassador prior to Trump’s inauguration. In an unprecedented move, AG Barr released Flynn from prison over the objections of the presiding judge in the case, declaring that his Justice Department was not proceeding with the case against Flynn. (It is still being adjudicated.) Meanwhile, Flynn, recently out of  prison, was caught on videotape reciting the QAnon oath with his family and others at a July 4 celebration, as per countrywide QAnon “guidance.”

One of QAnon’s main conspiracy theories is that Democrats run a child sex ring. In fact a young QAnon spokesman addressed this on his podcast the day after Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested. (Maxwell is the rich British woman who for years had worked as Jeffrey Epstein’s key associate in their international sex trafficking ring of young girls among the elites of Britain and the USA.) The QAnon rep. speculated that Democratic bigwigs must be sweating because Maxwell was obviously going to cooperate with the federal prosecutors. Yet, in the middle of a summer presidential press conference, it was Trump himself who publicly expressed his “well wishes” to Maxwell! Clearly, Trump’s intention was to alert Maxwell that if she protects him and

doesn’t roll over for the federal prosecutors,  he will protect her, pardon her, etc. just as he has done for Stone, Flynn and other Trump associates convicted of crimes during his criminal term as president.

 

Meanwhile, QAnon along with Proud Boys and Boogaloo and other secretive on-line organizations are mobilizing in preparation to be poll-watcher “voter intimidators” and/or to take to the streets to proclaim and enforce (with police help)* a Trump “victory.”   Of course, Attorney General Barr is the central figure running interference for all Trump’s attacks on the election process. For example, when Trump raised a general threat to send federal law enforcement to polling places, Barr rushed to his defense, raising that in particular and exceptional circumstances it might be legal.

*One of Trump’s few intelligible remarks in his initial debate with Biden, was his confident boast that he has all the police support while Biden has none.

On October 1, about two thousand former Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys, many of whom had worked under both Republican and Democratic Party administrations, signed an open letter accusing AG Barr and President Trump of “weaponizing” the DOJ to advance Trump’s personal interests. “We speak out now because we fear that Attorney General Barr intends to use the DOJ’s vast law enforcement powers to undermine our most fundamental democratic value: free and fair elections.’’ Imagine Barr’s deputizing QAnon, Proud Boys and Boogaloo for election “poll-watching!”
 
Finally, one key target of Trump’s attack on the upcoming presidential election has been the U.S. Postal Service. Historically the public post office is an election linchpin, and is even more central to the 2020 election process with the COVID-19 pandemic still raging across the USA. Even prior to the appointment of a new Postmaster General in the spring, Trump repeatedly told “the big lie” that vote-by-mail ballots are especially vulnerable to fraud, even while his fraudulent claim was repeatedly exposed. The new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, a major financial backer of Trump, immediately implemented disruptive and destructive postal policies sabotaging the highly appreciated and popular public post office, with its country-wide universal delivery of important medications, messages and packages as well as election mail and its admired “essential workers.” Trump and DeJoy, to their surprise, were met with bipartisan resistance from the citizenry and from many Republican as well as Democratic politicians. PMG DeJoy was forced to “apologize” and reverse at least some of his new policies and assure Congress and the public that the public post office will make successful election mail delivery a priority.

While there is no doubt still some residual damage to voters’

confidence in the U.S. mail service concerning this election cycle, the damage has thus far been mitigated and the postal election role still seems mostly viable. Moreover, the powerful resistance by the postal public and Congress to the Trump-DeJoy attack led to the exposure of DeJoy for his many years of illegal coercion of his employees as a corporate CEO and illegal funneling of campaign contributions from his company fronted by those employees. Now PMG DeJoy is being investigated for possible arrest and conviction not only for his illegal disruption of the U.S. Postal Service around the upcoming 2020 election but for his blatantly illegal election financing schemes going back decades. No wonder he was assigned the job of PMG at a time when Trump wanted the public postal service to be crippled and prevented from playing its important role in a successful presidential election.

This limited victory of the people of the USA against Trump’s major attack on the USPS at this critical moment underscores the difference between living under Trump, the fascistic leader, in the present, and living under a Trump fascist regime in power if he is able to weather the upcoming election period and is not compelled to leave the presidency.

*****

II.  Topple the Tyrant –   
“Trump the Terrible”!

WHAT and WHEN: VOTE FOR BIDEN-HARRIS By Election Day, November 3, 2020. THEN WHAT and WHEN: Then, if needed, Wage Battle for Democracy – During the period from Election Day until the Presidential Inauguration on Wednesday, January 20, 2021.

WHAT ELSE: If Trump’s full-scale assault on the presidential election process has resulted in no clear winner: On Inauguration Day when the terms of Trump and Pence are over since they have not been re-elected, IF TRUMP REFUSES TO STEP DOWN FROM the PRESIDENCY and LEAVE THE WHITE HOUSE, ESSENTIAL WORKERS ACROSS THE USA NEED TO REFUSE TO REPORT TO WORK UNTIL SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), IS INSTALLED AS ACTING PRESIDENT in accord with the Presidential Succession Act. And, as third in line, PELOSI should remain Commander in Chief until the election is ultimately decided.

WHY: Each time Trump has “escaped” punishment for his crimes against the people, he has been emboldened to become even more autocratic and dictatorial. Even after being impeached by the House of Representatives, only the third President in U.S. history so convicted, Trump became more aggressive against his personal foes, wildly reckless and destructive in his handling of the COVID public health crisis and dismissive of the public health experts, openly hostile toward the “blue states” of U.S. citizens, erratic and irrational in his approach to “opening up” the U.S. economy, the schools etc., demonstrated no respect for the self-sacrifice of the troops under his command, nor for the health care workers, meat packers and other industrial workers and all the other “essential workers” and was openly white supremacist in his support for murderous police power against working people, especially Afro-Americans and Latino immigrants and other people of color.

If Trump is allowed to remain at the head of the U.S. imperialist state apparatus and the U.S. Empire on the basis of his trampling of the most rudimentary democratic rights of the U.S. citizenry, including our voting rights, we will have no remaining rights. The growing dictatorial power of a fascistic leader over the past four years will be supplanted by fascism in power.

III.  An Existential Moment

Today the working class and oppressed peoples of the USA and the world are facing a number of global crises all at the same time. The Trump Regime at the helm of the U.S. Empire is already a menace at the center of most of the major crises.

A. Trump’s Genocidal Leadership of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the USA: The United States has just over four percent of the world’s population. Yet thus far the USA has hosted over twenty percent of the world’s people infected by the COVID-19 virus and over twenty percent of the world’s deaths due to this virus! In the absence of a U.S. public health service, during the entire eight month COVID period thus far, President Donald Trump has clearly been in charge of dealing with this U.S. public health crisis.

It has only been in the past ten days or so that famed journalist Bob Woodward released the tapes of his hours of one on one conversations with Trump in which Trump admitted that he had been informed by early February that this virus was five or six times more virulent than the annual flu. Yet Trump deliberately deceived the U.S. population and continues to downplay its lethal character up till now when he and much of his entourage has evidently become infected with this virus. In those early months he even raised the very opposite—promoting the lie that COVID-19 was more mild than the annual flu and would disappear on its own or as the spring turned into summer with its accompanying heat!

Moreover, he was informed back then that COVID-19 is an airborne-transmitted disease,  something he didn’t even share with the infectious disease experts responsible for providing safety and health to our country and making mask-wearing of great importance. Just days ago, Trump family members who accompanied him to the first presidential debate wore the mandatory masks to get into the debate hall, then took them off and remained maskless throughout the entire debate, refusing to honor this guideline agreed upon ahead of time! And as he admitted to Bob Woodward, he still plans to downplay COVID-19’s lethal character.

Trump has focused his attention to the virus on protecting and further enriching the private profits of the super-rich, including in the Stock Market. With this priority he has undermined the medical scientists and has suppressed their influence. In the spring, within days of closing down much of the economy in the face of the out of control spread of the Coronavirus, Trump began his zany, madcap campaign for “opening up America again!” And the highly respected medical scientists on his coronavirus task force, even the top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, failed to openly insist that the science-based protocols for reopening be implemented.

As the AP reported in early May, “The Trump administration shelved a document created by the nation’s top disease investigators with step by step advice for local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the still raging coronavirus outbreak.” “The 17-page report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team [was] titled, ‘Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework.’” Evidently, Trump officials told agency scientists the report “would never see the light of day.” As the AP article explained, “traditionally, it’s been the CDC’s role to give the public and local officials guidance and science-based information during public health crises. During this one, however, the CDC has not had a regular, pandemic-related news briefing in two months ... The dearth of real-time public information from the nation’s experts has struck many current and former government health officials as dangerous.”

Sure enough, on the eve of the economic “reopening” of more than forty of the fifty states, the projected infectious disease numbers and fatalities from the COVID virus immediately doubled. As the deadly pandemic again spiked across the USA Trump/Pence announced that by the end of May they were disbanding their coronavirus task force! The Trump regime had tipped its hand concerning its real reopening goal—maximum profits for Trump and his billionaire cronies. The health and well-being of our people be damned!

Having exposed his real priorities, Trump quickly reversed the outright elimination of the task force. Also, by keeping top infectious disease expert Fauci and CDC Director Redfield “on the task force” that basically no longer met, Trump could continue to exert some control over these experts, while pressuring many Governors, especially Republican ones, to open up their state economies with utter disregard for the protocols Trump’s own task force had outlined. U.S. COVID-19 fatalities have more than tripled since then. And Trump’s new medical expert, Scott Atlas, has no training in infectious diseases at all!

With the lack of any semblance of a national public health service, the Trump Regime’s capitalist “deal makers” in charge of leading the war on the virus have instead had a field day purchasing, manipulating and seizing monopoly control of scarce medical supplies—from ventilators to masks and gowns—and selling them off to the highest bidders. (Recall Jared Kushner’s insistence that the “national stockpile” is “our stockpile;” it is not earmarked for the states. The states can only access the stockpile as “back-up,” according to Kushner.) So, while the Trumpites joined the chorus of those lauding the health workers as “heroes” of the war against COVID-19, these monopoly capitalist vultures led by Trump-Kushner have been responsible for the failure to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) as well as adequate testing to the “frontline COVID Virus fighters.” They forced the physicians, nurses, and other health care workers, many of them Afro-Americans and Latinos, to reuse masks and gowns and do without basic supplies such as swabs and tests for their desperate patients. These are among the most criminal of the Trump Regime’s criminal COVID acts.

Why has Trump been so callous toward the suffering of those impacted by this disease? Old folks are most likely to die from this

virus, ending their Social Security and Medicare benefits. Other vulnerable populations are largely the most impoverished—Afro-American, Latino, Native American and white poor people—due to lack of access to quality medical care and to healthy food, to lack of green spaces and recreational opportunities. At the same time, the COVID-19 Pandemic made clear that the most “essential” workers, those who have to report to their job sites — from hospital and health care facilities to grocery stores, post offices and delivery services to industrial production lines including meat processing plants — involve a large number of these very same poor people and disproportionately Afro-American and Latino workers. The working class, including white workers, can see the gross injustice in workers who are “essential” being the most expendable!

Moreover, white workers and out of school and work youth, due to the Pandemic, have been in quarantine and experiencing some of the insecurities and instabilities that Afro-Americans often experience throughout their briefer and more stressful lives. And millions of quarantined people of all backgrounds have been more involved online. So they’ve been more aware of the big picture societal conditions beyond their usual circle of friends and family.

Once the Trump Regime realized that Afro-Americans and Latinos in particular are disproportionately vulnerable to serious illness and death from COVID-19, with Trump leading the way (“Liberate Michigan”, etc.), his supporters challenged and contradicted the protocols established by the Trump/Pence commission and fought viciously to open state economies with abandon. Cheered on by cooperative police forces, Trump’s armed “protesters” have threatened Democratic governors who were trying to hold the states accountable for adhering to the protocols for reopening the economy. The Trumpites propagandized for the reopening of the states as rapidly as possible, seemingly happy to do so over the dead bodies of the poor and oppressed communities as well as the elderly.


GEORGIA ON MY MIND

The “opening” of the state of Georgia is a prime example. The previous Georgia Secretary of State, Governor Kemp, had presided over the 2018 elections there. Thus, Kemp oversaw his own election “victory” over Stacey Abrams in a close vote marred by many voter irregularities. Ms. Abrams seemed to have been deprived of becoming the first Afro-American governor in a deep South state since Reconstruction, almost one hundred and fifty years ago and the first Black woman governor in U.S. history. And Georgia is the state at the very center of the Black Belt national territory of the Afro-American nation! Governor Kemp’s early “reopening” of Georgia not only included the most flagrant violations of the protocols established by the Trump-Pence  commission, but immediately targeted for opening the least important businesses such as tattoo parlors, and massage parlors which are also among the most difficult in which to ensure safe social-distancing.

In the early months of the U.S. COVID-19 attack, in Georgia the Afro-American people accounted for 80% of the deaths due to COVID virus.  Kemp,with Trump’s cooperation, has attempted to use the Coronavirus to carry out genocide against the Afro-American people of Georgia so that Stacey Abrams and/or some other Afro-American-led campaign would be unable to seriously challenge white supremacist rule there in elections going forward.*

*Kizzmekia Corbett, the thirty-four year old Afro-American woman heading the government’s search for a COVID-19 vaccine at the National Institute of Health had tweeted her concern that “white doctors would decide who would get the vaccine” to which someone responded that “this virus is a way to get rid of us.” Dr. Corbett replied, “Some have gone as far as to call it genocide. I plead the fifth.”

The effective mobilization of Black resistance to the radical “opening up” of Georgia’s economy by prominent Afro-American mayors in Atlanta, Savannah and other cities as well as some Afro-American clerics seemed to help foil much of that plan. However, on June 9 Georgia’s primary election, long postponed, was the biggest fiasco of this election season. A key feature had been the hours-long waiting lines for voting in predominantly Afro-American precincts. It felt like a dress rehearsal for a disrupted election in November.

*****

Finally, the COVID-19 public health crisis in the USA is far from over. There was premature talk in the spring about a possible “second wave” of COVID in the fall. In reality the first wave never really ended, thanks to criminal negligence as well as criminal profiteering and genocidal intent by the Trump Family Dynastic Regime. Ponder the depth of criminality in Trump’s division of the USA into blue and red states, when he defended himself against the USA’s number #1 ranking in total people infected with the coronavirus and number #1 in total deaths due to this disease. He stated that if you take away the blue states’ numbers it’s not so bad!

Meanwhile, Biden and Harris, as corporate Democrats, both failed to support “medicare for all” in the primaries when this call by Bernie Sanders in particular rallied tremendous popular support. Biden is now promising to add a public option to the Affordable Care Act. However, a serious public health service would have made Trump’s criminality in relation to this pandemic impossible to implement. After our continuing bitter experience with the COVID-19 pandemic, including its devastating impact on the U.S. economy and society, it should now be clear that socialized medicine is the public health service answer to public health crises that arise in the future.

B. Trump’s Great Nation Chauvinism, White Supremacist Violence Against the People of the USA and the Question of Global Wars:  When Trump assumed the U.S. presidency I predicted that at least in the early part of his term he would be less bellicose toward the rest of the world than Hillary Clinton would have been. This is exactly what occurred. One reflection of this was an article by Wall Street Journal Editor Gerard Baker entitled, “The Strangely Dovish Donald Trump (WSJ, July 6-7, 2019) Baker observed that, “Mr. Trump has not only launched fewer military interventions than any of his recent predecessors at this stage of their presidencies but has repeatedly sought a reduction in America’s military presence in the Greater Middle East.”  In fact, I suggested that the rest of the international working class outside the U.S. borders as well as imperialist partner-rivals and other countries’ governments could take advantage of this at least temporary respite from the overwhelmingly aggressive and violent U.S. Empire’s foreign policy under Reagan, the Bushes, the Clintons and Obama.

At the same time, however, I warned that Trump would be much more brutal toward the workers and oppressed nationalities within the USA itself than Clinton would have been. And this has also occurred.

The monstrous Trump Regime introduced a new fascistic ICE policy forcibly separating Latino children from their parents when crossing into the USA, Trump himself had pushed ICE to be deliberately brutal to the children to discourage efforts by other Latino immigrants to come to the U.S. In a very positive development, on June 30, 2018, there were protest demonstrations of thousands of people, including many U.S. white folks, in more than seven hundred cities across the country in defense of immigrant children and their families. The protests were so strong that Trump appeared to back off under the pressure.

In time for the 2018 mid-term elections, however, Trump ordered several thousand U.S. troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and fabricated a “crisis” involving alleged “hordes of Latin American immigrants” “marching on the USA.” The obscene immigrant-bashing campaign that Trump launched then enabled him to avert a larger Congressional Republican election defeat. Moreover as soon as the election was over, Trump sent the troops back where they came from. Yet there was no exposure by the Democratic Party leadership or the mass media of this dangerous and expensive ploy by the desperate President. Since then, Trump’s brutal treatment of the Latino immigrants at the Mexican border, in blatant violation of international law, has demonstrated what a criminal and rogue state the USA has become.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, handcuffed and lying face down, was brutally murdered by Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin with three other cops involved. Chauvin pressed his full body weight through his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes during which time Mr. Floyd pleaded for his life with his last remaining breath. Several video recordings gave the lie to the cops’ lame excuse that Mr. Floyd was “resisting” arrest.

In the weeks following the murder of George Floyd the Black Lives

Matter Movement (BLM) experienced explosive growth once again. This time, there were daily mass demonstrations all over the USA by a virtual “rainbow coalition” of whites, Latinos, Asians and indigenous peoples as well as Afro-Americans. And there were many protests in support of the BLM in countries around the world. Many participants were youth. And the movement uncovered a series of other recent Afro-American victims of outrageous police-associated murder, most notably Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County, GA, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, KY and Rashard Brooks in Atlanta, GA.

In late spring and early summer, with so many U.S. youth out of school and out of a job in the COVID-induced economic shutdown and in-home quarantine, there were massive daily and nightly demonstrations. And calls for “defunding the police” were passed by local government bodies. Also, pro-Confederate statues exalting anti-heroes who fought to preserve human slavery and fought against human freedom have finally been brought down in a number of places.

But Trump doubled down in support of the pro-slavery statues and cause, in support of the police and in opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement. The demonstrations against police brutality themselves provided voluminous documentation of police brutality against the protesters.

This culminated in Trump’s ordering up of federal military forces and the involvement of the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff (in military fatigues!) in his photo-op in front of Saint John’s Episcopal Church. Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 so that he could “legally” bring the U.S. military up against the U.S. citizens  peaceably protesting in Lafayette Park across from the White House. Trump and Attorney General Barr then ordered the police/military units to attack the peaceful protesters and clear a path for Trump across the park to the Church where Trump did his photo- op holding up an upside down bible. Most of the above was in fundamental contradiction to the tenets of the U.S. Constitution, including the Posse Comitatus act of 1870 that virtually prohibits the use of the U.S. military against its own citizens.

In response to Trump’s unprovoked attack on the citizens peacefully protesting near the White House, Trump’s former Secretary of Defense General James Mattis openly broke with Trump. General Mattis wrote: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. ... we are better than the abuse of executive authority we witnessed in Lafayette Square. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.” Mattis also criticized the current Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs Chairman for being out there with Trump.  In the following few days, many of the most senior retired military leaders, following Mattis’ lead, openly broke with the President. And the current Secretary of Defense apologized for having been there with Trump!

However, Trump has continued to send federal police and armed forces into cities with Democratic mayors, allegedly to protect federal buildings from being vandalized by protesters. In Portland, Oregon, without consulting with either the Mayor or the Oregon Governor and ultimately against the wishes of these top local and state officials, Trump sent in troops. These federal forces have provoked more popular resistance leading to more protests and chaotic violence. Unfortunately, one result of the turmoil he’s created has been Trump’s successful intimidation of large numbers of white as well as Black participants in the BLM movement and the subsiding of this movement.

In the meantime, as ongoing incidents of brutal police murders of

Afro-Americans emerge, Trump has increasingly sided entirely with the police despite the video evidence to the contrary. And he openly sided with Mark and Patricia McCloskey, both attorneys, who brandished guns while hundreds of racial justice protesters peacefully marched on their street. They have become folk heroes to some conservatives as they were arguably the most celebrated couple at the Republican National Convention this summer.  Trump used them to present himself as “the savior of white suburbs from poor people.” They have just been indicted by a St. Louis grand jury. And Missouri’s Republican Governor Mike Parson has already said he will pardon the couple if they are convicted.

Even more troubling have been cold-blooded murders at three protests against police brutality. In Kenosha, WI, Kyle Rittenhouse, a seventeen year old white supremacist from across the Illinois border, drove to the demonstration with his long gun “to support the police and protect property,” carried it into the demonstration and murdered two protesters and injured a third. While Rittenhouse waved to the police as demonstrators shouted that he had shot people, the police allowed him to leave the demonstration and return home. And Donald Trump has had only praise for the murderer. At the same time Trump has had nothing negative to say about the Boogaloo, the fiercely anti-government group which intends to bring about a second American Civil War. And Trump is silent about Steven Carrillo, a Boogaloo, alleged to have killed two law enforcement officers in Northern California this summer. True to the group’s desire to hasten the next civil war, Carrillo is alleged to have killed the officers at an otherwise peaceful demonstration with a silenced machine gun in the hopes of provoking retaliation by the police against the demonstrators. And Trump still insists that it is the “radical left” that is the source of violent protests.

Finally, in Portland, OR, a Trump supporter, part of a Trump campaign caravan into the more than a hundred days of anti-police brutality protests, was killed. Allegedly, the assailant was the rare leftist that committed such a murder. That anti-police brutality protester was gunned down by federal authorities. His vigilante-style execution by federal authorities has been supported and was possibly ordered by Donald Trump.

Trump’s connections with the alt right, the Proud Boys, Boogaloo and Qanon as well as his strong ties to the police, his ties to military men whom he pardoned and honored that the U.S. armed services themselves considered war criminals all exude a Nazi fascist culture combined with a Nazi fascist chauvinist hostility to Afro-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans. Until the past fifteen years, I had felt that U.S. imperialism had all the ingredients for fascism in power, except the society’s scapegoats that the majority population could terrorize with impunity. With the advent of Latino immigrant-bashing, and now with Trump’s white supremacist opposition to Black Live Matter, this final important ingredient is present.

While Trump is decisively fascist in his approach to the people of the USA, Biden and Harris, as corporate democrats, have both refused to embrace the concept of “defunding the police.” Such a concept takes funds away from police departments and provides them to social services organizations that may carry out some functions in cooperation but do not answer to the police.

Finally, Biden has stated that Trump is the first racist U.S. president. This shows how far away from being a fighter for Afro-American rights Biden really is.

C. Trump’s Climate Change Denial,  Global Warming and the Paris Climate Accords: California wildfires in summer and fall 2020

have now destroyed over four million acres of forests. The monstrous pattern of wildfires continues to plague the state, largely under the extreme drought conditions brought on by extremely hot temperatures caused by global warming. At this rate, significant areas of the most populous state in the USA could soon become depopulated savannas. This devastation has occurred most drastically during the time that Trump has been U.S. President. The Trump regime has essentially left California to its own devices. During these several years, Trump has mocked California governor Gavin Newsom and the misery of the citizens of his “blue state.” Trump has ignorantly insisted that it is California state forest management that is responsible for the fires, despite the fact that most of the forest is federal land and subject to federal forest management (and therefore Trump’s responsibility!) and that the forestry science community is in general agreement that global warming is a major factor.

Meanwhile, literally in the smoke and chaos of the massive 2020 California fires and  in the name of fighting for a better economy in the face of the COVID-induced economic crisis, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has cynically torn up regulations protecting the people’s safety and health to maximize short term profits for the most reckless, dirty and wasteful corporations connected to the Trump Dynasty. Much of this destructiveness has focused on rolling back auto industry incentives to convert to non-fossil fuel, an area in which California has been among the most advanced.

On October 6, 2018, “The Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius” was approved by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC, a UN creation, is the leading world body for assessing the science related to climate change, its impacts and potential future risks, and possible response options. This was the first Special Report invited by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change when it adopted the 2015 Paris Agreement. I observed then: “Stunningly, the IPCC Report projects an even more catastrophic environmental impact of global warming on humanity than previously envisioned by them and the governments that had mutually committed to a set of environmentally conscious goals at the Paris Accords.” (“The Longer Monopoly Capitalism Survives, the more Humanity’s Survival is in Jeopardy!”, Ray O. Light Newsletter #111, November-December 2018)

I added, “The basic flaw that makes scientists’ projections in the IPCC a lullaby instead of a wake-up call is that petty-bourgeois science in service to monopoly capital ... is criminally silent about and fails to take into account the … driving economic force for the monopoly capitalist dominated political-economic world. This is the incentive for private corporations and banks and  financial institutions to carry out their individual selfish corporate goals for profit maximization—and  humanity be damned! ... No wonder climatologists have consistently underestimated the gravity of the situation.” (ibid., emphasis in original)
    
Immediately upon assuming the U.S. Presidency, Trump, a climate change denier, had formally declared his government’s intention to leave the Paris Agreement as soon as possible. This is scheduled to occur just after the upcoming 2020 US election! No doubt, if Trump somehow remains in power, the USA will be henceforth formally outside of the Paris Agreement. And, along with former military officer and current fascistic Brazilian President Bolsonaro, who initially resisted efforts to quell similar wildfires in the Amazon, Trump will hasten humanity’s doomsday date by providing a reckless, anti-science and wild, unrestrained  “economic development” course of action.

The Obama-Biden Administration, on behalf of the USA, signed on with the Paris Accords along with 194 other countries in December 2015. If able to take office in January 2021, the Biden-Harris administration can be expected to keep the USA in the Paris Accords or immediately bring it back in, as befits a major monopoly capitalist and imperialist power. As with the other major world powers, the Biden-Harris regime will be too enmeshed in the world capitalist system to keep humanity from reaching a tragic tipping point,“a point of no return.” but it should help slow down the horrific rush of Trump and Bolsonaro to get humanity there at breakneck speed. It will, instead, hopefully provide the international working class and oppressed peoples the time to organize and win power so as to save Mother Earth as a human habitat.

On the other hand, if the fascistic Trump forces are able to make a successful coup to keep Trump as commander-in-chief with fascism in power, California, possibly along with Oregon and Washington (“blue” states also attacked by Trump), could create a formidable movement of secession from what will then be the fascist United States. Moreover, California Governor Newsome observed that the Trump White House “has abdicated its responsibility to the rest of the world on cutting admissions and fighting global warming.” And I observed that, “... the overwhelming majority of the world’s governments … have tremendous justification/leverage to unite to punish rogue governments such as Trump’s USA and Bolsonaro’s Brazil economically, politically and ultimately militarily, if necessary. For, as the rogue governments accelerate and exacerbate Mother Nature’s wrath coming down on all of global humanity, for the Paris Accord countries, punishing the rogue governments will constitute self-defense at the most macro level.” (ibid.)

Georgi Dimitrov and the Reichstag Fire Trial in Nazi Germany:
A Disturbing Lesson for this historical moment in the USA

The Reichstag was the German parliamentary building in Berlin. It was burned down on February 27, 1933, a key event in the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship. It was carried out by the newly formed Nazi government itself to turn public opinion against its communist opponents and to assume emergency powers. One day after the fire Hitler’s dictatorship began with the enactment of a decree that suspended the right to assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and other constitutional protections, including all restraints on police investigations. It remained in effect until Nazi Germany was defeated in May 1945 with the entrance of the Soviet Red Army into Berlin.

Georgi Dimitrov, the great Bulgarian communist leader whose quote opened this article, was the heroic comrade who exposed the Nazi culpability in the Reichstag Fire Trial. His defense was so strong that, rather than execute him and his two Bulgarian comrades, the Nazis whisked them out of Germany. Dimitrov went to the Soviet Union where he became the head of the Communist International and led the implementation of the United Front against Fascism strategy that spearheaded by the heroic Soviet Union smashed the thousand year Reich in a dozen years.

Donald Trump has shown no indication that he will give up power without a fight. He has maintained some independent strength in spite of the fact that he has not yet had his Reichstag Fire moment. Let us be alert and aware.




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